Read "The Flight from Reality" for Free.
I'm told it's an "absolute drop-dead masterpiece of informed political prose," so I took off the paywall. Plus, here's the postscript.
When I published the article I sent to you on Sunday night, I wasn’t happy with it yet. I thought it needed another few rounds of revision. But I was in a rush, because if it didn’t go out before the French election results were announced, I’d have to change the whole tense structure. So I sent it out, but immediately afterward, I spotted half a dozen typos, regretted my haste, and castigated myself. Obviously, I should have taken another day and changed the whole tense structure.
The next morning, though, this email from my father was in my In Box:
Claire –
An absolute drop-dead masterpiece of informed political prose. I hope that it is read everywhere. It is a classic.
Love,
Pop 1
I was so surprised. That one?
He’s an excellent judge of what’s good, though, so I’m going to take his word for it. You may not have realized it, but that was a masterpiece.
This made me regret having put it behind a paywall, though. It’s always a dilemma: If you don’t put the best stuff behind the paywall, why would anyone pay for it? But if you keep the best stuff hidden, why would anyone pay for it? (For those of you who haven’t subscribed, take my word for it: Some of the best stuff is behind the paywall. It can be yours for less than the price of a bottle of laundry soap.)
If you take off the paywall and release a your thoughts into the wild, there’s always an off chance they might be read by someone who has the power to act on them. There are people in our government who would not suffer from asking themselves whether they, too, are at war with reality. So given the good reviews—and my sincere hope that it does some good—I’ve taken off the paywall. I fixed the typos, too.2 Here you go: free stuff.
Bon appetit.
The Flight from Reality
None of what people say about why they prefer one candidate to another is true. Politics, in a democracy, is about giving voters what the deep, unacknowledged part of them longs for while simultaneously providing them with a political language they can use to justify that choice.
If after reading it you agree with my father that it’s good (you don’t have to agree it’s a masterpiece), you should subscribe. Here’s why. For all the reasons I explain here, there are few venues left for people who write about the world beyond Washington. Compare, for example, our coverage of the French election to that of the New York Times. (That’s a gift link; it should work.) It speaks for itself.
So help me keep this good thing going. Not only will it subsidize writing about the death throes of liberal democracy and the vast parts of the world that no longer receive serious news coverage, it will allow me to avoid what for years I have feared will be my fate: sleeping in a tent under a bridge with a shopping cart full of crap, muttering, “How was I supposed to know the Internet would destroy the business model for journalism?”
Now, about the surprisingly happy result of the election. A huge relief—one that’s palpable in the streets of Paris. To everyone’s surprise, the new Popular Front took the largest share of the vote; followed, again to everyone’s surprise, by Macron’s centrist coalition; followed by the National Rally, in a humiliating third place. No party won a majority—not even close. The Parliament will be paralyzed by chaos and nothing will get done. But “nothing” is a hell of a lot better than what those lunatics had in mind.
If you’re confused about how this happened, this video is really clear. Basically, the barrage worked. Even though they hate each other and no one was sure the dam would hold this time, the other parties once again worked together to keep the far-right out of power:
Here are the happy crowds that gathered up the street from me after the results were announced. They’re singing, “Everyone hates the fascists.”
Even though the coalition is being declared the surprise winner—and yes, I was certainly surprised—the whole coalition only won a plurality. They won well under 200 seats, which is less than Macron’s group had before the election. Without a majority, they can’t do anything unless they have support from the center or the right. So Mélenchon’s plans to destroy the economy are dead on arrival. His party, the LFI, is only one part of the electoral coalition that makes up the new Popular Front, and it only took 75 seats.
More importantly, as Arun pointed out in our podcast, the other members of the coalition aren’t bound to vote with the LFI in the National Assembly, and they all loathe Mélenchon. Some of them publicly dissociated themselves from him even before the second round. So in effect, there’s no Popular Front anymore. The coalition formed for one purpose, and that was keeping out the far-right.3
Center-left figures like Hollande and Glucksman lent their legitimacy to the Popular Front despite finding Mélenchon repulsive—and good for them that they did. It worked. It saved the day. You’ll remember, if you listened to the podcast, that I was afraid they’d delegitimized themselves by aligning with the LFI, which would result in a voters casting their ballots for the far-right to form a barrage against them. But Arun was right, and I was wrong. The New Popular Front concept was a success. (Mind you, the old Popular Front was a success at this stage, too.)
