Tocqueville in China

So I'm told:

First there was Confucius. Then there was Mao Zedong. And now Alexis de Tocqueville tops the must-read list for avid Chinese intellectuals and bloggers.

Can the Center Hold?

Bernard Girard considers Gérard Grunberg's thesis that France's future relations with Europe depends on compromise between the center-right and center-left, since both the left and the right are now irrevocably fractured over the question of further European integration. I have been saying this for some time, and Hollande's reversal on the TSCG, which he now makes the sine qua non of sound economic policy after having opposed it during his campaign, seems to me proof that such an "historic compromise" has already been effected in fact if not in theory. The problem is that I am not at all sure that it is a compromise that enjoys majority support, and what support it does enjoy is likely to diminish over the months ahead, as the consequences of austerity become increasingly apparent. This is an alarming state of affairs.

Amartya Sen Considers the Europe Question

Sen adds his voice to the worries about the pressures on European democracy:

If democracy has been one of the strong commitments with which Europe emerged in the 1940s, an understanding of the necessity of social security and the avoidance of intense social deprivation was surely another. Even if savage cuts in the foundations of the European systems of social justice had been financially inescapable (I do not believe that they were), there was still a need to persuade people that this is indeed the case, rather than trying to carry out such cuts by fiat. The disdain for the public could hardly have been more transparent in many of the chosen ways of European policy-making.

Noiriel Analyzes the FN Vote

Historian Gérard Noiriel analyzes the FN vote. Key point:

A partir des années 1980, la bureaucratisation de la société et la crise de la grande industrie ont liquidé les mouvements de masse entraînant une perte d’autonomie du politique au profit des médias. La « démocratie de partis » a laissé la place à la « démocratie d’opinion ». Le retour de l’extrême droite sur le devant de la scène est à mes yeux une conséquence directe de ces mutations. Le triomphe de la politique-spectacle a créé en effet des opportunités dont s’est saisi Jean-Marie Le Pen, en développant la stratégie des « petites phrases » conçues comme des « bombes médiatiques » qui prennent leur place dans l’actualité au côté des crimes, des catastrophes, des procès etc.

Les journalistes, pris dans les rouages de cette machine médiatique, sont contraints d’accorder de l’importance à ces poseurs de « bombes », contribuant ainsi à l’héroïsation des leaders d’extrême droite. Puisque ces derniers sont devenus des personnages centraux du récit médiatico-politique, les électeurs se sentent autorisés à voter pour le Front National. La réputation sulfureuse de ce parti séduit tout particulièrement ceux qui n’ont plus rien à perdre et qui cherchent à exprimer de la façon la plus radicale possible leur refus d’une société qui ne leur fait pas de place.

This argument strikes me as superficially appealing but empirically unfounded. Is it really true that that the FN "particularly attracts those who have nothing more to lose?" There is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the answer is no. The FN has found support in many segments of society, including retirees and small businessmen who definitely have something to lose. Its working-class support has been increasing, and some of that may come from the unemployed, but some of it also comes from the employed, who have their jobs to lose and fear losing them to immigrants willing to work for lower wages.

What Noiriel wants to call attention to, I think, is the fact that most of the public discussion of FN voters is conducted by "the political-media complex," a fancy term for people like himself and me, who speak of FN supporters as the Other and have no direct contact with the milieux in which a vote for the FN is a live option. We impute attitudes and emotions we do not really fathom: hence the "suffering" narrative, which Noiriel rejects as confabulation. That may be true, but in what respect is "the nothing more to lose" narrative an improvement? Isn't it just another name for the same thing?

Where I think Noiriel is right is in his perception of the way in which Lepenist barbs and provocations, echoed by the media, are used to construct an anti-systemic image. For voters whose judgment is that "the system" has failed them, the response is to seek the candidate whose provocations seem most disruptive of what they see as the routinized and ritualized exchanges that constitute the mainstream discourse. In the ensuing surenchère of acerbic attitude, anti-system candidates compete with each other in a closed rhetorical universe that hives itself off as a separate realm of what Noiriel calls the "democracy of opinion," in which one opinion is deemed as good as another simply because it is voiced and without need for the kind of justification once provided by ideology in the "democracy of parties." Hence the intense media interest in the Le Pen-Mélenchon face-off in Hénin-Beaumont. Nothing of consequence will be decided here, but the battle of provocateurs will surely défrayer la chronique.

"La gauche populaire"

Marianne2 has published the manifesto of a group that calls itself La Gauche Populaire. A more extensive statement can be found in a work entitled Plaidoyer pour une gauche populaire, signed by Philippe
Guibert, Laurent Bouvet, and Alain Mergier. Bouvet is also the author of a study entitled Le Sens du peuple, which presents an historical overview of the evolution of the left and of the recent cleavage, as Bouvet sees it, between the left-wing political elite and les classes populaires.

What does la GP (those of a certain age will have to be careful to distinguish between this group and la Gauche Prolétarienne of old) want? To understand this, one has to look at the fundamental premise of the manifesto: "L’élément structurant de cette élection était et reste l’inquiétude très forte des classes populaires sur la situation économique et la mondialisation." The authors argue, correctly, that the "Establishment" center-left has had a hard time responding to this "deep anxiety." What do they propose to do about this? Their response, like that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is long on symptoms and short on remedies:

La financiarisation et la planétarisation de l’économie ont depuis quarante ans liquidé les structures unitaires de la société française. La guerre de tous contre tous entretenue par le chômage de masse, la liquidation des grands récits et de l’encadrement des masses par des idéologies structurées, l’annihilation de l’ascenseur social, la déconstruction de l’histoire nationale au bénéfice de mémoires communautarisées, la réduction de la souveraineté populaire à l’opinion publique, puis de celle-ci à des segments communautaires : ce qui faisait République a été tellement mis en cause que nombre de nos concitoyens en sont venus à estimer que l’extrême droite pouvait en représenter la sauvegarde.

