“I hate to say that I told you so, but I told you so.” It may seem self-serving to appeal to one’s own foresight, but in the face of facts, it becomes inevitable.
Since 2018, I have been focusing on the so-called “culture wars”, a phenomenon rooted in the clash between so-called “conservatives” and “progressives” around moral issues such as abortion, the role of religion in society, same-sex marriage and other LGBT rights, gender identity, immigration, or national identity. These differences generate extreme polarization, amplified by social media, and translate into a genuine struggle for cultural hegemony at the heart of our societies.
In the face of the rise of a cultural left, which abandoned workers’ struggles to concentrate on identity-based causes and whose values gradually became dominant within social institutions, there emerged an inevitable reaction in the opposite direction—the so-called “cultural backlash”, a political response promoting ethnonationalist values.
This brings us to the recent report by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), in partnership with the European Cultural Foundation, which states that Donald Trump is waging a “culture war” against liberal democracy in Europe, fostering an ideological shift toward nationalist and illiberal values.
A report that is not only unsurprising but also belated. For quite some time, Europe has been the privileged stage for illiberal experiments, reopening old wounds on a continent scarred by the traumas of nationalism and authoritarianism. The political transformations that unfolded in Europe after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis are paradigmatic of the electoral drift toward what political scientist Cas Mudde has called the “far right.”
The instrumentalization of economic resentment in favor of an ethnic and religious nationalism—directed against immigrants, the left, and multiculturalism—resonates deeply with the emergence of nationalisms in the 1930s, the results of which are all too well known.
Yet Le Pen, Orbán, Fico, Farage, Meloni, or Wilders are not merely the result of MAGA-style ideological channelling of resentment, as the report suggests. In fact, the “culture war” Trump is now waging against European institutions, the multilateral order, the values of fundamental rights grounded in the principle of human dignity, and the foundations of the liberal rule of law, began with Putin. And here the report falls short.
It is precisely with Vladimir Putin that the seeding of racial and religious nationalism in Europe begins—a process that culminates in the war in Ukraine. Let me explain: Putin viewed NATO’s eastward expansion not only as a geopolitical issue, but as a civilizational one. Conceiving Russia as its own civilization, based on a distinct cultural and religious identity, Byzantine in orientation and czarist in spirit, Putin regarded NATO’s presence on his border as a civilizational threat—representing the advance of liberal democracy and its inclusive values, which undermine Russia’s spiritual order with sexual freedom, women’s emancipation, and LGBT rights.
It was precisely to confront liberal democratic values that Putin financed the European radical right, promoting an illiberal order whose Western epicenter became Orbán’s Hungary.
Trump’s “culture war” against Europe is therefore part of a broader cultural war that unites a nationalist international of authoritarian inspiration, neofascist in kind. The exaltation of a nationalist ideal of economic, industrial, cultural, and geopolitical closure is a project that binds Trump and Putin with the same objective: to dismantle Europe’s human rights order and its liberal democracy from within.
Europeans would do well to remember the old maxim: those who fall asleep in democracy, wake up in dictatorship.
© The Political Crow 
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