Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

This article is fun

>Great innovators, great thinkers, great inventors — they are almost always weirdos

Yeah, oh boy, racism! Those crazy thinkers, up to their own sillyness!

Now onto a real point the article tries to make:

> And the thing that is unmistakable about the rise of the National Front — now the most popular party in France — is that what is now referred to in the press as "the demonization strategy" has not only failed but contributed to the National Front's rise.

This is categorically and provably false. When the National Front actually made it to the second round of elections, their score went from 17% of votes to.. 18% of votes. of the 60-odd percent of people who had to change their vote between two rounds, only 1% decided to go full-fascist. This was entirely due to a massive media campaign pointing this out. The demonization campaign was a massive success!

The only reason the National Front is ahead today is because of a massive, 10 year "de-demonization" process, that went up to full exclusion of the former parter leader.

You see the same trope with Trump. "Oh, pointing out he's awful does nothing!".

But polls show that going over Trump's scandals over and over actually cause his numbers to fall! Demonization campaigns have worked for a long time, and won't stop working for a while.

> of the 60-odd percent of people who had to change their vote between two rounds, only 1% decided to go full-fascist

Nearsighted statement that completely occult the massive fear-mongering political and media propaganda that happened during the two election rounds.

> The only reason the National Front is ahead today is because of a massive, 10 year "de-demonization" process, that went up to full exclusion of the former parter leader.

Another sign of nearsightedness. The reasons the FN is so popular nowadays have a lot more to do with the Calais jungle, the recent murder of a priest, the beheading of a business man, the recent vote on life insurance and CODEVIs barring owners to cash their policies/accounts "if the circumstances permit it" (Sapin 2 law), the other vote setting a limit on how much people can expect to be saved in the event of a bank crash (EUR 100,000, cumulative over several accounts), the constant deployment of military in the country, the numerous wars (Libya, Mali, Syria, ...), the fact that migrants are given priority over French citizen for social housing, ... I could go on all day.

It's such a fallacy to call for the devil while shunning from public discussion all the problems that lower and middle class citizens are living every day. The same thing happened during the Brexit votation. The same thing is happening in the US with Trump. It's probably a sign of our time where so-called "liberal intellectuals" would resort to fear-mongering rather than address actual issues and risk jeopardizing their own social situations.

PS: In a famous interview, former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin clearly stated that there never was a fascist menace in France and that "demonizing" the FN was a ploy from President Mitterrand to divert the attention of the people from the waves of privatizations that the socialist government undertook in the mid-80s. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY3jUuFBWIM

How can anyone possibly show causality between demonization and votes? Where's the control group? Have you got any scientific evidence for your claims or are they really just rationalization?

Increasing from 17% to 18% sounds like an increase to me, not a decrease. Or am I misunderstanding how the French election works? Some people _have_ to change their vote?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system

Basically... 17% of people voted for the National Front as their first vote, and when the first vote failed due to no party having a majority, and all parties but those two with the highest number of votes were excluded, there was a second vote.

In the second vote between two parties, 18% of people voted for the National Front - only a 1% increase - despite 60% of people having voted for minority parties in the first round and thus having to switch their vote (or abstain). That is, the vast majority of people who had voted for minority parties decided to vote against the National Front in the second vote.

(For exact numbers - the National Front got 4,804,713 votes in the first round, and 5,525,032 in the second - a jump of 720,319 votes - and Rally for the Republic got 5,665,855 votes in the first round, and 25,537,956 in the second - a jump of 19,872,101 votes.)

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