The Center Cannot Hold

'In Paris, thousands of Islamists and leftists rallied against the ‘far right.’ Look at this clip  ... [N]otice: you cannot see a single tricolor there.'

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

The center of Western politics is dead, and the ones who killed it are the managerial liberals who lived by lies—and believed their own lies.

Until Joe Biden took the stage in last week’s debate with Donald Trump, the most catastrophically stupid presidential political decision of the year was Emmanuel Macron’s calling a snap election after the National Rally’s impressive showing in European parliamentary elections. After events over the past few days, it is still uncertain as to which blunder will have been the most consequential. Whatever the outcome, we are all watching corrupt systems collapse in real time. Amid this apocalypse—literally, an unveiling—we are seeing a kind of Reformation, the messy birth of a new order.

This is more the case in France than in the United States. The strong National Rally results in Sunday’s first round of voting occasioned an outpouring on France’s streets that could have been scripted by Camp of the Saints author Jean Raspail. 

In some French cities, Antifa and other leftist protesters set fires to express outrage at the results. In Paris, thousands of Islamists and leftists rallied against the ‘far right.’ Look at this clip captured by Luc Auffret. In this vast left-wing crowd, some protesters have raised various standards—the flag of Palestine, the flag of Pride, and so forth—but notice: you cannot see a single French tricolor there. 

Compare this to the image from a National Rally victory party on Sunday. Thousands upon thousands of French voters waving the tricolor, and singing the Marseillaise. 

What does the contrast tell you? It hardly needs elaboration, does it? Among other things, it is visual confirmation that le Grand Remplacement is no conspiracy theory, but established fact. Renaud Camus defines the Great Replacement as “the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question.” All those native Frenchmen in that leftist mob, the ethnically Gallic too ashamed of France to raise her flag, demonstrate that the Great Replacement is also a state of mind. 

France is now in the middle of a fight for its future as a nation. France’s enemies are the Frenchmen who hate her, and the aliens they have brought in to replace the French who resist. This could not possibly be clearer now. Until Sunday, France’s enemies also included the elite establishmentarians of both Left and Right who facilitated le Grand Remplacement, and who counted on the French public’s fear of Vichy to blind them to the emerging reality. 

Well. Thanks to Macron’s folly, and to the subsequent Sunday vote, his centrist party has been effectively demolished. True, France now faces a genuinely frightening future of left-right conflict that, owing to the Left’s radicalism and willingness to use violence, could finally mean the advent of the civil war that the French have long feared. Note well that the elites in politics and journalism have for ages warned that the far right is a threat to democracy. But who smashed windows and set fires to protest the results of Sunday’s democratic vote? Not Marine Le Pen’s crowd. 

This is the truth that France’s establishment spent decades attempting not to see, and working hard to ensure that no French voter ever saw either. In a 2014 speech before a Paris court, in which he was on trial for inciting racial hatred, Rénaud Camus said that, in fact, the stubborn refusal of France’s leadership class to see what they were doing to the country with their idiotic migration policies was going to bring violence. It is worth quoting at length from that address (which appears in English in the recently published Enemy Of The Disaster, a compilation of Camus’s political speeches); in his work, Camus uses the neologism “nocence” to mean “harm”:

Far from calling for violence, but trying on the contrary to avoid it, to drive it away from us, I tirelessly denounce reckless policies—or perhaps policies that are only too aware of what they are doing—these friends of the disaster, these harbingers of misfortune, that day after day create the strict conditions for conflict, tension, animosity, and uncontrollable nocence. It is an ex-Yugoslavia that they are blithely preparing for France and for Europe—a Sudan, a Mali, a Central African Republic, a generalized Lebanon. 

Indeed, we are alas no longer talking about the simple conditions for future violence; for ages now, we have been watching it quietly set up shop, as it were, in our lives. It is not as a prophet that I speak of this but as a chronicler and almost an historian. For the disorders that it brings in its wake are not just a matter for the future; they are already at work among us, as witnessed by the growing brutality of social relations, the unprecedented and sadly justifiable distrust between citizens, rising insecurity, and the worsening of major and minor crime alike. 

It is absurd to reduce, as it is commonly done, these phenomena to an inexplicable accumulation of random events, a matter for law enforcement or the courts, police intervention or the penal code. This violence and these disorders are not simply a matter for the police, nor even for the criminal justice system. They are matters of policy and of history, of the history of peoples, the relationships between civilizations, the disappearance of some of them, the conquering activities of others, of the collapse or preservation of nations.

