The relationship between France and the U.S. has always had its ups and downs. But through it all, one thing has remained the same: Their politics have always seemed entirely different — different processes, different issues, different coalitions, different ideas. Now, something new is happening: French and American politics are beginning to reflect one another.
This is weird.
Take, for example, Nicolas Sarkozy's recent climate change comments. The former French president, who is running once again, recently opined in the French media that "man is not the only one to blame for climate change." This was a strange statement for him, given that, as president, he kept using the environment to triangulate the left. But it's made even more strange by the fact that calling into question the consensus around the causes of climate change, even mildly, has simply never been a "thing" in French political or intellectual discourse the way it has been in the U.S. Sarkozy, running in a primary, needed a quick way to signal himself as a hard right-winger, and picked not a domestic French issue, but an issue from American politics.
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Then there's the most obvious example of French and American politics bleeding into each other: Donald Trump's presidential bid, which is much closer to a European-style nationalist-populist campaign than to a traditional conservative or Republican operation.
In fact, Trump has come to strongly resemble Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front — even down to the luxurious blonde hair and Putin crush. Both Trump and Le Pen have tried to appeal to "The Unprotected" — those on the losing side of the new economy and cultural shifts. Trump has done this throughout his campaign, and this is exactly the same constituency and message that Le Pen adopted in setting up the National Front as the party to protect everyday French people.
What always made the American right unique was its strange mix of traditionalism on social issues and classical liberalism. Where critics see incoherence, conservatives see a genius synthesis that keeps the best of modernity while safeguarding it from the excesses of progressivism. This sort of synthesis has never taken in France, where the right is instead split between squishy moderates and hardline authoritarians. That Donald Trump and French conservatives seem to feel the same way about the U.S. conservative movement is an aberration.
It's not just between the French and American right that there's cross-pollination. The rise of U.S.-style identity politics, formerly a taboo in French society, has been steady. In 2005, the Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France, or CRAN (a pun, since in French "cran" means "guts" or "grit"), was founded as a sort of French NAACP. While racism and discrimination are certainly a problem in France, the country has absolutely no analogue to the American history that has shaped the descendants of Africans taken to America as slaves into a specific group with its own history, culture, and interests. But this summer, after a black teenager died in murky circumstances in an encounter with French police, protests were organized, and a group called "Black Lives Matter France" emerged.
There are a few obvious reasons behind this overlapping, but the biggest is globalization, which is shaping the entire Western world. Globalization has made it easier for both countries to learn from each other, for good and for ill. American online media is much better at generating clickbait, and so most French click factories simply take what's going viral in America, translate it, and slap it up. The Tonight Show isn't aired in France, but Jimmy Fallon is still a household name because his funny YouTube clips with globally popular celebrities are shared all over the place. Countless young second-generation French immigrants, who are not familiar with their own culture and not enamored with French culture, find inspiration in American street culture.
Globalization also means that when one nation undergoes a particular phenomena, it's much easier for that same phenomena to spread to other countries. As discontent against elites has grown, it has manifested itself in populist movements across the globe.
Time will tell whether this cross-pollination is fruitful or destructive homogenization.
