IMMIGRATION COMMON THREAD IN FRENCH, U.S. ELECTIONS
In case you’ve been confused by the last few days of punditry, let me say outright that France is not America.
For example, we recently concluded a presidential election in the United States in which many argued that it was imperative to smash the “final glass ceiling” by electing a female president. One doesn’t hear that kind of talk in France about Marine Le Pen, who just came in second in the first round of presidential elections. If she wins the runoff against Emmanuel Macron on May 7, she would be France’s first female president.
Why is there no “ready for Marine” rhetoric? Because Le Pen would also be the first “far-right” president. Identity politics has its limits.
And so does the term “far-right.” Indeed, the terms “left” and “right” rank among the worst of France’s exports. Their inspiration wasn’t ideology, but a seating chart. Supporters of the monarchy sat on the right in the General Assembly while radicals, revolutionaries, republicans and other foes and critics of the Ancien Regime sat on the left.
Thus, champions of free markets and limited government were every bit as “leftist” as the Jacobin totalitarians who would usher in the Reign of Terror. To this day, a “liberal” in France is closer to what many call a “right-winger” in America, at least on economic issues.
As for what constitutes “far-right,” that has come to be defined as a grab bag of bigotry, nativism and all the bad kinds of nationalism. Le Pen, the youngest daughter of the even more “far-right,” anti-Semitic politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, until recently led the National Front party (FN), which was founded in 1972 by, among others, veterans of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government.
Le Pen rejects the “far-right” label, preferring a “third-way” approach that has a long intellectual history among nationalists and fascists. She says that the symbiotic issues of immigration and globalization (specifically relating to the European Union) yielded a new politics that “no longer put the right and left in opposition, but patriots and globalists.” She has downplayed social issues, highlighting the fact that she’s a twice-divorced single mother who champions “women’s rights.” She’s vowed to leave abortion laws alone.
Her “economic patriotism” — a mélange of anti-immigration, protectionism, support for civil service protections and entitlements (at least for the nativeborn French) — is an updated variant of old-fashioned national-socialism.
In other words, those looking to cherry-pick easy comparisons to American politics have their work cut out for them. Except in one regard.
For decades, critics of America’s mass immigration have argued that the social upheaval such policies produce is dangerous and destabilizing. But the topic became radioactive for reasonable politicians, creating an opening for unreasonable ones among the working-class constituencies most affected by immigration.
This is precisely what has happened in France. Interviews with Le Pen voters tell this story over and over again. They bemoan the great “replacement” of not only workers but also customs, traditions and lifestyles brought by waves of immigrants.
Those resentments are perhaps more acute in France than elsewhere, a country where national identity precedes political and ideological orientations, and where assimilation is narrowly defined. But the same dynamic is playing itself out across Europe and America.
Le Pen will probably lose, but the problem will endure long past May 7.
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.