The National Rally party won a crushing victory in the first round of voting for the French National Assembly, according to early projections, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time.
Pollster projections, which are normally reliable and are based on preliminary results, suggested the party would take about 34 percent of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and its allies, which got about 21 percent.
That’s from Roger Cohen’s paywalled report for The New York Times, quoted/linked from Scott Lemieux at LGM.
We Americans don’t usually pay much attention to elections in other country’s, but this one has a slightly higher profile because French polls seem to roughly reflect our own electorate. The loudest, most vocally enthusiastic faction is a right-wing, “nationalist and anti-immigrant” — which is to say ethnic nationalist — party supported by around a third of the country’s voters. The majority of French citizens oppose that faction, but their opposition is divided between moribund centrists, those left of center, and those who aren’t paying any real attention and can’t be bothered to vote.
“National Rally” is the new name for the former “National Front,” the far-right party begun in 1972 by ethnic nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen and now led by his daughter. This particular party is thus only about 50 years old, but the “nationalist and anti-immigrant politics” it promotes is far older — in France, in the United States, and in many other nations around the world.
That ideology of ethnic nationalism is also, of course, far older than the relatively recent sense that it is or ought to be “taboo,” which is an idea that only arose in the aftermath of World War II.
That taboo arose because of World War II — because that was a world war in which the world fought against and defeated this very ideology because it was destructive of freedom, prosperity, and morality. The “taboo” was not simply a case of history being written by the victors. It was a morally visceral and common-sense response to what the whole world had witnessed as the inevitable result of ethnic nationalism. It had been exposed as evil. And, just as importantly, it had been exposed as a practical failure. It was bad and it didn’t even work.
The long-standing “taboo” against this form of politics was not due to some kind of formal declaration. It was organic — an obvious reaction to the obvious confirmation of what had already been an obvious truth. “Nationalist and anti-immigrant politics” were not declared to be disgraceful. It was an ideology that had disgraced itself as publicly, thoroughly, and conclusively as could be imagined.
The “taboo” existed because everyone knew this ideology was shameful and stupid. This was not an “opinion” or a “belief.” It had been seen and, therefore, it was known.
It is still known.
There has never, ever been any story involving a “nationalist and anti-immigrant” party in which that party has ever emerged as the Good Guy. There has never been a way to perceive them as such, nor a way to portray them as such.
Nor has such a party ever even managed to prove itself to be the smart guy in the story. Every such party has been a disaster for the very nation and ethnic people it has claimed to champion.
This was true in the most notorious cases of Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South. And it proved to be true yet again in the most recent high-profile example of “Brexit.” That was an unprompted, unprovoked, unnecessary eruption of exactly this same kind of “long-taboo nationalist and anti-immigrant politics,” and it has been an unmitigated self-inflicted disaster that has brought economic hardship and a loss of political freedom to the very people who voted for it. Brexit made life in Britain worse for nationalist and anti-immigrant Britons.
This is what ethnic nationalism always does and what it has always done.
Every time. Time after time after time. This is always the result.
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