Of course, I’m not saying that France is exactly like the United States: these are very different countries. But there are three reasons for the comparison.

First: a shared, foundational Enlightenment heritage. This shapes political discourse in both countries, for better and for worse. These republics think of themselves as universal, and as an inspiration for other countries and political movements, as they often have been since their origins in the eighteenth century. This also introduces certain blind spots — and an inability to recognize certain types of discrimination and to live up to the promises made.

Second, these are both countries forged by immigration, with national identities that are the product of the mixing of people from elsewhere. This is obviously true in the United States; it’s also the case in France, though it’s less part of its national mythology. France is historically a land of immigration more than emigration, and this is hardly true of all of Europe.

Third is a simpler point to do with their electoral systems. The French president doesn’t have the same authority as their American counterpart. But ultimately both France and the US require voters to pick between two candidates to elect an extremely powerful president. This can create many similar dynamics. In both countries, there is this frustration with the status quo and the collapse of the postwar order — but also political systems that can elect highly unpopular presidents so long as they can mobilize their base to get 50 percent plus one of those who vote.

You’re right to emphasize the differences: the Democrats have always been a big-tent coalition whereas these French left-wing parties have had a more definite focus on labor. My interest, here, is in the people who make up these electorates rather than the political ideologies themselves, and if we look at the Democrats historically, there is a working-class base that goes back to [Franklin D. Roosevelt] and into the 1960s.

So what happened? My book is in the style of reporting, not sociological number-crunching, and I’m talking to people on the ground and showing what they look like.  When we talk about class dealignment, we could consider different ways of capturing this trend. Is it about people’s jobs? Their educational qualifications? Their income? But however you frame it, I think the trend is real, and it’s an important part of the story I’m telling.

We should remember that there have always been working-class people who vote for right-wing parties. There’s nothing inherently new about that, especially when we look at the more socially conservative and religious. But an essential part of the decline of the working-class vote for the Left in both France and the US is deindustrialization. It has ravaged the social fabric of communities in both countries, and that has profound effects on their politics.

In the book, I report on parts of the US that have turned to [Donald] Trump, which also evoke parts of northern and eastern France, which were once left-wing bastions but have now shifted toward Marine Le Pen’s far right. One of the many things going on here is that people used to vote for left-wing parties but now hold them responsible for failing to honor their promises to protect jobs. We saw pledges like that from the French Socialists with François Mitterrand in the 1980s to the early 1990s, or more recently under François Hollande. In the US, the [Bill] Clinton administration talked about saving the steel industry but failed to deliver. That creates real frustration.

Another big part of this story is the declining union density when you lose manufacturing jobs — and the loss of an entire political culture that goes with that. One benefit of doing on-the-ground reporting is that when you ask why thirty or forty years ago people in Mingo County, West Virginia, used to vote Democratic or people in northern France used to vote for the Communists, oftentimes people will say that it has a lot to do with the union — that it wasn’t just defending wages and conditions at work but about providing a whole space for people to discuss, socialize, and transmit progressive values.

Added to these factors is a certain kind of economic suffering, different from the kind in the big cities that still vote Democratic. There’s a particular nostalgia and anger that results from knowing that your parents or grandparents had it better. It’s bound up with a bitterness toward feeling neglected and abandoned by the state.

This mix lends itself to far-right narratives. Whether it’s Donald Trump or the Rassemblement National, they say that this is the fault of immigrants — a basic nativist message that appeals to people in these conditions. That’s why I reject this silly dichotomy asking whether it’s racism or economic anxiety that decides how people vote. Obviously, both factors are working together, when people have lost faith in the Left and when there aren’t unions offering an alternative.

We should remember that, in their different ways, both the Democrats and the French left retain solid bases of support in urban areas. If you look at the French electoral map, you can see more rural or peripheral areas that used to vote for the Left but don’t anymore. Still, it’s not as bleak as in the US, and there are little pockets where the French left does perform decently well outside of large urban areas. Part of that is also due to the different structure of union density.

