Trump, Brexit and Yellow Vests: “To Understand American Political Anger, Look to ‘Peripheral France’ ”

"You segregate yourself but continue to talk about an open society. That’s the paradox."

Speaking for myself, I find the analysis compelling.

To Understand American Political Anger, Look to ‘Peripheral France’, by Ian Klaus (CityLab)

French geographer Christophe Guilluy has a controversial diagnosis of working-class resentment in the age of Trump, Brexit, and the Yellow Vests.

Ever since the twin 2016 ballot-booth surprises of Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, academics, journalists, and policymakers have been looking intently at geographic divides—in particular, the gap between urban and rural communities. The arrival of the Gilets Jaunes—the Yellow Vests—on the streets and squares of French cities in 2018 prompted a similar searching. Led initially by disgruntled motorists protesting government fuel taxes, the Yellow Vests tapped a familiar vein of populist anger against an increasingly out-of-touch urban elite. To understand what the movement wanted, many turned to the work of French geographer Christophe Guilluy.

Before the Yellow Vests emerged, Guilluy laid out a searing indictment of trans-Atlantic capitalism and its urban forms in his books La France Périphérique and Twilight of the Elites, the latter of which has recently been published in English. Focusing on smaller French cities and rural areas, the 54-year-old writer takes aim at liberal articles of faith around openness, cosmopolitanism, protest, and multiculturalism. Provocative in print, congenial in conversation, Guilluy spoke with CityLab on why “urban” is a useless concept, the problem with the “cool bourgeoisie,” and why Notre Dame belongs to more than just Parisians. Our conversation was translated by Dylan Yaeger and has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Let's skip to the conclusion.

Ultimately, I think that what is interesting is to see that the global economic model has produced the same effects in all the Western democracies. We cannot continue to act as if the Yellow Vests or Trump’s electorate or the Brexiteers don’t exist. These people exist. They exist in regions very removed from the globalized city, and we need to come up with an economic model for them. We don’t have a choice. They will be here for around 100 years. So, whatever else, we need to think differently about space.

A brief but solid video overview of France's "yellow vest rebellion."

Courtesy of Deutsche Welle's documentary series (in English).

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France's yellow vest rebellion - a movement against Macron

Who are the "yellow vests” that have plunged France into crisis? Hundreds of thousands have been demonstrating to demand lower taxes and higher pensions.

What began as a spontaneous protest against high gasoline prices swiftly evolved into a mass movement that has caused a major crisis in France. The "yellow vests” have become synonymous with the widespread anger at the reform policies of President Emmanuel Macron - and constitute his greatest challenge since he took office. The protesters accuse Macron of being a representative of the rich while ignoring the plight of ordinary citizens. The wave of demonstrations was triggered by Jacline Mouraud and her video tirade on social media. Her subsequent fame has enabled her to continue criticizing politicians on TV talk shows. The "yellow vest” demonstrations have been organized almost exclusively online and without the involvement of opposition parties or unions.

The protesters have a range of demands, from lower taxes to high pensions and a greater say in the running of the country. They feel neglected by the Paris elite, who they see as showing no interest in their economic duress and fears of social decline.

Yellow vest protests: "Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular."

We needn't worry here. BOW would refuse the parade permit.

The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

The yellow vest protests are more nuanced than American pundits want to admit

“What’s wrong with elitism?” asked Washington Post columnist Max Boot this week on Twitter. Boot posed this in a discussion about the merits of centrism, raised in the context of the “yellow vest” protests against the government of Emmanuel Macron in France.

American media seems to be confused by the protests. Few seem to understand what protesters want, or even who they are. Some outlets describe protesters as Trump-like nationalists aligned with Marine Le Pen, others as antifa-style leftists aligned with Jean-Luc Melenchon.

The marchers actually cut across all political lines, and if anything, both Le Pen and Melenchon are trying to attach themselves to something independent of them. Unifying factors seem to be hatred of Macron and a desire to express this in profane fashion (the New Yorker noted that many of the protest slogans are colorful variations on the theme of people being literally screwed by Macron).

snip

Macron has a 23 percent approval rating, Paris seems to be on fire, and people are even spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe. How, Boot asked, could all this be happening to such a cool politician? When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled.

What’s wrong with elitism? Don’t we all want the best at the helm? You wouldn’t want an un-elite airline pilot, would you?

This was the Spinal Tap version of neoliberalism: what’s wrong with being elite?

The inability of pundits to make sense of the plummeting popularity of “centrism” is a long-developing story in the West.

Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular.

See: NAFTA, the creation of the WTO and GATT, deregulation of the banking sector, multiple unnecessary wars, tax holidays and other corporate subsidies like bans on drug re-importation, mass construction of prisons during an era of sharply declining crime (coupled with broad non-enforcement of white-collar offenses), and so on.

Allow me to recommend supplemental reading.

The Marxist Pop-Culture Theorist Who Influenced a Generation, by Rob Arcand (The Nation)

Through his blog, k-punk, Mark Fisher pioneered a different kind of cultural criticism.

... Across three books, numerous magazine pieces, and hundreds of short essays, Fisher established a vast and totalizing worldview defined by his thoughts on capitalism, media, and the afterlife. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism” to describe a specific belief increasingly common with politicians in both the UK and North America, that no matter how bad things were under capitalism, the roughly 300-year-old political and economic system had become the only viable option—with it all but impossible to imagine any realistic alternative to the current global marketplace.

Building on the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, Fisher regarded the expression that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” as more than mere Marxist fatalism; his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism, approached film, literature, and music as a lens into the phenomenon for which it was named—a manifesto for some lasting alternative to global capitalism, inspired by the art he loved. But before their inclusion in Capitalist Realism, almost all of the writing here existed in earlier forms as essays and posts on Fisher’s blog, k-punk.