Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Beware of the Demons
As this is my first post on Ricochet, I should let readers know whence I come. I am a British citizen who, after years of nomadic life working in banks in Scandinavia, the Middle East, Belgium and France, has decided to retire to Florida.
Having spent half my adult life in France, I follow with particular interest Claire Berlinski’s enlightened contributions to the Ricochet debate, and should like at this point, after the Brexit vote, the US presidential election and in view of next year’s French presidential election, contribute a thought of my own on all three.
Those who follow French politics will remember that in the first round of the presidential election of 2002, the Front National (led then by its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine), stunned pollsters and pundits alike by beating the Socialist Party’s Lionel Jospin into third place, thus earning a place in the run-off against Jacques Chirac. Of course, the Socialists and the Conservative RPR joined forces to give Chirac a landslide victory in the second round, but recent events show that the obvious lesson has still not been learned.
Demonizing a political opponent is quite simply counter-productive.
If you describe your opponent as racist, bigoted, or simply deplorable, not only will his (or her) supporters feel offended and then be more likely to mobilize on polling day, but they will also tend not to reveal to pollsters their real intentions for fear of ridicule (or worse). This leads to a ‘shock’ result (for some), speechless journalists (not necessarily a bad thing) and pollsters looking (more) stupid (than usual).
We saw this in June with the Brexit referendum, which the Remainers lost primarily because the Government, the BBC and The Guardian, aided by The Economist and (to my great distress) the Financial Times, assured them smugly that they could not lose.
It happened again earlier this month when CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post, having campaigned energetically, and with total disregard for any deontology dictating journalistic impartiality, for Hillary Clinton, assured the country that the result was a foregone conclusion.
The odds are that the same scenario will be repeated in next year’s French presidential election which will almost certainly end in a run-off between Marine Le Pen and, probably, François Fillon. But the concerted effort to cut the Front National off, which was hugely successful in 2002, may not work in 2017. Marine Le Pen is a far cannier politician than her father, a more likeable person and, above all, has a lot going for her : the growing feeling among the French that the migrant crisis is a threat to their national identity, not to mention an economic burden, a sneaking admiration of the British for having voted Leave (not that any Frenchman is going to admit that) and a general lassitude towards Europe which may well be magnified after the Italian referendum next month and the financial crisis which might ensue.
Whereas Nicolas Sarkozy and, to a lesser extent, Alain Juppé, might make a dramatic swing to the right in an attempt to win back supporters from the Front National, it would be totally out of character for M. Fillon to do so. But he is equally unlikely to attract the ex-Socialist and ex-Communist voters who are the principal reason why Mme Le Pen is doing so well in the polls, and the polls, as I believe I have demonstrated, are probably understating her support in the electorate.
Time will tell, but those who today sneer at ‘populist’ movements in Europe should beware. It may have escaped the notice of the chattering classes who read the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, The Guardian and Die Zeit, but Europe is now in a mortal struggle to conserve its cultural heritage, indeed its very civilization. European peoples are aware of this, even though their political leaders are largely in denial.
Beware of the ‘demons’.
Published in Politics
I believe @fidelio102 alluded to the logic of European mass immigration in an earlier comment:
The European welfare state, like the American Social Security and Medicare systems, are pyramid schemes: they depend on a growing number of young, healthy workers to pay the taxes to finance the ever-growing health care expenses of an aging population of retirees. That leaves Europeans with a choice, they can either:
So far Europe’s leaders have consistently chosen option #3. The voters may throw them out of office for it, but the problem won’t go away, and I don’t see any signs the European voters are prepared to embrace options 1 or 2 instead.
I read somewhere that many people in Europe will be paid more in their retirement than in their working life. If true, this is also an area that could be addressed. Starting work at 30 and retiring at 52 — this has to be seen for what it is: welfare.
Very interesting. You may well be right. It looks as if the French will have to decide between classical liberalism (which has not been on offer for a very long time) and an exaggerated nationalism. I, too, think Marine Le Pen more attractive than her father, and I agree that demonizing one’s opponents eventually backfires. The French economy has been stagnant now for almost thirty-six years. Change of some sort is coming. But of what sort?
Thank you for your comment, Claire. In my original post, I should have referred to your enlightened and enlightening articles (it would have been fairer to you).
It is indeed too early to predict with any certainty the French electorate’s behavior. It seems pretty certain that, unless some charismatic candidate emerges for the Socialists, the second round of the 2017 election will be between Fillon and Le Pen. Latest polls give Fillon a 67-33 lead, but anything could happen over the next few months : a major terrorist offensive, a collapse of the Euro following an Italian banking crisis ; all sorts of game-changers are possible.
Yeah, but in a way, it’s really a myth. Denmark—my grandparents’ native land—didn’t really have much in the way of a distinct culture (distinct, that is, from Germany and the rest of Scandihoovia) until the mid-1800s; the determined effort they’ve made to distinguish themselves from (especially )Germany is heroic, but the reality is that those little lines on the maps always were pretty permeable. My husband, supposedly 100% Dutch, turns out, upon examination, to be a little bit Dutch, a whole lot of Polish-Jewish, a sizable slab of Surinam-native and probably some other stuff thrown in there than no one liked to talk about, back in the day.
The reality is that “race” has always been a myth, and “old, traditional” culture always a whole lot younger and more nouveau than we believe.
Which isn’t to say that Norway will still be Norway, or Denmark Denmark when the birthrate tips the scales from Lutheran to Muslim in a hundred years time. On the other hand, it was the Vikings (my ancestors) who brought blue eyes, and probably a vulnerability to clinical depression to the British Isles, and a bit of blond nonsense probably traveled along with the exotic, tall, fair bodyguards we sent down to Constantinople. Can the Scandis really complain, now, about unibrows and sharia?
