On reality denial - the French Left

It could seem that my "transatlantic" focus is rather one way if I continue talking only about American politics...no worries!

[This post was started a couple of days ago and not finished...so it might look a bit old to French readers, but not so to others...]

The French Left has recently been giving a particularly absurd show - but unfortunately this has deep roots, and is not mere aberration. Looking at what befell the candidates for Socialist Party leadership is enlightening.



The Socialists just went through several months of campaigning, and finally an election by the party members, for their "General Secretary", i.e. party leader. Many things were weird:

-> A bit over 50% of card-carrying party members voted - so the leader was elected by maybe a total of 60,000 votes or so. The Socialists are a party that typically will aim at getting from 6 to 12 million votes or so in a general election - not much of a primary, really!

-> One of the frontrunners, the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe, narrowly got pushed out after the first round, after having been an early frontrunner. Delanoe's sin: he expressed in June his identity as "a socialist and a liberal" (the latter being in France understood generally as "free-market fanatic", which is not how he meant it of course). Given the general hyper-statist mood (financial crisis...), this clearly cost him a lot.



-> The two ladies who made it to the second round, Martine Aubry (the eventual winner by a handful of votes) and Segolene Royal (who was not a good loser, once again) fought bitterly and appeared to be rather from enemy camps than from the same party. What was weird was their political positioning:

> Aubry positioned herself as a "true left" believer, a kind of "historical socialism" stalwart - although she is the daughter of previous European Commission President Jacques Delors, of centre-left democrat-christian fame, and herself an able technocrat with a history of close relations with business circles. She was supported by the absurd (let's not say "unlikely" - this is not "unlikely" but clearly absurd!) alliance of the eurosceptic/old left wing of the party, and the clearly "social-liberal" (as we say in France) side of it (whose leader, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, could not run because he is heading the IMF...).

> As usual it would be difficult to say exactly what Segolene Royal stood for but she was arguably a combination of "more to the left" (popular participation is her great topic, as opposed to decisions coming from the top) and "more to the right" (a liking for law and order topics and, most importantly it seems, a professed openness to maybe one day discuss the possibility of talking to the Centre in order to consider some kind of "let's not call it an alliance but..."). The latter (readiness to talk to the Centre) was attacked by her internal opponents in pretty much the way the US neocons attacked Obama for his professed openness to maybe talk possibly one day to adversaries of the US. Seems the neocons are not the only absolute morons around.


So, in short, the leardership election was won "to the left", and through a vote involving a handful of card-carriers. And what does this "left" mean?

Marcel Gauchet in Lieux de Memoire has analyzed "left" and "right" not anymore like what they pretend to be, but as identities. As such, it does not matter so much what ideologies they cover, but rather whom you belong to. In this sense, they are still valid: there are still people who relate to them, and are convinced to be right...But what does this mean, except for this identity, which could be a secular, urban replacement of the old religious and village identification...?

Francois Furet in his books on the French Revolution showed how, starting from the Revolution onwards, what had once been the "left" of ideas and parties (and politicians) got constantly pushed to the "right" by the emergence of more revolutionary, further "left" ideas and movements. The criteria of being "more revolutionary" being to be for more equality - not more liberty.

I guess we have arrived at the point where we have gone full circle. Some ideas have been going from left to right, then back and forth - such as nationalism, the engine of the Revolution, then later in the 19th century becoming the source of a major right wing movement - and now? are not many defenders of the nation-state, again, on the left? The left never really was the party of the movement, is it still the party of equality?

Probably there is a lot to gain in trying to understand "left" and "right" as temperaments: "why not" against "why", "it could get better" vs. "it could get worse". But it is doubtful whether the French left even still matches this description, and it is Sarkozy's strength to have understood it: most of the left speaks only of preserving, conserving, defending...Not much optimism that things could get better!

Now, why did I name this post "reality denial"? Because the current state of affairs of the left in France is:
- a strong (both through public presence and votes) far-left movement that is against "capitalism", markets, globalization, private property, name it (and which is partly "alternative", i.e. ecological, libertarian in social issues - but only partly so)
- a mainstream socialist party, which is led by graduates of public administration, with a significant training in economics and international relations, but apparently pretend to be some communist operatives from the fifites...I mean, seriously, this is what they talk about:
-> globalization is BAD BAD BAD - just ask the millions of Chinese, Indians and others who escaped poverty in the past twenty years what they think? but never mind, it seems equality is meant only for French state employees??
-> markets are REALLY EVIL - never mind that the left wing governments under President Mitterrand did probably more market friendly reforms than the right, and that, unsurprisingly, combined as it was with reinforced (but "traditional French", one could say) public investments and planning, it worked, with France enjoying a very good time in the nineties, with strengthened competitiveness and a modernized country
-> more more more regulation is GOOD - no one even dares talk about reducing bureaucracy and red tape. Any "deregulation" is just evil - full stop - move over.

Now, this really sounds like a party that is ready to govern in the 21th century, doesn't it? Flatly deny the tremendous positive changes that globalization has brought for such a large share of the world's poor (sorry, just count how many there are in China and India, who recently went out from poverty!). Deny the accomplishments of the governments you ran and the obvious merits of focusing the state on where it can do most good, and let the market decide of resource allocation. As if we had not had enough experience of governments (left and right) throwing billions of dollars at: steel (ended up downsizing and globalizing anyway), shipbuilding (ended up with the only shipyard remaining open being the one that was clearly competitive from the start), computers (ended up wiped away anyway), banks (anyone remembers how much state-owned Credit Lyonnais lost for the taxpayers!?)... And finally, always proposing just more more more more rules?! You must be kidding...?
But then, there is the right...