Raphael Glucksman, in particular, has been so successful at reviving the fortunes of the Socialist Party that I’m sure he’ll want to dissociate himself from Mélenchon as fast as possible. Mélenchon is poison: He has a devout cult following among time-warped Marxists and Islamists, but the rest of France finds this cohort intolerable.
The worst-case scenario would have been an outright majority for the National Front. The second-worst would have been an outright majority for Mélenchon’s LFI. The third-worst would have been an outright majority for the Popular Front. The only result better than this would have been a thumping majority for the centrist coalition—ideally, one that wiped out the far-left and far-right so completely that they gave up politics in despair—but that was never in the cards. Given this, these were the best results we could have hoped for. I really didn’t expect them.
Had the far-right won a majority, it would have given them control of the budget and, perhaps, the so-called régalien ministries—justice, defense, and foreign affairs. They would have begun the process of installing themselves forever.4 Likewise, a majority for the LFI would have been a catastrophe. A majority for the whole left coalition wouldn’t have been so bad, because they’re already at each other’s throats, so they wouldn’t have be able to cooperate in parliament. But it would have been understood as a mandate to wreck the economy, and it would have given Mélenchon a better reason to claim he should be prime minister. So it’s a damned good thing it didn’t happen.
I see that many American outlets are interpreting what happened as a sign that France is eager for leftist economic policies, which they interpret to mean the United States is, too, and therefore Trump will be easy to beat. This is a dangerous misunderstanding. This victory was a tactical achievement, borne out of terror of the far-right; in fact, France has moved very far to the right. But the National Front is still widely understood to be just too dangerous to empower.
The Le Pen clan and the National Rally are not the GOP, not even in the GOP’s current form. The inner circle of the National Rally really is just one or two degrees of separation from the Waffen SS. When people use the words “Nazi” and “fascist” to describe this party’s roots, they are not metaphors.
When self-important American college students call themselves the #Resistance, they deserve all the mockery they get. When the last surviving members of the Resistance haltingly emerge from their retirement homes, with the aid of their walkers, and say, “I was deported to Buchenwald for acts of resistance, I don’t want us to be governed by former SS men,” it lands differently. Last week, the ancient maquis spoke out. They said the same thing: We’ve seen this before. We don’t want to see it again.
The party is not “detoxified,” no matter what credulous American journalists or the guests at CPAC believe. One reason it did so poorly is that many of their candidates had no political experience, so they lacked the good sense to scrub their social media feeds. Journalists poked around and discovered an astonishing number of them posing in Nazi Luftwaffe caps, sharing Pétain tributes, calling immigrants Untermenschen, and otherwise indicating that they were, as Jordan Bardella put it, “a few bad apples.” When I say “an astonishing number,” I mean “150,” at last count; the number kept going up as gleeful journalists discovered yet another candidate who had, say, used the phrase “cockroaches and vermin” to describe the French national football team—and one, gloriously, who had gone berserk, grabbed a rifle, and taken the town hall hostage:
While some of the posts in question were only mildly offensive, many were not.5 In France, Holocaust denial is a crime. (So is beating your wife. Embezzlement, ditto. These guys are creeps.) So you can imagine what their opponents did with this in the debates. There was no recovering from it, because these were candidates, not randos—and it definitely wasn’t just one brebis galeuse. As Gabriel Attal said in debate to a flustered Bardella, “This is beginning to look like a herd.”
So what comes next? Complete chaos and deadlock. I reckon they’ll be bargaining, bickering, backstabbing, and feuding until the first of August, at which point they’ll all go on vacation for the whole month, then they’ll start bargaining, bickering, backstabbing, and feuding again. Maybe we’ll have a government by Easter.
Attal announced that he would resign as prime minister just after the results came in, but Macron refused to accept his resignation. There’s talk of a broad coalition among all the parties except the far-right and the far-left, to “stabilize the situation.” Some members of Macron’s government said they’d consider forming a group with the Socialist Party. The LFI says they won’t participate in a coalition if Macron’s group is in it, and vice-versa. But the Ecologists say they’re not sure. Mélenchon is insisting loudly that he should be the prime minister. (Good luck with that.) Bompard said that the Popular Front intends to implement its entire program in its entirety, no exceptions. (Good luck with that.) The Socialist’s negotiator said she’d welcome the support of the leftmost members of Macron’s party in a coalition left-wing coalition. The Republicans said they won’t work with any party on the left. And so forth.
