Head, meet sand.

What happens when people don't like the answer to their problems? Denial has a certain appeal.

It’s not all coming up tulips in Holland

Welcome to 2024. Same shit, different year, you might think. Actually, it could be rather worse. But before even thinking about the grim possibilities that 2024 has in store for us, I’d like to look back to 2023 for some clues as to what the hell is going on in global politics – especially relevant given that one of the worse things that could happen this year is a Trump victory. To wit: I want to talk about the Dutch, home to dikes, Gouda cheese, and a language with more diphthongs than should be legal. Also, home to preternaturally tall people. (When I’ve taken public transport in Holland, I usually come up to about people’s kneecaps and have to Muggsy Bogues it out the door when I get to my stop.) Oh, and also home to Geert Wilders.

Geert Wilders

Now please don’t stop reading because this post is about the Netherlands (you can stop reading for many other good reasons). This post is not really about the Netherlands (which kind of sums up the Netherlands in one sentence). So bear with me.

In the event that you are a normal person and so don’t spend time worrying about the politics of a country that is known for hydroponic peppers, tulips, ganja cafés & legal prozzies, let me gently remind you that this past November there was an election in the Netherlands. The winner (after a fashion) was Geert Wilders, a muckraking haircut of a man who has long been a polarizing figure in Dutch politics. Wilders is the head of a party that he founded in 2004, called the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom). The PVV had its best showing ever to become the largest party in the Dutch parliament, although very well short of a majority.

The four largest parties in the 150-seat House of Representatives in the Netherlands

The PVV is typically deemed a radical right political movement. But the “right” in this case does not refer to any of the traditional political values we would normally ascribe to political conservatism – smaller government, lower taxes, freer trade, less regulation, and hypocritical moralising. No, in this case the PVV’s main political position is its relentless opposition to immigration, served up with extra helpings of rigidly and openly-bigoted anti-Islamic sentiment. They’re also anti-EU (of course!), but that’s mostly because they blame the EU for the “ermagerd! the (Islamic) immigrants are like, everywhere” brand of populism that is at the core of the party’s DNA.

After his unexpected showing in the election (which should not have been surprising, as I will get to in a moment), various outlets assembled some of Geert’s Greatest Hits, and there are many, but the best – for its sheer sophomoric, playground-bully panache – had to be his call to fine people €1000 who wear Islamic head covering outside, which he termed a form of “public pollution” that should be subject to – note his delicate phrasing – a “head rag tax.” Of course, if you had hair like Geert’s, you might also incline to the view that covering it up is a crime, as some kind of Freudian displacement. Me? Different story.

The party’s unflinching anti-Islamic posture helps explain why it is quite unlike its conservative confrères elsewhere across the continent that, while they also don’t like Muslims, such as the Vox party in Spain, or Fidesz in Hungary, also espouse a kind of nostalgic vision of an atavistic Christian Europe (because that worked out well for everyone), with the predictably retrograde value system to match. PVV is the party for the freedoms that it sees immigrants – and again especially Muslim immigrants, and especially Muslim immigrants from Morocco and Turkey because, why not? – as trying to take away. So they are pro gay-rights, (TERF) feminist, and largely democratic-socialist in their fiscal approach. From their perspective, the Dutch have managed to create a functional, generous, prosperous social democracy, and the battle now is to defend Dutch values and the Nederlandse levenskwaliteit against those who, coming from other parts of the world (like, oh I dunno, say Turkey and Morocco), seek to destroy the social consensus with their Islamic beliefs because (checks notes) “Islam (says Geert) is not a religion; it’s … the ideology of a retarded culture.”

Now, to discover the reason why Geert Wilders showing was hardly surprising, you need only look at the person who heads up the main rival centre-right party, the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD): Dilan Yeşilgöz. Dilan Yeşilgöz is a longtime, prominent politician who is as Dutch as they come, assuming the ‘they’ in this case means Turkish Kurds who came to Holland at the age of 7. That said, her name is probably not as bewildering or off-putting to the Dutch as it might seem, since Dutch already consists mostly of the unpronounceable (although at least it’s not Danish). And she ran on a platform that also took a hardline anti-immigrant (= anti-Muslim) stand. Which is not a shock given that (in case you are not a close student of Dutch politics) the election was held two years earlier than expected precisely because the previous government had collapsed over a disagreement about asylum seekers (read: Muslims, but also some Ukrainians). Faced with the intractability of the issue, the previous head of the VVD and longtime prime minister Mark Rutte was all like, fuck it I’m outta here, you figure it out. And then his party, facing an election over the issue of immigration from, let’s say, the East, decided that their best move was to elect someone born in Ankara named Dilan Yeşilgöz as their new party leader. I mean, yes it’s a lesson in courage, but, you know, read the room people.

A debate between party leaders specifically about immigration (you can watch it here) revealed that there was not much disagreement between Wilders and Yeşilgöz over the main points of contention. Too many people are coming; there’s too much abuse of the system; there’s not enough housing; there is a need to defend Dutch values (i.e. against Muslims), etc, etc. AND – they both have great hair. But if you were a Dutch voter going into an election and your primary worry was about immigration, meaning those pesky Muslims are coming to get you, and you had to choose between a Geert Wilders or a Dilan Yeşilgöz to defend the country against the immigrating horde? Well… as I say, hardly a surprise.

Now, I said this post is not about the Netherlands, and to explain why I have to delve into some more stuff about the Netherlands, but bear with me here. In 2023, the Dutch population grew by all of 0,8%. And all of that growth, all of it, came from immigration. Why? Dutch fertility rates are plunging. You can check out the latest figures from the government’s statistics bureau. (And listen up people, that article was published like goddam yesterday, so I am bringing you the freshest of the fresh in Dutch demography, so just throw me a like, please.) Last year there were 164k births against 169k deaths. Those are not good numbers. And they’re not going to get better. The Dutch fertility rate in 1963 was over 3; by 1978 it had fallen to half that. Last year it declined to 1,43/woman, and will almost certainly continue to fall or, at best, flatline.

