"Le moment populiste", part 2. Three dangerous tendencies of modern world

Boulevard Voltaire introduces its readers to a recent book that the editorial team appreciated. Every day, a new extract is published. Le Moment populiste. Droite-gauche, c’est fini!, by Alain de Benoist.

In France, the founding event of the populist surge was the victory of “no” in the 2005 referendum regarding the project of the European constitutional treaty, followed by the confiscation of this vote with the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty by the Parliament, this time without the people being consulted. This “no” revealed the breadth of the trench that had already formed between the elites and the people, a trench both ideological and sociological. It revealed the defiance of a people who no longer felt represented by those who pretend to speak in its name, those who were accused of only seeking to maintain their privileges and serve their particular interests.

In fact, for many decades the people noticed that their daily lives were deeply effected by developments that they had never been consulted about, that the political class, in all its tendencies, never sought to change or stop.

Firstly, immigration. In the space of two generations, through the mechanism of family reunification and migratory influx, the former temporary immigration has taken on the character of a population changing immigration. Massive, rapid, poorly received and poorly controlled, it has engendered a series of social pathologies in every domain (school, daily life, the world of labor, security, delinquency), created or exacerbated cultural or confessional splits, effected social mores, and deeply transformed the composition of the population […]

Next, the European Union. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the European construction has resulted in the disappearance of entire swathes of state sovereignty, without that sovereignty being transferred to a higher level. […] Already dependents of NATO in the military scheme, subject to the budgetary constraints dictated by the European Union, states are only nominally bearers of a sovereignty which is now only a memory. Moreover, European institutions are put in place from the top down to the bottom. The peoples have not participated in the European construction, and on the rare times where they've been consulted, their opinion hasn't been taken into consideration. Long presented as a solution to every problem, the European construction seems like one problem that adds to the others today. The debates have become increasingly technical, and thus decreasingly comprehensible. Divided, powerless, paralyzed, the European Union has ended up discrediting Europe, which the dominant ideology only conceives as a “container asked to empty itself of all content in order to make room for the Other.” (Élisabeth Lévy) […]

Finally, globalization. Made possible by the collapse of the Soviet system, which symbolized the division of the world into two systems, it represented a major symbolic revolution that changed our relation to the world. […] Through the mechanisms of relocation and competition, in dumping conditions, with the under-paid masses of wage labor of the Third World, it has destroyed the collective negotiation power of the workers, at the same time infringing upon the sovereignty of states, which find themselves forced to abjure the use of their political willpower. Thus a world without borders, without an alternative, ordered by the law of profit alone, has been established. Defended by the business milieus in the name of the principle of free circulation of persons, goods, and capital, globalization is defended by the left through moral cosmopolitanism and abstract humanism, all finding themselves in agreement in order to legitimize international mass migrations, the universalization of norms, downward pressure on salaries and threats to employment. Globalization creates many “winners” among the elites, but millions of losers among the people, who increasingly realize that economic globalization opens the way to cultural globalization – dialectically creating new fragmentation.

Source: Boulevard Voltaire