Eric Zemmour

There's an interesting post up at Gallia Watch on Eric Zemmour, a French writer and journalist I'd previously not heard of.

Zemmour has gone much further than most in making a principled break with liberalism. Here's an excerpt from his wikipedia entry:

Zemmour considers himself Gaullist and Bonapartist, and places himself in a profoundly anti-liberal (economically and socially) portion of the French right. He also considers himself to be a reactionary, in that he believes his views to be a reaction to a society that dismantles the social order, especially family and tradition, in the pursuit of a false goal: liberating the individual, who only finds himself isolated and reduced to the status of consumer. He reserves subversiveness for the right-wing, arguing that the progressives now dominant in French culture and media can no longer claim to be critics of the established order since they have become the established order.

Zemmour's anti-liberalism also causes him to oppose European federalism. He considers Europe to be profoundly liberal and out of step with the French social order. He also believes that within a European community, the political right and left are forced to advocate "the same economic policy, social liberalism or liberal socialism", since, in the words of Philippe Séguin, "right and left are outlets of the same wholesaler, Europe."

We can at least see from this that Zemmour:

• Rejects both social and economic liberalism (i.e. a liberalism of the left and right)
• Recognises that the individual is not liberated by autonomy, but is left isolated and with the trivial status of consumer
• Recognises that the establishment is not conservative but liberal
• Recognises the dominance of left-liberalism within the EU ("social liberalism")
  

I don't know enough about Zemmour to endorse his politics in a general sense. But his break with liberalism at the political level has been deep enough to allow him to take some genuinely traditionalist stances on a number of issues:

• He opposes European federalism
• He believes that sex distinctions matter
• He opposes mass immigration into France
• He believes that the role of fathers is different to that of mothers
• He recognises that different races do exist
• He advocates the "revirilisation" of men and of the European nations

Again, I don't have a systematic understanding of his arguments. He apparently gives a lot of weight to the idea that men have been feminised and have lost their authority and virility. He connects this to the declining fortunes of the European peoples.

The significant thing for me is that Zemmour is an example of how leading intellectuals can recognise the problem of liberalism, make a significant break with it, and begin to reassert traditionalist positions.

The quality of the positions taken by such intellectuals will vary, but the political landscape opened up will be a much more favourable and encouraging one.