Posted on 01/07/2017 10:16:34 AM PST by oblomov
Late on a Sunday evening a little more than a year ago, Marine Le Pen took the stage in a depressed working-class town in northern France. She had just lost an election for the region’s top office, but the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-euro National Front did not deliver a concession speech. Instead, Ms. Le Pen proclaimed a new ideological struggle.
“Now, the dividing line is not between left and right but globalists and patriots,” she declared, with a gigantic French flag draped behind her. Globalists, she charged, want France to be subsumed in a vast, world-encircling “magma.” She and other patriots, by contrast, were determined to retain the nation-state as the “protective space” for French citizens.
Ms. Le Pen’s remarks foreshadowed the tectonic forces that would shake the world in 2016. The British vote to leave the European Union in June and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November were not about whether government should be smaller but whether the nation-state still mattered. Ms. Le Pen now has a shot at winning France’s presidential elections this spring, which could imperil the already reeling EU and its common currency.
Supporters of these disparate movements are protesting not just globalization—the process whereby goods, capital and people move ever more freely across borders—but globalism, the mind-set that globalization is natural and good, that global governance should expand as national sovereignty contracts.
The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional left-right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron?
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Would love to see LePen take france
The views are of one writer. It’s called an opinion piece.
We’re not the world, but we’re part of it. That doesn’t mean we need to let everyone and his little sister into the country, but we do need to help whomever we can whenever we can.
Understood, but such opinion pieces weren’t being published prior to the election.
This is a guest editorial.
The WSJ Editorial Staff (YOU PAUL GIGOT!) remain implacable anti-American globalists.
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