Elite Macroeconomic Policy Failure Drives The Rise of the European Far-Right

Marine Le Pen is the leader of the far-right National Front party in France (and the youngest daughter of its founder) and looks like she may be poised to outpoll incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy in the French presidential election next year. Russell Shorto has an excellent profile of the woman in the new NYT Magazine that naturally includes reflections on the broader electoral success far-right European parties have been having. As he puts it on his blog, the new far right is "mixing frank right-wing anti-immigrant policies with a very left-wing social agenda, which includes a critique of capitalism and a call for a return to state regulations."

Here's Le Pen laying it out:

Signaling a clear break from her father and the right in general, she has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. "For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector," she told me. "But I'm convinced that's not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand." The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

I think that when the far-right has been successful, it's almost always by pairing the politics of violence and racism with a critique of laissez faire capitalism. It's not a coincidence that Mussolini was a dissident socialist before he was a fascist, and Hitler, too, forged an alliance with the German business community while remaining critical of free markets as such. The common thread here is that this is what happens when the elites running a capitalist political economy fail. And a failure of the elites who run the system is exactly what the US and Europe are living through right now, and we lived through a bigger one in the 1930s. There's been a bit of a bloggish contretemps lately over whether or not JM Keynes was in some sense an advocate of "central planning," and this reality is the right lens through which to view his intellectual project. His idea was that only through accepting the need for an important government role in economic stabilization could the underlying project be saved. Otherwise, if crisis is inevitable and all efforts to fix it are counterproductive, then Marx or Le Pen or Hitler or someone is right and the system has to be torn down.