Roger Cohen echoes Dragged from the Bottom!!!

In the NYT Roger Cohen writes an article about France that was presaged by yours truly. Well Cohen's article is admittedly a bit more polished and informative but it will suffice to say that I am always right and should be assumed to be without question.

What is right about Cohen's article is that unlike Will Cohen recognizes the importance of the character of Sarkozy, and goes through a list of political and cultural taboos that Sarko is breaking. He recognizes that his importance lies not in the technical policy reforms he is making, for those will take years, but in the fact that the personality of Sarkozy marks a sharp contrast with French tradition. No more hugging farmers, no more literary poseurs, and no more politicians drawn from the same incestuous group of friends at ENA France has just been liberated from 10 years of being run by cow kissing a slave to France's fascistic "fonctionnaires" with the energy of brain starved zombie. Not to mention that he was flanked by a wrinkled, weak chinned, aristocratic hangdog, dilettante who fancied himself half Rimbaud half Léon Blum, but could manage only half Gerald Ford half Jimmy Carter. Give Sarko some time.

George Will vs. Sarko

I think I am incapable of being unbiased when it comes to posting about France due to my incredibly positive experience with their cheese. Thus in that spirit I will disagree with George Will's refusal to acknowledge Sarkozy's election as a good sign for those hoping to see liberalizing reforms of the French economy.

What Will doesn't recognize is that the anti-globalization and anti-Americanism of the left which stifles reform in France is so historically blind, and discredited due to snail-like rates of growth and high unemployment that it has come to occupy in France the position that right wing talk radio occupies in America. Don't forget that in France the Socialists are the conservatives. They are the ones who don't want change, and against all good sense they want to protect a statism whose entitlements they try to intertwine with French identity. And like talk radio they make the same intellectually impoverished and ideologically dogmatic claims about resisting a gravitation to a more liberal system which inevitably gets compared to America.

When I was in France during the tumult over de Villepin's attempt to liberalize French labor laws a friend, who opposed him, could do nothing more than speak in vagaries claiming that unlike America, France had no "working poor" and other such horrors of the American system. It apparently passed him by that they do in fact have quite a lot of non-working poor.

Will's pessimism about Sarkozy needs to be tempered. At least now a French politician has been elected on different rhetoric, and speaking kindly of America and of economic liberalization is no longer anathema to the electorate. Many economic neo-liberals here were overly ebullient at his election and expressed hopes- calling him the French Margaret Thatcher -that he won't be able to satisfy, but he is a step in the right direction and if nothing else will make talk of reform politically tenable in the near future. If you keep in mind that in France the socialists are the conservatives this makes sense. They are the ones who represent what they think is more traditionally French. And as the right here uses cultural demonization of liberals and Reagan-worship, so too do the socialists in France use Mitterrand-worship and anti-Americanism. That's not Sarkozy.