Marine Le Pen Is A Mainstream Republican
This May, the eyes of the world were fixated on France, buzzing with anticipation and anxiety over the contest between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, wondering whether this would represent the latest victory for right-wing populism. To the great relief of many, it would not be- Macron won a massive landslide, sixty-six percent of the vote to Le Pen’s thirty four. One reason why he succeeded where Hillary Clinton failed was due to the endorsement of parties across the political spectrum, from the center-right to the center-left. Why did this largely not happen in the United States when Donald Trump won the Republican primary? An easy explanation is the binary nature of our two-party system, and that may be so, but the truth is far more insidious- Donald Trump was merely a more impolite expression of today’s mainstream American conservatism. If Marine Le Pen were an American politician, she would be right in the middle of the modern Republican Party.
It is a stark contrast to compare the treatment that Le Pen and Trump received from the so-called “mainstream right” of their respective countries following Le Pen’s advancing to the runoff of the French Presidential election and Trump’s winning the GOP nomination. Les Republicains (no prizes for guessing what the English translation is), the center-right French party, immediately rejected Le Pen. Their nominee Francois Fillon, an arch fiscal conservative sometimes referred to as the “French Margaret Thatcher,” nonetheless immediately endorsed Macron, as did Benoit Hamon, the candidate of the center-left Parti Socialiste. The controversial exception to this trend was the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who did not formally endorse Macron, but even he made clear through surrogates in the media that he preferred a Macron victory.
Contrast this to the reaction of mainstream American conservatism to the rise of a man who they supposedly deplored, whom they cast as a perversion of their values and a betrayal of all that good, true conservatives hold dear. House Speaker Paul Ryan made the briefest show of declining to endorse Trump before falling in line, while Senate GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn quietly played the good soldier. When Trump’s primary rival Ted Cruz made a half-hearted attempt to tell the GOP faithful to “vote their conscience” at the Republican convention, he was met with a resounding chorus of boos and jeers, meekly endorsing Trump not long after.
The easy explanation is that partisanship is so deeply rooted in our country, Republicans and Democrats so diametrically opposed that if Jesus Christ himself came to walk the earth again the GOP would denounce him as a Christian-hating lib traitor. I do agree partially with this- this state of affairs is the result of a poisoned and broken American body politic. However, it is not poisoned and broken because of “partisanship” or “gridlock”- it is poisoned because the Republican Party is the Front Nationale of American politics, and the two parties have been kindred spirits since long before the rise of Trump.
Marine Le Pen brought the Front Nationale into the mainstream with a policy of “de- diabolisation,” deliberately attempting to distance herself from the outright holocaust denial and Vichy France apologia of her father, Jean-Marie, who famously referred to the gas chambers as “a detail in the history of World War II.” This entailed denouncing overt racism, particularly anti-semitism (Le Pen made outreach to Jewish voters a priority, citing her strength on Islamic terrorism), even expelling her own father from the party in 2015. As the 2017 Presidential campaign wore on, however, this was revealed to voters as the cynical pose that it was- she denied Vichy France’s complicity in the rounding up of French Jews during the Holocaust, and her handpicked party chairman was forced to resign in the wake of racist and anti-semitic remarks.
While she is most often and readily compared to Trump, this aspect of her PR campaign parallels quite nicely with the Republicans’ modern history of simultaneously dismissing the racists in their midst on one hand while inviting them in on the other. The intellectual forefather of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, made a big show of his mission to expel crazed right-wingers such as the John Birch Society from the party, while denouncing civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Richard Nixon came into power on the Southern Strategy, and once in power instituted the War on Drugs, which Ronald Reagan proceeded to expand. This laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration of black men and other minorities that persists to this day.
Bob Dole denounced racism in his speech to the 1996 Republican National Convention while that same year the party was electing Jeff Sessions to the United States Senate. George W. Bush pledged he was a different, “compassionate” conservative while winning the Republican primary in 2000 with robocalls alleging John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black daughter, and then once in office gutting the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. If anything, the Republican Party and the Front Nationale have followed opposite paths along the same track throughout their history- Le Pen has put the veil of respectability over her father’s racism while maintaining it in practice, while all Trump has done is remove the veil from what was there all along.
It would be wrong to say that Marine Le Pen aligns completely with the modern mainstream GOP on all policy issues. In the most direct parallel to Trump’s particular brand of Republican racism, she professes economic populism, in sharp contrast to her father’s past as a “staunch advocate of small government,” (sound familiar?)[1] as well as denouncing NATO and the EU. Though as has proven to be the case with Trump, one wonders if she would in fact follow through with this if she were ever to achieve power.
Transposing one politician to a different country is never a perfect comparison, but is it really any kind of stretch of the imagination to picture someone with Marine Le Pen’s exact views being elected to the House and Senate at any point in the past fifty years? Would she stand out at all an ordinary Senator alongside colleagues such as Jesse Helms, Jeff Sessions and Strom Thurmond? How about “respectable” main-line senators like John McCain, who opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday and campaigned for the white supremacist George Wallace Jr in his bid for Lieutenant Governor of Alabama? Even the economic populist pose and isolationist rhetoric supposedly invented by Trump is echoed by leading Republican figure Pat Buchanan. The 2017 election in France and the historic vote totals for the Front Nationale may be a chilling new development for the French, but here in the United States, Marine Le Pen and her politics have been business as usual for the Republican Party long before Donald Trump.
[1] Cécile Auduy, “The Devil’s Daughter,” The Atlantic, October 2013
