The right-leaning media and pundits are excited: Marine Le Pen’s party gained twice as many seats in recent French elections. The left-leaning media and commentariat are thrilled, too: Le Pen’s right-wing party won the popular vote but landed only third place in the French National Assembly. If both sides of the political spectrum are so enthusiastic, it could mean only one thing: something is missing here.
The answer lies most likely in conflating two different political spectra: absolute and relative. Since Stalin proposed the modern relative political spectrum, it garnered popularity, and members of the Frankfurt School of socialism brought it to American soil.
As it is known, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin altered the game’s rules: he decided to utilize the pre-existing left-right conceptual dichotomy (in a pretty narrow setting) to crush any opposition to his dictatorial rule. Any aberration from the orthodox communist party line — no matter how small — had to be labeled. Thus, the “Right-deviationists” and “Left-deviationists” were born.
The “Left-deviationists” were deemed “too orthodox,” “too revolutionary,” as strange as it may seem, for the taste of bloodthirsty revolutionary Bolsheviks. In contrast, the “Right-deviationists” were considered traitors to the idea of the planet-wide socialist revolution because they dared to consider building a workers’ paradise by cleverly exploiting the mechanisms of state capitalism. Unquestionably, the word “capitalism” was anathema to communists. The “Left-deviationists” were to the left of Stalin, and the “Right-deviationists” were to his right.
Consequently, instead of the rostrum at the French Assembly, Stalin positioned himself at the center of the ideological universe and thus opened a new page in the “left-right” semantic journey. To rephrase it, Soviet communists delineated intra-communist opposition as either left- or right-wingers. Since then, the left-right labels were no longer utilized to describe opposing political forces; henceforth, they characterized deviations from the official Soviet communist party line and evolved into a tool for massive party purges.
The application of the terms “right” and “left” in the 1930s strictly denoted slight variations of Marxism, leading to the question: “Should we continue with the communists’ infighting language?” Should the world assume the universal fittingness of French symbolism? Likewise, should the world accept the universal suitability of Soviet communists’ symbolism? These are certainly not rhetorical questions because, since the 1930s, these terms have circulated widely.
Stalin and his cadres applied the “right-wing” label extensively. That is why fascism and National Socialism, although representing archetypical left-wing movements (measured by an absolute, not relative scale), receive the right-wing label. Regrettably, such an interpretation of the terms became a part of the modern political lexicon for both the left and the unsuspecting right.
A typical case is Marine Le Pen in France. Le Pen desires to keep the working week at 35 hours (France has forgotten the 40-hour working week for some time.) She wants to lower the retirement age from 62 to 60. Her grandiose plans include taxing wealth (instead of income), raising import tariffs, and nationalizing entire industries. She seeks to increase social benefits (we know payments go mainly to armies of loafers who have learned the art of “pity me”) and others, typical for the leftist governments’ gargantuan expenditures.
Marine Le Pen definitely belongs to the left wing of the political spectrum. Most of her ideas are traditional for the left methods to siphon wealth from the productive population and use it to maintain rock-solid voting blocs by selling them illusions. Some economic positions of Le Pen are far to the left from those of ordinary French socialists.
That is not surprising. Marine Le Pen’s National Front is a socialist party with a nationalistic bent. Mass disinformation media call this party “extremely right,” but where did you see the right-wing socialist parties? The French National Front is undoubtedly a leftist party; its slogans are typically leftist, while its economic and political policies are commonly leftist. For instance, the party is dedicated to nationalizing health care, education, and banks.
Le Pen wants all religious symbols to be banned from public places, including Muslim scarves and Jewish kippas. They would have ridiculed this war on windmills long ago in pragmatic America. However, Le Pen does not intend to stop there. She also plans to make France less hospitable to its non-French population by introducing pork into the school lunch menu.
Current hysteria about elections in France is similar to the 2022 French presidential elections. Back then, the media went wild that Marine Le Pen, the “right-wing” candidate for the French presidency, who has moved up to the second round of voting. At the time, the socialist Macron also advanced to the second round of the presidential elections in France. However, the undeniable truth is that both candidates represented distinct but close flavors of the left.
Unfortunately, elections are primarily around non-fundamental issues in post–World War II Europe. The primary watershed between two antagonistic political philosophies cannot materialize if all candidates profess the same — the left — side. Under the helm of Le Pen — the Joan of Arc of the left — France’s ideological monoculture could face a dilemma: global socialism (globalism) or national socialism.
France is currently under the governance of a mix of leftist branches — communists and socialists. To no one’s surprise, once in power, the ruling left-wing coalition immediately began the traditional-for-all-leftist-regimes internecine warfare: two days after the election, they opened an investigation into Le Pen’s presidential campaign. Many European countries are in a similar position. For example, in the United Kingdom, a recently elected Trotskyist prime minister assembled a socialist government. However, it is not an isolated case of the leftward shift: socialist prime ministers are leading the Spanish and Portuguese governments. Their coalition governments also represent a mixture of various leftists, including communists.
To conclude, Europeans are fast approaching the endgame. Since World War II, left-wing ideas have been plaguing Europe, and the European right has slowly been worn away into irrelevance. Western Europe’s future seems to lie in its distant past, constrained by murky terminology and a lack of dynamic conservatism.
Gary Gindler, Ph.D. is a conservative columnist at Gary Gindler Chronicles and a new science founder: Politiphysics. Follow him on Twitter/X. This piece is adapted from Gary’s book, Left Imperialism (2024).
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