Look out, Greenland!
Denmark joins the freakout over the Restoration of the Orange Troll
Hello again after a long hiatus owing to health issues, family issues, and plain laziness. Thank you for sticking around, subscribers, even if you forgot about this newsletter in its absence.
Alert readers will notice the long-overdue revamped title of this publication. When I began the blog, way back in the innocent era of early 2016, Denmark had been ensconced atop the World Happiness Report rankings. But in recent years it’s been consistently overtaken by its sauna-steeped neighbor Finland. I didn’t bother to update the heading because, as noted at the outset, the Nordics, which dominate the rankings every year, are separated by less than the margin of error and Denmark was still a good representative.
Nevertheless, as silver medalist in the past five surveys, it’s time to admit that the country is no longer the maximum paradise on Earth. Has its happiness slipped, or has Finland eked out a bit of extra wellbeing? Does the fawning publicity for the derby winner in Sunday supplements translate into cold tourist cash? More on the local happiness barometer reading in a future post.
For now, one Dane we can suppose to be one of the happiest people in the world is Victoria Kjær Theilvig, the freshly crowned (Denmark likes crowns) Miss Universe. Otherwise, something else is weighing heavily on Danish happiness, particularly concerning relations with its geopolitical boss, the United States. Its reaction to the election result was not merely annoyance that tariffs will slow Novo Nordisk's Ozempic juggernaut and leave Americans back at the fast-food trough. It was fears of heightened x-risk for the continent and the planet.
Anxious eyes on the doomsday clock
In a Bloomberg poll of how Europeans would vote in the US presidential election, Denmark scored highest for Harris at 85 percent. I recall another at 95 percent. The Danes are still ensconced at No. 1 in hating Trump, and still astonished that such a thoroughgoing scoundrel could even be considered as a presidential nominee.
While Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (DK), who famously pissed off the wily dealmaker by calling his idea of buying Greenland “absurd,” congratulated him on his victory and assured Denmark’s cooperation, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the current foreign minister and the PM during Trump’s first term, who has called Trump “dangerous,” had this to say: “This is very difficult” (DK).
There have been innumerable commentaries (DK) and speculations about the election and its consequences for the world. The predominate reaction in Denmark is typical of Western Europe: fears about the loss of security from weakened NATO and UN, the loss of foreign trade from drastic tariffs, the loss of Ukraine, the loss of progress on climate change, and the loss of support for liberal democracy and human rights altogether.
Disbelief and disinfo
Unpredictability and chaos in the global order certainly aren’t trifling matters. The Danes saw Trump as unhinged and untrustworthy, and agreed with the Democrats’ charges of his fascist tendencies. They viewed Kamala as a serviceable continuation of Biden-Obama-Clinton neoliberalism in a fraught world, and they can’t understand how the deadlocked two-party system and unfair electoral college can persist.
Did 76 million Americans really just decide to sacrifice Europe? The Danes put their hopes in the carefully curated polls insisting on a “toss-up” and neglected to check the betting markets. Trump was so unthinkable that they hardly questioned the Democrats and were therefore so surprised at the extent of the Republicans’ sweep.
The dark side of Joy
They didn’t understand that the Democratic Party had become so arrogant and corrupt in its own form of authoritarianism that it sabotaged itself: with media surveillance and censorship, bogus lawfare, dissembling over Biden’s condition, suppression of the primary nomination process and secretive anointing of a cipher and the least-popular VP ever as substitute candidate, and above all, obliviousness to the unpopularity of Progressive causes.
I joked to them that Europeans would gladly sacrifice a generation of young Americans to the depredations of woke ideology for the sake of maintaining the muddling diplomatic stability of Biden’s handlers.
Unlike the party leaders and donors and the shamelessly biased American mainstream media, unsuspecting Europeans had at least the excuse of being an ocean away from the unhappy American heartland of disenfranchised deplorables who didn’t buy Kamala’s ersatz “joy” and stonewalling on the border, inflation, and taxpayer-sponsored sex-change operations for convicted illegal immigrants.
Rolling the dice on Elon the Fixer
While I considered Kamala (meaning her puppet-masters) the lesser catastrophe myself, my initial reaction was that the Democrats should rebuke themselves instead of disloyal demographic segments. I could even see the value of a critical review of the federal government’s bloated expenditures and regulations, even if it doesn’t give the hardcore MAGA cult anything besides USA Bibles made in China and other grifting memorabilia. But that was before Trump started floating cabinet appointments.
With right-wing populism ascendant across Europe, little Denmark is one of the last redoubts of classical liberal consensus and good global citizenship. Maybe that’s partly because it was prescient in tightening its own border controls, despite racist allegations, in time to preserve its civil society.
Despair not, Never Trumpers, we’ll have some tips for all the panic-stricken leftists who immediately googled “move to europe.” With the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity, living in a constitutional monarchy might not be such a stretch. You’ll have to rely on the Baltics as a buffer against Putin’s imperial ambitions, but you’ll feel safer from the other mad dictator’s vengeance.