Ho, Ho, No!

The first time I saw him was a shock. I was out for a weekend walk one December afternoon in Ghent, the mid-size Belgian city where I live. Ghent is a bit of a liberal oasis in Flanders, where a troublingly high and growing number of Flemish parliamentary seats are held by the N-VA, an odious conservative party, and Vlaams Belang, the most extreme right-wing political group in all of Belgium.

Ghent, on the other hand, has been run mostly by socialists since 1989, and the city itself can be obnoxiously pleasant. In its tidy, well-maintained, and almost wholly pedestrianized medieval centre, locals often get around on foot or by public transit. Many, though, ride their bicycles everywhere, including the most bobo of all: the young parents on their bakfietsen (cargo bikes), who shuttle their offspring from multilingual daycares to their lovingly restored nineteenth-century homes to observe the city’s designated vegetarian night each Thursday.

That...