Let neither our reflexive anti-American sentiment nor our democratic sausage-fueled complacency deceive us. This could happen to us. This could happen to me and my community, where I live in France. This could happen to you and your community in Australia. Some have already done so.

The rise of the far right is the defining story of our century thus far. The voters of the United States elected a rapista racist with deep ties to fascism, a convicted felon who tried to steal the previous election. They also elected his dead-eyed vice presidential candidate, a purveyor of the most despicable thinking put forward by the hyper-connected international far right.

Donald Trump and JD Vance are not alone. They have elected political counterparts in Argentina in the form of Javier Milei; with the Hungarian Viktor Orbán; at the Italian Giorgia Meloni; in Austria; in the Netherlands; in India. Don’t ask what Trumpism means to the rest of the world. Trumpism is already here.

Ukraine’s future is uncertain, with Trump promising he can resolve the conflict “in a day”, likely by forcing capitulations to Vladimir Putin. Europe can no longer count on the United States as a reliable defense partner. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has already stretched out your hand to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to discuss how the EU will handle Trump 2.0. Macron likes to consider himself a Trump whisperer, having harassed his American counterpart with military flyovers and Marching bands playing Daft Punk during their first mandates.

But Macron is today hampered by an ascendant far right at home, which finished first in European elections and in the first round of parliamentary elections this summer, only to be defeated by a tenuous electoral pact between centrists and the left. Today, a right-wing government serves to the pleasure of Marine Le Penwho can tip her over in an instant by withdrawing her support. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, still in full swing, has planned mass deportations based on racist criteria, just like Trump did promised to do.

Around the world, far-right agitators feed on military misogyny, the blood and soil of the international manosphere, the same animosity that drives them. race riots and violent attacks on asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, Neo-Nazi protests in the streets of Melbourneand incel gun massacres in the United States. They are influenced by the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory, born in France and according to which whites will be replaced by non-white migrants in the Western world.

This is a theory that promotes white nuclear families reproducing more than people of color. It is therefore a theory that is based on the suppression of women’s reproductive rights, the erasure of gender diverse and LGBTQIA+ people as well as the violent “deterrence” of migrants. She is the one behind right-wing attacks on trans and sexist people – a major part of the Trump campaign. last days – aided by the delusional and transphobic current of feminism which exists mainly in the United Kingdom but seeks to establish itself elsewhere. This is a theory espoused by Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who shot dead 51 people at two Christchurch mosques during Trump’s last presidency; by Robert Gregory Bowers, who massacred 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue; by Patrick Wood Crusius, who murdered 23 black people in a Buffalo supermarket.

One of Trump’s first acts in office will be to restore the Global gag rulewhich deprives USAID of funding to NGOs and charities around the world that mention abortion as part of reproductive health care. This international attack on women’s rights will echo the decimation of reproductive rights in the United States. Despite some small victories on abortion via ballot measures in Tuesday’s election, the United States today is a place where adolescents die of sepsis because doctors refuse to intervene when a pregnancy goes wrong, fearing prosecution under the abortion ban.

The same fundamentalist religious groups that brought Trump to power twice and whose attacks on abortion rights over five decades led to the downfall of the Roe v. Wade in 2022 are now financing anti-rights movements in Africaincluding Uganda, which passed a law making homosexuality punishable by death in 2023. Similar groups fund anti-abortion movements across Europe, promoting misinformation and disinformation about abortion through false information.crisis pregnancy centers”, which aim to dissuade desperate women from terminating unwanted or unviable pregnancies.

None of this is one-sided. While the American far right wields enormous power around the world, it actually has a symbiotic relationship with fascist and far-right groups elsewhere. An anonymous French billionaire put his thumb on the scale betting prediction markets ahead of Tuesday’s vote, while German Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis happily welcomed crypto-conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in his castle. Alito wrote the court’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade and has let the flags fly January 6 insurgents in his vacation home.

The United States of America has always been a bogeyman for those of us who pride ourselves on living in what we consider to be superior democracies, in which extremists and billionaires have not taken over major institutions. But our relief at not living in a country where, to cite just one example, women are second-class citizens, should not mask the fact that the sprawling reach of the far right, reinforced by social platforms unregulated, owned by billionaires, affects everyone. of us, everywhere. We would be better off responding to the rising tide of far-right, neo-Nazi, and fascist movements springing up in our own backyards than patting ourselves on the back now.