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Why Europe and America Need Each Other

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European elites are greeting the incoming Trump administration with something less than enthusiasm. The UK has sent an ambassador to Washington with a well-expressed disdain for the returning US president. Le Monde, a French publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, called Trump’s election ‘the nail in [the] coffin’ for the US as a ‘democratic model’ for the world. The Guardian, predictably, has called for Europeans to fight to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime.

Some seem to think that Trump’s return is the spur Europe needs to finally stand on its own two feet. But they need to recognise, as was the case during the Second World War and the Cold War, that only a strong alliance between Europe and the US offers any hope of resisting the rise of an authoritarian bloc, this time grouped around China.

There are hopeful signs. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, ties between Europe, Canada and the US have been strengthened. There is some promise in an incipient alliance between North America and India, Japan and Australia. But Europe cannot expect the US to bear the strategic burden itself.

Trump’s insistence that Europe rearm makes sense at a time when the continent is facing immediate threats, most immediately in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Today, almost all European countries outside the UK, Greece and the Baltic states do not spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence, while the US spends roughly 3.5 per cent.

Although there is an isolationist tendency among MAGA activists, most US voters are in favour of expanding America’s ‘global presence’. In a reinvigorated alliance, Europe has much to offer in terms of production and expertise, particularly given the sad state of the US military industry, as evidenced by shortages of materials to send to allies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel.

A similar imperative exists in the economic sphere. Europeans have long prided themselves on producing a stronger, more equitable economy than the military-oriented Americans. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force in the world economy. This is no longer the case. It’s basically a choice between China and the US.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Whitehouse Archives, Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Flickr, Government work, Public Domain.

Why Both Sides Are Right in the H-1B Visas Row

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The current clashes over high-skilled immigration between Donald Trump’s right-wing base and his ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk, reveal a fundamental divide within the US president’s odd coalition. On one side are the populists concerned with jobs being prioritised for American workers. On the other, libertarians fret about how businesses can compete on a global scale.

The row was sparked last week by a tweet by Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, in which he blamed American culture for celebrating ‘mediocrity over excellence’, causing firms to seek skilled workers from abroad rather than hire home-grown talent. Musk has since chimed in to tell opponents of high-skilled immigration to ‘take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face’. ‘I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend’, he wrote on X.

Never one to sweat the details, Trump’s views on this issue are often ill-defined and seem ideal for sparking just such an internal conflict between his base and his Silicon Valley backers.

As the populists point out, H-1B visas – temporary work permits for skilled workers, first introduced in 1990 – have a record of abuse. Most notably, in 2014, Disney was accused of exploiting the H-1B programme to replace American programmers en masse with cheaper Indian ones. In an era of depressed growth in tech jobs, in part due to AI, the oligarchs’ claim that we face a profound shortage of such workers may be increasingly strained.

The populists also have it right in that H-1B visas have accelerated class divides, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. Valley types used to hire from local schools, like San José State University, rather than from places like the Indian Institutes of Technology. Today, roughly three-quarters of the Valley’s jobs go to non-citizens. Tech oligarchs may like this arrangement, but taking jobs from people who vote can have severe political ramifications, something those galaxy-brained techies seem not to comprehend.

What’s more, the widening social divides in the Bay Area have already created a progressive monoculture, while the GOP has all but ceased to exist there. Back in the 1970s, when the Valley was a place of upward mobility, its politics were decidedly centrist.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: TED Conference via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Trump Presents Opportunities for Canada — but Trudeau is Unlikely to Take Them

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Let’s stipulate for the record: U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is a jerk with a serious lack of self-control. So when he mocked Canada as a potential “51st state,” he did the one thing no Canadian politician has managed to do: unify a deeply divided country. Read more

The Democrats Need to Get Over Their Delusions

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Since the election conservatives have assumed that the results represent a “mandate” for their political agenda, as well as a confirmation of their version of national identity. Read more

California Ruled with Great Jobs and Boom Times. What Happened?

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Gov. Gavin Newsom’s constant reminders that California’s economy ”leads the nation” as well as being a model for social justice are delusional. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of tech companies, but it is not widely seen as a place for class mobility, and it is slowly ceding its dominance, even in tech-related industries.

