Last night I heard a very interesting discussion on the Rassemblement national, which is the recent new name adopted by M. Le Pen for her political party. A movement, therefore, rather than the limited membership that the precedent name of Front national implied. This defunct name took its energy from the communist movement of the thirties, the Front populaire. What is now remarkable is that Le Pen has abandoned not only her father’s antisemitism, at least in its crude forms, but even the notion of a frexit, at least superficially. She has been making steady progress among the electors for the past fifteen years or so. The major and powerful argument for electing her party to govern France is the steadily growing perception among blue collar and service class—the less educated—that they have been abandoned and left behind without any collective means to restore security and dignity. They are angry about a neglect that feels like a betrayal, The anger is fed by a deep concern about their own survival as well as that of their children. So, Le Pen retools the word national to mean a community of culturally defined members whose shared identity will guarante that social programs like public schooling, pension systems and national healthcare will be competently maintained (to be seen) under her and only under her. It would be the only way to prevent their dissolution and destruction by global financial interests (mezzo voce, Jewish) for which Europe is a Trojan horse.

The big and urgent political problem created by this view, aside from its more subtle antisemitism, is that a guaranteed social welfare becomes indelibly linked in the mind of her voters, including the potential ones, to the rejection of immigration and more generally to the hate of the foreigner and a return to restrictive, narrow-minded, competitive nations. More to follow.