By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, April
26, 2022
A country without a Left may sound like a
paradise to American conservatives, but it isn’t the paradise they had in mind.
Vive la France!
France’s 2017 presidential election was a
preview of the one that took place over the weekend: Emmanuel Macron won,
and Marine Le Pen claimed a moral victory owing to the fact that she didn’t
lose as badly as she did the time before. The 2017 French election season was
notable for another development: the collapse of the Socialist Party, which in
France is the center-left party. In fact, the Socialists’ showing in the
parliamentary elections that season was so poor — it went from having 280 out
of 577 seats to just 29 — that it lost its state subsidies, meaning that the
party would not be refunded for the cost of running its election, as is the
French practice. The party was financially ruined: It warmed many a capitalist
heart to see the strapped Socialists forced to sell their party headquarters, a
splendid Left Bank mansion — these are French socialists we
are talking about. In 2022, the Socialist candidate was knocked out in the
first round, winning less than 2 percent of the vote. Which is to say, in this
election what once was France’s main center-left party has underperformed the
showing the Libertarian Party in the United States enjoyed in 2016.
(N.B.: 2016 was an unusually good year for
the Libertarian Party, another reminder that Trump vs. Herself should have been
a New York City mayoral election, not a presidential race.)
Of course, it isn’t entirely true that
France has no Left left: The third-place finisher in the first round was the
far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And it isn’t only the center-left party
that is in trouble: The Republican (center-right) candidate also was knocked
out in the first round, winning less than 5 percent of the vote.
And so, as things stand, there appear to
be two major blocs in French politics: The technocratic-progressive Macron bloc
and the nationalist-populist Le Pen bloc.
Put another way, France just had its 2016:
The far-left candidate was a significant but in the end minor factor (So long,
Bernie!), the center-left element coalesced around a technocratic
progressive-centrist (which is the position that the Clinton and Obama factions
always have aspired to), the old center-right tendency was effectively absent,
and the nationalist-populist element grew in stature by fusing a species of
reconstituted social conservatism with big-spending welfare populism. Donald
Trump won and Marine Le Pen lost, but the political vectors in play are
remarkably similar in the two cases.
So, who is Emmanuel Macron? He is the most
popular French political figure . . . in Germany, which should tell you most of
what you need to know about him. Macron began his career in the Socialist
Party, became an independent, and then ran for president on the ticket of a
party he founded as his own personal vehicle: La République En
Marche! (As in the case of 1990s rock bands Therapy? and Godspeed You!
Black Emperor, the punctuation is part of the name.) Macron has a great deal in
common with Barack Obama: He began as a left-winger and moved toward the center
when he desired to become a national figure; he has genuinely technocratic
tendencies, together with a tendency to take political and ideological pet
projects and dress them up in technocratic drag; his party is organized
(reorganized, in Obama’s case) around his personal political interests and does
not fare nearly as well as he does in its legislative and local races; he is
often arrogant and at times insufferable; he is very, very lucky in his opponents.
But he is unlike Obama in important ways,
too: Obama left office with a 59 percent approval rating, while Macron faced
reelection with the precise inverse approval rating: 41 percent. (Obama was at
a solid 53 percent in his 2012 reelection.) Americans are generally pretty well
disposed toward Barack Obama (if this comes as a surprise to you, you need to
broaden your media diet), while the French — including many of those who voted
for him — generally detest Macron, denouncing the former Socialist as président
des riches.
In many ways like Obama, Macron also is in
many ways the French version of a 1990s Democrat, beginning with the fact that
he is made rapt by Silicon Valley–style business rhetoric, describing his
vision for France as building a “start-up nation.” He is very much a
Europeanist (he marched to his victory celebration to the tune of Beethoven’s
Ninth, the European Union’s version of a national anthem) and a globalist, a
progressive and a Davos man. (And surely a Monocle man.) He is a business-friendly corporate progressive in the
Clintonian New Democrat mode.
Marine Le Pen is something that once would
have seemed strange if not anathematic to the American Right: a right-winger
who lands a bit to the left of Elizabeth Warren on most economic issues. Le
Pen, like Donald Trump and many of the figures who wish to claim his gold-lamé
mantle, is what is sometimes called a “welfare chauvinist,” a term that is
useful in that the most obvious alternative — national socialist — comes with a
great deal of baggage. She is
as perfect a modern example as you will find of Jonah
Goldberg’s observation that
as a practical matter almost all socialist regimes end up being nationalist
regimes and most nationalist regimes end up being socialist regimes. A socialized industry
is a nationalized industry and vice versa, but there is more
than economics at play: Goldberg is correct in identifying this as a matter
of sentimentality in that rationalist theories of government
fail to inspire the kind of emotional commitment necessary to sustain the
regime and thereby require the psychological oomph of nationalism,
ethno-nationalism, or some other political tendency that implicates issues of
identity. Stalin always elbows out Trotsky, and the dream of worldwide
revolution always ends up being the Great Patriot War to Save the Motherland.
