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.

Hillary and Libya: Update

That's "Aidez-moi!" on his fingers. Image via Freaking News.

The extremely remarkable news coming out of France this week about ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, under arrest in a grotesque illegal campaign financing case, sheds unexpected light on a question we were working on two years ago, as the presidential campaign and the calumny campaign against Hillary Clinton were intensifying, and one of the angles of the latter was the portrayal of Clinton as a bloodthirsty warmonger against peace-loving Donald J. Trump, as in this example featuring a strange pro-Trump alliance among Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Green candidate Jill Stein, The New York Times, and young Conor:

Je suis cheap shots

Because you all want to be smarter than the New York Times, which is incapable of reading the Luz cover for tomorrow's issue of Charlie Hebdo:

It shows a tearful caricature of the Prophet Muhammad holding the by-now iconic “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) placard with the words “Tout est pardonné” (“All is forgiven”) above him. Many viewed the cartoon image as a conciliatory message from the new editors of Charlie Hebdo after the carnage of the Paris attack.

Wrong, cons. The drawing depicts the Prophet aligning himself with Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy, Binyamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, bishops, cabinet ministers, TV idiots, pseudophilosophers, the New York Times Paris bureau, and all the other authoritarians, fundamentalists, rightists, prudes, and cons that hated Charlie and now want to march to show how much they cherish the journal and its freedom. Whether he's the one saying "Tout est pardonné" or being pardoned, he's in the same warm bath of mutual freedom from criticism that they made out of the #JeSuisCharlie party with their solemn and respectful presence. He wants to march too!

The message isn't about Mohammed at all, but about the hypocrites in the parade, and I'm so happy to see that the paper's toughness is undiminished.

Socialisme!!

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

"Chuis pu président" = "Je ne suis plus président" in Sarko's ugly swallowed-up diction. The joke turns on the difference between "faute de" ("mistake in" a given discipline) and "faute à" ("fault of" a given agent), with the suggestion that it's one of the subtleties where the (ex!) president tends to screw up. Goodbye, Sarko, in any case.