VOICE

Marine Le Pen Is Donald Trump Without the Crazy

Her grace and eloquence make her dangerous to liberalism. His contemptuous
cynicism makes him an existential threat.
BY JAMES TRAUB James Traub is a contributing editor at Foreign
Policy, a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation, and author of the
book John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit.
FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Last week, Marine Le Pen, head of Frances nativist, anti-globalist National Front
and the partys candidate for president, was accorded the privilege of a two-hour,
prime-time grilling more of an auto-da-f, really on France 2s prestigious
Politics Show. Ive now watched the program twice through, and both times I was
torn between my repulsion at what she said and my admiration for how she said it.
Maybe Im a sucker for a xenophobe who can quote the poet Paul Valry on the
Christian foundations of French culture. Or more to the point, Donald Trump has
conditioned me to associate right-wing populism with monosyllabic yapping.

Le Pen is not, of course, a former reality TV star but the scion of a family business in
politics; her father, Jean-Marie, founded the National Front. She knows perfectly
well how to provide the grand discours that the French expect from their political
leaders, even if in an easy-to-digest form. Nevertheless, I was impressed by her gift
for signaling calm rationality even as she was saying things that appall most French
voters. If her goal was to reassure those who agree with her views on immigrants,
refugees, and free trade but cannot stomach the thought of voting her party into
power, she may well have done herself a service. She attracted 3.5 million viewers, a
record for the show.

The setting, and the etiquette, was fascinating, at least if youre used to political
debate as an 18-ring circus. (Similar interviews will be repeated in coming weeks for
the other leading candidates.) Le Pen sat across a small round table from the two
hosts, David Pujadas and La Salam. They addressed her, respectfully, as Marine
Le Pen, in stark counterpoint to their barbed questions: So, Marine Le Pen, you are
saying that Germans working in France who pay into social security nevertheless
should not receive medical treatment when they get sick? (Answer: Yes.) Halfway
through the program, she was ambushed, game-show style, by an unannounced
guest, Patrick Buisson, a former acolyte of Jean-Marie Le Pen who turned against
the National Front to support Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Buisson rather laboriously
tried to force her to say if she considered her rivals for the presidency patriots.
(Answer: No.)

Of course, Le Pen also said all sorts of things that simply arent so. Le Nouvel
Observateur came up with a nonexhaustive list of five small and large lies she
told in the course of the interview. Le Pen repeated Donald Trumps canard that
Barack Obama had banned immigrants from Iraq; denied, despite vast evidence to
the contrary, that her supporters routinely fire off racist and homophobic tweets;
and claimed, wrongly, that immigrants can automatically gain French citizenship
through marriage. And then there were the Trumpian delusions: that a policy of
economic patriotism penalizing French companies that move abroad would not
raise the cost of French products but rather would foster a virtuous circle boosting
growth and employment.

But Trump can tell five lies in a paragraph. Le Pen calmly plowed ahead for 135
minutes, speaking slowly in complete paragraphs in a slang-free French that even I
could understand. She smiled and bit her tongue when, in a final segment, the
current education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, talked over her and called her
a liar.

Le Pen lost her cool only once, when Patrice Bessac, the Communist mayor of
Montreuil, a heavily immigrant working-class town outside of Paris, asked her if she
was really prepared, in the name of lacit, to tear the veil off the head of one of his
constituents, a Muslim woman whose son had been murdered by an anti-Islamic
fanatic. That question is ridiculous and beneath your level, Mr. Mayor, Le Pen
barked. (She was, in fact, committed to do just that. The defense of traditional
French identity from the threat of Islam is the core of her appeal.)

Does it matter that Frances Donald Trump can demonize Muslims with a
gracious smile instead of a vicious Twitter tirade?

Does it matter that Frances Donald Trump can demonize Muslims with a gracious
smile instead of a vicious Twitter tirade? Politically it does: Le Pen has set out
to detoxify the party she inherited from her crackpot anti-Semite of a
father, and she seems to be doing it quite well. That makes her more far more
dangerous to France than he was. Current polls indicate that she is still unlikely to
be Frances next president, but it feels like a real possibility in a way that it never
did with Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Its hard to imagine that the French, who take reading and thinking very seriously,
would elect a president as incoherent and as proudly philistine as Donald Trump. Le
Pen is traditional in ways that Trump is not. Indeed, one of the reasons why it has
been so hard to fully grasp the Trump phenomenon is that he represents a radical
break on so many different levels at once. He is utterly unlike the presidents who
came before him, Republican as well as Democratic, on the level of ideology, for he
is neither left nor right; on culture, because he has managed to yoke together the
gilded plutocracy and the working class; professionalism, because he views prior
experience in government as a hindrance; and, for lack of a better word, cognition,
because he views information itself as a plastic commodity to be manipulated to his
own ends.

If Trump had a more or less conventional relationship to information on the level,

say, of a congenitally magical thinker like George W. Bush he would still be a
dreadful president, but he would not seem quite so dangerous. Democracies do
not often engender political leaders who are nakedly cynical about the
very idea of truth, if only because such brute nonchalance was thought
to turn off voters. It is not only the presidents indifference to the separation of
powers but also his contempt for rational discourse that makes him a genuine
authoritarian threat. It is not clear how long a democracy can sustain itself when
neither leaders nor voters believe in a robust exchange of ideas or even believe that
such a thing is possible.

Most of the worlds illiberal democrats Vladimir Putin, Polands Jaroslaw

Kaczynski, Hungarys Viktor Orban are, like Trump, cynical fabulists.
(Kaczynski may be an outright lunatic.) Watching Marine Le Pen, however, I realized
that one can have some parts of the package and not others. A President Le Pen
would carry out an assault on a united Europe and on European values
but not on reason itself. Im inclined to think that, because she seems to lack
the Orwellian dimension of Trump and the other ultras, she poses less of a
danger of authoritarianism. Or does that just show what a bang-up job
of ddiabolisation shes done?

The last few months have brought home to me something I had not fully recognized:
Liberalism depends on mental habits as much as on political principles.
A liberal culture, whatever politics it practices at a given moment, requires an
acceptance of a common body of fact from which all may draw and of a means of
debate available to all. That is why, in his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
puts so much emphasis on the need for citizens to expose themselves to
contrary and even repugnant ideas. It is why, in The Open Society and Its
Enemies, Karl Popper describes the open-ended inquiry practiced by
scientists as the foundation of liberal societies.
Bad policies can be reversed. Incompetent administrations can be booted out of
office. But our habits of thought, once corrupted, will prove very hard to rehabilitate.
Here is the one great source of hope for those of us who fear Donald Trump: Nobody
can doubt the threat.