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Quick Take on France: Not Necessarily a Defeat
American Righties are distraught over Macron’s win and Lefties are relieved. Both are wrong. In my view, it was a mistake to analogize or allegorize this French election into the Trump/Brexit story as everyone was doing. There is no such easy overlap. I think those two things are something uniquely Anglo-American; something taking shape in the Anglosphere that only has hints around the world. First, as Daniel Hannan recently wrote:
Let’s get one thing clear at the outset. Marine Le Pen is not “far Right”. She is not, in any meaningful sense, Right-wing at all. She wants wealth taxes, higher social spending, limited working hours, worker control of companies, tariffs. The garrulous agitator is Right-wing only in the BBC sense of “baddie” – a designation which the corporation applies to everyone from the revolutionary ayatollahs in Iran to the Stalinist nostalgics in Russia.
Marine Le Pen is a National Socialist. I’m not calling her a Nazi, it’s just the most accurate description of her program. From an American perspective, she is a decidedly left-wing candidate. It was her views on immigration and culture that necessitated her labeling as a “baddie” and thus right-wing. Second, Reuters says of the new French President: