Center Right Sarkozy Wins In France - Road to the Middle Class

BECAUSE the left has liked to represent Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France as “fascist” and “right-wing”it is important to state that Sarkozy is a conventional center-right politician.

Sarkozy believes that the science is in on the economy, that capitalism and limited-liability companies work for the average person, and especially for the marginalized. That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

Sarkozy thinks that there ought to be sensible control on immigration and that immigrants have a responsibility to integrate with the land in which they wish to live and work. That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

But Sarkozy has a problem. When the center-right Reagan/Thatcher revolution began a quarter of a century ago in the Anglosphere it was founded upon a widespread understanding among the voters that something was wrong and something had to change. As the folks at National Review put it:

Sarkozy’s greatest problem, however, is that with all its problems France is stable. Those Frenchmen in work, especially those in the public sector, have a guaranteed comfortable existence even under high tax rates. France has not yet suffered a “winter of discontent” — a collapse of the economy under strikes and labor unrest similar to the one that persuaded the British that there was no alternative to Thatcher’s economic and labor reforms.

Commentator Mark Steyn agrees, but in more colorful language.

[The French are] sick of crime and unemployment and on the whole could do with rather fewer Muslims on the streets, but they’re not yet willing to give up on the economic protectionism and lavish social programs that lead, inexorably, to the crime and unemployment and a general economic and demographic decline leaving the nation dependent on mass immigration and accelerating Islamization.

After all, why should they? The preachers of the left have taught the French people for a century that they deserve a life of security and sinecure and tenure by right.

We wish the best for our French friends, but fear that things will have to get worse before they get better.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

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China and Christianity

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Religion, Property, and Family

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US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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