C'est la faute à Rousseau

Just ten years ago, when the blog was just getting going, Rectification Central was all excited over a French presidential election, in which the Socialist Party's François Hollande defeated the corrupt conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. I appear not to have written a post claiming that all Europe was coming to its senses in acclaiming a triumphant left, but I'm pretty sure that's what I thought.

Sadly, no. Five years after that, the Socialist Party had virtually vanished from contention, and so had Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the last gasp of the former UDF, or whatever that thing was that was equally opposed to socialism and Gaullism, an exhausted iteration of the French version of Christian democracy that wasn't particularly Christian or democratic, or anything really.  Rather, the contest seemed to have altogether personalized itself at last, among a collection of new characters rather than parties with ideologies: Marine Le Pen, daughter of the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, representing a neofascism "with a human face", so to speak; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, representing a kind of nationalist left more worried about "globalism" than anything else (though he has been pretty positive about immigrants, which I consider good, of course, and a bit brave as well); and Emmanuel Macron, representing some kind of ideal of bureaucratic competence, which won, not because anybody liked it very much but because they were less frightened of it than the others, a pattern that seems to be replicating itself this year.

When I find myself wondering if this is going to be the new party system in France after all, an essentially two-party system that weirdly resembles some of the stupidest takes on our own situation here in the US, polarized between an authoritarian conservatism that identifies itself as "populist" or "working class" (meaning of course "white working class") and a kind of authoritarian liberalism that identifies itself as smarter than you, technocratic, unapologetically elitist. While the left properly speaking is permanently sidelined, in its inability to recognize that it needs to adapt to flourish in a "center-right" country.

That is, as the US right would like it to be reported, and the legacy media dutifully report it, to confound the correct impression that Republicans are the party of the rich and propertied, as they have been since the Gilded Age, plus whoever they can sucker into voting with them, while Democrats have become adherents of democracy, trying to represent everybody's interests, including a preponderance of nonwhite people and a preponderance of the relatively well educated (two overlapping groups that mostly don't make much money but do set trends in popular culture) and a lot of civil servants. (And that the problem with the left properly speaking isn't that it's "too far left" but that it still hasn't learned industrial production is no longer what drives an economy.)

Anyhow, it's disturbing if French democracy is actually building a party system that way. Hopefully I'm just misunderstanding it from too far away, the way The New York Times is misunderstanding ours.

First reaction to the Hollande election, by Loïc Sécheresse for Libération.

"I'm not president any more!" ("Chuis pu président" = "Je suis plus président" in Sarko's ugly swallowed-up diction.)

"That'll teach you to speak such faulty French!"

"It's not the French's fault, it's the Arabs' fault!"  (improper "faute aux Arabes" instead of the correct "faute des Arabes")