An argument has been ringing out for several years like a little tune that accompanies our political life: “we haven’t tried it yet”. What is it about? The adventure of the National Rally in power. This tune has been particularly loud in recent weeks, to the point that it has been mocked in many ways on social networks and even in press cartoons. “Oh yeah?”, “really?” the mockers ironically repeat: we haven’t tried the acid bath either; we haven’t tried throwing ourselves into the void, etc. It’s funny and not so wrong, but it reduces the formula to that of the fallacy ofargumentum ad novitatemThis consists of considering an option as superior because it is new, or of denigrating a situation because we are living it in the present (which amounts to almost the same thing).
It seems to me, however, that the slogan “we haven’t tried yet” says more than that. When the mocker retorts that one did not try to throw oneself into the claws of a tiger, one assumes that the sentence implies an infinite universe of possibilities; but she says quite the opposite. This formula reveals two things about a certain contemporary political imagination: we have already tried everything except that, and everything else has been unsatisfactory. Both points are to be questioned. The first because it is not true that we have tried everything in terms of political adventure: we have not tried degrowth or self-management… not at a national level in any case. At a more local level, there have been numerous political experiences in this area: New Australia, Colonia Cecilia and the countless attempts to reestablish social life on “good foundations”… Gilles Lapouge devoted a beautiful book to it, Utopia and civilizations, and summed it up by writing: “Reality is against it”. This is not a definitive argument but, at least, it inspires a form of distrust regarding political adventures which propose the best and which, based on a naive anthropology, result in the worst.
Helplessness and frustration
The second point seems the most interesting to me: “everything else has been unsatisfactory”. We could ironize about this gloom by recalling that Steven Pinker, in his book The triumph of the Enlightenment, supporting figures, show that the period we are living in is the most decent, both from the point of view of prosperity and health or security – and this throughout the world -, but it would be useless. In doing so, we would forget that politics is often a matter of representations rather than objective facts, so that these collective perceptions become reality and not a simple fantasy that could be made to evaporate with statistical arguments – also whether they are objectively valid.
It’s hopeless for a rationalist but the facts are there: the contemporary political imagination is partly contained in this little phrase: “we haven’t tried yet”. It expresses both the feeling of helplessness of our contemporaries dominated by the idea of dispossession in all areas, and that of a frustration which urges them to believe that no political experience would be to be feared, expected that we would have already “hit rock bottom”. They forget that the worst has more imagination than them and that the bottom is an abyss. And this is how totalitarian adventures often accompany democracies in the shadows: they await their moment. These can fade in the face of the constraints of reality as, it seems, we observe in Italy today. They can also turn into unstoppable danger, as history has shown with the fall of the Weimar Republic.
In reality, no model can predict such a chaotic tree structure between cause and effect. I am not naive enough to believe that our country could easily tip over into a total eclipse, but I hope that we have enough collective lucidity to know that the world has become more unpredictable than ever. A proverb invites us to be “brave but not reckless”. Will history remember that in this summer of 2024, the French people were reckless but not courageous?
*Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at La Sorbonne University.
.