Posted on 07/14/2024 10:32:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The right-leaning media and pundits are excited: Marine Le Pen’s party gained twice as many seats in recent French elections. The left-leaning media and commentariat are thrilled, too: Le Pen’s right-wing party won the popular vote but landed only third place in the French National Assembly. If both sides of the political spectrum are so enthusiastic, it could mean only one thing: something is missing here.
The answer lies most likely in conflating two different political spectra: absolute and relative. Since Stalin proposed the modern relative political spectrum, it garnered popularity, and members of the Frankfurt School of socialism brought it to American soil.
As it is known, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin altered the game’s rules: he decided to utilize the pre-existing left-right conceptual dichotomy (in a pretty narrow setting) to crush any opposition to his dictatorial rule. Any aberration from the orthodox communist party line — no matter how small — had to be labeled. Thus, the “Right-deviationists” and “Left-deviationists” were born.
The “Left-deviationists” were deemed “too orthodox,” “too revolutionary,” as strange as it may seem, for the taste of bloodthirsty revolutionary Bolsheviks. In contrast, the “Right-deviationists” were considered traitors to the idea of the planet-wide socialist revolution because they dared to consider building a workers’ paradise by cleverly exploiting the mechanisms of state capitalism. Unquestionably, the word “capitalism” was anathema to communists. The “Left-deviationists” were to the left of Stalin, and the “Right-deviationists” were to his right.
Consequently, instead of the rostrum at the French Assembly, Stalin positioned himself at the center of the ideological universe and thus opened a new page in the “left-right” semantic journey.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Take the case of Marine Le Pen in France. Le Pen desires to keep the working week at 35 hours (France has forgotten the 40-hour working week for some time.)
She wants to lower the retirement age from 62 to 60.
Her grandiose plans include taxing wealth (instead of income), raising import tariffs, and nationalizing entire industries.
She seeks to increase social benefits (we know payments go mainly to armies of loafers who have learned the art of “pity me”) and others, typical for the leftist governments’ gargantuan expenditures.
Marine Le Pen definitely belongs to the left wing of the political spectrum. Most of her ideas are traditional for the left methods to siphon wealth from the productive population and use it to maintain rock-solid voting blocs by selling them illusions. Some economic positions of Le Pen are far to the left from those of ordinary French socialists.
That is not surprising. Marine Le Pen’s National Front is a socialist party with a nationalistic bent. Mass disinformation media call this party “extremely right,” but where did you see the right-wing socialist parties?
The Le Pen’s are a joke.
Marine Le Pen is also pro-abortion. More on this in next post.
posted this in another thread. appropriate today though in light of it being Bastille Day in France.
The French right is deeply divided and needs a clearer and new identity. To start: the main way to distinguish conservatism in Europe at large with the movement here in America, is the role (or lack thereof) of Christianity.
Marine Le Pen is a SECULARIST. At the moment there is no core spiritual heart of her movement other than a generalized anti-wokeness and anti-immigration. There is a divide between people who are genuinely Christian (and not anti-Israel) *versus* people who are secular (meaning pro-abortion etc..) *versus* people who appreciate the veneer of cultural Christianity, but still don’t understand the spiritual heart and application of it all.
It’s the radical secularism of the French Revolution that’s led to the demise of Europe and left the spiritual vacuum open for radical Islam to foment. That’s the crux of the matter.
So: Le Pen renamed her party from “National Front” to “National Rally” in 2018 in large part to divorce itself from its anti-Semitic founding. Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie, was a vocal Holocaust denier.
Marine Le Pen’s niece split from the party and dropped “Le Pen” from her name altogether (she goes by Marion Marechal). She is representative of the new generation which is more religious. But her “Reconquest” party imploded due to infighting and expelled her.
(Note: while anti-Semitism has been at the heart of the postwar European right wing for decades. I do not lump *UK conservatives* with rest of Western Europe. In the UK, it’s been the Left that’s been anti-Semitic. But there’s no “Christian Right” type legacy among the Tories.)
And finally: Macron is quite complex too. He is rather patriotic, and not super woke…but…yeah…
[Marine Le Pen definitely belongs to the left wing of the political spectrum. Most of her ideas are traditional for the left methods to siphon wealth from the productive population and use it to maintain rock-solid voting blocs by selling them illusions. Some economic positions of Le Pen are far to the left from those of ordinary French socialists.
That is not surprising. Marine Le Pen’s National Front is a socialist party with a nationalistic bent. Mass disinformation media call this party “extremely right,” but where did you see the right-wing socialist parties?]
Le Pen is a far left socialist who wants to deport illegal aliens and keep new ones from coming in. That may prevent her from getting an outright majority. Property owners don’t like having their assets stolen from them.
What’s astonishing is that there is no non socialist party that wants to deport illegal aliens and keep new ones out. This is the problem with political parties where party leaders, not voters, call the shots.
See also: ‘God has undoubtedly decided to take over’: France’s continuing (and surprising) Catholic shift against secular progressivism
Politics in France is chaotic right now because secularism has traditionally been entrenched in both the Right as well as the Left wing parties — and now, with less room for doldrum Centrism — the way faith-based votes and values shape French elections and political parties is evolving in real time.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4249601/posts
France has a nationalist, not a free-market, right.
It's not simply the Left who manipulates the left/right terminology. Libertarian style free-market ideology only took root in the US in the 80s. But as the "free-trade" and immigration debacles show, there are large parts of the libertarian agenda that are inimical to the national interests of the US.
The US gov should act to maintain a free-market against internal monopoly as was seen as far back as Teddy Roosevelt. It is possible to do so precisely because the US gov has legal authority over businesses and capital in the US itself. But it cannot control the predatory pricing and practices of foreign firms and governments or even just the unfair advantage it gives them by imposing high taxes and regulatory costs on US firms when foreign companies do not face the same.
Hitler’s movement was nominally national socialist, but the socialism was mainly in terms of expanding the welfare state rather than nationalizing private industry.
Other than that, they are a lot alike.
https://cdn.mises.org/the_vampire_economy_20201022.pdf
Read the above. It is an easy interesting read. Pick one chapter of interest.
You are living it today. It is important to understand facism.
The winning party has to prioritize what it wants most. Under normal circumstances, no party delivers everything it promises. The left has the most seats now, but no way are they delivering everything they promised.
France has a multiparty system with various coalitions competing with one another. If a government can’t get votes from outside its party, and even from outside its coalition, it can rarely get things done.
Governments also have to take budgetary and economic concerns into consideration. No party in France that campaigns for raising the work week to 40 is going to win, but it’s doubtful that the country can afford to lower the retirement age to 60.
No party in France is going to offer American-style conservatism, and even in America, conservatism doesn’t always deliver the policies or the results it promises. Conservatism is also hard to define. The global free market that was celebrated at one point by conservatives turned out not to be such a good thing.
ECONOMIC WAR: NATO Threatens to Nationalize Assets Owned by China the EU. France is in deep trouble financially. The EU is grasping at straws.
In today's Europe "Right" == restricting immigration. There are other issues, but that is the litmus test.
And "small government" isn't even a concept.
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