When French politician Marion Marechal-Le Pen strode onto the stage at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference last Thursday, most conference attendees likely had little or no idea who she was.
There were lots of empty seats in the grand ballroom, where the main events of the conference took place. It was early afternoon, and many of the day’s attendees were still at lunch. Of those in attendance, some were dozing off.
Then the striking young woman delivered a most captivating message.
To open up to the outside, you must have a solid core. To welcome, you have to remain. To share, you must have something to offer. Without nation and without family, the limits of the common good, natural law, collective morality disappears as the reign of egoism continues.
Among other things, she was referring to the failures of the European Union and the French government: Her government had bequeathed sovereignty to Brussels, and as a result, her fellow countrymen lost a certain amount of independence to choose their own laws and own destiny, especially on issues like mass migration.
Her words echoed President Trump’s immigration rhetoric, and he often said on the campaign trail, “We either have a country or we don’t.”
The message was that citizens of a free country, not foreigners, should get to decide who enter their land.
Yet despite the similarities, Marechal-Le Pen’s message sounded different.
It sounded conservative not in terms of policy. It was not a celebration of, or a call for, conservative policy prescriptions, be they lowering taxes, ending Obamacare, cutting regulations, or reducing the size of the administrative state. Rather, it sounded conservative in the general sense: Conservatism is a set of attitudes, a mindset.
Marechal-Le Pen’s message applies not just to her gripes against the overreach of the EU or the excesses of its diktats, but it could even apply to daily life, to modern culture. After all, the political Left is not the only one insisting that people open up, whether by granting amnesty to illegal immigrants or asylum to refugees from terror-prone countries or by acquiescing to international agreements (such as the Paris climate accord) rejected by the American electorate.
No, the modern existence is suffocated by the endless pressure to share, for instance, on social media, when there is nothing worth sharing at all. It is characterized by never-ending requests to open up to selfies and smartphone videos when there is nothing worth capturing.
Beyond social media, there are numerous examples of unseemly, forcible sharing in both the personal and political spheres. Often, those demanding that others open up or be welcoming have nothing to offer. The act of sharing is not an automatic virtue, especially if it undermines values and institutions very much worth preserving, such as the nation, family, traditions, or basic courtesies.
The late conservative intellectual giant Russell Kirk once wrote that conservatism is “a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.” It is “sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than a system of ideological dogmata.”
Oddly enough, the young Marechal-Le Pen’s message at CPAC echoed those sentiments.
She might not have meant to do so. No one is crediting her as a reader of conservative thought. In fact, the charm of her words could have all been a fluke. Maybe it was a translation of the speech’s original French text to inexact English.
Maybe if her talk had lasted longer (it was a brief seven minutes), CPAC would have discovered her true colors, which her critics claim are much uglier. Her famous grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was the founder of the National Front party and a Holocaust denier. Her aunt, Marine, currently leads the party and ran for president last year.
Marechal-Le Pen’s arrival at CPAC was preceded by media controversy. Some conservatives complained she had no business whatsoever speaking at the conference, and that like her grandfather, she is a racist, or like her aunt, she is a big government socialist.
But Marechal-Le Pen was only on stage for seven minutes. However intriguing or toxic the young Marechal-Le Pen might be in France, she is just a blip on the conference’s multiday agenda.
The real rock star of the conference, Trump, showed up the next day. There was no empty seat in the grand ballroom, no one dozing off during his performance.
In the age of Trump, his detractors accuse him of having engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, of being an opportunist who is antithetical to the conservative movement.
Turns out, a controversial young woman from France offered a surprising reminder of how to think more seriously about conservatism.
Ying Ma (@GZtoGhetto) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is the former deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the former deputy policy director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign. She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto.
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