Yascha Mounk: Why America Has Won Its War of Words with France

Yascha Mounk is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University with research interests in political theory, intellectual history and comparative politics. The founding editor of The Utopian, he has written about European and US politics for the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe and Unità, among other newspapers and magazines.

Perhaps the most captivating fallout from Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s rape trial has been the glaring culture clash between the United States and France. The opening salvo in this war of words was fired by the New York Daily News when, on the day after Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, it adorned its front page with the simple words, “Le Perv.” The implication was clear: the French are all oversexed deviants. Strauss-Kahn’s Frenchness is not incidental to his alleged crime—on the contrary, his being French is what accounts for his misdeeds.

The French media immediately rose to the bait. They railed against New York’s sensationalist tabloids and America’s bloodthirsty justice system. On their telling, the last days demonstrate not the sexism of the French, but the puritanism and general lack of sophistication of all Americans.

A lot of this is just plain silly. America’s image of the average Frenchman as an uninhibited pervert is as much of a self-glorifying projection as is France’s image of the average American as an enthusiastic participant in a lynch mob. But beyond these clichés, the current debate actually raises real differences of outlook that are worth taking seriously.

The first, and more widely discussed, of these differences is about the role of sex in contemporary democracies: should we care about the private lives of our leaders? The other, less obvious but equally important, question is about the role of past achievements: to what extent should a person’s lifelong contributions to society offset his or her current misdeeds?...