An opinion piece in City Journal, “Heirs to Fortuyn” by Bruce Bawer shows just how badly the art of editorial has fallen. Bawer talks about the swing towards conservatism in Europe and the reasons behind it, but he makes such a mess of things that it’s hard to believe anything he says without triple-checking first. He’s particularly fond of non-sequiturs.

For much of the American left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia…This rosy view was never accurate, of course…Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.

Well it didn’t take a Swedish think tank to work out that Sweden and Denmark have less wealth than most US states. The US has been the wealthiest nation on the planet for more than a century. It is also much larger than Sweden or Denmark. But, you know, on the ladder of GDP per capita, Sweden is 9th in the world and Denmark is 5th so they’re hardly economic failures. But what makes this a non-sequitur is that there never was a logical link between the American Left’s view of Europe and the wealth of America. The American Left, even accepting for the sake of argument that it represents a monolith of opinion, never claimed that Western Europe was superior to America on the basis of wealth.

My favourite non-sequitur, though, is this:

…[C]onservative columnist Peter Hitchens recently charged that nowadays “you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.” That elite, alas—as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of Shariah in parts of Britain—is bent on appeasing fundamentalist Islam.

Mr Bawer may not have noticed but the Archbishop of Canterbury is not part of the “media elite.” What’s more, the so-called “Centre-left media elite” was savagely critical of Archbishop Williams’s speech. The Independent called a parallel legal system “intolerable” and the Guardian thought Williams displayed hopeless “naïveté.”