TRUMPIFIED ITS POLITICS
This sort of presidential campaign is, by now,
pretty familiar to American audiences. But for
France, which has long considered itself, in
Karl Marx’s famous phrase, the “fatherland of
politics,” it represents a complete and radical
change.
Former prime minister François Fillon represents
the right. Former minister Benoit Hamon runs
from the classical left. Marine Le Pen , the
daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen , champions the
extreme right. Jean Luc Mélenchon champions
an exotic far left. And at 39-years-old
Emmanuel Macron , who broke with his patron
and mentor, President François Hollande, and
has subsequently been likened to Brutus, plays
the part of a centrist French J.F.K.
But by the time the voting takes place, nothing,
or pretty much nothing, of importance will
have been discussed during the campaign. This
is the first time in the history of a French
national election that moderators have dared
to say to the candidates: You have one minute
to tell us your position on Trump , Putin, radical
Islamic terrorism, and the poison gas attack in
Syria. It is a campaign in which more interest
has been shown in endocrine disruptors and
the housing tax than in the rise of populist
movements, Europe’s fate, the alliance with
the United States, or the battles against ISIS for
Mosul and Raqqa . It is a campaign in which
punchlines have replaced arguments, voters
have become fans, and commentators have
assumed the role of referees at a fight. This
sort of presidential campaign is, by now, pretty
familiar to American audiences. But for
France, which has long considered itself, in
Karl Marx’s famous phrase, the “fatherland of
politics,” it represents a complete and radical
change.
This is the first campaign in which what was
required of a candidate was not to have a
platform, but to pull off a performance. And, if
you happen to be the frontrunner at the
moment, to know how to play defense. It has
been not a campaign, but a soap opera.
Nothing about it has been presidential. It is
our House of Cards , with its twists, scandals,
and cliffhangers. It might have been dreamed
up by a screenwriter in search of plots of
diabolical intrigue.
his has indeed been an election of many
firsts. For the first time, conspiracy
theorists had a candidate of their own
own, a Pétainist dressed up as a Gaullist
in the form of newcomer François
Asselineau . French viewers seemed to be
less bothered by this lamentable first than by
the fact that Asselineau seemed to have
swallowed an anthology of Chinese proverbs. It
was also our first introduction to Jean Lassalle ,
yet another populist, a former shepherd, this
one announcing from atop his ass on the road
to Damascus—and, in his much-remarked-
upon gravelly voice—his support for the Syrian
dictator and the criminal Bashar al-Assad . And
yet France focused not on the shocking fact of
his support for Assad but on the voice in
which the support was uttered.
This is also the first election in which a
modern fascist party, the National Front, has
been so close to victory and, as I write, has
regained the lead in many polls. (Macron is the
other leading candidate.) How can Le Pen be
doing so well? Has she made her party out to
be something other than what it is? Not at all.
To the contrary, Marine Le Pen wears her
racism, her hatred of migrants, like a badge.
This week, she even embraced her ideological
roots in the collaborationist wartime France of
Marshall Pétain . How else are we to construe
her insistence that France played no role in the
deportation of French Jews? She cannot erase
the fact that, in July 1942, French police—
French police—arrested more than 13,000
Parisian Jews, who were then deported to
Hitler’s extermination camps.
Ours has become a society of the spectacle,
displaying the terminal nihilism that so
terrified the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
This is both reflected in and abetted by the
triumph of the Internet and social media. And
we are coming to a precipice—or rather two.
The first precipice: The reduction of politics to
moralism with, as a consequence, the dawning
of an era of generalized suspicion and the
revival of the Law of Suspects—guilty until
proven innocent. America has been through
this experience before—it is almost standard
in politics now, the focus on “gotcha” moments
of alleged personal shortcomings rather than
on the most important public issues at stake.
But, again, it is relatively new in a country like
France, where the strict separation between
public and private sphere has always been an
unwritten law.
The second precipice: In the case of Fillon, we
saw the further reduction of the art of politics
to the sport of hunting fox or grouse: the avid
pack of beaters and pointers—that is, the avid
pack of us —whose task it was, not to fight the
adversary but to flush him out and run him to
ground. Oh, our furtive desolation when the
weekly Le Canard Enchaîné failed to feed us
our juicy Wednesday update on
“Penelopegate” ! Come on, admit it, France:
Raise your hand if a photo of the candidate as
wounded game has not given you a thrill or a
tingle—or if you haven’t felt let down on the
days when you were deprived of your pound
of human flesh.
Is there a cure? Consider for a moment
Talleyrand, that most corrupt of men, but one
of France’s best diplomats, which is evidently
not the case with Fillon, who is a friend of
Putin and of Iran. But that is precisely what
needed to be hunted. What a pity that, on this
point as on so many others, we rubbed salt in
the wrong wound and added injury to the
wrong insult.
Consider Machiavelli. Consider the moment
when the long faces of virtue replace the
grandeur of virtù , the moral strength, the
courage, that are the qualities required not
only of political leaders but of every citizen
participating in the res publica and its difficult,
perilous, but indispensable civic deliberations.
What are the real stakes that France is facing
today? How will we solve the problem of mass
unemployment that has been growing and
growing through the last 20 years? What can
we do about the declining productivity of our
industries? Our massive public debt? The flow
of refugees? The process of their integration?
These are the urgent deliberations we must
have. And the campaign is just burying them
under a mass of empty words.
At the door of the Jacobin Club in 1789, hung a
sign reading, “Here we are proud to call
ourselves citizens.” Citizens, yes, as
distinguished from armchair moralizers;
defenders of the common weal, yes, and
arbiters of its dilemmas, of its constant
necessary compromises, of the justice of the
American strike of April 6 on the base from
which, three days before, Assad’s child-
hunting aircraft had taken off—citizens, yes,
not users of the spittoon that the public arena
is becoming in a nation that invented the
rights of man.
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