Somebody else’s babies

tion of Donald Trump with his “America First” anti-Muslim jingoism, can think otherwise. The liberal order has lost its centre of gravity. People without memory are on the march. They have no time for the free world if the free world means mingling and migration.

In the Netherlands it’s the rightist Geert Wilders who personifies European unease with large-scale Muslim immigration. He understood early the uses of fear. He wants to close mosques and close borders to asylum seekers. Like Trump he marshals his movement through Twitter rather than traditional party organisation. His tweets speak of an “asylum tsunami” and the “Islamisation” of the Netherlands, where Muslims make up about 6 percent of the population but more than 15 percent in big cities like Rotterdam.

Ever since the murders, in 2002 and 2004 respectively, of the taboo-trampling politician Pim Fortuyn and the movie director Theo van Gogh who had explored suffocated female sexuality under Islam, the Netherlands has been Exhibit A in Europe’s questioning of multiculturalism and the political potency of illiberalism.

What is new is the favourable ecosystem in which Wilders now moves. A dozen years ago no US congressman would have tweeted this: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

That is what Representative Steve King declared over the weekend. Fascist genetics now have a place on Capitol Hill.

James Fallows of the Atlantic tweeted that King should go to military bases or Afghanistan to “see how many of ‘someone else’s babies’ are in uniform” for the United States. Wilders-loving King might also go to Ellis Island for a refresher?