TAC editor-at large Daniel McCarthy warns nationalists and right-wing populists to stay away from Le Pen:

Ross Douthat and Noah Millman are right: Marine Le Pen stands for several policies that France should take seriously. But that’s why nationalists on the French right should do everything in their power to make sure she loses in a landslide in the presidential run-off on May 7. For as long as Le Pen and the National Front are the faces of right-wing populism in France, controlling immigration and opposing the EU — both worthy goals — will be lost causes.

Douthat ignited controversy over the weekend with a column whose headline asked, “Is there a case for Le Pen?” (Here at The Week, Millman asked a similar question: “Why not Le Pen?“) Yet the case Douthat made was arguably less for her — still less her party — than for a French right that’s up to the task of confronting globalization. And Douthat was quite wrong about one thing, at least: the notion that Le Pen is ready to govern. For all her attempts to reform her image, as well the National Front’s, she is still every inch a Le Pen, and the National Front is the ethnically chauvinist, basically anti-Dreyfusard party it always was.

True, National Front’s immigration policy has softened over the years, beginning even before Marine Le Pen took over. The National Front no longer calls for the repatriation of legal immigrants, for example. But it’s hard to believe Le Pen will be an effective force for encouraging Muslims to assimilate when there are still those in her party who don’t think the Jews of France have ever been French enough.

Stepping down as the National Front’s leader, temporarily, as she heads into the second round of the presidential election is not going to fool anyone into believing that Le Pen stands above party. It may, perhaps, ease ever so slightly the consciences of those on the right — or even anti-globalist left — who told themselves they’d never vote for the National Front. Yet the move is most significant for illustrating just how profoundly toxic and unelectable the National Front remains. Its name is poison to the populist causes it purports to champion. And so is Le Pen’s, ultimately. With or without the party label, she’s not headed to the Élysée Palace.

Contrast McCarthy’s case for Trump in October of 2016:

The conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, responding to the list [of pro-Trump intellectuals], correctly characterised the view of many of the signatories that ‘Trump is correct on particular issues (immigration, foreign policy, the importance of the nation-state) where the bipartisan consensus is often wrong, and his candidacy is a chance to vote against an elite worldview that desperately needs to be chastened and rebuked.’ But Douthat insists that however valid some of those concerns may be, the Donald is temperamentally unsuited to the White House. ‘Trump’s zest for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inability to delegate or take advice, are not mere flaws; they are defining characteristics.’

And yet Trump has succeeded not just in one field but in many — in property, in television and now in politics, by winning the Republican nomination against well-funded rivals who had the support of the establishment right. Barack Obama won the White House in 2008 by promising ‘hope and change’. Trump — so temperamentally unlike every other recent Republican and Democratic nominee — promises to be a much greater force for change. Already he has changed the Republican party and the conservative movement, re-opening essential questions of foreign policy, immigration and the needs of the American workforce.

This is why I support him and why I signed on to ‘Scholars and Writers for America’. If President Trump does keep out of wars like the one the last Republican president started in Iraq, if he limits immigration and helps restore the US labour force to prosperity, he will have done what no other Republican or Democrat could do. On the other hand, should he live down to the worst expectations — getting into wars like Iraq to, as he puts it, ‘seize the oil’, or inflaming racial tensions at home — I have no doubt that he would be even more effectively opposed in his folly than George W. Bush was. The anti-war and civil-libertarian left, which has been conspicuously silent in the Obama years, would roar back to life.

The opposite would be true with President Hillary Clinton: in advancing globalist economics and pushing a foreign policy of interventionism and nation-building, she would have the support of many Republicans in Congress — and of Acela conservatives in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. She will reduce the left to sycophancy and make accomplices of the right’s ‘wets’. (Or ‘squishes’, as we call them here.) Whether Trump succeeds or fails as a president, he will force American politics to make a choice between globalism and the nation. With Clinton there will be no choice, only more of the same disastrous policies we have seen under both of the last two presidents. With Clinton, there is neither hope nor change.

McCarthy’s case against Le Pen amounts to: she and her party are unfit to govern; if she loses narrowly, then her party will become the dominant force of right-wing opposition, which will discredit her important ideas. Better for her to lose badly, and thereby give the other, more-worthy right-wing parties an opportunity to pick up the torch.

His case for Trump is that his important ideas need to be vindicated by the strongest possible showing; if he wins the system will be forced to reckon with those ideas, whereas his opponent will vindicate the status quo once and for all; his fitness to govern remains to be determined; and if he proves unfit the system will check him.

It’s possible that the stark contrast in assessments boils down to an appreciation of the differences between the French and American systems, or to a belief that Trump pretended to harbor an ethnic animus that was insincere, while Le Pen is trying to soften a more deeply-held set of biases.

But it sounds to me like the big difference from McCarthy’s perspective is that Trump captured a major American political party with diverse roots, while a strong Le Pen would potentially bring a host of new voters into the FN’s camp. In other words, McCarthy believed that Trump would change the GOP in ways that he wanted the GOP changed, and that the GOP would change Trump in the way that he wanted Trump changed, while he believes that Le Pen and any voters she brings in will fail to change the FN in any material way, while the FN may capture the loyalty of enough voters on the right to change them without managing to ever constitute a majority. And I’m not sure why he thinks that. I’m even less sure why he didn’t consider the possibility that a failed Trump presidency would radically discredit his distinctive ideas in the same way that association with Le Pen would.

My bottom line remains where it was: I opposed Trump from the beginning because he was Trump, but I recognized from the beginning that he was making a distinctive argument that needed to be addressed, on his terms, by either his primary opponents or by Clinton, or he might well win. It wasn’t and he did, and here we are. I don’t want to see the FN win either; once again, I want the mainstream candidate to wake up and recognize the distinctive argument that needs to be addressed, and to address it. But I’m more sanguine about Le Pen in the Élysée than I was with prospect of Trump in the White House, partly because of what I see as their differences in character and partly because France is not America.