Marine Le Pen and Conservatism’s Identity Crisis

The French election has mercifully come to an end. I say this because the fascination on the American right with a pro-choice socialist named Marine Le Pen has been the most baffling political development we’ve seen in quite some time.

It was one thing for the right to embrace the likes of Donald Trump, who, while certainly not an ideological or constitutional “conservative” and not pretending to be one, is at least a capitalist. By contrast, Le Pen is a socialist the likes of which Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would welcome into their wing of the Democratic Party with open arms. She, like Emmanuel Macron, is also pro-choice. Where she parts ways with the American left, and one would argue with most of the real right, is that she ran a campaign based largely on reducing immigration into France and running as the nationalist-dominated National Front’s chosen one.

Let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being proud of your country and espousing it. Le Pen and her National Front Party, however, became the mouthpiece of right wing groups who embrace the very identity politics employed by the left that they claim to be against. This is where the right in the United States has lost its way.

Since when would any self-respecting conservative even dream of supporting an avowed socialist? Le Pen and her party supported more taxation, protectionism, lowering the retirement age to 60 (thus expanding their entitlement system, of course), and reducing foreign investment. Last time I checked, free market conservatives don’t subscribe to the notion that we need more taxes, more regulation and protectionism, and increased entitlements. We’re supposed to be the ones who support lower taxes, decreased regulation, and reducing entitlement spending.

Make no mistake. The French people went to the polls to vote for which socialist they wanted to elect as many Americans who claim to be conservatives and capitalists cheered on one of the candidates who is essentially Europe’s Elizabeth Warren if Elizabeth Warren also just so happened to be strongly opposed to immigration. This is hypocrisy and absurdity of unimaginable proportions. What’s even more hypocritical and absurd? Americans who claim to be “nationalists” who vehemently oppose globalization while simultaneously concerning themselves with an election in France, largely via social media, which has linked the entire world in ways we couldn’t have conceived of just about a decade ago.

Sadly, this is not at all surprising. The right has embraced the leftist mantra of thinking of people in groups, whether they be made up of of race, religion, gender, orientation, and so on, as opposed to emphasizing the importance and the rights of the individual, no matter what color they are or which deity they pray or do not pray to. The problem is that the left will eat us alive if we keep this up, because they engage in their obnoxious brand of identity politics in an effort to gain votes from the groups in question, usually by employing cheap political scare tactics, whereas the right seems to be doing everything in their power to participate in the same “us and them” mentality with similar scare tactics, except they’re also just alienating people instead of winning their vote.

Hopefully, socialist Marine Le Pen’s roughly 2 to 1 loss teaches the currently dissonant American right a very important lesson.