ROGER KIMBALL: Despite defeat, Le Pen’s party has made steady progress.

There is perhaps a silver lining to yesterday’s election. Although Le Pen did not prevail absolutely, her party has been making steady progress. As Glenn Reynolds reports, citing a friend, “When Mr. Le Pen made it into the second round of the presidential election in 2002, he got 18 percent of the vote. When his daughter made the second round in 2017, she got 34 percent. When she did it again in 2022, she got 41 percent. They are persuading, just very slowly.”

The question is whether the cultural confidence that is necessary for civilizational survival will progress quickly enough to stave off disaster. No one’s crystal ball, I suspect, is far seeing enough to say. But the fact that everyone in the flaccid, low-testosterone corner of the punditocracy dismisses Rassemblement National with the epistemically empty epithet “far right” suggests that the battle, or at least the war, is not yet over.

In the meantime though, the French left seem determined to finish off their nation once and for all: The left-wing French coalition hoping to introduce 90% tax on rich.