Macron’s success, in this regard, is to adopt an apparently insurgent agenda which in fact draws almost all ruling-class and media support onto his side. He has not just broken through the old center-left / center-right divide, but united the forces formerly aligned with each behind his own leadership. His presidency is the pure expression of a political landscape where the market has not only conquered democracy but increasingly society itself.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Macron’s landslide win is how little genuine enthusiasm there is for him or his agenda. He won one of the most lopsided presidential victories in modern French history, but it was in many respects an empty one. The election also saw relatively low turnout, a rate of abstention higher than in almost fifty years, and a huge number of blank or spoiled ballots. This was an electorate that grudgingly accepted Macron as the less awful of two options, but there doesn’t seem to be much confidence in him despite the gaudy final result.
THE TWO CURRENT FRONTRUNNERS in the presidential election—Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the former investment banker and minister of the economy under Hollande—call on inversely symmetrical bases of support, Macron’s weak showing among working-class voters is emblematically identical to Le Pen’s share of senior executives (13 percent). Their campaigns have in many respects been complementary. Both candidates embrace the slogan “ni droite, ni gauche,” popularized by the interwar fascist leagues. Macron, bauble of the extreme center, seeks to substitute for the traditional right-left divide a vision that opposes globalizing, educated, cosmopolitan professionals to backwards, bigoted, and unenlightened nationalists: Le Pen’s worldview in camera obscura. For both Macron and Le Pen, openness, free movement, and European integration can be counterposed to patriotism, “national preference,” and the defense of entitlements. The prospects for either option depend on a significant recomposition of the electorate.
And big changes often come where you least expect them. Just ask the people of Maine. The sleepy state, not known for its radicalism, was the first in America to adopt a ranked-choice voting system after a referendum in November 2016. Under this system, voters will now be able to rank their preferences among various candidates and parties, rather than simply casting one vote for each office. If no candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes, then second-preferences are accounted for, and so on, until one candidate has a majority. It’s not a proportional system, but it’s a step towards empowering minority parties and breaking up the traditional two-party monopoly.
If he wins the upcoming presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, known as France’s Bernie Sanders, hopes to change French politics for good by moving his country to proportional representation from an electoral process that resembles the American system and leads to gerrymandering. This would allow for a greater variety of political parties to be represented within the French Parliament.
So, for instance, George W. Bush had German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s personal cell phone hacked to monitor his position on the Iraq War that Bush wanted to launch illegally.
Then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had Schoeder’s successor’s personal cell phone put under surveillance. Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone. An ally . It may just have been face-saving for President Obama, but the White House leaked that Obama was surprised and disturbed that her personal phone had been targeted. This leak tells us that Clapper and the NSA were acting without the president’s knowledge. Yet no one was fired over it. It makes you think maybe the US cyberspies are an authority unto themselves and this elected democracy thing is so eighteenth century.
But it wasn’t just Germany. The NSA hacked into the private and government communications of French Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Francois Hollande. Sarkozy even wanted to sign a bilateral US-France intelligence cooperation agreement. (Gee, that might be useful in preventing terrorist attacks in the two countries). But he was frustrated, because the US wouldn’t sign if it meant promising to give up spying on … France and Sarkozy!
With thousands or tens of thousands of potential “terrorists” like Mohammed Bouhel, who do you deport? Who do you put under preventative arrest? Who do you wiretap? Who do you put under full-time watch, when each 24 hour surveillance requires at least 18 police?
What if ISIS isn’t really all-powerful? What if it’s not an unstoppable band of international terrorists able to strike anywhere in the Western world at will, all because mom-jeans-wearing Obama gave the group the leeway to develop superpowers out of an overabundance of political correctness? What if ISIS has been able to strike several times in France this year not because it’s the most terrifying threat ever, but because France is just across the border from Belgium, a country where the authorities are struggling to take the most obvious steps to combat it?
But it is very difficult to propose concrete measures to fight against structural racism when it is illegal to collect racial statistics, when race is immediately called an “American import,” when it is said to simply not exist in France. Don’t name it and perhaps it might go away. In the US, this is called “color blindness,” and although this philosophy has many local supporters (including many within the Supreme Court), it is not a value that is usually associated with leftist politics — at least not since the 1970s.
mtg-brokentoken