The Rules of the Game

 

So French voters did that thing they do periodically, usually in a presidential election, and rejected fascism decisively in the second round of the snap legislative election. Somewhat grudgingly—they don't want the candidates they voted for to think they're impressed, but they know their duty.

As did the parties, which showed commendable discipline in carrying out the program of dropping out candidates to turn every race into the two-person race in which they had the best chance of defeating the Rassemblement Nationale. But it was the massive turnout that completed the job and defeated not just the fascists but the pollsters as well, who kept predicting a majority for the Rassemblement well into yesterday afternoon,  even as they noticed an unexpectedly large number of voters.

I couldn't help thinking I was seeing a repetition of a pattern we've been seeing a lot of lately, of voters breaking the poll predictions when they're voting to say there's a degree of authoritarianism they can't tolerate, in Brazil and in Poland, Spain and Iran, even when it's not enough to really change anything, as in the losses endured by authoritarian rulers of India and Turkey, and Hungary (in June's EU election), and of course in the United States of America in elections going back to 2018 reacting against the chaos of Trumpery, the terror of the incompetent COVID response and the racist violence of police forces, the overturning of Roe and rush to outlaw abortion.

I mean, it's not just heartening, but it's also interesting that the polls keep erring in that direction, with authoritarians underperforming. It doesn't happen when authoritarianism isn't a primary issue, like in Germany in June (where the appeal of the fascistoid Alternativ für Deutschland is still only in the former East Germany, while voters in the former West were punishing the sort-of leftist government by voting for the normie conservatives). Though in Britain one survey had Nigel Farage's "Reform Party" winning 18 seats in Thursday's general election (they won four).

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.

Ukraine Blogging

 

Weird message from Mr. Tucker Carlson a while back that was tagged by some observers, I think correctly, as of Russian origin:

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

It's easy to call it propaganda, but I'm finding myself inclined to think of it as something a little bit different, really a message from Putin, one in the Whataboutist mode, seriously, asking for just a little understanding, bro—the Russian Federation really is kind of surrounded on its west, by NATO members some of which control nuclear weapons, all along the western borders of Russia or Belarus or Ukraine from Estonia to Turkey, from the north end of the Gulf of Finland to the eastern end of the Black Sea, members of an alliance that was specifically designed 70-odd years ago to thwart Russian movements in that direction. 

L'Esprit des Lumières

Promising to "defend the spirit of the Enlightenment", from the Turkish French-language newspaper TRT.

I am feeling pretty good about the outcome of the présidentielle in France, though obviously not as thrilled as the Bothsides Twins, who were beside themselves, or at least beside each other, which is virtually the same thing:

@ron_fournier Exactly. It is time America did this. Now.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) May 7, 2017

Right now, Ron! This minute!

Annals of Derp: Unemployment in the Le Pen philosophy

Photo by AFP/Getty Images via Daily Mail.

NPR Tuesday morning, interviewing a member of the Le Pen campaign, Mikaël Sala:

GREENE: Let me just step back and look at Europe and the world right now. There was a lot of talk that there was this populist surge across Europe and in the U.S. But, you know, recently Austria rejected a populist candidate for chancellor. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands did not do as well as expected. Angela Merkel seems safer now in Germany than a lot of people thought politically. I mean, is there really still a populist surge that you're seeing?

SALA: Sure. I'm going to tell you why it is really powerful in France. In France, we have two problems. We have a problem with mass immigration that we cannot afford anymore, and we have a problem with our economy which is unable to grow. And it so happens that in the Netherlands and in Austria, they have one of those two problems. They're facing mass immigration, but their economies are still going about all right. So it's not that we're not compassionate, it's that we can't afford, you know, welcoming any more people because we are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Doesn't that suggest anything to you? Like maybe if the Dutch and Austrian economies are growing in the teeth of all those immigrants—to say nothing of immigrant-friendly Germany and Sweden and Belgium—maybe immigrants aren't the problem?

Puffed Tweet

Photo by Libération. Looks like Macron 23.7% and Le Pen 21.9% to the second round, with Fillon and Mélenchon in the 19s, third and fourth respectively, and the ci-devant Socialist pretty much dead for the moment.

Not the worst result you can imagine, by any means, especially since the polls for the deuxième tour favor Macron very strongly, as if Obama's intervention for Macron and Trump's for Le Pen may have made a difference (Trump's in the opposite direction from the one intended).