So, the only way for Holland to maintain a stable (let alone growing) population, given this disinclination of Dutch ladies to produce rugrats, is to welcome … who? Oh yea, immigrants. And who wants to emigrate to Holland, and will learn something of that unpronounceable language? Well, true some people, especially from elsewhere in the EU, like to go there for the high quality English-language university programs and even higher quality weed, yes, but those people tend to leave because, in order to stay, they’d have to learn Dutch and, as they say, life is short, and certainly too short to learn Dutch. So the people for whom it represents a seriously better option than where they were born is generally not other European countries, but places like … (quiet now) Morocco. Turkey. Syria.

While the situation is a little more complex than I am making out, in broad strokes it will suffice. Because what the Dutch are experiencing is known as the demographic transition. As the prosperity of a society increases, the fertility rate plunges. This is a universally observed phenomenon. You may have seen recently that China is facing a similar fertility collapse, and is projecting a population decline by as much as half by sometime next century (in their case, the demographic transition was artificially intensified by the one child policy).

But the absolute Olympic-calibre demographic transition leaders are: Japan & South Korea. For Japan, under current modelling, the population is expected to fall from 127 million in 2015 to less than 95 million by 2065. And that modelling is probably very generous because it assumes a “low variant” fertility rate of 1,25. If we pop across to South Korea to check out what rat-race capitalism, sorry prosperity, can really achieve, we find a fertility rate of – wait for it – 0,79. Early last year, Japan’s Prime Minister delivered a stern warning that it was “now or never” for his compatriots to start having more kids. Because everyone knows that nothing spices up the bedroom like a stern admonition from a Japanese Prime Minister. Oh the Romance!

Japanese fertility rate since 1970. Last year the country recorded the fewest births since records began in the 19th century.

Now you might just say, we’ll adapt to a declining population. Sure kiddo, but the problem is that as the population declines, it also ages very inconveniently. By 2065, almost half of the Japanese population will be over 65. And recall that thanks to their diet of sushi, noodles, and saki, the Japanese age miraculously. So they get old, and then they stay old for a long, long, looong time. By 2065, only 8% of the population, and possibly rather less if Japan follows the South Korean route, will be under 14 years of age. That is a gerontology, which wrecks the basic premise of the capitalist compromise, namely that if you work hard for the man for 40 years, you can then enjoy a senescence supported by the younger workers who follow to keep your pension checks rolling in and your health centres staffed. When the population skews so aggressively toward the elderly, however, it’s not just the math, but the whole logic of the scheme which breaks down.

This is what the Dutch are facing at 1,42. And the Norwegians (1,5). And the Finns (1,4). And the Italians (1,3). And the Spanish (1,29!!). In fact, every country in Europe with the exception of (any guesses?) fucking Monaco (really? Monaco? I mean it’s three streets with a casino) has a fertility rate that is well below replacement. And it’s the same in the other developed economies. Put simply, fertility and market-driven prosperity are not good bedfellows.

South Korean fertility rate, 1970-2022

If we look at South Korea, the principal reasons why the birth rate is so low relates specifically to the quality of life that the average South Korean is experiencing under a grinding, hyper-competitive capitalist labour market. People prioritize work (i.e. earning money) over family. And this despite the fact that the South Korean government has prioritised some of the most family-friendly policies on the planet: monthly stipends, generous parental-leave programs, subsidized child-care. Doesn’t matter. Trying to tinker with the work culture to make having children less burdensome for people caught up in an unforgiving labour market, the very function of which under the system is to enhance returns to capital, is not going to make a whit of difference. If the underlying economic structure promotes – as a feature of the system itself – economic precariousness, then the result will be predictable no matter what the offsets. So I’ll say it out loud: South Korea may well become the first victim at the national level of late-stage capitalism. Not brought down by intolerable wealth inequality, the hubris of the capital-controlling bourgeois class leading to the rising up of the masses in a frenzy of revolutionary consciousness as per Marx, but just an inexorable, weary indifference of the fertile population to actually be, well, fertile because they’re working too goddam hard and getting too goddam little. Revolution doesn’t start in the streets, it starts in the bedroom.

So, the really interesting feature of the Dutch election was how it reveals in unusually clear terms an ouroboros politics that is incapable of addressing the structural problems of the system, and reveals what is increasingly becoming part of the political identity of developed nations, one which will surely only intensify as the problem becomes more acute.

In a nutshell: the Dutch contest was explicitly fought over the question of immigration, immigrants that the country needs to maintain the viability of its social-democratic model, a model that is championed by the leading anti-immigrant party.

In order for the Dutch (or the Italian, or the Finnish, or the Spanish, but NOT apparently the Monégasque) model of social prosperity, as it has been elaborated as a compromise between labour and capital under the modern capitalist economic infrastructure, in order for that model to be sustainable there needs to be either:

(1) a miraculous and unprecedented revival of interest in having larger families among the native born, which all measure, including prime ministerial haranguing, have proven unable to achieve; or

(2) an acceptance of an ethnic reality for the future that is starkly different from, i.e. much more diverse than, that of the past.

Seems clear to me. The cost of maintaining the viability of social prosperity in developed late-stage capitalist economies, as the percentage of the population over 65 starts to increase rapidly, is to welcome those (including, shhhh Muslims) who actually want to live and work in the country.

Faced with that stark reality, the Dutch election was instructive and prognosticatory.

Head, meet sand. And vote Wilders.

If you’ve made it through to the end, dank je wel en geef me alsjeblieft een like.