Donald Trump at Camp David, 2018 (White House Archive: Public Domain)
[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism–ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1938
I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble.” –Joe Biden, 2018
“One of the tragedies of the Trump era,” author Fatima Bhutto recently lamented, “has been how American liberals have co-opted and utterly ruined the word “resistance” so that it now applies to neo-con interventionist hawks, former CIA directors and anyone who has ever tweeted against the 45th president.” Partisan politicos should note that the neo-con interventionist hawks Bhutto is referring to are Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright and, thanks to the welcoming embrace of Michelle Obama, the waterboarding torture president, George W. Bush.
“Madeleine Albright,” Bhutto scathingly emphasizes, “who claimed that the death of a half-million children in Iraq in the 1990s was ‘worth it’, can be hailed as a principled anti-fascist fighter […].” She makes a valid point, I think. In the idiom of the Star Wars franchise, this version of The Resistance bears too much resemblance to the Death Star to serve as a convincing Rebel Base. These are not the anti-fascists you are looking for.
Bhutto’s observations allude to something unsettling and, at first blush, bizzare about the contemporary state of liberalism–especially American liberalism. American liberals are simultaneously obsessed with and not very serious about resisting reactionary-fascist politics. How can this be? In this first of several pieces exploring the relationship between liberalism and internationally ascendant far-right authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and reactionary-fascist politics, I want to venture an explanation of this odd ‘obsessed/unserious’ state of affairs. My hope in writing this is a very practical one: that in some small way it’ll provide a bit of political insight for those of us trying to making sense of the political jockeying taking place as we ramp up for the 2020 election cycle.
In the course of these explorations it will quickly become apparent that this narrowly inscribed conflict–liberalism versus fascism–is far too narrow and ill-construed to afford us much practicable political insight. Rather than a head-to-head competition of political ideologies fought in a mythic ‘public marketplace of ideas’–tried and true liberal democracy battling against the out-of-the-blue resurgence of a hateful ideology we thought we’d buried on the battlefields of Europe–I want to suggest that it would be wiser for us to view the rise of reactionary-fascist politics as a symptom of a global crisis of liberal centrist governance. This crisis is, in turn, fueled by broader crises, the most prominent of which are the still unresolved deep crisis of global capitalism revealed in the financial crisis of 2008, the consequent growing recognition and popular dissatisfaction with the deleterious effects of neoliberal ideology, and the destabilizing geopolitical impact of the United States’ waning status as the world’s first true (and perhaps last) global hegemon.
This is obviously far more than we can chew in one bite, so for now let’s focus on mainstream American liberals’ fickle attitude about fascists.
Liberalism, Political and Economic
On one hand, American liberals are very much worried about the rise of authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and neo-fascist movements–particularly as exemplified by Donald Trump. A quick glance at Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s new book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them reveals that Trump almost instinctively displays many archetypal fascist characteristics. Among them are: racist animus, anti-immigrant nativism, ethnonationalist and ethno-supremacist mythologizing, valorization of the authoritarian strong-man daddy/protector figure, basic contempt for democratic institutions, valorization of masculine violence, hetero-conventional gender hysteria, and toxic, machismo-fueled misogyny, and (rarer but far from absent in Trump whose daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren are Jewish) violence-provoking anti-Semitic dog whistling. All of this is an affront to liberal political and moral sensibilities and American liberals are appropriately repulsed by it.
On the other hand, however, American liberalism is still in the drunken throes of a 40-year neoliberal bender, awash in corporate influence money, fawning towards Wall Street, celebrity, and elite wealth while contemptuously indifferent to the plight of working people, and willfully naïve about the uses, abuses, and consequences of American imperial power abroad. If these are the people you were hoping would save us all from fascism, I wouldn’t hold my breath. To the contrary, actually. Revulsion towards this ideologically neoliberal, economically-elitist, corporate capitalist comportment (which mainstream Democrats and Republicans share), fueled by the suffering and humiliation induced by the Great Recession, are the main ingredients in the toxic reactionary cocktail that produced a President Trump in the first place. After all, reactionary-fascist politics are just that: reactionary. They’re reacting to the very thing that American liberalism has invested itself in defending for the past 40 years: a global system of winner-take-all corporate capitalism so dysfunctional, so destructive to the lives of ordinary people, so caustic to social cohesion, and in such deep structural crisis that it’s destroying people’s hope for some semblance of ‘the good life’ and ‘the American Dream’ on a grand (dare I say popular) scale.