The reference point of social conservatism
is, ironically, easily shifted. French social conservatism once meant
Catholicism and monarchy, whereas Le Pen and her element position themselves as
champions of French secularism, particularly vis-à-vis Muslim immigrants.
Thirty years ago, Donald Trump would have been held up as Mr. Bad Example by
the same American social conservatives who rallied to his cause in 2016 and
2020. The Golden Age is wherever you find it: There are Americans Left and
Right who wish to fix the nation forever in 1957, though for very different
reasons.
Whatever the point of reference, social
conservatism and welfare-statism meet and conjoin on the common ground of Hobbit-hole
sentimentality, which is predicated on the false belief
that if modern capitalism were a little less dynamic and a lot less global then
there would be a renaissance of civic and community life, of life lived at the
family, village, and parish level rather than the transnational scale or, as in
the cases of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the extraterrestrial scale. In reality,
everybody chooses modern capitalism, because nobody really wants a 1957
standard of living — I’ll confidently wager that J. D. Vance does not live in an
800-square-foot house without air-conditioning — but the welfare-chauvinists
believe (again, wrongly) that atavistic economic policies would put them on
more defensible ground when it comes to social status, which is, of course,
what right-wing populism is all about: It always begins with Tucker Carlson of
the La Jolla He-Man Woman-Haters’ Country Club sounding the klaxons of alarum
about the death of masculinity and ends with Madison Cawthorn in a lace
bustier. Somewhere along the way, Republicans give up the idea of balancing the
budget or reforming entitlements.
Anti-capitalist conservatism and
anti-capitalist reaction are familiar elements of Continental politics. There
is a tradition of anti-capitalism in Anglo-American conservatism, too, and it
is very closely allied with anti-modernism. T. S. Eliot, the great Modernist
American poet, was such a social reactionary that he ended up an Englishman (accent and all!) whose Tory politics were quite at home with his skepticism of business
and industry, his prescient environmentalism, his neo-medieval model of
community life, and — unhappily, this is not incidental — his antisemitism. J.
R. R. Tolkien — the original Hobbit-hole sentimentalist — had a deep dread of
technology and industrialization, which he wrote about in terms that were more
mystical than political. There is a good deal of wisdom in Shire conservatism —
“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing
uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” — but in politics as in
literature, that life is mainly fantasy: The world does not go away when you
cover your eyes.
A capitalism-skeptical Right may seem
alien to those of us who remember OK Soda, but you’ll find similar sentiments
everywhere from Albert Jay Nock to Dwight Eisenhower’s misunderstood
“military-industrial complex” speech. (Eisenhower was in many ways a High
Modernist, as much a midcentury icon as an Eames lounge chair, but there was a
strain of 19th-century prairie populism in him, too.) The tendency is more
pronounced in Catholic Europe than it is in the English-speaking countries,
where private wealth has long provided a welcome counterbalance to the power of
the state. England may be a “nation of shopkeepers,” in Napoleon’s (supposed)
estimate, but, as it turns out, all that shopkeeping makes a nation rich, free,
and powerful — a lesson not lost on England’s overseas descendants.
Not lost until recently, anyway.
In the United States as in France, we are
seeing politics settling into two main blocs: a technocratic-progressive bloc
with its roots in the Left and allied with the commanding heights of business,
and a reactionary-populist bloc that has swallowed up most of the Right while
attracting enough support from the center and the Left (those Sanders-to-Trump
voters are a real thing, though the rank-and-file union vote shifting rightward
is a bigger deal) to leave the Left proper as a weak third-place contender in a
political contest that recognizes only first and second place.
Figures such as Elizabeth Warren are
seeking to straddle the technocratic and left-wing camps in the belief that
this is the surest route to power against a thoroughly Trumpist Republican
Party, but Sanders-style socialism remains a distinctly minority taste among
critical voting blocs within the Democratic Party, which is why Joe Biden won
the 2020 nomination and is president today. Of course, personalities will shape
coming events: Le Pen has lost enough presidential races that she probably will
be obliged to pass the baton, and I doubt that Trump will run again on the
Republican side, though I do not regard that as an impossibility. As it stands,
both camps are limited mainly by their respective cultural radicalisms: There
are moderate conservatives who could find some common ground with pro-market
technocrats but find it impossible to share political space with people who
can’t say what a woman is and support legal abortion up until the moment of
delivery. (And, in more cases than you’d think, a ways beyond.) There are
moderate Democrats who might be attracted to a political party that wants to
protect or even enhance their social-welfare benefits while also taking
seriously issues such as crime and illegal immigration but who cannot work
themselves around to joining a party that goes to such extraordinary lengths to
accommodate anti-vaccine kooks, the Jewish-space-laser element, and (WFB
forgive the term!) crypto-Nazis.
And like France’s Republicans, the sort of
people who used to be Republicans in the United States — social conservatives
who also support free enterprise and an assertive foreign policy backed by a
strong national defense — are reduced to the point of near irrelevance as far
as elections are concerned, though they maintain some institutional power.
We may end up being a country that is
effectively without a Left, but that doesn’t mean that conservatives are going
to get what they want.
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