A new YouGov poll contains an interesting discovery, which made sense but was, at the same time, infuriating. The two ends of the political spectrum respond in opposite ways when asked whether allies should support the United States. Conservatives say yes. Liberals? Not so much.
That is a no-brainer. The answer should be an unequivocal “yes.” What’s the point of having allies if not?
Indeed, both sides are equally in agreement when asked if the United States should come to the aid of allies.
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Support for that is strong across nearly all races, age groups, and political affiliations. The only exception is black Americans, who support helping allies at 45%. But whites and Hispanics support the U.S. coming to the aid her allies at rates of 65% and 64% respectively, with a puny 8% of whites and 11% of Hispanics saying no.
In terms of ideology, 60% of liberals and 74% of conservatives said yes. Incidentally, voters who identified with President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, or MAGA, were supportive of the U.S. helping allies at an even higher rate: 79%. This belies the misunderstanding that MAGA is isolationist.
But when the question is, “If the U.S. asked for help from its allies, should they agree to help?” only 21% of liberals responded yes. Conservatives said yes at a rate of 79%. How does one explain that percentage-point gap among liberals?
The obvious variable here must be Trump. Liberal Americans loathe him so deeply that they would cut off their nation’s nose to spite its popularly elected leader’s face.
We were, indeed, immediately presented with evidence of this proposition. The European Parliament last week invited Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) to speak to a committee on the Digital Services Act (DSA), which is the EU’s attempt to turn its bureaucrats into the world’s online police.
Vice President JD Vance spoke forthrightly about these matters at the Munich Security Conference last year, where he said that in his view, Europe is facing a “threat from within” and that European leaders are “running in fear of their own voters.”
That is because the reason the DSA was created in the first place is barely hidden. It is the response by the left and the center-right to a new wave of conservative parties and limit their ability to communicate with voters. Anyone with an interest in free expression would oppose it.
But not Raskin, one of the most liberal members of Congress, with a score of 0% for this congressional session on the Heritage Action scorecard. Raskin is not just liberal — as someone who has testified in front of him in the House, I can tell you that he is also nasty to conservatives.
And nasty he was about America under Trump, which he painted as a benighted place where liberties are being trampled.
“The bottom line is that Americans are now being killed, teargassed, bullied, chased, sued, jailed, intimidated, and harassed for the audacity of exercising their basic political free speech rights under our First Amendment, protesting Trump and lawfully recording the officers engaged in these authoritarian tactics,” said Raskin, speaking via Zoom.
Don’t follow what the U.S. government is telling you, Raskin told the Euro MPs: “The Trump MAGAite is not engaging with your leaders in good faith. Their obsessive pushback on your tech rules is for one purpose only, to dismantle any laws around the world that would curtail far-right propaganda, disinformation, and hate speech.”
Raskin’s caustic diatribe against Trump and his MAGA Movement went on for so long before he finally got around to discussing the DSA, that conservative members of the EU parliament tried to get the speaker to shut off Raskin’s microphone.
“Madame Speaker, this is outrageous. He is not speaking about what he came here to speak,” Jorge Martin Frias of Spain’s Vox Party is heard interjecting at one point. Martin Frias was obviously told offline by the speaker, Anna Cavazzini of the German Greens, to quiet down, because he is heard responding, “No, I am not going to shut up. He is not talking about what we’re here to discuss.”
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Later, when it was his turn to speak, Frias said, “You said we were going to have an American point of view being presented here. But that’s not what we had. We had a certain vision, but in no way is it representative of what the American vision is. First, I don’t understand the rant that we heard. It was 20 minutes of propaganda, and of these 20 minutes, we had perhaps two minutes on the issue that we have here today.”
Paradoxically, we’re seeing breaches that have opened across societies, rather than between them. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has closed his country’s airspace to U.S. planes fighting in Iran, is being feted by the press in America, which explains why American liberals don’t want our allies to come to our aid.