On Sunday, in France, more than half of those who cast votes cast their vote for candidates of the hard right, and hard left. President Macron – who will probably scrape a victory in two weeks – won the votes of fewer than one third of the French. The old establishment parties of centre left, and centre right won less than 8% of the votes between them.
Mr. Macron will likely win because a substantial portion of those who voted for the hard left candidate will grudgingly prefer him to Marine LePen. But if he does win, it will be an election majority constructed from resentment, not love or enthusiasm.
What an astonishing situation. And what an unsurprising one.
This did not come about by accident. The liberal, progressive, centre has all sorts of excuses it makes for populist revolts. We can all list them now, almost by rote: Online misinformation is usually at the top of the list, followed by racism, and various bigotries.
None of that is true. Or, at the very least, none of it is the cause. The cause is the society that the progressive centre has built.
We have constructed, in the west, an “inclusive” society that, bizarrely, includes very few people. Sure, it professes to include all sorts of people. Diversity is the watchword, and all that. But it does not include them practically. Go to France, jump off your plane at Charles DeGaulle, and take a train into Paris. You will look out your window at points during that train journey and wonder if you have mistakenly arrived at Aleppo, or Baghdad, or some war-torn country. Miles and miles of slums, and ghettos, and poverty. Most of the people who live there are either immigrants, or the children of immigrants. Many of them have become so alienated that they form the backbone of European recruitment to ISIS and Al Qaeda.
The inhabitants of those ghettos are not truly included in French society. No more than travellers are truly included in Irish society. And they are not alone.
At its best, modern inclusivity includes the representatives of the great unwashed. It is tokenistic: A traveller Senator here, a transgendered minister there, a black nominee to a supreme court over yonder, to cheer us all up and make us feel good about ourselves. All fine, so long as middle class, upper middle income white liberals continue to run the show, and keep their netflix documentaries and starbucks.
On the other side, meanwhile, we have an inclusive society that excludes whole swathes of people as untouchables. From the very poor, to the very deplorable. Western societies spend more time consciously excluding people than they do including them – the unvaccinated were the most recent segment to become untouchable. Committed Christians were excluded before them. People who do not believe in unrestricted immigration have been excluded for years. We now formally exclude – even from being allowed argue their position on television – those who question the wisdom of climate change policy. Before that, it was those who believe it is permissible to hunt foxes for sport.
Inclusive western society now has entry tests for participation. To have a voice, or a seat at the table, you must, ultimately, conform to the values of the ruling class, no matter your background. Have you not noticed? More women is good, so long as they are women with the right opinions. I promise you, if LePen wins, the headline in the Irish Times will not be “Glass ceiling shattered as France elects first female President”.
And all of that means, simply, that some things must be ignored, or not spoken about.
It is no coincidence that the top item on Mrs LePen’s 22-point electoral agenda is immigration. She makes several eye-catching pledges. She would begin a program of wholesale deportations of people in France illegally, or, as she calls them, “delinquents and foreign criminals”. She would prioritise native French citizens for housing, and benefits. She would reserve social assistance to French people only. She would remove the residence permit of any foreigner who has been in France for a full year without working.
No wonder the governing class, right across Europe, is horrified. People who believe such things have no place, after all, in an inclusive society. They were supposed to have been excluded, long ago.
This is the great paradox, because, fortunately or unfortunately, lots of people see LePen’s program on immigration not as “extreme”, but as simple common sense. It is not vastly different, after all, from present immigration policy in Australia, a western country.
Here’s the thing: The modern western ruling class has a very narrow range of lifestyles and opinions that it truly considers acceptable, even as it proclaims itself inclusive. Traditional socialists are excluded, because they are, after all, the enemies of progressive corporations and capitalism. Traditional Christians are excluded because they are the enemies of the sexual revolution. Traditional conservatives are excluded because they are the enemies of radical social engineering. Increasingly, middle class white men are excluded because of alleged crimes against feminism. And the funny thing is that many immigrants are excluded because they are poor and don’t speak the language – though it would be racist, of course, to make them learn it.
Who are these people to vote for then?
We don’t live in inclusive societies, here in the west. We live – and Ireland is a good example of this – in societies where a single ideology is acceptable, and deviation from it makes you de facto an extremist.
That a majority of French people voted for “extremists”, then, is not surprising. Because no matter how much the establishment protests to the contrary, their vision of the world is not, and never has been, the majority.
A great many people in western society absolutely detest rainbow-encrusted elite capitalism, which is what we have now. They reject societies where a few companies own all the housing; and where politicians are too scared to say what a woman is; and where all white men are considered potential rapists, but mentioning sex crimes by migrants makes you a racist; and where the most important thing about a US Supreme Court Judge is not what she thinks, but that she is a black woman; and where the rich live in married, two parent, one income homes, but preach that the poor must embrace non-traditional families.
Who are they to vote for? Not Mr. Macron. Not the traditional parties of left and right, who will now, as ever, endorse Mr. Macron. Not the Greens, who are Mr. Macron with a bicycle. That leaves Mrs Le Pen. Or Mr. Melenchon. Or some other undesirable.
But, worry not, because this time, at least, “inclusivity” will win. And we can forget all about those horrible people who voted against it, at least until the next time there is an election.