By Michael Burleigh
Until a few days ago, it had never crossed my mind that people across Europe – including Londoners like me – were living in a strife-afflicted hell hole, “suffocated” by regulations, stripped of political liberties, and bound for “civilizational era sure.” So, it was with some surprise that I read this assessment in the new US National Security Strategy – a document that echoes pseudo-intellectual propaganda more than resembling any serious foreign-policy analysis. As US President Donald Trump’s administration informed Europe of its misery and decline, he also announced its salvation: “cultivating resistance” by “patriotic” political parties capable of confronting the sovereignty-destroying European Union and reversing migration policies that threaten to make their countries “unrecognizable.” The clear implication is that the United States wants far-right Trump toadies to lead Europe: the National Rally’s Jordan Bardella succeeding French President Emmanuel Macron; Alice Weidel of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) replacing German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage instead of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Of course, the last thing Europe needs is to take advice from a US regime that sends armed thugs into the streets to snatch up suspected immigrants, and treats matters of war and peace as opportunities for self-enrichment. It certainly should not heed an administration that takes its policy cues from mendacious propagandists, even if they present themselves as “philosophers,” such as the far-right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, and “theologians,” such as US Vice President JD Vance’s “British sherpa” James Orr.
These pseudo-intellectuals, and the media that amplify them, are the political descendants of the “useful idiots” who helped foster sympathy for the Soviet Union in the West. Just as the journalist Walter Duranty touted the wonders of Soviet life as Stalin marched millions off to the gulag, the useful idiots advancing right-wing populism today have little understanding of the issues they discuss. Instead, they simply make things up, as Camus did with his “great replacement theory.” The stakes, in their view, are not that high: pandering to power is generally a low-risk, high-reward activity nowadays. (The same was not true in, say, the 16th century, when Niccolò Machiavelli was strung up by his wrists for crossing the Medici family, and Thomas Cromwell was beheaded by the king, Henry VIII, to whom he had long been a trusted adviser.)The French novelist Julien Benda, in his eponymous book about the luminaries who welcomed authoritarian and fascist regimes, described such sycophancy as “the treason of the intellectuals.” Today’s cast of “treasonous intellectuals” is distinctly undistinguished. There might be sophomoric “tech bros,” like Dominic Cummings, the failed chief adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the American software guru Curtis Yarvin, whose incoherent jottings on Substack tantalise the likes of Vance and the increasingly unhinged billionaire Peter Thiel.
Many, like the American political scientist and AfD/National Rally cheerleader Henry Olsen, have abandoned any pretense of scholarly neutrality. Olsen’s work has been featured on Brussels Signal – a right-wing news platform founded with the backing of American political strategist Patrick Egan – alongside commentary from disgraced media kingpin and convicted fraudster Conrad Black (who received a pardon from Trump in 2019). The far-right activist Matt Goodwin, a former academic, has been hired as a presenter on evangelical billionaire Sir Paul Marshall’s imitation Fox News cable channel, GB News, and named “honorary president” of Students4Reform, Reform UK’s youth wing. Together with the far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson, Goodwin has become a key player in the foreign propaganda operations of Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
A key pillar of those operations is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Hungary’s largest private educational institution, which received an endowment of more than 1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) from the government in 2021. The MCC’s Brussels satellite branch is run by yet another “treasonous intellectual,” Hungarian-Canadian sociologist Frank Furedi, who, as a university student, co-founded the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a leftist sect that promotes a muddled brand of Leninist libertarianism. Far from “canceling” these figures, supposedly “woke” establishment media outlets regularly feature them, in the name of a spurious “balance.” The BBC invites Baroness Claire Fox, head of the portentously named “Academy of Ideas,” to weigh in on the issues of the day. Mick Hume, Editor-in-Chief of europeanconservative. com, and Brendan O’Neill, a former RCP member who calls Trump an “anti-fascist hero,” also appear in mainstream newspapers. One can find a number of commonalities among these populist ideologues, not least their almost pathological fear of migrants.
As the Dutch populist Geert Wilders recently learned, however, ordinary people can grow tired of aggressive anti-migrant and Islamophobic rhetoric. The jaunty Farage, with his fake countryman garb, should take note. In any case, one feature seems to dominate the rest: a deep resentment of so-called liberal elites. Many populists behave as if they have spent their lives with their noses pressed against the windows of grand buildings, peering at glamorous parties to which they were not invited. For some in the United Kingdom, this has translated into a near-obsession with joining the House of Lords (as Fox has done).
The modern media landscape has afforded these figures a salience beyond their wildest dreams, as Trump’s National Security Strategy shows. (Given that Trump does not read, they are probably eagerly anticipating the rise of the intellectually pretentious Vance.) But their pseudo-intellectualism will never pass as the real thing, especially when viewed alongside distinguished thinkers – such as Anne Applebaum, Giuliano Da Empoli, Timothy Garton Ash, and Timothy Snyder – who see through them. What they see is that these “intellectuals,” who pretend to be courting the working class – or, as Trump put it in 2016, the “poorly educated” – are simply serving financiers and tech billionaires keen to evade regulations and taxes. In a world where machines are doing the learning, these are the players for whom the idiots might turn out to be the most useful.
The writer is a senior fellow at LSE Ideas at the London School of Economics.
