Such is Naomi Wolf’s dedication to the Unreality Principle that she can’t even consider the possibility that the increasing appeal of traditional nationalism and to women in the West is neither fascist nor false.
Many lower-income women in Western Europe today – often single parents working pink-collar ghetto jobs that leave them exhausted and without realistic hope of advancement – can reasonably enough feel a sense of nostalgia for past values and certainties. For them, the idealized vision of an earlier age, one in which social roles were intact and women’s traditional contribution supposedly valued, can be highly compelling.
And, of course, parties that promote such a vision promise women – including those habituated to second-class status at work and the bulk of the labor at home – that they are not just faceless atoms in the postmodern mass. Rather, you, the lowly clerical worker, are a “true” Danish, Norwegian, or French woman. You are an heiress to a noble heritage, and thus not only better than the mass of immigrants, but also part of something larger and more compelling than is implied by the cog status that a multiracial, secular society offers you.
The attraction of right-wing parties to women should be examined, not merely condemned. If a society does not offer individuals a community life that takes them beyond themselves, values only production and the bottom line, and opens itself to immigrants without asserting and cherishing what is special and valuable about Danish, Norwegian, or French culture, it is asking for trouble. For example, upholding the heritage of the Enlightenment and progressive social ideals does not require racism or pejorative treatment of other cultures; but politically correct curricula no longer even make the attempt to do so.
There are numerous errors in her essay. The first, and most important, is her failure to recognize that it is the multiculturalists who are both anti-democratic and fascist. It is the eurofascists of the EU and their corporatist allies in the USA who forcibly installed unelected governments in Greece and Italy, who attempted to deny the Russian nationalists in the Crimea their right to self-determination and they are now turning against the Ukrainian nationalists who supported their anti-democratic coup in Ukraine.
The second is her denial of the fact that there are, materially, true Danes, Norwegians, and French. She obviously subscribes to the bureaucratic myth of geographic relocation, where the simple act of traveling by plane magically transforms an individual into something he is not. As an expat myself, I continually find it amazing that people who would absolutely insist that I am an American will turn around and claim that Moroccans who happen to be in Holland or Turks who happen to be in Germany are actually Dutch or German simply because they have a piece of paper granting them state citizenship.
But the nation is not the state. In fact, the nation-state is generally considered to date back to about 1700 and the Treaty of Westphalia, so it should be obvious that making a national the citizen of a state belonging to a different nation does not change anything intrinsic about the national.
The third is that it is objectively obvious that the nationals of a state being invaded by hordes of immigrants are heirs to a materially better heritage than the invaders. The invaders want to live in the society created by that heritage; the national does not want to go and live in society created by the invaders’ heritage.
The fourth error is the failure to grasp that mass immigration will end. It is mathematically doomed. The secular advocates of The Invaded Society don’t seem to grasp that all of these various nations did not come into existence ex nihilo. They were created by the same force of natural human preferences that will soon bring a violent end to The Invaded Society.
It’s all very simple. British people want to remain British. They don’t want to be African, or Pakistani, or some sort of Afro-Britistani melange. The Dutch want to remain Dutch, they don’t want to become Moroccan. And neither black nor white Americans want to become Mexican. And they will not, even if that means wars will be fought and national borders will be redrawn.