FP: You were at one time, I think it would be safe to say, a man of the Left. But you grew quite critical of leftwing European attitudes toward the US, Israel and capitalism. Could you give us an insight into your intellectual journey in this context?

Bawer: I’ve always thought of myself as a more or less classic Cold War liberal. But never New Left. The New Left always appalled me, and I’ve always been strongly anti-Communist. Yes, I’ve changed political alliances more than once over the years – not because I’ve changed positions, but because the labels started meaning different things.

This business of labels is maddening. In Stealing Jesus I criticized Christian fundamentalism and liberals loved it; in While Europe Slept, I criticize Islamic fundamentalism, which is by any measure a lot worse than Christian fundamentalism, and some of the same people who loved Stealing Jesus are appalled and think I’ve totally changed my politics, when in fact I’m being totally consistent. Anyway, as I explain in While Europe Slept, I moved to Europe in 1998, not long after Stealing Jesus came out, I looked forward to living in what I thought was a secular society. What I found, however, was a society governed according to what I gradually came to recognize as another kind of fundamentalism – namely, big-government, welfare-state social democracy...

...The hostility to America was ubiquitous, and reflexive. Ditto the hostility to Israel, which Europeans have been taught by their elite to see almost exclusively as America’s 51st state, an oppressor of Palestinians and an illegal occupier of Arab and Muslim lands. I had been in many ways a critic of America, but in Europe I increasingly came to appreciate its virtues – and repeatedly found myself in social situations where I was obliged to defend it against people who regurgitated inane anti-American clichés that they’d been fed since infancy...