"If European governments fail to improve the anemic economic performance described by Tyler, and remain unable to assimilate Muslim immigrants effectively, there is a real chance that voter frustration will increase, and the far right or far left will successfully exploit it and eventually come to power in one or more major European nations - with potentially disastrous results. Many of those Europeans who vote for extremist parties are probably just "protest voting" and do not actually endorse their platforms in full. But the same was probably true of many of the Germans who "protest-voted" for the Nazis and Communists during the Weimar Republic (as Richard Evans suggests in this recent book). The results this time around probably will not be as bad as what happened in the 1920s and '30s, but neither will it be pretty.

[ Which brings to mind the following from Tom Wolfe: "For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe. -ed. ] "