A new party is born in France. Alternative Libérale. Its spirit is liberalism, liberalizing liberalism, and its color is violet, underlining that it's ni gauche, ni droite
, neither left, nor right, neither socialist, nor conservative, neither red, nor blue.
Edouard Fillias sent me an email today with the news. This is news, big news. I love France, and I hope the French escape from the dirigistes that plague them from both the right and the left. I might even decide to work there if they do. Half the battle is understanding what liberalism is. Here in America, too.
Sabine Hérold, photographed above, explains their opposition to the French Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy is liberal on the economic plane, but not on the societal one. With us, it's wide-angle liberalism
Edouard Fillias says, We do not have a cult of authority like Sarkozy. We do not believe in a savior. Liberals don't like it when someone bosses them around.
By the way, in the last sentence I translated the French verb diriger, which I really think should become an English verb of opprobrium, to dirige
. The noun dirigisme already exists in English. Diriger literally translates to the English verb to direct
, but it carries connotations of arbitrary, centralized, top-down control.
I first found out about Hérold and Fillias last June from the blog of a friend Tom Palmer.
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