America too left-wing for France

Blaming American implants for undermining France’s national identity is a time-honoured sport of the French. Yet now it’s being played by new rules.

Traditionally, the Americans were held to be guilty of poisoning France’s sacred body with dog-eat-dog capitalism, frantic commercialism, fast food, pop music, Coca-Cola and wholesale rejection of progressive shibboleths.

Now that the Americans have seen the supposed error of their ways, they are being blamed for “out-of-control leftism and cancel culture” that exerts a ruinous transatlantic influence on France.

So claim prominent French intellectuals, politicians and academics in their letter to the New York Times. They lay the blame specifically at the doorstep of American universities, which infest the world with obsessive attachment to issues of sex and race. The latter especially is getting out of hand after last year’s BLM riots.

Manny Macron, facing elections and hence wishing to woo the Right, chimed in with warnings against “certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States”. Now which theories would they be?

Those of statist dirigisme, with the central government amassing vast power at the expense of local institutions? The welfare state? A Marxist craving for a single world government, now being partially realised through the EU? Institutionalised atheism? A culture of rights riding roughshod over both tradition and common sense? A tendency to use barricades as a redress for grievances?

No, none of those. They are all homespun phenomena appearing in the rubric of France’s exports, not imports. What then?

In fact, the signatories’ principal concern is race, which a new book describes as a “bulldozer” rolling all other issues into the dirt. It’s American campuses that are fanning the fires of racial strife, with tongues of flame scorching the blessed soil of France.

Why, some of those leftie Yanks in the grips of hatred for the West’s “white civilisation” even justify acts of Muslim terrorism. France saw three of them last autumn, and Allah only knows how many over the years.

Considering the growing toxic influence of American theories, before long the country will see an open season on white Frenchmen, including intellectuals, academics and politicians. That won’t do, will it?

Now we’ve dug through a pile of rhetorical manure to uncover a pearl of truth. Those French intellectuals aren’t really concerned about the phenomena I enumerated above, things like dirigisme, socialism and an obsession with universal human rights stamping out tradition.

And they don’t see a direct link between any of those and what does justifiably worry them: seditious Muslims playing with knives, firearms and explosives.

All European countries, including Britain, have similar concerns. But the severity of the problem is proportionate to the number of Muslims in the country. And France’s is higher than anywhere in Western Europe, twice as high as in Britain.

I bet those French intellectuals see no connection between La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and those AKs firing in the streets of Paris. Yet a connection exists, and it’s more fundamental than the one between American universities and French violence.

Those intricate minds honed at France’s Grandes Ecoles reject faith in God and, by extension, the Old Regime. That’s lamentable. But neither do they seem to believe in consequences, and that’s catastrophic.

The Enlightenment, more appropriately to be called the Twilightenment, set out to crush Christendom and replace it with a new ethos of purely secular rights, universal equality, democracy and progress. The crushing part has turned out to be easier.

A tectonic revolutionary shift always produces a multitude of unintended consequences, most of them even worse than the intended ones. When the genie of mass discontent escapes from the bottle of tradition, it acquires a life all its own, and this life is lived according to its own laws.

When the bien pensant ethos of the French Enlightenment was imported to England’s American colonies, the Founding Fathers were sage enough to see the dangers. That’s why they sought to introduce into their constitution all sorts of safeguards against the populist egalitarian mania gripping France.

But, predictably, they too failed to control the newly liberated genie. Years after the American Revolution they looked at what they had created and were appalled.

In 1811, America’s second president John Adams rued: “Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?”

A few years earlier, he wrote: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.” Thomas Jefferson echoed the sentiment: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

Hindsight is better than no sight at all, but it seldom helps to undo the damage done. What the Founders realised is that a new ethos is a multifaceted entity, with all facets coming as a package tied with the strings of causality.

The Founders didn’t lack intelligence, but they did lack experience of such massive tectonic shifts as the American and French Revolutions. That’s why they failed to identify a series of ironclad ‘begats’ ensuing irrespective of their wishes, designs and plans.

Specifically, they didn’t realise that any republic constituted on Enlightenment principles is bound to beget a virtually unlimited democracy, which will in its turn beget mob rule exerted through politicians dependent on the mob for their livelihood.

They couldn’t foresee that the more they expanded the notion of rights, the more widely would the rights be replaced with appetites passing as rights. They couldn’t anticipate that the implosion of the universally accepted absolute will spray deadly shards of petty relativities, with no legitimate defences limiting their spread.

The French heirs to les philosophes suffer from the same misapprehension. They seem to think they can cherrypick things they like about the society begotten by the Enlightenment and toss aside things they dislike. Alas, things don’t work that way.

The French are rightly appalled by the intellectual and social venom spread by American ‘liberal’ academics and media, but they are incapable of looking at the problem diachronically. They should really look at their own history of the past 250 years and then ponder this passage from the book they ignore:

“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”