In contemporary California, home to four of the world’s seven most valued tech firms, tech bros and real estate speculators occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights,” while the reality on the ground is far less ethereal. The view from where most Californians reside is revealed in a new study sponsored by Chapman University: “Is California Losing Its Mojo?,” by business professors Marshall Toplansky (Chapman) and Kenneth Murphy (UC Irvine).

Historically, the report notes, California has outpaced the rest of the country in terms of the growth of its goods and services. However, that pace of GDP growth in the state has dropped significantly since 2022, with the measure now lagging when compared with other states. The distribution of jobs and wealth is even more worrisome.

California has been a particularly poor bet for blue-collar professions, such as manufacturing, the traditional path to upward mobility for minorities and non-college educated people. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, analyzed by Lightcast, shows California has lagged far behind places like Utah, Nevada, Texas and Arizona over a decade.

The Chapman paper acknowledges that the state has experienced enough job growth to keep unemployment levels low, but as the report details, most new jobs in California aren’t concentrated in high-wage sectors. Over the last 10 years, 62% of jobs added in California were in lower-than-average paying industries, versus 51.6% for the nation as a whole. In the last three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1% of all jobs added in California coming from lower-than-average paying industries, versus 61% for the nation as a whole.

In a state with high living costs, a dearth of well-paying jobs seems likely to bear responsibility for the state’s out-migration rate and its poverty rate, which the Census Bureau calculates, in its most comprehensive estimate, as 15.4%, one of the highest in the nation. California may be home to a lot of billionaires, but it also is home to nearly 30% of the country’s homeless.

Of course, not everyone has suffered. Besides tech billionaires, who is doing well in California? Older homeowners, for one, whose bottom line has risen as home values increased dramatically. Government workers have also thrived.

Census Bureau data highlighted in the Chapman report show that California public sector job growth over the last decade has been growing at about the same pace as jobs overall in California, but the average annual pay for those government jobs was almost double that of private sector jobs. In other words, the road to the middle class comes not from private employment but from jobs that are funded by taxpayers.

In the past, California cities including San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego all ranked in the top 10 among hubs for “advanced industry” employment — where there’s high investment in R&D and a high percentage of STEM roles. But since 2020, only San Jose remains in the top 25 metro areas for growth in such employment. Today the emerging hot spots are often east of the Sierra: Austin, Texas; Nashville; Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; and Phoenix.

Can California get its mojo back? After all, many of the state’s assets — research universities, leading tech firms and the lifestyle appeal — have not disappeared.

First, Newsom and other state cheerleaders have to stop using the size of the economy as a cover for real problems. Whatever the state’s strengths, as the Chapman report puts it, low-wage jobs overtaking advanced industry work is not sustainable.

The Biden administration emphasized bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and President-elect Donald Trump promises to do the same, but California misses out on opportunities due to the costs associated with its regulatory regimes.

Consider technologies largely developed and embraced by California, such as EVs and the batteries that run them. Jobs in those manufacturing industries overwhelmingly fall to red states, largely a reflection of such things as easier permitting rules, lower energy costs and less intrusive labor regulations.

Remarkably, Newsom, who feuds with Elon Musk and has taken on the role of the national anti-Trump, has promised that if the next administration in Washington eliminates the federal $7,500 buyer EV tax credits, California will step in with state rebates for the vehicles — with reportedly one exception, Teslas, which happen to be the dominant American brand and the only EVs made in California. The plant in Fremont employs thousands in good manufacturing jobs.

And that’s hardly the end of the self-destructive politicking.

One “advanced industry” where California, and in particular Southern California, still has a leg up is aerospace, and its corollary, defense. The state remains well in the lead in terms of aerospace-related employment, and innovative new firms, such as Anduril in Orange County, seem primed to take advantage of Trump’s emphasis on military spending. In his first term, he increased the defense budget to historic highs.

But is California’s Democratic leadership on board?

Once again, the state’s relations with Musk, Trump “first buddy” and the world’s preeminent space pioneer, would indicate just the opposite. Musk, upset at a California law that allows schools to keep parents in the dark when their children identify as LGBTQ+, decided to move SpaceX’s headquarters from Hawthorne to Texas this year. And just weeks ago, the California Coastal Commission denied SpaceX’s request to increase its rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base; reportedly after commissioners discussed his political views before they voted on the issue. Even Newsom objected.

