My best friend R, is a Muslim from Kerala who is a French citizen. She sees no contradiction between being a devout Muslim, eating pork, praying five times a day, drinking wine or voting for Marine Le Pen. Our ideas on issues on many issues, like identity, gender, and agency, are the root of why we support Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.
The undeniable fact remains that Macron, much like his transatlantic counterpart, Justin Trudeau, gets away with anything and everything, no matter how stupid, because he looks good, has a great body, and says all the right, kosher speech-directorate-approved things.
Emmanuel Macron Gets Away With Things Most Others Can’t
Consider this: Le Pen has what would seem like an unworkable economic plan that is not focused on austerity or layoffs, but can’t tell you where the money is going to come from to sustain the unsustainable. She opposes gay marriage but also opposes homophobia. She supports the Catholic Church up to a point, but still believes in Laicite – the French concept of secularism that strictly separates church from state. She has no problems with immigration per se – just Muslim immigration, and that too of the illegal kind. Hypocritical? Yes. Xenophobic? Maybe.
But now, in contrast, consider Macron. He claims to be neither Left nor Right. But he was the mastermind behind many of Hollande’s disastrous socialist policies and, to this day he refuses to spell out exactly what his economic policies are. But, hey, as long as he’s got a pretty face, who really gives a damn, eh?
He fervently supports gay marriage and the personal right to adultery, but he’s quite happy to champion the cause of illegal immigrants who’d throw gay people off the roof and stone him and his wife to death (since his wife was married to someone else when they first met). But as long as he’s got that hot body, who cares right?
He says he is committed to Laicite and the glorious French tradition of keeping church and state apart, but just not mosque and state apart. But forget secularism because has it ever produced such taut, well worked-out glutes?
He claims to be tough on crime but supports illegal immigration – or refugees as we call them. Forget the fact that illegal immigration spawns a whole ecosystem of illegality that is impossible to deal with for decades. Not to mention, the immediate consequences the host country has to deal with due to the leverage that unscrupulous elements exercise on these immigrants. But hey, as long as he talks in that sultry voice, who cares?
Why Should We Vote Like a Herd?
This right here is the problem. Like every other politician, Le Pen is a hypocrite, too. But Macron’s hypocrisy is far greater than Marine’s will ever be. Marine may threaten those who refuse to integrate, but doesn’t threaten people like R and I, who integrate but refuse to assimilate.
Macron, on the other hand, is a threat to our very way of life because his policies of enabling regressive voices in minority religions and the majoritarian reactions to them are a far greater immediate threat the existence of people like R and I.
But just because he doesn’t call a spade a spade, the people should vote for him. Worse still, R is “required to vote for him” because “he supports Muslim rights” (whatever that means).
So basically, agency be damned and we have to vote like a herd based on reductionist identity politics, or out of gratitude to our great liberators who have bestowed on us the right to live without being stoned or thrown off rooftops. If one doesn’t, they’ll be tortured on social media.
As religion has declined in the west, political correctness has risen as a tool of social control. The problem is that just like religion, its core is vacuous, hollow. It is prone to the same dangerous mob mentality, the need for social control, and is driven by power coteries like religion was.
In our case, it’s simple: we didn’t get rid of one brain-dead set of mullahs, pujaris and padres so that they could be replaced by another brain-dead set of high priests drawn from journalism and the new economy.
You don’t like it? To quote the immortal words of Clarke Gable: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”. Marine Le Pen is mine and R’s way of showing just that.
(Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is an Alt-Right activist and supporter of all things unpopular. He tweets at @abhijit_iyer. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)