The people chose “chaos,” and it was the best possible outcome. It was a good result for Kyiv, a bad result for Moscow, a good result for Americans, a good result for Europe, and good for the Berlinskis. Rejoice.
Does this mean I take back everything I wrote in my “absolute drop-dead masterpiece of informed political prose?” No. Rational voters would have given the center a majority so Macron could go back to making them better off. But it does suggest that voters were not, in this instance, quite so irrational as I feared. This, in turn, goes to show the limits of political prognostication. Where politics are concerned—where people are concerned— nothing is written.
Thank heavens.
PS: Here’s a good study of Macron’s character by a journalist named Jamil Anderlini:
… The Chinese Communist system has legions of experts who prepare voluminous tactical briefings so Xi can gain advantage in any interaction with foreign governments. They prepare extensive psychological profiles on leaders like Macron so that Xi can know when to flatter, when to threaten and when to cajole.
“I think [Xi] rather sees France as having a leadership role,” Macron told me in one of our interviews. “And with regards to leaders who last … he respects them. And then he understands our logic of building strategic, financial and military autonomy.”
For the Chinese Communist Party, these are the words of a useful idiot. Macron is not an idiot—far from it—but nobody can be the smartest person in the world on every single topic. It was totally clear to me that he was unprepared for the flattery and manipulation the Chinese system is famous for.
(Can you imagine what those briefings say about Donald Trump?)
PPS: Maybe a neurologist who just happens to specialize in early-stage Parkinson’s had some other reason to make eight visits to the White House last year.
This story is not going to improve.
See why I don’t need the approval of the President of France?
Let me know if you catch one I missed.
The New York Times put a bizarre headline on an article about Mélenchon today. “France’s far-left firebrand: Ready to govern?” You’d conclude from that headline that this was a real possibility, wouldn’t you? That he had won the right to govern? But he hasn’t. Nowhere in the article is this made clear. (Does the Times understand this?) If you read the comments, it’s obvious that readers are completely confused by it. They think Mélenchon has won the election and France has gone communist. Also, someone, please— rip the word “firebrand” out of the New York Times’ dictionary.
You should definitely cancel your subscription to the Times and subscribe to CG instead. I don’t say this just because I’d benefit from it. I’d give you the same advice if I were wholly disinterested. To judge by the comments on that article, their subscribers would be better off reading nothing at all.
If you’ve forgotten, these are the 14 rules for destroying a liberal democracy:
Rewrite history.
Exploit ethnic, racial, religious, and class divisions.
Magnify fear of foreigners and outsiders.
Enter Caesar—the voice of the “real people” in their struggle against the “elites.”
Conflate entertainment and politics.
Create chaos, confusion, and a sense of permanent emergency.
Destroy confidence in the idea of objective truth.
Humiliate or destroy those better fit to be leaders.
Gain control of the media and turn it into a non-stop propaganda machine.
Reward the loyal with government contracts, tax loopholes, and tenders.
Punish the disloyal with punitive taxes and spurious lawsuits.
Stack the courts.
Take control of the central bank and make foreign banks absorb the losses.
Jigger the constitution so that opponents have no hope of coming to power through democratic means.
Voilà, you’re done. Elections still happen, but they are denuded of everything that makes elections meaningful. Hail Caesar!
The linked article will give you the gist if you use Google translate, but Google Translate’s not accustomed to rough language. For example, it translates “Va faire la soupe salope,” as “Go make the slutty soup,” which sounds more like something overheard in a Chinese restaurant than a sexist insult. The correct translation is “Go make soup, you slut.”
Great stuff. Depressing that gridlock was the safest option for democracy.
People forget how close most of the continent is to having lived under fascism or Stalinism.
I don’t know if Americans appreciate what real fascism is.
Your Dad was right. That article is a wonderful piece of writing. I spent a lot of time on it, and the various tangents off your main argument, and considered it time well spent.
Today's CG is equally incisive and engaging. Thank you for introducing me to the term "brebis galeuse." As I was typing this, I spotted your footnote 5 right above. You're absolutely right about online dictionaries. When I looked up that term, I got "black sheep" as an answer. That seemed too mild to me, so I looked up the individual words, which led me to the real nastiness of the concept. And that nastiness is entirely appropriate for the group of people you (and Attal, indirectly) direct it at.