Why Marine Le Pen Is So Close to Power - The Atlantic - 0 views
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how can a few missteps by an incumbent president, or a few adroit moves by his extremist challenger, be enough to put the far right within arm’s reach of winning the highest office in the country?
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The answer, I believe, has to do with the power of the relentlessly pessimistic narrative told by the far right—and the failure of the rest of society to counter it with a more optimistic vision of the future.
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In their speeches, Le Pen and Zemmour give the impression that the country they purport to love is on the brink of collapse. Over the course of decades, they claim, corrupt elites have betrayed the country by attempting to replace its native population with more pliable immigrants.
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These newcomers, especially Muslims, are said to be fundamentally opposed to both France and French values. Unless the country turns back the clock, and puts “real” Frenchmen in charge again, it is supposedly doomed. Islamism, Le Pen has argued, is a “totalitarianism” that aims to “subjugate France.”
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France’s left rightly rejects both conspiracy theories about a “great replacement” and attempts to blame immigrants for the concentrated poverty that does persist in some French suburbs. But even as it has contested who is to blame for the current malaise, it has, in its own way, mirrored the relentless pessimism of the right.
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Many of the loudest left-wing voices in France also depict life in the banlieues as bleak and dystopian.
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they, too, give the impression that most immigrants and their descendants are perpetually stuck at the very lowest rungs of society.
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American reality is much more hopeful than the pessimistic narratives that are now so fashionable suggest.
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yet, life in contemporary France is much better than the dominant discourse on either the right or the left now seems to suggest. Indeed, France has successfully managed to integrate the majority of its immigrants over the course of the past decades
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Far from being stuck in poverty or welfare dependency, most immigrants are experiencing rapid social, economic, and educational mobility. According to one large study by European economists, for example, the children and grandchildren of immigrants are more likely to improve their living conditions than the children and grandchildren of similarly positioned “natives.”
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Because of the failure of the French mainstream to contest the pessimistic narrative of the far right, these facts are barely known in the country
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Under those circumstances, it is hardly surprising that so many voters are choosing to seek fault with outsiders rather than themselves.M
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he difference lies in who is blamed for these dystopian conditions: The real culprits, according to more progressive pessimists, are the incessant discrimination and racism that define contemporary France.
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The majority of African Americans are middle-class. Most have completed high school and about half have, if they are below the age of 40, spent some time at a community college or research university. Black Americans are more likely to work in white-collar jobs than in blue-collar ones. They are more likely to get their health insurance from their employers than to either have to purchase it on an open marketplace or be uninsured.
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Black Americans are actually more likely than their white fellow citizens to “believe in the American dream” or to say that the country’s best days still lie ahead.
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Immigrants fared very well, rapidly boosting their incomes from one generation to the next. And this turned out to be true irrespective of their ethnic or geographical origin. “Children of immigrants from nearly every sending country,” the economists write, “have higher rates of upward mobility than the children of the US-born.”