Marine Le Pen in NYT tells a fantastic lie

After Brexit, the People’s Spring Is Inevitable

It's about democracy and freedom, she says, comparing the EU to the USSR.

To the extent that the democracy deficit she complains of has any foundation in reality it is because so many of the major decisions on how Europe is governed are actually embodied in treaties negotiated among and adopted by the national governments and then enforced by the EU bureaucracy.

Yet that is really not very different a method of controlling and changing arrangements than our method of adopting constitutional amendments, and it has in some cases been in a sense more democratic in that some of the treaties have been subjected to popular consultation in some of the nations.

And, anyway, that's really neither here nor there since, in the name of ethno-nationalism, Marine Le Pen denies democratic legitimacy to the very idea of a European law made by a European parliament.

And what about the European Parliament? 

It’s democratic in appearance only, because it’s based on a lie: the pretense that there is a homogeneous European people, and that a Polish member of the European Parliament has the legitimacy to make law for the Spanish. 

We have tried to deny the existence of sovereign nations. 

It’s only natural that they would not allow being denied.

In that one sentence she insists on the brazen lie that democratic legitimacy can only occur in a mono-ethnic polity, whether or not ethnicity is understood as a matter of culture, blood, or in some dosage of both.

And the list of "nation states" in Europe that are not, in fact, mono-ethnic is quite long, if it doesn't quite include all the states of Europe.

Not to mention pretty nearly every country in the Americas and nearly all of them anywhere else in the world.

Even Japan, often cited by Buchananites as an example of a state determinedly homogeneous is not, in fact, mono-ethnic.

It is an extremely rare condition, if it really exists anywhere, and mono-ethnicity is a damned silly political goal.

Like Pat Buchanan, she takes tribalism pretty far into fine-grained absurdity.

And I'm pretty sure for both of them the blood part of ethnic identity is pretty important.