It's easy to write Donald Trump off as a bizarre, American phenomena — a businessman-turned-reality-star who somehow ended up in the political limelight.

That's not quite right: there's actually something global about the rise of Trumpism, and his blend of extreme hostility to immigration paired with centrist or even at times left-wing stances on elements of the welfare state.

In a wide range of countries across the continent, newish parties — often, though not always with roots in ideological extremism — are gaining support with platforms that emphasize economic nationalism and anti-immigrant politics, often paired with a more centrist view on the welfare state.

Roughly the Trump ideological mix, in other words, except without the bombastic billionaire. And one of the few exceptions to the trend is Italy, where the main center-right political party has long been lead by Silvio Berlusconi, a bombastic billionaire with anti-immigrant views.

Consider the current situation in Sweden: an August 20 poll showed Jimmie Åkesson’s Sweden Democrats Party in the lead for the first time in party history. In Sweden's multi-party system, it only takes them 25 percent to be in first place. But that's a lot better than the 12.9 percent they scored in the country's 2014 parliamentary elections which, in turn, was a lot better than the 5.7 percent they got in 2010 — and that was the first time they ever managed to win any seats in parliament at all.

Their rise has been astoundingly swift, and it tells us a lot about Trump.

After all, as unlikely as Trump's rise in the polls has been in some ways the rise of the Sweden Democrats is even weirder. The party has its roots in things like the straightforwardly racist Keep Sweden Swedish, its first official party auditor was a Waffen-SS veteran, and in its early days tried to forge international connections with David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People. Their growth in part reflects ideological moderation and a move toward mainstream politics.

Trumpism, in other words, is much bigger than Donald Trump or the particular pathologies of the US Republican Party. It's a global phenomenon.

Right-wing populist parties aren't extreme per se

The kind of political movements we're talking about are often shorthanded as "far right" in the United States and by their European opponents. This is because several of them have institutional roots in old fascist political movements. But their current ideological positioning is generally much more complicated than that, and some of them have no such institutional roots.

For example, when I read the platform of the French National Front, I found a genuinely extreme and super-right-wing view of immigration combined with a critique of the Eurozone and the European Central Bank that would be comfortably at home in a Paul Krugman column. They also promised to avoid cuts to France's version of Social Security and indeed to enhance benefits for stay-at-home m

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