Les Intellos Speak: For French elites, Bush’s re-election signals the start of fascism in America.

City Journal ^ | November 11, 2004 | Theodore Dalrymple

[quidnunc]

The French press has greeted the re-election of President Bush less than enthusiastically. On the morning after the result became known, the left-wing daily Liberation’s headline was L’EMPIRE EMPIRE: THE EMPIRE GETS WORSE. (The day before, it ran a picture of George Bush on its front page, with the headline, THE MAN TO BEAT.) The liberal Le Monde’s reporting was more measured, but its editorial began: “It goes without saying that the re-election of George Bush is bad news.” These are the only two newspapers that count for les intellos, the intellectuals, in a country with the lowest readership of newspapers in the western world.

The choice before the American public, according to the commentary in the two newspapers, was between reason and religion, tolerance and bigotry, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, openness and close-mindedness, modernity and reaction. There are no prizes for guessing which of the candidates represented the former, and which the latter. For intellectuals, everyone’s mind is closed but their own.

An interview with Olivier Todd, published in Liberation, was typical. Todd is a highly intelligent and well-informed commentator, a demographer by training who predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, when most people thought of that nation and its bloc as a permanent fixture of the geopolitical landscape. It took some courage on his part to swim so strongly against the current of the time, and he proved one of the select few to understand the Soviet Union’s weakness. Now he is predicting the demise of the United States as the only great power.

-snip-

[JasonC]

Uh huh. That is why Buchanan is so much more successful at the polls than le Pen is, and why Heidegger and his children have so much more influence on intellectual life in the US than they have in France.

[exDemMom]

Thanks for the Paris Match link. I didn't find any opinion on Bush's reelection, but I did find an interview with him. It was too much like British journalism, all chit-chatty with very little substance (at least the pre-interview part of the article).

[Dan from Michigan]

Assclowns. This from "Vichy".

[Sabatier]

Exactly.

[MNJohnnie]

Of course since France is a one party state where a corrupt oligarchy is propped up by a State Run Media, I guess they would be far more expert on what a Fascists state looks like any American would.

[Natural Law]

Aw geez, now we are going to have them trying to collaborate.

[nickcarraway]

Hasn't Sharia law taken over there yet?

[Grampa Dave]

That picture throws the Fascism charge back into the Fascist Frogs Faces!

[FreedomSurge]

In about twenty hyears the Frenh intellos will be useful aa homsexueal catchers for the Islamic team.