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What Le Pen can teach the Democrats
Coddling the far right never pays
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson
April 29, 2002 -- Mt. Shasta (zeppscommentaries. com) -- Even by the undemanding standards of French politics, it was a shocker. In the primary round for Presidente, neo-nazi Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second, beating out three left-wing candidates and finishing only a few points behind the incumbent centrist, Jacques Chirac.
Now French politics is usually pretty exciting, but I never really know what's going on. They show lots of spirit for their causes, and stampede past shouting joyously and waving placards, and I'm usually left in the dust, looking after a retreating wave of berets and polo shirts and asking, "porquoi?"
They get excited, they shout a lot, and they usually make a good testing ground for various liberal and/or socialist schemes, usually with considerable success, but always with a great deal of noise and arguments that make no sense. And I speak French -- de peu, mon petite paquet de linge sale; I don't even want to guess what people who depend solely on CNN for their information must think.
But the key word in French politics is "left." The centrists are well to the left of the Democratic party. The Communists were the second biggest party in France as recently as the 70s, and most of the candidates for office in this election were Trotskyites. The American corporate right, seeing all this unbridled, nay, even gleeful socialism, usually whimper, cover their testicles reflexively, and try to pretend it's all just a bad dream and could never happen here. They pray to blessed Saint Ayn that it will never happen here.
The far right in France, widely regarded as the produce of contaminated puddles of fluids flung out of a German brothel during World War II, are seen as good practice target for spitting and catcalls when no American republican presidents happen to be available. Like the National Front in England or Pat Buchanan in America, the National Front in France is regarded as a bad joke, nothing more.
So when Le Pen finished second in the preliminary election for President, waves of consternation spread across Europe like a toilet with a bad seal, and suddenly, terse announcers -- conspicuously not French -- were talking about the rise of Nazism in France.
Granted, when I first heard that Le Pen had finished a close second to Jacques Chirac, my initial reaction was "Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick! What have those crazy bastards done now?" Or words to that effect.
Then I looked at the results of the race over all, and relaxed. Le Pen usually polls about 15%, and this time he got 17%. But his following are the intellectual, moral and spiritual dregs of French society: the xenophobes, the anti-Semites, the anti-intellectuals, the peasants with pitchforks -- the Dittoheads. All societies have such. In a healthy society they are a tolerated infection, like pseudomonas is in human bodies. Only when the body is sick is it dangerous. His two point bump doubtlessly came from a rise in anti-Semitism in response to Israel's actions in the occupied territories.
Indeed, the next day, a poll was released showing that in the runoff between Chirac and Le Pen, Chirac would win handily, by a 78-22 margin. Which, if you factor in the closet bigot element (the people who secretly support creatures like Le Pen but are ashamed to admit they do so to pollsters), he might get 25% of the vote.
The moderate right parties in France (the equivalent, ideologically, of the "mainstream" Republicans like Olympia Snowe and George Pataki) have thrown their support to Chirac.
France has a healthy society. The Nazis are not a threat. America should be so lucky.
Le Pen doesn't reflect any new strength among the far right. What he does expose, however, is an ongoing weakness on the part of the left.
In the recent election, there were three major leftist candidates, all of whom polled more than 12%, but less than Le Pen's 17%. A United left would have not only handily beaten Le Pen, but Chirac as well.
The French left is fragmented, and worse, it lacks a coherent message. Oh, it's commonly understood that the mainstream left stands for worker rights, religious freedom, and strong public services and infrastructure. But they haven't been readily able to get out their message to the public about why they should support such things. In the best of all possible worlds, it would seem a no-brainer to get people to support their own best interests, and it doesn't take much in the way of thinking to conclude that workplace guarantees, the ability to believe as you wish without state hindrance, or good roads and schools and an accessible health system are all good things that benefit everyone who isn't independently wealthy. The fact of the matter is that you DO have to explain to people where their best interests lie.
Of course, here in America, everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of the truculent dittohead who is making $15,000 a year and snarls that he doesn't want no nanny state ejukatin' his kids, but if they would just give him vouchers to cover half the cost of sending him to a for-profit flat earth academy, then he'll be able to stand tall and say he's free. If you use plenty of propaganda, you can get people to go against their own best interests. To a point. If you can convince a man that by sending his kids to a school that costs more and will be less accountable he'll somehow be better of, that point is a fair stretch down the road.
The fragmentation issue is of greater concern. In France, the differences between the various left-wing political parties are small, even petty, and often as incomprehensible as the doctrinal wars that wage among the various splinter cults on the edges of protestantism here. It's something that afflicts the left here; recently I saw two liberal friends leave on of my mail lists in a huff because I was anti- Ariel Sharon. Not because I'm anti-Israel, because I'm not, but because I'm anti-Sharon. They've gone to liberals who will really understand their support for Sharon, liberals such as the Washington Times, Trent Lott, and Putsch. I wonder how many little discrepancies in worldviews they'll have to ignore in order to avoid us impure liberals who are skeptical of Sharon and his penchant for savagery against the Palestinians.
The biggest issue of fragmentation among liberals is whether the Democratic Party is worth a wet turd or not. Some believe that only by working within the party can it be pulled to the left. Others note that those of us who have been doing that have failed abjectly -- they point to the dull and centrist Gore, and the right-winger Lieberman, as examples of how badly efforts to move the Democrats back to the left have gone and that the party will never veer to the left unless the left seriously threatens to abandon it.
Certainly, Democrats won't bother much with the left as long as they know the left has nowhere else to go. Don't be surprised if Chirac doesn't bother to embrace any of the leftist parties in the general election in France. Why should he? Where are they going to go?
The Democrats, for years, have held the left in the same contempt here. And, just to make matters worse, they have attempted to placate the far right, playing fair when the right was viciously cheating, stood by their Democratic principles against elitist GOP people who had nothing but contempt for the voice of the people, used reason against the Newt Gingrich demagogues.
It's to their credit that they did this. America, if it survives, will remember people like Clinton and Carter with pride, the Bushes and Reagan with shame.
It's long past the point where it was time for Democrats to tell the thugs of the right that they had compromised as far as they could go, and if the right wanted to run the country, they would have to do it without Democratic help.
Meanwhile, the left is still debating whether it is worth their while to support the Democrats, and so far, the Democrats have done little to demonstrate to the left that they are still capable of enveloping the left.
It's time the Democrats stopped playing to the neo-fascists and religious nuts on the right, and started working on support for their base.
Or, despite the fact that they represent far more Americans than do the Republicans, they will find themselves irrelevant in this next election.
Copyright © 2002, Bryan Zepp Jamieson.