Matt Yglesias of the website Vox (“the smartest thinkers, the toughest questions”) decided over the weekend to read the party platform of the National Front, the so-called far-right French political party that’s expected to gain substantially in its standing because of last week’s terror attacks.
He makes two discoveries. First, the National Front is not a uniformly conservative party as Americans might conceptualize it — it’s hostile to “Anglo-Saxon finance,” supports a generous welfare state (for the native-born), etc. This is obviously not characteristic of most of, say, the right wing of America’s right-wing party, but it’s not odd in terms of the history of what have been termed Western far-right parties. There’s a name for this phenomenon, called the “horseshoe theory.” I don’t know if Yglesias is unaware that he’s identifying a common dynamic, but it seems like useful context for his readers. It’s also an explanation of why almost no American conservatives and relatively few British ones like Le Pen.
In any case, Yglesias’s other discovery is that the National Front wants national control over France’s currency. He’s surprised that a far-right party has hit upon a good policy insight: The euro was either a horribly misguided project or way ahead of its time, and that’s made it an atrocious economic policy for Europe, cause of a great deal of the continent’s pain right now. It should be relatively obvious that serious and nationalistic economic conservatives were going to get that one right.
The incredibly shallow understanding of European politics implied by this piece’s surprised tone means that Yglesias’s conclusion is naïve. He writes:
Le Pen deserves to be confronted where she’s making the most sense, not the least. Mainstream leaders need to either co-opt her European agenda, or else construct a viable alternative in which the European Central Bank creates growth-friendly conditions without disrupting the single currency.
EU leaders and the European politicians who support their project, of course, have chosen to confront Le Pen and her ilk where they’re making the least sense (in their alleged racism), not the most. That’s not just because that’s generally how politics work. It’s because, for the reasons Yglesias cites from Le Pen, it’s nigh impossible to create “growth-friendly conditions,” or an economy that can respond to the business cycle, “without disrupting the single currency.” And they can’t co-opt her European agenda — it would then not be a “European” agenda at all, as pro-EU forces understand it.