The electoral success of Jean-Marie Le Pen comes as blast of invigorating Arctic air in a hall where the bien-pensant have been suffocating in the fug of self-congratulatory eurosmugness. He speaks the truth of a darker side not just of Europe, but of mankind. We need these reminders of reality, especially in the media, where we tend to babble comforting inanities about the world, while forgetting that this a world of Srebenice, Auschwitz, the Twin Towers.
It is simplistic nonsense to say that Le Pen is a Nazi. The only people in history who have been Nazis were the Nazis. Even Mussolini's fascists weren't Nazis. Yet right across Europe the media have been using terms such as "Nazi" and "fascist" to decribe Le Pen. This is typical: the liberal-left traditionally tars any right-wing phenomenon it seriously dislikes with outdated terminology, as if by corralling what you don't approve of into historically discredited categories, you can somehow or other make it easier to defeat.
Decent people
Some analyses of the French vote seems to assume that those who voted for Le Pen are simply wrong - a fairly useless observation. Yet what is going on in France when so many decent people vote for such a horrible man? Does their departure from the norms of French politics tell us that perhaps those norms are failing them? And is it possible that they have genuine grounds for disliking what is going on in their country?
In one sense, the problem is not "the right" but the salon-left, who are so powerful and ubiquitous in France. The salon-left doesn't listen to working-class and lower middle-class people, but it does tell them what is acceptable to think and to say. And ordinary people who have seen their lives and their arrondissements changed beyond all recognition in the past few years have been told that to complain is to be reactionary, fascist, Nazi or - their favourite word - poujadiste.
Well, that is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. If you demonise popular sentiments without accepting those sentiments have a real validity for the people who feel them, then sooner or later you are surrendering those people to the demagogues of hate. It is easy for the élite to proclaim that it is wrong for lesser folk to have certain feelings when the élite in their salons have neither those feelings nor the experiences which cause them. This is rather like a young adult receiving a lecture on the evils of sexual desire from a eunuch.
Moreover, people simply do not fall into the categories of left and right so beloved of the political classes. These are false definitions, as the experience of the Weimar Republic should have proved: its downfall began when large numbers of people who had been voting Communist switched their allegiance to the Nazis. This mobile voting block didn't think in terms of left or right; it thought in terms of issues and of people.
Immigration
So it is in France. A lot of French people like Le Pen. He has an appealing and robustly Gallic humour. And the issue which concerns many, many French people is immigration. I don't know whether Le Pen made anything of the fact that the only known survivor of the terrorist gang responsible for September 11th was a black, Muslim Frenchman; but it seems unlikely that this was not a factor behind the huge Le Pen vote.
With the emergence of Al-Qaeda across Europe, a lot of people in a lot of countries must now be wondering, sometimes silently and sometimes not so silently: My God, what have we done? Because when mass immigration to Europe began in the 1960s, all questions about the wisdom of such population movements were simply outlawed by the humanitarian liberals and the salon-left who dominated the media.
Certainly, if anyone had suggested that it was possible for an international Islamic terrorist network to emerge within these immigrant communities, dedicated to the complete destruction of the European societies in which they lived, they probably would have been jailed for incitement to cause racial hatred.
We know better know. So did the bien-pensant, salon-left really think that an event as colossal as September 11th could occur without electoral consequences? Did it really think that its high-minded disapproval would prevent people registering their concern, or even their terror, at the world they find themselves in?
Before we issue sermons to the French, ask yourself: how would plain Irish people react if we found that an Irishman of immigrant stock had assisted in the September 11th bombings? How would they react if large numbers of immigrants actually supported those bombings? How would they react if Irish synagogues and Irish Jews were being attacked, as synagogues and Jews have been attacked in France? How would they react if the majority of schoolchildren in Dublin were Muslim, as they are in Paris?
Real issues
Never mind the paradox that, as well as being anti-Arab, Le Pen is also anti-Jewish: a thug and a genuine anti-Semite. Only the political classes seek intellectual coherence in the way voters vote. Only those classes try to recycle old words - Nazi, fascist - for entirely new phenomena. Le Pen is a brute, but he speaks to something in the French electorate.
Le Pen is not the problem. The problem is the political class which will not tolerate a real discussion of the real issues that affect real people who feel power over their lives slipping from them. That is the lesson all Europe should learn from what happened in France last weekend.