Has France become a fascist backwater? Critics of French hypocrisy, many of them conservatives, were quick to pounce on the election result. Just as the French mock American materialism and then revel in Jerry Lewis, they now have been known to denounce Americans as reactionary in their morality and use of military power only to pull the lever for the National Front’s presidential candidate. Unless you are a reckless partisan on the level of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, it is obvious to you that Le Pen is the real reactionary, not George W. Bush.

Yet there is a message in Le Pen’s strong showing for conservatives as well. Major parties on the right throughout the Western world have largely ignored "the national question" and have thus created the void for rightist-nationalist parties to fill. Bulwarks of conservative journalism like The Wall Street Journal editorialize in favor of obliterating national borders while longtime editor Robert Bartley is said to have asserted that the "nation-state is finished." (Bartley has since denied the quote attributed to him by financial journalist Peter Brimelow.) Yet the national question is shaping up to be the quintessential political issue for authentic conservatives in the 21st century.

This is not to suggest that Le Pen deserves none of the criticism being leveled against him. His past insensitivity toward Jews, most infamously captured in his description of the Holocaust as a historical "detail," is legendary. The National Front has made calculated political appeals to racists and anti-Semites. Le Pen has been as critical of the U.S. as the French socialist left, siding with Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War.

But representing the preliminary election result as a vote for pogroms is dishonest. The French left, which will not be represented in the May 5 presidential election, has at least as much of a problem with anti-Semitism as the far right. It was no Le Pen supporter who described Israel as "that shitty little country." Other more radical leftists are even more outspoken. Christopher Caldwell noted in The Weekly Standard, "But whereas the old right’s anti-Semitism is vestigial and utterly hemmed in by French constitutional practice, this new left’s anti-Semitism - which operates through an identification with Islamicist ideology that was spreading like poison even before Zacharias Moussaoui replaced Camembert as France’s most famous export - is activist, violent, and chic." Le Pen received votes at least in part because of the spate of anti-Jewish crimes and synagogue trashing committed by Muslim immigrants.

The French political elite is transforming their country without the consent of their countrymen. National sovereignty is increasingly being surrendered to anonymous bureaucrats in Brussels as France is consumed by the European Union. Mass immigration from cultures wildly different from the West is accepted without any assimilation. France is in the midst of a crime wave disproportionately committed by immigrants and their children. If the Socialists, then under the leadership of the late President Francois Mitterand, pushed through the Maastricht treaty and promoted unwise immigration policies, Chirac’s conservatives have not governed much differently on these matters.

Thus, the recent election results should be understood in the context of mass immigration, crime and the growing officiousness of the European Union. It was mainly voters rebelling against these trends who gave Le Pen 17.5 percent of the vote to Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s 16.3 percent and Chirac’s 19.8 percent. Those who dismiss these results as a product of low turnout are deluding themselves. A substantial 72 percent of French voters still went to the polls (far greater than the proportion of American voters who turned out in the elections that gave us Bill Clinton) and Le Pen came close to his present vote totals (15.2 percent in 1995, 14.4 percent in 1988) in past elections where voter turnout was greater. Moreover, in this election Le Pen’s longtime associate Bruno Megret ran as the candidate of a rival party and took 3 percent himself.

It isn’t fascism to seek to preserve the cultural traditions and political self-determination of one’s own nation. Nor does one have to be anti-immigrant to question whether unfettered immigration without assimilation is in a nation’s best interest. Some of the most vocal critics of the United States’ post-1965 immigration policy have been immigrants and their descendants themselves. (Of course, native-born critics of open borders are denounced as xenophobic nativists while immigrants who question porous borders are labeled hypocrites.) But immigrants personally and immigration in principle shouldn’t be confused with how immigration policy is being conducted in practice.

Opposition to immigration polices that import social strife and to supranational organizations that compromise national sovereignty shouldn’t be ceded to people like Le Pen and Jorge Haider, yet it is now virtually impossible to find an Enoch Powell. The responsible right wants nothing to do with issues like immigration and national sovereignty because they are afraid of being called names, like racist and isolationist.

Their cowardice is all the more inexcusable when it becomes apparent that their fear of being labeled bigots creates political opportunities for those who actually are.