Dismayed

From “tomorrow’s” eternally post-dated Le Monde:

The intellectual Alain Finkielkraut said Tuesday that he is “dismayed by the current state of the left”. “The socialist Party is in a coma.” “The left chose the way of Mitterrand.”
[...]
“There are other possibilities which are offered to the voters” for the presidential one, he declares. “There are perhaps candidates who are more suited than the left to take into account the problems and deal with the disaster”, he said.

He spoke also of consistency and of wishing to see TV enviro-vangelist Nicolas Hulot as their candidate.

“If I speak out in the countryside, it won’t take the form of a rallying. It will be by an analysis of the problems” because “we’re living a kind of disaster”, he explains it. “I think that the schools are in a disastrous state, I think that civic morals is in a disastrous state, I think that the rise of incivilities took absolutely terrible proportions”, he detailed. He concluded “Ecology requires we that we change.”

I’m a lot more worried about people trying to “live off the land” in an inefficient, starvation inducing, pre-scientific fashion than that, but so be it. Though his frame of reference is not that different than those he sees flaws with, Finkelkraut is part of the way there, and at least moving in direction of returning to the classical rationalism that in the past sought a morally sound and serious view of human affairs that made real efforts to alleviate burdens and difficulties – not just calling out for one outrageous measure after another to display a desire for life, somehow, to be ”perfect” though Socialist meddling in people's lives.