SO EVERYONE’S PATTING THEMSELVES ON THE BACK ABOUT MACRON’S WIN, but isn’t this by far the best performance for the National Front ever? Macron has the chance to turn things around, but if he fails — which, to be honest, is what I expect — that trend could continue. And if the French establishment asked my advice, I’d say to drop the contempt. As Megan McArdle writes from France: “They are sick of that class, sick of being looked down upon as their old way of life disappears and their communities implode. And so they rejoice when someone is willing to transgress its edicts. What I heard from Le Pen supporters sounded an awful lot like what I heard from those Trump voters. Neither France nor the U.S. would be a better place if people felt freer to make racist remarks. But they probably would be better if no one class felt comfortable disdaining another. They would probably also be much less angry, fractured and ungovernable. Getting there probably starts by recognizing that Trump and Le Pen supporters are not simply interested in the joy of hate.”

The problem is that the coin of smugness is one of the main things dispensed by the paymasters of the left. Feeling morally superior is, for many in that coalition, the entire reason for politics. But people don’t respond well to contempt.

UPDATE: Adriana Cohen: French Ignore Signs Demanding Change, Strength. Well, such fundamental change doesn’t come overnight, and Le Pen was a flawed vessel for that sentiment.

MORE: Brendan O’Neill on Facebook: “Leftists are cheering an election in which the far right got a third of the votes, abstention was the highest it’s been since 1969, and the victor is a former banker and darling of the establishment who is devoted to the baleful status quo of an EU that heaps severe economic punishment on the working class of any nation that dares to defy it. The definition of desperate.”