Clinton led Trump by 2-3 points
Remain led Leave by 1-2 points
Macron leads Le Pen by 26 points in runoff polls

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 23, 2017

Most enjoyable Schadenfreude point is the way rightwing Twitter is unable to understand that the first-round numbers—not an exit poll but a statistically valid sample of real votes—are real, and keeps reporting partial numbers from the officials as if they were going to last:

LE PEN AT 25.2%, MACRON AT 21.1%: INTERIOR MINISTRY AT 8:21PM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 23, 2017

That's commtment, reporting the #fakenews up to the very last minute. https://t.co/8ISOU1IcDm

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 23, 2017

Hope to post something more funny or profound later, but in the meantime have some more Puffed Tweet and useful links:

Friday Friday

Via L'avenir en commun, website of the Jean-Luc Mélenchon campaign.

I've felt pretty dispirited about the French election, and was heartened by this Mélenchon campaign cheer by one key supporter, Olivier Tonneau, in The Guardian, which may help talk you out of any fears inspired by reportage from the bothsiderist mafia that the only plausible leftist candidate is where Left meets Right around the back of the circle if you believe in that particular myth, or that Mélenchon is a Putinist or that he wants to destroy Europe:

we don’t plan to leave the EU: we aim to force the renegotiation of its treaties by means of unilateral disobedience. From the moment we come to power, we will implement a massive, environmentally focused Keynesian stimulus funded via a public bank, thus kickstarting the French economy and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

We will not apply privatisation directives. We will opt out of the posted workers programme, but we will not reduce freedom of movement. We will implement a salary scale: the highest salary will never be more than 20 times the lowest. We will cap revenues at €400,000 a year. We will regularise the situation of all working illegal immigrants, and we will not implement quotas for refugees.

Tiens, v'là une Marine

Not another secret Muslim (in the shahadi the thumb is not supposed to stick out like that). Photo by Reuters via Independent.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Can Populism Take Paris?"), has a crush on the sweetheart of European neo-fascism, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. Maybe you could call her an angular Reese Witherspoon type:

Le Pen’s pessimism about mass migration may be too dark, but it’s a needed corrective to Merkelism, and much more reasonable in the European context than Trump’s overhyped warnings about refugees. Her brief against the follies of the euro is almost inarguably true (for reasons that you can about read about on Vox, not Breitbart). Her party platform overall suggests what Trumpism would look like if it were more coherent — and, for that matter, more responsible, since she’s actively tried to distance her movement from the sort of toxic bigotry that Trump’s campaign saw advantages in winking at.

That last bit is so Ross. He too specializes in non-toxic bigotry. Le Pen was prosecuted in 2015 on not at all toxic charges of

“incitement to discrimination over people's religious beliefs”, for comparing Muslims praying in public to the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War. 

The charges were dropped, but at the moment she's under investigation by French authorities for tweeting pictures of ISIS executions, including that of the journalist James Foley, which violates a French law against the publication of violent images, and that seems more serious (she could get three years and a €75,000 fine). The European Parliament is likely to take away the immunity she enjoys as a member, as they did over the recent case in which she's been charged with defrauding the European Union by paying campaign employees out of EU funds for imaginary jobs, where French police raided the party headquarters last week and the European Parliament has demanded repayment of almost €340,000 (she won't pay, so they're docking her wages).

Le monocle de mon oncle

Image by Heart-Eating Mermaid.

It's easy for people to hate the New York Times, but how many of you can drip with contempt for famed journalist of the Edwardian era Steven Erlanger, still miraculously alive and serving as the New York Times London bureau chief? Or get through a first paragraph, for that matter, without drifting into a dreamland populated by Proustian mustaches and monocles?

Yesterday Erlanger showed his American stuff by going to Paris in August, like nobody in history who has ever hoped to speak to a French person in a good mood, to [jump]

Better bred than red

Shorter Steven Erlanger:

The fact that the Socialist Party swept the presidential and legislative elections in France just proves that Bernard-Henri Lévy is right and socialism has been dead since 1968.

Or maybe that's overinterpreting. Erlanger, the dean of the diplomatic correspondence, seems to have been laying down this kind of solemnity for so long that he could have been the model for Proust's M. de Norpois,* and like Norpois, he knows how to stop well short of a conclusion, so that his argument can be read as leading to either of two opposed views, whichever one turns out to be the Received Opinion.

The trick of it is in deploying your quotations carefully. Let's have a little look at how Erlanger achieves that in this little essay.

*Here's a classic bit of Norpois, from À l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs:

“But forewarned, as we know, is forearmed, and he just kicked the insults aside,” [M. de Norpois] said, with even greater force, and a glare that made us stop eating for a moment. “As a fine old Arabian proverb puts it: ‘The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.’” M. de Norpois paused, watching us to see what effect this quotation would have on us. It had a great effect: his proverb was well known to us. All worthy men had been using it that year instead of “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind,” which was in need of a rest, not being a hardy annual like “To labor and seek for no reward.” (quoted in Shut up, Proust!)

The Marquis de Norpois, portrait by David Richardson.

