Charles de Gaulle on Order, Progress... and Why Liberalism Wins
Charles de Gaulle could be a very pedagogical politician when he wanted to be. In 1965, the French president, who usually preferred to give off airs of Olympian detachment rather than engage in the squabble of electoral politics, was forced by the left-wing François Mitterrand into second-round presidential elections.
During the campaign for the second round, de Gaulle gave an uncharacteristically down-to-earth interview in which he explained some of his views on order and progress:
What’s happening in France is like what happens in a household. The mistress of the house, the housewife, wants a vacuum cleaner, a fridge, a washing machine, and even, if possible, to drive a car. That’s movement.
At the same time, she doesn’t want her husband to go partying somewhere, or the boys to put their feet on the table, or the girls to come home late at night. That’s order.
The housewife wants progress, but she doesn’t want a mess [pagaille]. That’s also true for France: we need progress; we mustn’t have a mess.
It’s noteworthy that de Gaulle emphasizes the economic aspect of progress here. As a practicing Catholic and an old man raised in the cult of military and public service, he was not very keen on the kind of 1960s social liberalism that was just around the corner. For him, this meant a shift to a culture of self-indulgence which he was largely powerless to prevent.
De Gaulle understood well the psychological asymmetry between left and right in the postwar West. Consider his exchange with Minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte in 22 July 1964:
De Gaulle: The right is just as stupid [as the left]. The right is stuck in its ways, does not want to change anything, does not understand anything. Only, one hears it less. It has infiltrated the press and the university less. It is less eloquent. It is more closed in on itself. It exists in more narrow circles.
Whereas the left, on the other hand, is talkative and in great shape [a des couleurs]. It creates parties, holds conferences, summons people, and claims to have talent. That’s something the right does not claim.
One is a bit ashamed to be right-wing, whereas one makes a show of being left-wing. But in any case, the politicians and parties no longer have much prestige. They no longer lead the people.
Peyrefitte: But they lead the journalists, the union leaders, the dinners in the city, in short, the political class…
De Gaulle: You mean the chattering, gossiping, and jabbering class.1
It’s amazing how little has changed since 1964; or rather, how much the trend identified here has become entrenched and amplified, to not say hegemonic. Whatever the causes of this asymmetry, it leads to some curious sociopolitical dynamics.
On the one hand, liberals’ and leftists’ activism means they periodically overreach and poke to life the usually lethargic mass of center-right people (Nixon’s “Silent Majority”). This can lead to big electoral victories for the right. However, the right has no general counter-project of its own—except perhaps tax cuts and changing things more slowly—so the liberal left tends to win out in the long term. The people tend to follow, however unevenly and with a certain lag, the views of the cultural elites. This can be seen in popular views on gender roles, race, abortion, homosexuality, and much else.
Economically, left-wing overreach is checked by economic failure (pre-Thatcher Britain, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Argentina more recently). Societally, crime and violence seem to be the only major checks on the progress of social liberalism (the explosion in racial violence in the U.S.A. which coincided with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society paved the way for Nixon and Reagan). This might be why the recent push to include biological-men-who-identify-as-women in women’s sports, women’s prisons, and other women’s spaces may by a step too far.
Otherwise, there don’t seem to be any real checks on the progress of social liberalism. The anti-abortion movement in the U.S. has won a major legal victory by overturning Roe v. Wade, but in terms of public views the movement has made no progress and opposition to abortion is now one of the most toxic political issues for Republicans nation-wide.
The secular trend towards social liberalism is one of the reasons I promote techno-natalism to counter the debilitating fertility collapse of the Global North and mounting mutational load. Techno-natalism means enabling access to and voluntary use of reprogenetic technologies that enable the birth of children who are more likely to be healthy and thrive.
It’s fairly hard for opponents of reprotech of either the left (typically motivated by equality) or the right (typically motivated by religion), to argue for forcing people to have children who are more likely to be unhealthy and less capable. Of course one can coerce people, but at a rising political cost. The arc of history is long but it bends, inter alia, towards personal choice.
Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle (Paris: 2002).