France’s Long Slide “is an excerpt from Éric Zemmour’s book, The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation, which was translated by Nathan Pinkoski and will be published by Encounter Books on July 14.” Zemmour offers a perceptive take on rhe MAGA movement’s two phases separated by Trump’s 2020-2024 ‘sabbatical.’ Zemmour appreciates Trump’s world-historical significance.
Excerpts from the excerpt:
. . . in Arab-Muslim civilization, the process [of civilization] that Elias describes has never happened, and passions, impulses, emotions have continued to be suppressed by ferocious, brutal reprisals. When people who have learned to control themselves encounter, on the same soil, those who expect fierce and brutal reprisals that never come, it’s a safari for the latter, where the people who have undergone Elias’s “process of civilization” become game. Against them, anything goes.
[. . .]
The existential anguish of the French people in the face of their disappearance is finally being taken seriously. The “great replacement” is no longer marginalized as a literary fad or a conspiracy theory. The French people’s desire to emancipate themselves from the State’s shackles, standards, and taxes, which enslave them without protecting them, is also recognized by all. Ideological victory has not led to political victory, but we know that it always takes time to move from one to the other.
We saw this in the United States. Trump’s unexpected success in the 2016 presidential election had caused nothing irreversible. Nobody was really ready: neither the candidate’s teams, nor the president. Nor, doubtless, the country itself. The triumph of 2024 has a completely different significance. The MAGA camp engaged in a veritable counterrevolution. A counterrevolution in the sense of the “Counter-Reformation” of the Council of Trent after the Protestant revolution. I don’t think the comparison is excessive. The revolution brought about by the Left in the 1960s tore America away from its age-old history, like a river diverted from its course. France, as we have seen in this book, followed exactly the same path in the 1970s. This revolution, which started in America, set fire to the whole of the West. It was therefore necessary for the counterrevolution to start from America too, if it is to have any chance of prevailing. [emphasis added.]
[. . .]
The 21st century will be terrible: it will be a telluric mix between the 19th century and the Middle Ages. It will see the return of states, peoples, and nations, a confrontation between great powers, where “force takes precedence over law,” in Bismarck’s famous phrase, and where the game between European rivals, France, England, and Germany, will simply be extended to the whole world, with these new players: China, the United States, Russia, India, and Turkey. It will see the return of religious fanaticism carried out by Islam, as in the 7th century, with its cohort of violence, intolerance, sacrilege, and superstition; with tribalism, pillage, massacres, mass rape, obscurantism, and irrationality.
The time has come for every people, for every continent, to return to the very essence of their civilization. This is already happening all over the planet: Russians are rediscovering Orthodoxy and the tsars, even when they were Red; China is returning to the teachings of Confucius, India to Buddha, Islam to Mohammed and the Ummah, Turkey to the Koran and the Ottoman Empire. All of them are returning to their deepest identities in order to tear themselves away from Western universalism, which they experience—partly with good reason—as a dispossession, an illusion, a subjection. Only Europe and the West are slow to reclaim their roots, perverted as they are by a corrupted universalism and a poorly digested humanism. Paradoxically, this Western universalism, once the weapon of European imperialism, has now become its prison, even its deadly poison. In the United States, the Trump network, with Vice President JD Vance as its mouthpiece, no longer hesitates to proclaim the greatness of Western civilization, Jewish prophecy and Catholic majesty, Greek rationality and Roman law. Some European countries, often the smallest, in the east but also in the west of the continent, have understood the danger and are no longer deluded by the suicidal mirages of a nihilistic universalism. That leaves the great European nations, France, Germany, and England, who are the last to understand where the wind of renewal is blowing.
Through word and deed, I’m fighting with all my might to put France back at the heart of this struggle to return to our roots, to the roots of our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman identity, to our genius for freedom, rationality, and beauty. [emphasis added]
Bill,
While the second Trump administration has certainly sought to overturn the most egregious policies–open borders, DEI, green energy, regulatory federal overreach, and the weaponization of the administrative state) –and guiding divisive ideology (racist and tribalist notions of identity) that the Left sought to impose on the Republic, first under Obama and then, more radically, under Biden, Zemmour goes to characterizing this effort as a “veritable counterrevolution.” I say this not because I do not support most of what been achieved in the last year and a half and not without the hope that more will be accomplished in the remainder of the president’s term, but rather because (1) no attempt has been made so far to overturn the foundational pillars of the leftist project, instituted in law during the last six decades, to alter the essence of American society and the American state and (2) no political party exists with an ideology and will to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task.
