The amazing thing about Donald Trump’s arrival in office for his second term has been the sheer consequentiality of it. What felt like an inflection has proved a revolution. Dreams that seemed alive to some people just six months ago—transcending binary sexuality, for example—are dead and discredited. So are the state mechanisms by which such dreams were imposed—affirmative action, speech codes, and so on. Though revolutions often fail or turn dangerous, they are hard to undo, once the spell of the old regime has been broken.  

But what was this regime? What was it about? The life of its most dogged and enduring opponent, the French populist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, may suggest an answer. Le Pen died in January at age 96, two weeks before Trump returned to office. Half a century ago, Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s