Sunday’s vote, and undoubtedly the second-round voting on July 7th, confirm that most Frenchmen choose to believe their own eyes over the official lies and harassment by the establishment. Do not expect France’s journalists, academics, and other professional experts to comprehend what has happened, much less to explain it accurately and dispassionately. They have built their entire careers and indeed their very being as intellectuals on a set of liberal, globalist lies that require denial of facts and demonization of dissenters. Now it is all falling down around them. 

Meanwhile, across the ocean, the Democratic political class—journalists among them, of course—professes to be shocked by senile Joe Biden’s pathetic debate performance last week. It is high comedy to watch pundits and commentators express astonishment that the elderly president could barely string sentences together. Had they not been told by the White House that Biden was mentally sharp? 

Yes, they were—but only those determined to be fooled could possibly have believed it. If you were a reader of right-wing media, or at least subscribed to Twitter/X, you have known for a very long time that Biden is an ambulatory eggplant. It was obvious, in the many clips of his stumbling, his verbal tangles, his attempts to shake hands with people who were not present, and so forth. The journalists and party allies who now voice shock and horror at the president’s condition only have themselves to blame. 

Why did they believe an obvious lie for so long? The answer can only be because it served their political interests—specifically, keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. It is not particularly interesting to contemplate those who knew it was a lie, but who voiced it for cynical political reasons. Far more intriguing are those who sincerely believed Biden was basically fine, and who demonized anyone in the media and on the Left who said otherwise. 

Now Democrats face a catastrophe. If Biden chooses not to withdraw, he will likely be humiliated by a Trump landslide. If he does withdraw, or is somehow forced off the ticket, the party will be faced with the Kamala Harris problem. What do you do with a presidential candidate who is widely disliked and mocked as a lightweight chosen by Biden only because she is a black woman—and who will be beaten badly by Trump? 

If the Democrats dump Biden but also sideline Harris, the party will fracture around the outrage of its black and female activist constituency. Democrats are now having to live with the consequences of their reality-denying lies about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Democratic strategist James Carville, the 79-year-old Clinton-era warhorse, has been warning for some time now that Democrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans, and too bound to the illusions and rhetoric of coastal elites. Now Carville’s party is living with the ruinous consequences of its folly.

The tectonic political shift happening in the U.S. is not as threatening to civil order as France’s earthquake, but make no mistake: across the West, this is the end of an era. It matters immensely that the National Rally is now the most popular party in France, and that AfD is the second party of Germany. These are the core states of the European Union. 

Plus, unlike in the Anglosphere, most young voters favor the hard-right parties, not the left-wing ones. The bullying they experience on the subways from migrants moves them more than the bullying they receive from establishment bien-pensants on television shows. 

That said, all of this makes a stunning contrast to what will happen in Great Britain this week. On July 4, UK voters are going to give the governing Conservative Party a staggering defeat, perhaps even worse than the Tories’ humiliation by Tony Blair in 1997. Despite massive problems with migration and political extremism tied to migration, British voters will empower perhaps the most radical left-wing government since Clement Attlee’s Labour created Britain’s modern welfare state in the ruins of World War II. 

Yet Labour back then was thoroughly patriotic, and it governed a Britain that was far more socially and culturally cohesive. Today, especially after two decades of uncontrolled migration, as well as comprehensive national self-hatred instantiated throughout British institutions, the UK is deeply fractured. After 14 years of Tory rule, I don’t know a single British conservative who actually believes the lies the Conservative Party tells about itself. The fecklessness of the Tories, Macronist John Bulls who governed in the interests of London elites, will have delivered Britain into a grim woke future at precisely the same time patriots in continental democracies are finally voting to save their nations. 

We remember the Summer of 1914 as the last idyllic season before the West blew itself to bits with World War I. Will we recall the Summer of 2024 as the last idyll before the West destroyed itself with civil war, even if fought primarily through increasingly radical politics? That conclusion seems rash—for now—but one thing is undeniably clear: the center of Western politics no longer holds. It is dead, and the ones who killed it are not Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and other politicians of the real Right, but rather the managerial liberals (including Republicans, Tories, and Gaullists) who lived by lies—and who, crucially, believed their own lies.

The historian Barbara Tuchman, writing about the folly of the Renaissance popes in provoking and failing to contain the Reformation, criticized their “obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, [and] illusion of invulnerable status.”

“They could not change” the system, Tuchman wrote, “because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.” So it is with the liberal governing elites of the Western democracies. And now, a Reformation is upon us.