Interview with new right wing president of France, Sarkozy, puts not just GOP to shame here but most

Democrats.

The interview is in the latest edition of Harpers.

The guy is literate, nuanced, and reflective in a way that makes the right here look like a bad Saturday morning cartoon, and even makes most Democrats look like they are talking down to us and patronizing us.

This doesn't at all mean that I like the guy, but it just shows how infantilized and embarrassing our discourse his, when candidates are asked how much they love Jesus and hate the boogie man.

I think that Rush Limbaugh, and the RW "talk" media "movement" that he spawned, and FOX "News", and the RW "newsfotainment" "movement" that it spawned, have pretty much brought us to where we are.

at the time.

That would not happen today.

Every once in a while I look in the TV listings to see what the "news" magazine shows are going to be about, and it is almost always true crime or lifestyle stuff.

60 Minutes is still okay at times, but I don't expect them to be on the leading edge of a story or do anything that would shake things up.

And even though he's a conservative, he's actually liberal by our standards. Go figure.

<snip>
Some facts about politics in France

According to its constitution (Article 1) "La France est une république indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale" (France is a republic, indivisible, secular, democratic and social).

In France, unlike the USA, the majority of national politicians are civil servants (often high-ranking) ; the President, the majority of the cabinet members and a very large number of parliament members graduated from the same prestigious school : Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). In 2002, it was considered very unusual when the Prime Minister did not. It is not exaggerated to say that they are often cut off from real life : read about the 2005 strikes.

The major national parties are : PS (Socialist Party), UMP (Neo-Gaullist), UDF (Christian Democrat), each of them counting between 15 and 25% of the votes, FN (Extreme Right National Front), around 10%, and various others around 5% (Communist, Ecologists, Extreme-Left, including CNPT Chasse-Pêche-Nature et Tradition, the party of people who oppose European regulation on hunting etc...).

France has the highest number of local authorities in Europe (more than 37,000, not including the structures they form between themselves) and therefore has a very active local political life with more than 500,000 elected officials. Of course, local communities are small and therefore the political system is very centralized with a strong central state but one can say that the local authority and its city council are the core of French democracy.

Women are heavily under-represented in French political life (maybe this why it is so often ridiculous...) : see comparative figures.

The French love politics and they believe that the first thing you must do in a democracy is to vote : voter participation is very high (almost 86% in the 2007 presidential election) and they are shocked by the low figure in the USA. They believe in what old Pericles said : "a citizen who is not involved in politics is not a quiet citzen, he is a useless citizen"

The French are very fond of national politics : if you watch the Evening News on a national TV channel (at 8 p.m.), you will be surprised by the number of reports and interviews. Read about the 2007 Presidential campaign.

Politics is a fight and when you win, you win everything : you are on one side or the other and non-patisan votes do not exist ; "checks and balances" has no translation in French. See more about the reasons why the French do not like change and prefer revolutions.

<MUCH MORE>

http://www.understandfrance.org/France/Society.html

we should always keep that in mind when making judgments about right and left. It is very highly centralized and rather hide-bound, i.e. "conservative" to the extent that it resists changes. Periodically, the system cracks - witness the fact that they are on their "Fifth Republic."