By Tom Rogan
Monday, April 24, 2017
Thus ends the first round of the two-step French
presidential election. Beating the expectations of pollsters, centrist Emmanuel
Macron eked out a win over Marine Le Pen. The two will now go head-to-head in a
winner-take-all runoff on May 7.
With François Fillon (the GOP-equivalent candidate) now
defeated, American conservatives might wonder who to support. After all, Macron
is a former member of France’s current socialist government, and Le Pen is
avowedly pro-Trump.
The answer: Macron.
First off, Macron’s economic policies are the more
conservative. Like Trump, Le Pen supports protectionism and robust protections
for the entitlement state, but she also wants expanded welfare benefits, a
reduction in France’s already unaffordable retirement age, and the retention of
a 35-hour working week. Le Pen claims she will pay for all this with efficiency
savings. Good luck. But that’s just the start. Le Pen’s National Front party
also wants import tariffs to protect lethargic French industries from
competition.
This is socialism. It would mean higher living costs for
families, ballooning deficit spending, and more barriers to first-time
employment for younger workers. Conversely, Macron has promised reforms to
encourage entrepreneurial risk taking and to unshackle private-sector
businesses from France’s constricting labor laws. Put simply, Macron is the
candidate of economic opportunity; Le Pen is the candidate of special
interests. Millennial conservatives have particular reason to support the
former, in the sense that their futures depend on creative destruction born of
fields such as those in the sharing industry.
Second, where Le Pen fetishizes national division, Macron
speaks of patriotism joined to opportunity. Even as words alone, this is a
political narrative that France desperately needs. As Andrew Hussey explains in
his 2014 book, The French Intifada, many young French Muslims feel that their
citizenry exists on paper only — that when it comes to education, opportunity,
and respect, their country has no interest in them. American conservatives
should be alarmed by that sentiment. The glory of American patriotism is its
combination of shared opportunity and personal responsibility. Indeed, American
Muslims’ patriotism is proof that Le Pen is wrong. It shows that where
expectations are matched to opportunity, nationalism can be inclusive.
There’s a broader ideological issue in play here. As I
wrote yesterday in the Washington
Examiner, Le
Pen’s obsession with identity politics galvanizes her base but alienates
everyone else. Some American conservatives think that Le Pen’s beliefs are
similar to Trump’s, but they’re not. Where Trumpism consists of chameleon
political expediency, Le Pen-ism is grounded in the purity of sectarian anger.
Trump flirts with sectarian rhetoric, but he corrals it to themes of crime,
employment, and trade. Le Pen’s identity politics run far deeper. Her speeches
are webbed together by a thinly veiled disgust for French citizens of colonial
ancestry. It’s a telling differential between Trump and Le Pen. Where candidate
Trump pledged to increase social mobility for American minorities, Le Pen uses
minorities as a whipping horse to pleasure her base. Earlier this month, Le Pen
promised to transfer government funds away from what she described as
drug-addled, crime-ridden suburbs and toward rural areas. Regardless, her tone
is always clear: The young Muslim men of Clichy-sous-Bois, where riots seized
international headlines in 2005, are to be reproached. The empowered pure offer national salvation.
This is not to say that France does not need to crack
down on criminality and terrorism. It does — urgently. But confronting
terrorists and organized crime gangs won’t do much good if the means of doing
so drive future generations into those same endeavors.
Finally, when it comes to U.S. security interests, Le Pen
might as well be an American adversary. Yes, she wants to leave the
bureaucratic and illiberal European Union. But Le Pen also wants to abandon
NATO and cozy up to President Putin. Hers is a pathetic mix of Gaullism and
appeasement. Don’t believe me? Read her policy platform and look at this
photo.
Macron, however, pledges to improve France’s security and
intelligence apparatus. Expect, for example, increased French
special-operations deployments alongside U.S. military forces. He has also
shown admirable courage in condemning Putin’s harassment. If American
conservatives truly care about human freedom and the basic rule of law, their
support for Macron must be a given.
This isn’t a complex choice. Neither Le Pen nor Macron is
a true conservative, but the latter is far closer to conservatism than the former
is. Without Lafayette and France, the United States would probably have died in
its infancy. Our close ally deserve better than Le Pen.
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