What France's Sarkozy Learned About Politics from the US ( and a good lesson for us too)

[yurbud]

One of the things I like about traveling and talking to people from other countries is it gives me a different perspective on things back home, and sometimes even helps me see things I so took for graned before that I was barely aware they existed.

When you look at our right wing template overlayed on France, it might be easier to dispassionately figure out how to combat it.

The Reinvention of France's
What Sarkozy Learned About Politics from the US ... and From Antonio Gramsci

By SERGE HALIMI

The last president of France fell out of favor with his own party: his successor is a man of the right who has beaten a woman of the left. This cautionary tale may comfort Republican candidates in the United States who want to succeed President George Bush, especially if they expect to run against Democrat Hillary Clinton in November 2008.

But it would be odd if the right in the US were to adopt the new French president's political strategy; that would be taking a cue from its mirror reflection. Nicolas Sarkozy's strategy was not a new and magic formula. On the contrary, he studied keenly all the political skills used in the US for the past 40 years. His themes have been national decline and moral decadence, intended to prepare voters for liberal shock treatment and a break with the past; he proposed action against leftist dogma, which he claimed had paralysed the economy and stifled public debate; he wanted to reinvent the right on the lines suggested by Antonio Gramsci, so that he can show off his multimillionaire friends, and their yachts. He has redefined the social question--it is no longer about the division between rich and poor or capital and labor, but an internecine feud between two sections of the proletariat, those who won't work and those who will; he claims to speak for the "persecuted" silent majority and wants to mobilize them. Overall, he means to take an aggressive political stand against a ruling elite that has thrown in the towel.

The US right has used these tactics since the presidency of Richard Nixon and needs to learn nothing from Sarkozy, who took up the most effective arguments of recent US Republican presidents, embellishing them with references to Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum and Guy Môquet.

Decline is a favourite theme. It seems natural to call for order when your own house needs to be put in order. On August 8, 1968 Nixon, the rightwing presidential candidate, began his speech accepting the Republican nomination by praising the silent majority weary of watching the US descend into chaos. Two eminent political figures, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, had just been assassinated and the Tet offensive by the Communists in Vietnam meant that the US had already lost that war. Nixon called on fellow Americans to listen to "a quiet voice in the tumult of shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They are not racist or sick; they are not guilty of the crimes that plague the land."

http://counterpunch.com/halimi06082007.html

[athebea]

1. When immigration creates a new underclass ...

... as a result crime will surge. Crime as a issue directly pits the working class and working poor who bear the brunt of it against the 'compassion' of the left intelligentsia (the French Communist Party is having to hock its art collection to raise cash because ALL of its working class support defected to Le Pen).

There are, we are told, banlieue where minions of the state are physically denied entry. In effect, "islamic republics" right in France. This bespeaks a law and order situation that is completely out of hand and that Royal was perceived to be too 'compassionate' on. Her desparate argument that electing Sarkozy would lead to riots was a blunder. Voters in a democracy cannot capitulate to mobs. By urging French voters to capitulate to the threat of mob violence, she showed that she would, too.

When the political issues are crime, the rule of law, the sovereignty of the state, the maintenance of order in the public square and that armed factions cannot be allowed to make politics in the streets, the right wins.

[yurbud]

2. a reason why the right quietly likes immigration, legal and otherwise

your comment is worth a thread of its own

[athebea]

3. But these are problems of the lefts own making...

... but this belies the question.

Why didn't American working class voters in 1968 or French working class voters now, trust the left on law and order, security of the state issues ? Was the left too romantic about the 'Other', too sentimental ? A perceived lack of toughness in the face of real threats ? As I mentioned, Royal's perceived willingness to capitulate in the face of mob violence sealed her doom, notwithstanding her mature Eva Green dynamic.

And as for 'Right' you must differentiate between populist Right and corporate Right. Not all Right wingers live in mansions. There were quite a few whose cars were burned last summer in Paris and mind somewhat. There were quite a few who remember when their neighborhoods were safe. The populist Right in Europe and America (Le Pen, Haider, BNP, Pat Buchanan) has indeed been created by the reaction of people who cannot afford to live behind walls or in 'nice' neighborhoods to their perceived betrayal by both the left intelligentsia and corporate elites on the joint issues of cheap labor globalism and immigration.

The right picked up the ball because the left spectacularly dropped it.