by H. Goldman.
As the long debate on healthcare finally comes to a close, it seems like the conservative movement in America is bouncing back. It has scaled back the healthcare bill immensely, spawned many "tea-party" protests, and the political climate going into this year's Congressional elections is tending toward the Republican Party as the economic times cause Americans to jump on whatever bandwagon that they think will get them out of financial turmoil. However, today, the French Socialist Party defeated the majority party, the conservative (by European standards) Union for a Popular Movement, the party of French President Sarkozy, in 21 of 22 regional elections. The prime reasons for this, it seems, were the harsh economic times and, therefore, a desire for social safety nets to be maintained and increased. This begs the question, how could these two countries, with the same primary issue (the economy), reach such different conclusions? I would say that the answer is solely cultural, but the underlying anger of the "tea party" movement, for instance, is oddly similar to that of the French. Many tea-partiers are elderly, and have an obsession with making sure that no one takes away their Medicare. Economic rights are implicit within the movement itself, although buried under rhetoric and bigotry (as a side note, the nativist National Front Party received 8.7% of the vote in France). Populism is as alive as ever, yet people in this country still vote against their interests. Maybe it is just because of a tendency to vote out the majority party in every couple of election-cycles, but it seems to run deeper than that.
I'm am inclined to think that we, as Americans, are often in fear of a top-down power elite, even when that elite does good things for us. When this fear is exploited by loony pundits pontificating into a camera (e.g. Glenn Beck), given a face, if you will, then we often abandon our interests in an attempt to bring power back to the grassroots. This is the lesson that the Democrats need to learn from the health care debate. It isn't that there is a freak tendency toward the conservative movement because people become tired of their government every few election cycles, it is that the Republicans and the media have just been good at making people afraid of a big-bad power conspiracy in Washington that is going to somehow take itself and everything else away. Every election is a message war, a war over how much people will express their real interests, and the Democrats need to learn that.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Ironic, to say the least.
Labels: France, H. Goldman, Health Care, socialism, tea parties
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4 comments:
Agreed! I think the Democrats would have had much more support (or at least more vocal supporters) if they'd put the good old grassroots network to work. (What ever happened to Organizing for America anyway?!)
The parralel between france and US can't be so simple. Actually, I don't find it pertinent there.
The claim that the very punishing vote against the current government is only a consequence of the crisis, is absurd.
Actually, this line is the current official line of UMP to minimize their responsability in the defeat.
In my (left-wing) opinion, the result is as much due to a huge disappointment on Sarkozy's presidential "type", as from the crisis.
Sarkozy promised a new type of americain-like governement style (most presidentialist), but only offerred tabloid scandals and egocentrism.
Astoundingly, his prime minister, François Fillon, his one of the most popular politics in France right now (quite an ironic inversion of the traditionnal frnech prime minister, pure fusible for the presidential impopularity)
Nothing to compare with the tea-partie movement here.
A few other points:
-The excellent score of ecologists is showing other matters currently taking new importance in traditional french politic.
-The score of FN (Front National), is much higher than the national result show. They only had candidates in ten or so regions. With scores regularly around 15-20%.
Putting the national score is a dangerous minoration of their score. Jean-Marie Le Pen is close of 23% in PACA (Wealthy south-east)
Extreme-right is growing stronger in France, wich is also very interesting (please note that the tea-parties are very close to french extreme-right in their ideas)
The closest parralel I can find between US and France nowadays is in this precise rise of extreme.
(Well, I must precise that I'm partial there. But it's obvious for most french that the crisis was only a small cause of UMP's defeat.)
Titouan Lemoine.
Of course there existed other factors in the outcomes of the French elections, I never disputed that, but maybe I was trying to be too simplistic in my approach to writing the piece (I didn't want to get too technical, so I tried to leave out as much power-relations stuff as I could). In fact, the other factors that you mentioned reassert my point. The "huge disappointment on Sarkozy's presidential 'type'" is not only based on media messages, but also on perceptions of a top-down, bottom-up power dichotomy left over from centuries ago, the only difference being that, in the French media "war," if you will, what has prevailed has been a notion that we can deface the current power structure, which is Kafkaesque in depiction (tabloid scandals being the analogue to judges reading pornography during night trials). The only difference between this kind of defacing and tea-party conspiracy theories (other than that the french defacing may have a kernel of truth to it) is that, at the same time, the people voted in favor of their interests. The top-down power fears were, in effect, in the "right" direction.
Moreover, the success of the FN is also a symptom of macropolitical notions of power, and provides proof that the two nations can be compared in this manner. Bigotry and Nativism are mixtures of stupidity, message, and fear of an Other, which is seen as a macropolitical organization that will take something away from people.
As for the success of the ecological movement, I would just place that with the success of the socialists. It is just the result of a message war over how macropolitical relationships play into people's decisions.
Correction: "...deface the current power structure..." should be "...unmask the current power structure..."
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