So much pessimism, so much false prophecy - but so little sense

Good politics is just like our own lives - complex and tedious, made up of small things done quickly and big things done slowly

The air is full of talk of European rough beasts, whose time has come around. After 60 years the Second Coming is at hand and the indignant desert birds are squawking. "Europe is sliding into a new abyss," says one leftish British commentator. "The genie [of European anti-Semitism] is out again," writes a right-wing American one. The front page of a weekly magazine this week is composed of a typically beautiful Garland cartoon, in which the moon and star of Islam rise over a crepuscular English countryside – the brightness of the alien symbol contrasting with the dull white of a familiar cross in the eclipsed churchyard.

The air is full of talk of European rough beasts, whose time has come around. After 60 years the Second Coming is at hand and the indignant desert birds are squawking. "Europe is sliding into a new abyss," says one leftish British commentator. "The genie [of European anti-Semitism] is out again," writes a right-wing American one. The front page of a weekly magazine this week is composed of a typically beautiful Garland cartoon, in which the moon and star of Islam rise over a crepuscular English countryside – the brightness of the alien symbol contrasting with the dull white of a familiar cross in the eclipsed churchyard.

God alone knows that I do not wish to miss a trend. Especially a relatively important one such as the descent into fascism or medieval theocracy of the continent on which I live. And there are plenty of things going on in modern Europe that worry me. In several countries – particularly the wealthier ones – far-right parties are able to command up to a fifth of the vote. The political life and savage death of Pim Fortuyn arrived from out of left field, undermining the treasured perception of a favourite nation – Holland the ever-tolerant. A monkey won the Hartlepool mayoralty, suggesting one of those teen rebellions against seriousness that used to characterise student-union elections.

But the Second Coming? In The Washington Post, the veteran opinion-former Charles Krauthammer (a rather lovely name for this lambaster of Europeans) told Americans that "The European 'street' has lately been expressing itself on the subject of Jews." Krauthammer listed the assaults on synagogues in France, the beatings of Jewish boys in Belgium and some alarming advice given to Jews by the police in Berlin. From which he deduced that, "in Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew."

Then came this passage, which readers may care – as Europeans – to apply to their own neighbourhoods. "What we are seeing," concluded this author, "is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release – with Israel as the trigger – of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history... Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed."

Europe's past cannot and should not be denied, any more than white America's. This article is, however, simply a libel on present-day Europeans. There are no pogroms, no enforced ghettoes, no best-selling anti-Semitic books, movies or tracts. No politician can expect to gain votes out of anti-Semitism in any part of western Europe. Only the truly bonkers go in for it – which is more than you can say, alas, about anti-Muslimism. Talk about taking a Krauthammer to crack a nut.

But what about the "abyss" theory? When Jean-Marie Le Pen came second in the first round of French presidential voting 11 days ago, the benchmark used by pundits to measure his success or failure in the second round was whether he gained 25 per cent of the vote. Some even talked about 30 per cent. When he actually got only 18 per cent, and got it against a politician widely known as "Super-liar", one might have expected a raft of analyses of the Front's unexpected failure. Le Pen himself talked of a terrible blow to France's hope (ie himself).

Not a bit of it. We now heard the "one-fifth" Jeremiad. One fifth of voters were so alienated that they voted for this man. One fifth were at fundamental odds with the political establishment, with liberal values, with multiculturalism. The democratic glass was one fifth empty. Never mind the million who physically demonstrated against Le Pen, or the 25 million who voted against him. Into the abyss!

There is a new-left orthodoxy which links Le Penism and abstentionism together in a critique of modern social democracy. It says that voters are alienated by the sameness of the mainstream political parties. They are offered no fundamentally competing visions of society. New Labour, for instance, has abandoned its historic class base and appeals to a more amorphous and less loyal set of social strata. So its jilted supporters, shorn of their old political certainties, are sniffed out and seduced by fascists. Meanwhile younger electors fail to be energised by the tedious sameness of the politics on offer.

Even if this analysis was correct (and I don't think that it is), it offers no exit strategy. Labour (and European socialist parties, for that matter) cannot very well appeal to constituencies – such as the traditional industrial blue-collar sector – that have largely disappeared. Nor is it attractive for politicians to adopt policies that they know are unworkable simply because they want to appear exciting.

A common feature of both left and right Cassandras is a pessimism about race. "Of course," writes one of the former this week, "multiculturalism and diversity have found many new friends in Europe... but it would be wrong to regard this is as the dominant trend." Not dominant, perhaps, but easily one of the most powerful. Why else is Ann Winterton no longer on the Conservative front bench?

On the right, this pessimism takes the form of arguing that the views of the fifth (or, in Britain, the 100th) "should be taken into account". The latest unpleasant demagogue, after all, "only says what everyone else is thinking". So one writer this week starts from the premise that "Most of the mass immigration now convulsing Europe is composed of Muslims". But is it? In the 1992 British census, those citizens from predominantly Muslim countries numbered about 700,000, or less than a 50th of the population.

I have battered myself against the rock of "we must take their views into account," several times in debate, always asking just how we should accomplish this. Should we pretend that ethnic minorities do get preferential treatment in housing and social services, when they don't? Should we nod when it is suggested that "they" attack us more than "we" attack them, in contradiction to every fact we have available? Or should we be honest and tell those inclined to vote for racist parties that their perceptions are just plain wrong.

Lets also be honest and admit the often disappointing nature of governance in a mature democracy. Admit that good politics is just like our own lives – complex and tedious, made up of small things done quickly and big things done very slowly. Journalists complain that, in the Netherlands, "nothing really changed". But why – in a decently run country – should things "really change", in any revolutionary sense? No, this is a trahison des scribes in which democracy is made to seem useless because it is unexciting. Some people seem, for the sake of entertainment, to want to transform Westminster into Weimar.

Lots of things are exciting. There is never a dull moment in the Middle East these days. Meanwhile we back home have the endless, joyless wank of the Byers affair to remind us of the crushing tedium of beltway obsessions. But at least, voters, Mr Byers has never killed anyone.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com