Le Pen may be mightier

Since time immemorial, the populace have had, to a degree, immutable faith in government to achieve the right solution. Humanity is one long game of follow my leader, and as long as that leader says something that sounds good, then the people who listen will vote for them, and trust them. How else did Hitler come to power - or Stalin, for that matter. The recent showing of Marine Le Pen in the French elections is a good illustration of this. For many French people, she is talking sense. Her opponents, horrified to the core, insist on branding her a Nazi. In fact, she is politically a shadow of her father, a true extremist. Ms le Pen is merely echoing the sentiments of a growing proportion of her population, and indeed the populants of many European countries. It speaks volumes of the censored society in which we now live that anyone who dares stray somewhere near the extremes polarly occupied by so many leftists is branded a product of National Socialism and therefore to be despised by all. It is in fact an admission by the proponents of enforced multiculturalism and political correctness that theirs is neither the right way, nor one which has any real traction with human who's IQ exceeds that of a dustbin. That's not to say the right are right. Anyone whose intellectual capacity exceeds that of a cupcake will agree that is is highly unlikely that either side has a monopoly on the right answers. In fact, the growth of extremes is a product of the party system. If you are aligned with a faction, you must espouse all of the causes and beliefs which they represent. Failure to do so may result in relegation to the back benches, or worse, expulsion. Most politicians enter politics with an ideal - to serve, and serve well. That ideal is eroded as the waves of party manipulation crash remorselessly against it, and quickly morphs into a sense of self preservation. Thus the party system has become a despicable anachronism, and its resultant flaws render talented and ambitious politicians impotent. So begins another erosion - the erosion of trust that the government will prevail, that their solutions will work. And as a result, the people open their ears and listen, most often to single issue politics. Hence the rise of Le Pen, and in the UK of UKIP. Their ability to manage the day to day business of government is overlooked. Their most vocal standpoints achieve support, because in difficult times humans retreat into those issues which frighten them the most. A stable economy, where standards of living grow well is unlikely to produce support for anything other than the status quo or its mildest opponents. But this is something we neither have nor, despite the increasingly hollow protests of our leaders, expect to have in the foreseeable future. And so we retreat to the poles. What compounds this sorry state of affairs is the blind denials of those who have lead us down this path - our leaders. They just can't see that their weakness is the cause. They refuse to face facts. But of course they are only mere mortals. And we were fools to trust them in the first place.