They then hark back to Jaurès in search of a politics adequate to this diagnosis, and what they prescribe is "more 'social' and less 'societal.'" This detour into the jargon of sociology may be clearer in French than it is in English, but I doubt it. Here is the authors' elaboration of the point:

Une ligne politique claire s’est imposée à nous : le commun plutôt que les identités, le social avant le sociétal, l’émancipation collective plus que l’extension infinie des droits individuels, seule cette ligne politique permettant de bâtir une majorité sociologique et électorale.

Is this actually a political program or the incantatory invocation of a state of society that no longer exists, when "working class" and "bourgeoisie" were indeed collective social and cultural identities? In any case, the theorists of la Gauche pop' are convinced that the "identity" issues raised by the right are not simply masks for underlying economic issues but constitutive of a social reality of which the economy is just one aspect:

Il importe de saisir que si cette insécurité culturelle est inséparable dans son appréhension, notamment dans les catégories populaires, de la dimension économique et sociale, elle s’en distingue tout de même. C’est à cette préoccupation-là que la stratégie « Buisson » (du nom du conseiller de Sarkozy issu de la droite dure) devait s’adresser autour du ciblage des musulmans et de leur « mode de vie » comme menace pour l’identité nationale (viande halal, prières de rue, burqa, etc.).

It's here that I have some difficulty following where their political line leads. On one level they are offering the sound advice that the feelings and instincts of the popular classes cannot be ignored or wished away, even if they express themselves in racist or xenophobic terms. But what exactly is to be done about this? Is the left-wing alternative to a Buisson strategy simply to validate the spontaneous judgments of the "authentic" underclass but without the anti-Islamic overtones? And how is that to be done? By substituting "financiarisation" for "islamisation" and "social" for "societal"? I confess that I am somewhat at a loss to see where this leads. The manifesto concludes on a high rhetorical note, a kind of Mélenchoniste lyricism with its allusion to Sieyès, its apotheosis of the Republic, and its invocation of the universal:

Cependant, être de « gauche », c’est croire à l’égalité sans ramener celle-ci exclusivement à la question sociale mais à ce qui tient ensemble en amont de cette dernière : l’égalité des conditions. La gauche est un moyen pour redresser le pays, et non une fin. Qu’est-ce que le peuple aujourd’hui ? Rien. Qu’aspire-t-il à devenir ? Tout. Au fond, ce qui relie « gauche » et « populaire » c’est la République dans sa dimension sociale et la nation dans sa seule version universaliste.

Do I reveal myself to be a hopelessly jaded intellectual or worse, a social traitor, if I say that I no longer thrill to this martial music? It seems to me to avoid all the hard questions in the name of an empty egalitarianism. What exactly does "equality of conditions" mean? As a Tocquevillean, I know that the phrase can be parsed in many ways. And its power to mobilize is no longer what it was when it stood in opposition to the ascription of status by birth and corporate membership (see my Collège de France lecture). I would like to see la Gauche pop' as something new on the political horizon, but in the end I find that it stirs me as little as the rhetoric of Mélenchon.

Kapil Takes on Mélenchon

My blogging confrère Arun Kapil dislikes Jean-Luc Mélenchon a good deal more than I do, and I don't like him much. I know that Mélenchon has many supporters among my readers, and they will no doubt be incensed by Arun's post. They should nevertheless read it. He states his position forthrightly and invites debate. I found this passage noteworthy:

The political scientist Marc Lazar said recently that the Communist party in France may be all but dead but that a communist culture still exists on the French left, and that Jean-Luc Mélenchon has achieved the singular feat in his presidential campaign of awakening this culture and giving it a unified political expression.

I would take some issue with Lazar's formulation. Mélenchon revives one aspect of French Communist culture,  but that culture was far more than Georges Marchais's sneering attitude toward journalists, which Mélenchon shares. Communist culture would never have survived as long as it did if it hadn't provided a structure of support, solidarity, and community for its adherents. Mélenchon has resurrected the cult of personality, the combative spirit, and a good deal of the nasty invective as well as the high-flown historical rhetoric of that earlier period, but one might speculate that a part of the enthusiasm he has aroused comes from a yearning for a restoration of that community on the part of a mostly older group of leftists who found in May 68 a solidarity that no "modern" political party--and certainly not the French Socialist Party--can supply.

To my mind, such solidarity, which grew naturally out of the experience of the shop floor when labor was regimented in battalions and treated like cannon fodder, is not a natural part of today's society. It can flare up briefly in specific settings: the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s bore some, though not all, of its earmarks. And since I was a part of that counterculture, I can attest to its attractions. But such fellow-feeling, however pleasurable, is not a sound basis for the kinds of political decisions that we face today. It leads almost invariably to a division of society into friends and enemies--a distinction that is the basis of the thought of Carl Schmitt more than that of Karl Marx. It is no longer possible to wish that "demain l'Internationale sera le genre humain." We have become too diverse to believe that any one class of society is called by its very nature and essence to become "the universal class." And for me that is the essence of Mélenchon's error and the illusion under which his supporters labor.

The rest I leave to Arun, along with the responsibility for his remarks.