Left, Right and Le PenJean-Marie Le Pen styles himself as French patriot who does not fit the conventional political spectrum. He says that he is socially on the Left and economically on the Right, but in American terms he is dyslexic. After all, Le Pen opposes abortion and homosexual “marriage,” but is protectionist in his economics. By our standards he is socially “Right” and economically “Left.” Le Pen’s success in the first round of this year’s French presidential election has set a number of pundits chattering about the decline of the Left-Right spectrum. Alain de Benoist, writing in the German conservative weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit, provides one of the best analyses, drawing on data from polls taken in the months before the election:
Benoist is a leader of the Nouvelle Droit – the “French New Right” – an intellectual movement tangentially related to Le Pen’s political movement. Benoist’s opinion of Le Pen’s success reflects the French New Right’s belief in the obsolescence of Left and Right. Benoist elsewhere has proposed instead a new framework of politics as center vs. periphery. The Nouvelle Droit itself is not easy to characterize, but it is generally anti-American, anti-capitalist, decentralist, and communitarian. The more prosaic Left-liberals of the International Herald Tribune (it’s a joint venture of the Washington Post and New York Times) have a similar take on the ideological significance of Le Pen. Philip Browning, an IHT correspondent in Hong Kong, writes:
Charismatic politicians have always had the advantage over their less personable rivals, so that’s nothing new. Still, Mr. Browning is surely right that the differences between mainstream candidates – Jospins and Chiracs, or Republicans and Democrats – have become blurred. But is “the dominance of…global capitalism” responsible for this? It is, but that’s only part of the story. The collapse of Soviet Communism and discrediting of old-style socialism have indeed forced Leftist parties throughout the world to adopt new platforms and identities, at least superficially. But what about the Right? “Conservative” parties, from Chirac’s Gaullist RPR to America’s Republicans have an identity crisis of their own, one whose origin is in the long-standing tendency of these parties to “conserve” nothing other than the welfare state. There is much with which an American conservative must disagree in Benoist’s philosophy but he is surely correct to emphasize the differentiation between “center” and “periphery.” The “center” is the State itself, which has assimilated the conventional Left and Right into its own substance. This process was underway well before the end of the Cold War and has only accelerated since. Relative to the triumph of social democracy, which took place over the course of more than sixty years, the collapse of Communism is of only secondary ideological significance. Between mainstream parties in the semi-civilized world today there is very little intellectual or programmatic difference but that is not because the Left-Right axis has ceased to exist. Rather the 20th century victory of the non-Communist Left has been so absolute as to reduce the stature of the real Right to almost nothing; to the status of a “periphery.” This makes the Right almost as negligible as the remaining Communists, who are also peripheral, but that does not mean the Right and the Communist Left now have anything in common. The peripheral Right has to fight both the peripheral, Communist Left and the vast Center-Left, which includes most nominally “conservative” parties. Several of Le Pen’s positions, most notably his desire to restrict Third World immigration, do threaten the Center-Left. That’s why those positions are never discussed, but only ridiculed as xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic and nativist. Mass immigration serves social democracy both by creating an enormous quantity of gullible voters and by culturally dividing communities: it’s a strategy to divide and conquer. His ideas may be dangerous but Le Pen himself and his Front Nationale are electorally harmless. The same is true of analogous “populist” movements elsewhere, which are never very popular. For all the talk about the alienation of the common man from the political elite, he still usually votes for them. With good reason; once the social democratic Left in all its forms has won the battle of ideas (and of reputation), the electoral outcome is only an afterthought. Whether Le Pen is socially Right and economically Left, or economically Right and socially Left, or some kind of “third position” makes no difference for his political fate. He has just enough of the genuine Right about him, in the form of his views on immigration, to be consigned by the media and political establishment to the peripheral fringe. In order for him to have a serious chance at winning the affections of the masses, he would have to accept not only the economics of social democracy, to which he may already be amenable, but also its entire worldview. He would have to become entirely a man of the Left, just as the likes of Jacques Chirac already are.
April 30, 2002 Daniel McCarthy [send him mail] is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis. Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
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