Of many differences between the US and France, even as the Right gains strength, the Left finds ways to make the shock of their illogic work against them. There’s striking attempt to ignore the hate generated by Trumpism, where Senators like JD Vance blame the Trump assassination attempt on the Left. As if Trump preaches sweetness and light at events like his rallies, much like the GOP is trying to beatify a bullet’s near miss.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” wrote Sen. J.D. Vance, (R-Ohio), who is on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
shamelessness is his most defining skill
The former and maybe future president understands like few others the singular power of pictures — how to see them, stage them, make them — and he’s always been able to transform moments of utter vulnerability into total shows of strength. He turned his bout with Covid into an image of defiance. He turned wide-ranging alleged criminality — he turned his own mug shot — into a means of political reanimation. And somehow, on Saturday at his rally in western Pennsylvania, in the chaotic wake of his brush with death, he stood up and pumped his fist and in essence told a swarm of agents from the Secret Service to stop doing their job so he could do his — and produced an image for the ages. If a certain relentlessness is one of his defining traits — his critics would say it’s shamelessness — this perhaps is his most defining skill.
www.politico.com/...
You might imagine that a possible assassination of a leading presidential candidate would be a scared-straight moment for a nation that has been sleepwalking into a culture of political contempt, delegitimization and tribalism. But before anything, it was right back to reflexive criticism of the media, vitriol for the other side and conspiracy theories.
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We don’t yet know what the shooter’s motivations were. But even by just looking at the reactions to his act, what’s striking to me is the weirdly familiar 21st century American combination of shock and non-shock that permeates all of them.
The shock: Someone was apparently able to take multiple shots at a former president of the United States, protected by a phalanx of Secret Service and surrounded by a throng of citizens.
You might wonder: How could this happen?
The non-shock: Yet another person in the United States was apparently willing to engage in potentially lethal violence in the arena of politics, the latest in a sorry trail that has menaced elected officials, judges, civilians, the Capitol and now a leading presidential candidate.
You could just as easily wonder: How did it take so long for this to happen?
www.politico.com/...
The New Popular Front (NFP) sees itself as having saved the Republic.
This was not merely an election like any other, but a struggle for France, a contest over the definition of French identity. Against the racist and xenophobic far-right drunk on conspiracy theory and islamophobia, the French left united to insist that this nation, this people, is not determined by skin color, neither by religion, nor by language: but is constituted as a legal community by its common good. And it is now the Popular Front that rallies the people anew around its program of free school lunches, increased wages, and repairing the damage done to society by neoliberalism.
This conception of France explicitly includes both immigrants in mainland (or “metropolitan”) France and indigenous peoples in the overseas collectivities, regions, &c. (“outre-mer”). This was brought up several times on election night by various speakers, and always with a universalizing angle: the natives of the outre-mer, the immigrants of the Paris suburbs, and even Mélenchon, the son of pied-noirs himself, are all striving for dignity, liberty, and justice. This universalism allows for the inclusion of members like Emmanuel Tjibaou, a militant in the Kanak independence movement elected to represent New Caledonia on the NFP ticket. For the French left, solidarity with Palestinians is critically important; the flag of Palestine is everywhere flown as a symbol of universal, socialist, and republican values: liberty, equality, and fraternity.
To anglophone ears, this discourse may at first seem confusing. To understand its inner logic requires following the historical thread of French socialism back from 2024 to 1968, 1917, 1871, 1848, and 1789. Auguste Blanqui, Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, & al. had their political imaginary bound up by in republican thread. And throughout French history, from the days of Abbé Sieyès and the *Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen* to Simone Weil and *The Need for Roots*, the question of France, of how the Republic is constructed, recurs. We hear this resounding through the words of Manès Nadel, vice-president of the high-school student union, who at a recent NFP meeting got up and quoted Lenin, saying, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”, before going on to urge the audience, “we have two weeks left to finally produce in France the social Republic and to root in this Republic our social gains!”
www.counterpunch.org/...