This is not the way to build a truly inclusive and healthy economy. Gavin Newsom can talk all he wants about California’s bounty, but the road the state’s Democrats have set for us has been profoundly regressive.

This piece first appeared at Los Angeles Times.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Tesla Factory, Fremont, California by Maurizio Pesce via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Elon Musk and the Rise of the Alt-Oligarchy

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The US is increasingly a country ruled by oligarchs who pour cascading levels of funds into the competing parties. In 2024, election spending was two-to-three times what it was two decades ago in real terms.

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The American University is Rotting From Within

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The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.

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Democrat Resistance to Mass Deportations Could Push the US to a Civil War

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If something approaching civil war occurs in the US, as many Americans now believe, the most immediate cause may be President Trump’s move to deport huge numbers of people, upwards of 10 million just since 2021, who have crossed the border illegally and unvetted. This population swelled as the feckless Biden administration left the border largely unguarded. Talk of resistance to “mass expulsions” is already becoming common in the mainstream media, with some suggesting that migrants will be victims of government “atrocities”. Numerous Democrats, notably Denver’s mayor Mike Johnston, have advanced plans to block federal agents with a “Tiananmen Square”-style occupation. Read more

Jews Are Discovering That Canada’s Multicultural Utopia Isn’t Safe

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In the many summers my family spent in Quebec, at the farm owned by my wife’s uncle Morris and his wife Louise, I could see Canada in its best light. Morris, who grew up in the old Jewish ghetto of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montreal, always expressed gratitude to Canada, a country that birthed his own success and provided security his Polish forebears never enjoyed. “Canada,” he would say, almost tearfully, “is a very good country.”

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The Return of Realpolitik

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If the election of Donald Trump means anything, it marks the end of the liberal world order and its replacement by grim realpolitik, described by one MIT analyst as “the pursuit of vital state interests in a dangerous world that constrains state behavior.” Realpolitik may be ugly but it’s back. It is already being ruthlessly practised by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but it has also been central to the Trumpian worldview since his first term. Whereas his predecessors sought engagement with other countries, Trump’s style will be to cut deals narrowly perceived as beneficial to the United States.

Trump will be less like Roosevelt or Reagan, who led crusades against authoritarianism, and more like Lord Palmerston, who famously remarked that his country had “no permanent allies, only permanent interests.” Other icons of realpolitik include Austria’s 19th-century minister of foreign affairs Klemens von Metternich, Wilhelmine Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, or the US’s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who ditched morality in pursuit of “an equilibrium of forces.”

How the Liberal World Order Failed

The new realpolitik marks the end of an era in which politics was defined largely by ideology and religion. As in the 19th century, world events now revolve around control of markets, resources, technology, and military aptitude. In this new paradigm, institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are largely irrelevant, as are climate confabs and the high-minded pronunciamentos of the World Economic Forum.

Joe Biden’s foreign policy was informed by Wilsonian notions of global liberalism, an ideology that also permeated US policy during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Although these administrations approached foreign relations very differently, they both embraced the allegedly democratising influence of free trade and the need to protect the “rules-based” postwar order. Yet the legacy of this approach has been involvement in open-ended wars that often resulted in strategic defeats.

The shift to Trumpism is unsurprisingly causing panic among the US’s old allies, particularly France and Britain. Le Monde, a publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, calls Trump’s election a “nail in the coffin” of America’s “democratic model.” Much of the US policy establishment is similarly horrified by the prospect of an administration that promises to prioritise American interests with a doggedness, and even glee, rarely seen since the early republic.

If a European bureaucracy faced with increasingly right-leaning populations and its American allies want to know what has precipitated this change, they ought to look in a mirror. Biden’s early proclamations that “America is back” seem, in retrospect, close to delusional. Rather than firming up the West, Biden’s secretary of state Anthony Blinken—whom Tablet acidly described as “Neville Chamberlain with an iPad”—has been a fevered fireman unable to put out fires.

Blinken’s foreign-policy script has failed to arrest China’s rise, prevent or repel Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and has seen an equally awful conflict erupt across the Middle East. America may still be a world-leading military and economic power, but it has been unable to cope with assaults on its economy, its communications, and even its elections by Russia, China, and Iran. Trump can claim, with some justification, that he left the White House in an era of relative peace and has returned to a chaotic world in which the West is in retreat.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: Wikimedia photos/Canva.