What will it mean for Europe when the new Trump regime takes power next week in Washington? The question brings to mind something that happened to me recently on Mount Athos, the isolated Orthodox monastic republic in Greece. The driver of our van stopped to pick up an elderly Russian hermit walking along the dirt path. When the hermit learned that several of us were American, he said, in thickly accented English, “Trump is hope!”

Traveling on the continent since the November U.S. election, I have met ordinary Europeans who all say, in one way or another, that the Trump victory gives them hope, at last, for real change in Europe.

Whatever happens in America eventually comes to Europe. Even in Budapest, a staunch holdout against globalist liberalism, in 2021, the left-wing mayor of one district erected a temporary statue of the criminal George Floyd. When asked by journalists what the purpose is, given that Hungary has almost no black people, she replied, as only a Western leftist can, that we all must be united against racism.

The late Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in his great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, said that what makes a leftist a leftist is the ability to corral anything into the narrative of the Grand March—a parade through history towards ultimate liberation from oppression. This is the messianism of the Marxists, of course, but it is also a utopian creed believed by Western liberals, both of the Left and the Right. After all, what drove George W. Bush’s insane crusade against Iraq was, in large part, a sincere belief that liberal democracy is the final destination of all humankind.