For want of a better term, I’d say that in France there’s more of a “civic spirit” that’s not as deflated as the US, and this is also a reason why in France it’s not so bad for the Left outside of the main cities. You see this in voter participation: even the last parliamentary elections in France had a higher turnout than the last US presidential contest, which is at least one basic indicator of how engaged people are.

Still, another essential part of this picture is the media, since in a more individualized society, with less of a collective process of political participation, TV has a bigger impact on individuals. This is also a growing trend in France. It’s telling in this sense that the French right is importing a lot of the styles and techniques and tactics that have been successfully implemented by their counterparts in US conservative media.

This is surely a big difference — but we are also seeing the emergence of more American-style culture wars in French politics.

It’s worth noting that there’s recently been a significant uptick in adult baptisms in France. We’re nowhere near close to US levels. But there is something of a rise in religiosity in France, especially in conservative environments where people are rediscovering the church as a unifying force.

Part of why the culture wars are so prominent in the US is that they have a significant motor among evangelical Christians who see politics as a spiritual, religious struggle. I think this is extremely dangerous — and I was a little bit shocked even to see the stuff I saw in the United States. I didn’t grow up surrounded by evangelicals and engaged with them as a correspondent would covering a foreign country. It was genuinely disturbing to see the kind of Christian-nationalist rhetoric and the stranglehold it has.

Still, what’s striking in both countries is not just working-class voters, especially outside large cities, shifting toward the far right, but a radicalization of the existing “mainstream” right. It is increasingly obsessed by topics like immigration but also “wokeness.” Traditional right-wing voters are radicalizing, in the French case also because of media like CNews, which adopts a lot of the style of Fox News. Its hyping up of wokisme — as it’s called in French — is a direct American import, and it’s presented as a threat to democratic debate and civil society in a similar way to what we’ve seen in the US. Last time I checked, there had been 450 articles over the last year mentioning this term.

The charge against wokisme signifies, basically, the Right’s hostility to anyone who wants to talk about discrimination, and it leads to an obsession about immigration but also things like trans issues. This is a way of bringing together the Right’s historic base and newer working-class voters. With this kind of cultural offensive, a lot of the mainstream right who might historically have thought of Trump or Le Pen as a little too extreme will go along with them because they don’t want to vote for the Left, which is associated with hostile economic policies and a whole set of progressive values they disagree with.

In short, in France, there isn’t a similar political religiosity, but I am also looking at the resurgence of Catholic-identitarian politics on the far right. Someone like Marion Maréchal Le Pen would be a good representative of this. You could say she’s marginal for now. But I think it’s something to keep an eye on, as a kind of anti-republican force and ideology on the French right.

When I talk about radicalization, I’m not saying that the developments in France are all just a product of US influence. I’m trying to alert French people to the similar processes in the US in order to recognize them as they’re happening and take action before it’s too late. But it’s important to recognize that the radicalization of the US Republicans precedes Trump: in the book I also talk about other figures like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, and George W. Bush.

In both countries, we have a slow-boiling radicalization. In France, there have been years and years of mainstream politicians thinking they’re going to defeat the far right by adopting parts of their rhetoric. We had that in the late 2000s with Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency, and Emmanuel Macron has done it again and again, talking about “civilizational” threats and the like.

Trump doesn’t come out of nowhere: he’s the product of a long-standing radicalization on the Right. In France, there isn’t a Trump-like figure with this style of politics that Christian Salmon would call the “power of the grotesque”: a buffoon making a mockery of politics because no one believes in it anymore, in the manner of Jair Bolsonaro or Silvio Berlusconi or Boris Johnson. In France, there isn’t such a figure or anyone directly using that style. Indeed, I’d say that Trump makes a lot of people on the far right in France uncomfortable, as he goes “too far” on some topics.

Still, there’s a frightening convergence in some ways: notably, a growing rhetoric that openly questions the rule of law and a focus on supposed liberal judges blocking the Right from carrying out its agenda. Trump has accelerated these attacks and a lot of the French right is leaning into it, too. We had a sitting French interior minister [conservative Bruno Retailleau] say that the rule of law isn’t the be-all and end-all of politics, which wouldn’t have happened fifteen or twenty years ago.