He begins by noting that socialism in Europe certainly isn't as radical as it used to be—

it championed social justice and a progressive tax system, and in that sense has largely done its job. As the industrialized working class gets smaller and smaller, socialism seems to have less and less to say.

And he gets this view certified by the Left, in the form of two grand old soixante-huitards, now veteran Greens, Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who ought to know, since they're not as radical as they used to be either.

Even in the United States, Mr. Fischer says, “you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don’t want to admit it — you don’t allow people to die on the street.”

So why the prospect of “European socialism” is so frightening to some Americans puzzles Europeans, a mystery as deep as the American obsession with abortion or affection for the death penalty.

Then he moves on to the Center, in the person of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Thomas Friedman of French philosophy:

“There are no more socialists — if they were honest they would change the name of the party,” [BHL] told me. Socialism “evokes the nightmare of the Soviet Union, whose leaders named themselves socialists.” Today, he maintains, European socialists are essentially like American Democrats...

except of course American Democrats haven't gotten us single-payer health care, free day care, six-week paid vacations, worker representation on company boards, pensions a person can live on, and all the rest of it.

"If they were honest" they would abandon the name "socialist", which "evokes the nightmare of the Soviet Union." How's that? Dishonestly evoking the nightmare of the Soviet Union is how they won the election? Uh, no. The voters were probably not thinking too much of the Soviet Union. But BHL is always thinking about the Soviet Union...

Jeunes filles en fleurs (1969), by David Hamilton.

A bit of Erlanger's prose reminds us that France is indeed pretty socialist no matter who's in power; 

delegates at the Socialist Party’s summer meetings address one another as “Comrade,” a gesture to the past for a party largely made up of academics and bureaucrats — in other words, state functionaries, of whom there are many in France. The French state represents 56.6 percent of gross domestic product, one of the highest figures in the Western world.

(Although I realize now that he means to be joshing the party for its elitism, not for its effectiveness in nationalizing the economy.)

This leads him back leftward to an actual socialist of sorts, Marc-Olivier Padis, who fascinatingly divulges that "Socialism here is very statist" (hmm, unlike what other kinds of socialism?) and then a hard-right swerve to Alain-Gérard Slama, who assures us that those who voted socialist were not in the main socialists (presumably meaning they were actually patricians like himself, who felt that it would be better to have the government run by nightmare socialists than by anyone as ill-bred and ungrammatical as Nicolas Sarkozy).

And then it's BHL one more time, mentioning that the real leftist in the presidential elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, didn't even win a seat in the législatives:

He then aptly quoted Marx’s famous line about Louis Bonaparte, that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

( M. d'Erlanger paused, watching us to see what effect this quotation would have on us...)

You see? If you don't read carefully, it corroborates virtually any opinion you might want to have, but on closer study its meaningfulness just evaporates into the aether. That's refined opionionating!

Republics and democracies

Democracy is the Athenian way, right, where all the members of the population (δῆμος/dêmos) take part in the governance (κρατία/kratía) of the state, each watching out for their own particular interests no doubt; the republic is the Roman way, where the business (res) of the state is public (publica), common to everybody. A democracy is about people and what they do, a republic is about a thing and what it is.

From the documentary 1981: Un été en rose et noir by Virginie Linhart. Found at Telle est la Télé.

Or is this formulation polluted by an idea, bizarre and totally ahistorical, that American party names, Democrat and Republican, have a meaning? I'm thinking of today's parties, with the Democrats concerned with identity politics and conflict resolution, under the assumption that different people are going to want different things that must inevitably clash, and [jump]

Per austerum ad astra

Updated 4/24/2012

"Oil's up another $3 a barrel... Looks like we'll have to sell you, Bud!" "Aw, Dad, can't I just get a paper route?"

You know how they always say a country is just like a family, in that it has to gather around the kitchen table (well, OK, a family with an eat-in kitchen) and figure out what we need to give up in order to make ends meet? And we always say back that it's a stupid analogy, and end of conversation?

Maybe it's not the analogy that's the problem, but the way it's worked out. Not only is this imaginary family exceptional in the size of its kitchen, it's also exceptional in that it doesn't seem to have to consider the possibility of going into debt. "Oh, we'll trade in the Cadillac for a Subaru and send little Tyler to public school."

If you think of the family vertically, as a succession of generations, and not just as an island of Mom and Dad and the kids, then it's clear that most of us are in fact in a state of debt as permanent as the United States. As the older generation starts to slide out from under, the younger generation starts to slide in, with the school loans, and the car loan, and the credit cards, and ultimately the mortgage.

What we don't ever do if we can avoid it is decide Tyler can't afford to go to college so he'll have to stay home and pick peas, or we can't afford to redo the roof so we'll just have to let it slowly rot away. The boy is going to go to college so he can earn some real money and get out of our hair; the roof will get fixed so we can sell the damned house and move to Far Rockaway (I hope not!). We borrow money to guarantee a future in which we'll be able to pay it back and have some left over.

