As Mark Lilla argues in an illuminating new essay paywalled in The New York Review of Books, something similar may also be happening in France, where Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right National Front, and niece of the party’s president, Marine Le Pen) is working to foster a new political movement situated to the right of the center-right Republican party but separate and distinct from the extremism associated with her family.
This nascent movement is marked by a rejection of the individualism — or in American terms, the libertarianism — that characterizes so much of neoliberal thought. Like American conservatives, it valorizes traditional family structures, gender roles, and religion as a source of social cohesion and psychological meaning, while expressing hostility to multiculturalism and open immigration. But it combines these positions with skepticism of free markets and a genuine and deeply felt environmental ethic rooted in the conviction that the flourishing of human beings and the planet depends on reining in the dynamism of technological modernity and imposing a sense of limits.
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