So I think Trump is showing them that it’s possible to use that rhetoric to mobilize their base. Take Rassemblement National’s call for a referendum on immigration, which would almost certainly be in direct conflict with the constitution — but it says that it should happen anyway. In that sense, Trump is leading the way.

To give just another example on the anti-immigration front: a couple weeks ago, Retailleau proudly announced the deployment of 4,000 police officers at bus and train stations across France to round up undocumented immigrants over a two-day stretch. It was a made-for-TV stunt meant to inflict terror and energize conservatives that felt right out of the American playbook. When you see the media attention that Trump’s crusade against undocumented immigrants gets here, it’s not hard to imagine where the inspiration came from.

Trump is quite unpopular in France, and during the last [US presidential] campaign, there was a certain reluctance to be associated with him. My sense is that this started to change toward the end of the campaign with a certain reconnection with Washington.

If you look at the inauguration, there were French figures there like Sarah Knafo, who’s with [Éric Zemmour’s] failed party [Reconquête, an anti-immigration force that briefly surged ahead in the 2022 presidential election]. And you see direct collaboration when you look at French figures who attend CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference].

Then again, you see how sensitive the French far right is about these associations: the Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella pulled out of CPAC because of Steve Bannon’s Nazi salute. It’s emblematic of a weird dance they are doing, where it’s great to be associated with a growing international movement, but they are also conscious that some of its rhetoric and symbolism will play poorly in France.

So the line you often hear from them is: Trump can do his own thing, but basically he’s protecting the sovereignty of Americans and that’s what Americans want. He’ll do things that maybe don’t fit with our own approach, but at least he’s looking out for his people.

It’s a real problem — though the data doesn’t allow any definitive answer. French pollsters don’t ask people to self-identify by race or ethnic belonging, so we can only rely on surveys that classify people by the kinds of neighborhoods they’re living in. But the French left surely has reason to be worried about this scenario. They should look at what’s happening to the Democrats and realize that there’s nothing automatic about capturing the vote of ethnic minorities forever.

In the last US election, a lot of Hispanic voters — a minority but a large one — supported Trump. We see this throughout American and even French history: that buying into nativist rhetoric can become a sign of becoming more integrated into the country. Second-generation immigrants have wanted to feel American by saying: I am an American — and these Italians or Asians or Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are not. In France, too, we have people with Italian or Polish last names who are strongly anti-immigration.

The French left can sometimes be very disconnected from immigrant working-class people and assume they’re a monolithic bloc that’ll always vote for the Left. We saw, in the US at least, that this was a miscalculation. I don’t think we’re there yet in France but we should be worried about taking people’s votes for granted. If you want to earn people’s vote then you need to advocate for their interests and stand up for them once you’ve been elected.

Many French unions are accustomed to the advantages they enjoy under the law and the benefits that are protected by the constitution. They have certain roles delegated by the state: in particular, they are responsible for negotiating collective bargaining agreements that cover 98 percent of the workforce. So there’s a simple question of incentives: they don’t have to organize just to survive, as US unions might.

If there are at least the beginnings of a union renaissance in the US, this can be inspiring also in France. If American trade unionists can make headway in an atomized society with less sense of class solidarity and in a hostile media environment — on top of heavy opposition from employers — then French trade unionists can do the work too, if they decide that it’s important.

At a time when the Left is losing its connection to working-class voters outside of large urban areas, building unions is even more important because they are the vital connection between working-class people and socially progressive values. We saw a recent example of this with the dockworkers near Marseille blocking weapons for Israel.

That’s the kind of thing that happens where you have near 100 percent union density, where it’s just part of the culture to be part of the CGT [General Confederation of Labor]. That comes with a certain consciousness about international issues and anti-racism and not voting for the far right, because you have the political education to know that it’s not your ally. Both in the US and France, despite growing far-right support among the working class, this remains less likely among union members.

At the end of the book, I make a simple point, but one that I think it’s important to remember in a grave moment like the current one. A Left that is successful is one that’s able to deliver material changes to people’s lives, not just one in permanent campaign mode with rhetorical flair. The Left needs to win power but also make a difference in order to regain the confidence of voters.