You can't make any money without spending some. You have to take a shower and put on some clothes before you go to the job interview. You have to do the rail network and the electricity grid and the education system before you can get growth. National austerity budgeting is like the couple in that ghastly Maupassant story that lost the diamond necklace, bought a replacement on credit and retired into obscure penury to spend the rest of their lives in menial jobs trying to pay it off. There's no way they're going to make enough money to pay off all the Euro banksters unless they show up in town ready to do business!

Cécile de France as Mathilde in La Parure for TV, by Claude Chabrol. From Linternaute Television.

Apparently people in the Netherlands don't like austerity for themselves nearly as much as they like it for others. As they howled about bailouts for those reprehensible countries in the south of Europe, the center-right Dutch government was overshooting the E.U. deficit targets by about 50% (it's supposed to stay under 3%, but is expected to rise to 4.6%). But the package of spending cuts and tax increases they proposed can't make it through Parliament, so the prime minister is going to have to visit the queen and there will be early elections, maybe in September.

The Czech center-right government looks set to collapse over an austerity program too. Their case is a little less bizarre than the Dutch one, which is complicated by the fact that the most right-wing party of all—the Freedom Party of Islamechthriac Geert Wilders—is the one that is toppling the government, presumably in the belief that they will do well in the elections, whereas the Czech voters are most likely to simply turn back to the good old center-left.

And it looks as if France is set to take a center-left turn, as you've no doubt heard by now, with the first round of the presidential elections going as expected to the Socialist candidate (not very Socialist, though perhaps well to the left of the party's lamented great rich hope, Dominique Strauss-Kahn) and the second round in two weeks not very likely to go to anybody else (although the scary right did much better than the real left).

And then, if experience is any indication, all the new center-left governments will roll up their sleeves and, sadly, implement some austerity programs, just as in Greece and (by then, no doubt) Spain, and get voted out for their trouble. Oh, well.

"Mr. Viguerie says if we get this batch out in time he'll send us a chicken on Reagan's birthday."

Update 4/24
The Times thinks austerity is going out of fashion all over Europe, as Spain goes back into recession and Timmy Geithner begs them to try some kind of stimulus:

“The formula is not working, and everyone is now talking about whether austerity is the only solution,” said Jordi Vaquer i Fanés, a political scientist and director of the Barcelona Center for International Affairs in Spain. “Does this mean that Merkel has lost completely? No. But it does mean that the very nature of the debate about the euro-zone crisis is changing.”

What a swell party this is!

Mélenchon remplit sa plage! Today's rally in Marseille for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French presidential candidate of the Front de Gauche, drew a crowd of 120,000—looks like holding it on the beach was a smart idea. What a swell party this is.

A bit of a setback in Egypt in the news that the Supreme Presidential Election Commission, presumably military-run, has barred ten candidates from the election, including some we don't like—the hard-line Salafist Hazem Abu Ismail whose mother became a US citizen before she died, and the Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. No reasons were given, according to the Guardian, but the New York Times speculates that in the cases of the likewise barred Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat el-Shater and the classy old liberal Ayman Nour it was their prison records.

And how did they get prison records? Jailed by Mubarak, of course, for political activity. They can't run for president because the disgraced criminal ex-dictator didn't like their politics! Looks like premature anti-fascism is still a crime, and that can't be good news.

From The Albinophant blog.

Here's another depressing little irony: Guess who doesn't like austerity, in Italy and Ireland? Small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and it's not very funny, either, because they're killing themselves: unable to pay their debts in County Cork (190 suicides from 2008 to 2011), creditors of a deadbeat government in the Veneto (more than 30 small-business suicides in the past three years). All those job creators just need to man up a little, I guess. Look at Mitt Romney! He doesn't whine.

Why is this man smiling? Photo by Sean Gardner/Reuters.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate couldn't get his taxes done on time, though!  He's filed an extension, the same day Barack Obama and Joe Biden publicly released their 2011 returns. Luckily, he'll totally get it done before the election.

"Earlier this year, Gov. Romney released his 2010 tax return and an estimate of his 2011 income and taxes.  This is an extension for filing his 2011 actual return, similar to what he has done in prior years," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement. "Sometime in the next six months, and prior to the election, Gov. Romney will file and release the 2011 return when there is sufficient information to provide an accurate return."

The Romneys estimate a total tax liability of $3,226,623 for 2011, according to Saul. They made payments of $3,434,411 in 2011. They made an estimated payment of $887,000 for 2012.

Naturally Obama has it easier—he works for the government, doesn't he? Just goes to show how out of touch Obama really is.