You do have a way with words. Well done.
Anyone can complain about sharia as it is incompatible with liberty.
If only we knew what those were! Opinion polling now seems as discredited as astrology, and no one seems to have a clue what Western electorates will do when they go to the polls. Would you have predicted Fillon’s victory two weeks ago? Did you realize the French electorate was so hungry for a liberal, Thatcherite economic policy? I sure didn’t. And frankly, I don’t know if they are, or if it’s just RP primary voters who are. We’ll see when he goes up against the socialists and the Front — are you willing to bet that France, deep down, wants to be rid of its overweening state?
And do the French really want a pro-Putin foreign policy? Or is that a casual afterthought? In the whole debate, only five minutes went to foreign policy. Do we know from this vote that a pro-Russian alignment is what France wants? Or do we know that France has had it with immigrants, or perhaps with gay marriage, or perhaps with slick, slightly oily politicians like Juppé?
Ms Braestrup’s Viking ancestors certainly participated, probably for the better, the creation of what became the English nation, but they came as invaders, not as immigrants.
If Britain, over centuries, and to a lesser extent, Sweden, over decades, have successfully assimilated waves of immigrants, it is because we (the British, I mean) have convinced immigrants of the virtues of our way of life.
As Mr Castaigne points out, Shariah law is incompatible with Western democratic values and, whatever its merits, cannot be tolerated and certainly not applied concomitantly with local law.
Which brings us back to France. Ms Berlinski can confirm that a couple of months ago the Sunday paper JDD did an in-depth survey of ‘moderate’ Moslems in France. 29%, nearly one-third, wanted to see Shariah law applied in France. This is a deafening alarm bell, not only for France but for the rest of Europe.
I agree completely. We seem to have entered a world of radical uncertainty. Or perhaps I should be more precise: We’ve entered a world in which we’re aware of our uncertainty.
I’ve lost any confidence I had that my gut feelings about where things are headed, politically, are worth much. I’ll note my gut feeling about France not because I’d bet a dime on my own prognostications, at this point — I’ve been consistently wrong for a while now. It’s been a long losing streak. But my gut feeling is that France is in no way sold on the idea of cutting back the state. I suspect what people really wish is that they could undo their knowledge that the left hasn’t delivered. If the PS hadn’t been in power all this time, I figure they’d be channelling all the throw-the-bums-out energy into putting them in power.
I’m guessing Fillon won precisely because Juppé characterized him as “too radical.” People want a radical change. Juppé tried to sell himself as a practical, realistic version of Fillon — they said, non. But now Fillon will have to sell himself as a practical, realistic version of Le Pen. (How else can he run?) Le Pen is selling more socialism (with an ugly nativist twist). Fillon is telling people that they’ve run out of other people’s money. Which way, realistically, are all those former PS voters going to go? I figure they’ll go to Le Pen.
They’re both awful, as far as I’m concerned: They’re both running on selling out Eastern Europe. But apart from that — as if there could be an “apart from that” — Fillon is talking about a program that might really help the French economy. She’s talking about digging even deeper. If he’s really the heir to Thatcher, he’ll have to make the case for popular capitalism to the electorate. I’m just not sure they want to hear it.
What do you think?
****
*The socialists.
I wrote about that here. (If we’re talking about the same poll — JDD being Journal de Dimanche, which commissioned the Institute Montaigne study?) Here’s the questionnaire: you can see that they didn’t ask a question about the Sharia: They asked about a number of related topics, from which, I think, some journalists extrapolated, but I don’t think the extrapolation makes sense. There’s an executive summary of what they think they found here, in English.
It would have been interesting if they’d asked whether the respondents wanted to see the Sharia applied in France, but even if they had, I think it would be wise to treat the results with some skepticism: I suspect few people would feel comfortable saying that to a pollster; and we’re all getting a lesson in the limits of modern polling these days.
My apologies if you were referring to a different poll.
Bet Fillon could win with a less ugly nativist twist.
But I don’t know much about current France. My prognostication is based on history and that things never REALLY change.
Whether it be “Dark Ages”, Middle Class, enlightenment, peasant revolts, or reformations, the wave typically washes over all of Europe. There is something happening in Europe.
No, but I hadn’t seen the original poll. I had read a comment on the JDD poll in Le Figaro and maybe I confused the poll itself with the journalist’s spin.
Quite right. As it happens, I had ancestors on both sides—invaders and invaded—which sounds kind of icky, I know, but it was very long ago. And yes, the Scandinavians were invaders, but they weren’t quite as warlike as they prefer to imagine; there is evidence that a lot of them just sorta settled in, started families, hung out, became…British-ish.
So while, by all means, my present-day cousins should resist Sharia, there’s no real reason to assume that having a little freshening in the gene-pool and some nouvelle cuisine added to the definition of Scandinavian culture is either unprecedented or disastrous.
Still, I wonder whether–now that Europeans are getting angry, and throwing off the yoke of PC—Islam will modernize and modify more rapidly under the newly increased pressure? (The self-abnegating tolerance didn’t seem to work all that well; maybe intolerance—“shape up, or go back to where you came from”—will actually help Islam become what Obama is always claiming for it? The R of P, that is.)
Thanks for the mention in your post on the primary results. I will be answering your question in my next post.
I hope American conservatives are also learning this lesson. I hear conservatives nonchalantly say that liberals are what’s wrong with America, & even that America would be more or less perfect, or as perfect as possible for human beings, without liberals. I’m pleased to note, that’s not the same as calling them demons or demonizing them, but I’m worried to note, the similarities are serious.
That boring time between 1945-2001 still matters. I don’t see democracy going away and I don’t see the GPD per capita going down. The ideas of liberalism or the seeds of those ideas will still remain. The new waves will incorporate what came before them.