By Dr. Harold A. Black
blackh@knoxfocus.com
haroldblackphd.com
The latest French election shows voter discontent with the establishment. The incumbent was primarily challenged by the same far right candidate that was soundly vanquished in the last election. However, this year, the election was closer than predicted with the ruling party garnering less than 50% of the vote dictating a second round runoff. The challenger’s party was openly racist and pro-Nazi when it was founded with its sole issue being the massive immigration of Muslims into France. Today its rhetoric is softer. The party now speaks of independence from the European Union, the removal of French forces from the command of NATO and amending the French constitution to limit immigration.
In last week’s runoff, the opposition party ended up with less than 50 percent of the vote but the French discontentment was still evident. It is almost identical to the discontentment with the Biden Administration. The Wall Street Journal called the discontent a “cultural alienation from a progressive hegemony in the West’s academic, media and artistic institutions” and “resistance to the new religion of universal climate change compliance with its costly implications for energy customers and seething fury with the little autocrats in government and health bureaucracies decreeing lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates. … “underlying it all, righteous indignation at the arrogance of unaccountable elites who dismiss opposition to their authority as the product of bigotry and ignorance and denounce anyone displaying it as a traitor or a domestic terrorist.” Sound familiar?
The incumbent, Emmanuel Macron won but acknowledged that many voted for him as the lesser of two evils. A few on the American Left have said that if Macron could be re-elected with his low popularity, then there is hope for Biden. I am no expert on the sagacity of French leadership but Macron is no Joe Biden. Here our problems are compounded by the ineptitude of our leadership. We, too, must endure the left’s obsession over climate change, open borders and Covid mandates. Add to that Afghanistan, gender identity, transgender athletes, Critical Race Theory, the woke military, inflation, shutting down pipelines, shackling oil and gas, the ‘Build Back Better’ fiasco, the surge in crime and the war on parents where the attorney general was investigating parents attending PTA meetings as domestic terrorists.
The difference between the French election and our forthcoming election is that the opposition is projected to win. If Republicans win both the House and the Senate, then Biden will try to enact his changes through edict – something that the progressives in Congress have been urging all along. No Biden budget would pass both Houses. No radical progressive would be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans would have the power to effectively shut down the Biden agenda and throttle back actions taken by those in the administration who think that climate change is the “existential crisis of our time.” I find it remarkable that so much damage has been done to our economy and our national psyche in so short a time.
We are confronted with elected officials who want to severely curtail our freedoms, re-write the Constitution, pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the Electoral College, abolish the Senate, cancel our culture, muzzle free speech and annul the second amendment. We take to heart the words of Abraham Lincoln: “Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Amen.