With regard to (1), no one even dares to speak, for instance, of the absolute necessity of abrogating the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which abolished the national origins quota system, tilting immigration away from Europe and toward Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean and vastly increased the number of legal immigrants into the nation each year. With time and further legislation, the percentage of foreign-born population of the United States relentlessly increased from 5.4 percent (9.7 million) in 1960 to an estimated 14.8 percent (50.2 million) today. The negative effects on social cohesion, comity, and patriotism, especially with the arrivals of peoples with alien and often hostile ideologies and traditions, should be evident to all. Nor does anyone dare to speak about repealing some of the legislation of the Great Society, by which the federal government, its power and reach vastly expanded, has imposed its will (“coercive federalism”) in matters that were traditionally reserved to the states, localities, families, and individuals, resulting in lasting social dependencies, the undermining of family structures, the weakening of economic initiatives, and the explosion in federal and state indebtedness. More can be said, but I will stop here.
As for (2), whatever merits the Republican Party possesses, it is simply too internally divided and ideologically compromised and confused to lead and sustain a counterrevolution. While the rise to MAGA has certainly shifted the party to the right, it still contains too many political actors that do not understand or are too frightened to confront the existential threat of the Left. The current struggle of the president to pass the Save American Act in the Senate is a good example of this reality.
Vito
Sorry. I did not catch this omitted clause: “Zemmour goes too far”
Vito,
You make two good, albeit depressing, points. Has no conservative with real influence argued against Hart-Cellar? It is blindingly evident to me that there is no right to immigrate (contra the last two pontiffs) and that immigration is permissible only if it is to the benefit of the host country and its national culture. This implies that all illegal immigration must stopped; all illegals must be deported even if they are otherwise law-abiding; and that legal immigration must favor those most likely to assimilate.
There are within the MAGA movement the germs of reforms in these directions. (I am thinking of Stephen Miller: surely he has had these same thoughts.) So, while you are probably right, I am a bit less pessimistic.
But cheer up! Total collapse takes time, and you and I may have a few good years left. In any case, this world is a passing scene of no ultimate significance.
Unfortunately, I can’t see a way out for France or even the UK, for that matter. Let’s hope this madness stops with them.
I fear you are right. France and the U.K. have decided on national suicide. Have you read Gad Saad, SUICIDAL EMPATHY? There is hope for the USA and other countries if we pay close attention to French and British examples.
It can’t be forgotten that the major european countries have longstanding ties to other countries during the colonial era therefore as with the commonwealth for example there will always be an exchange of demography (to a small extent), goods even customs like tea drinking as happened in history. Although migration has got out of hand now and with bad consequences, France and UK will course correct and will be end up somewhere which reflects the long history they have had. Time will tell. However, it may be help to extricate themselves from America where they keep importing culture and ideology that doesn’t quite fit the context and just complicates things e.g. all the BLM and now MAGA.
Hi, Bill!
I’ve heard of Suicidal Empathy, but unfortunately, I haven’t read it yet.
I would add that the problem with suicidal empathy (as a coinage and in actual use, not the book itself) is that its adepts don’t actually believe a thing they’re saying—just as the materialist reductionist doesn’t follow through with eliminativism about the mind because it hits too close to home.
I think the problem is very closely related to what 2 Timothy 3 describes: ‘People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power’ (emphasis on this last part).
Here in Brazil, this last part is translated as ‘They will have the appearance of godliness (piety), but will not truly believe anything they hear.’ I guess it doesn’t matter how much I could say about this lost generation of people—that they don’t know love, empathy, or any such thing. They have only a vague idea of these concepts, along with a deep hatred, contempt, and resentment for others. So they try to fill their empty lives and signal virtue by following the flock that promotes tyranny through equality — I could never capture it in such a good and compressed way as this passage does.
Lastly, it breaks my heart to hear you say, “Total collapse takes time, and you and I may have a few good years left.”
We cannot afford to lose hope — even if hope is all we have left. America, especially America, cannot fail. This is the country that still allows conversations like this. This is the place where people can openly wrestle with the deepest deliverances of philosophy in a way that is simply not possible anywhere else. America is more than a country; it is an idea, a living symbol of hope. It is the pleroma where men of goodwill have poured every sweet dream and sacrificed every noble aspiration.
All this freedom has cost far too much blood and sweat to be handed over to people with dyed hair and clinical depression who can’t even define their own pronouns — let alone the invaders they so eagerly sponsor.
Bill,
“Has no conservative with real influence argued against Hart-Cellar? ”
Yes, Patrick Buchanan and Ann Coulter have long warned of its grave dangers to the nation. At the time of its passage, the main opposition in Congress came from Southern Democrats, such as Sam Ervin and James Eastman.
“In any case, this world is a passing scene of no ultimate significance.”
I also take some comfort in this reality, although at present I am moving toward “the undiscovered country” completely on my own, what with (1) the retirement of my orthodox pastor and the consequent termination of the TLM that he offered (2) and the throughgoing transformation of the RC into a left-wing NGO under the Bergoglio and his fils à papa.
Finally , invoking Greece and Rome as models of cultural purity is historically backwards. Neither civilisation was remotely homogeneous — they were built on immigration, absorption, and constant cultural mixing. Athens depended on metics for its economy and innovation; Rome expanded by granting citizenship to outsiders, integrating conquered peoples, and blending languages, religions, and customs across three continents and further. Isn’t this the case ? I have been known to be wrong.