Liberalism’s two historical branches–political liberalism, which (among other things) valorizes the freedom of citizens, and economic liberalism, which valorizes the freedom of the market–have always cohabitated in uneasy tension. However, the current manifestation of economic liberalism, neoliberalism, has become so antagonistic to the better angels of our politically liberal nature that it’s generating a liberal democratic legitimation crisis–not just in the United States, but throughout the liberal democratic world. To put the matter in the simplest terms possible: political liberalism finds fascism abhorrent and neoliberalism in deep crisis is a fascist generator. As long as the latter problem goes unaddressed, the former attitude doesn’t really lead us anywhere.
This largely unreflected and unresolved conflict lives deep in the heart of the early 21st century mainstream American liberal. It at least partially explains the kind of ideological schizophrenia we saw from American liberal centrists leading up to the midterm election Blue Wave, and that we’ll continue to see as we move towards the 2020 elections. Progressive in their vehement opposition to the racist, misogynist, neo-fascist Trump. Strangely conservative in their defense of a devastating economic status quo ante–in evidence most clearly in the form of undercutting proposals from the economic left (e.g., Medicare for All, tuition reform, progressive taxation, a Green New Deal, etc.).
Progressive Neoliberalism
The feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser offers an extremely useful framework for understanding the odd unreflected and unresolved conflict in liberalism I describe above. Fraser appeals to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (i.e., the dominant ideology of a ruling class established through a process of naturalizing the presuppositions of its worldview to the point that they are accepted as “common sense” cultural norms). Because it is internalized as commonsensical and natural, hegemony is obviously extremely difficult to counter.
The organizational counterpart to hegemony, Fraser explains, is the hegemonic bloc, “a coalition of disparate social forces that the ruling class assembles and through which it asserts its leadership.”
Until Donald Trump’s rise to power, Fraser argues, the dominant hegemonic bloc was progressive neoliberalism. If that sounds like an oxymoron, bear in mind that it’s effectively the unreflected and unresolved conflict I described above that lives deep in the heart of the early 21st century mainstream American liberal.
Progressive neoliberalism rose to dominance from among several hegemonic contenders. It’s main rival was reactionary neoliberalism of the sort birthed in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan. Reactionary neoliberalism married neoliberal economics and governance (financialization, deindustrialization, the free movement of capital, deregulation of banking, the growth of predatory lending, the weakening of labor unions, tax cuts and austerity, the uncoupling of the market from democratic steering) to reactionary politics (traditional marriage, Christian fundamentalism, neo-nationalist patriotism, and overt forms of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia). Reagan formulated this ideological coupling by simultaneously championing neoliberal economic policy while rallying the, up to that point, apolitical “Moral Majority” of Christian fundamentalists into active political participation. It’s interesting to note that Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand, a pro-choice and anti-religious neoliberal of the Hayekian libertarian variety, hated Reagan because of it. It was nevertheless popular enough to survive as a counterhegemonic contender via the ‘culture wars’ into the 21th century present.
Fraser notes, however, that this conservative configuration of neoliberalism proved incapable of becoming hegemonic largely because the country was still coming out of the pro-labor and pro-democratic welfare state sensibilities of the New Deal and the social movements and civil rights revolution of the 1960s New Left. These sensibilities made neoliberalism a hard sell. “Only when decked out as progressive,” Fraser writes, “could a deeply regressive political economy become the dynamic center of a new hegemonic bloc.”
To become hegemonic, Fraser explains, progressive neoliberalism married an “expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition.” To succeed it first had to put down two main rivals: it had to destroy what remained of the New Deal coalition and it had to defeat reactionary neoliberalism. The former task, as we well know, was accomplished by gradually destroying the political power of organized labor. It accomplished the latter by embracing the kind of progressivism-decoupled-from-economics exemplified by New Left social movement politics. That is to say, it championed anti-racism, feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights.
The progressive neoliberal hegemonic bloc has now failed, thanks largely to the damage caused by neoliberal economics and the 2008 financial crisis. This failure was occasioned by populist backlashes on the right and left. This backlash initially became apparent in the rise of the Tea Party Movement. It was followed by Occupy Wall Street. It came to a head, as we all know, leading up to the 2016 election cycle. The first wave of socialist-progressive populist push-back–represented in the presidential bid of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders riding the wave of Occupy Wall Street anger–was successfully put down by Hillary Clinton and the progressive neoliberal Democratic National Committee. Neoliberals in the Republican Party, however, failed to put down the reactionary populist backlash represented by the presidential bid of billionaire reality TV star Donald Trump, who ran on a campaign attacking both progressivism and neoliberalism.
Interregnum and Political Opportunity
So where does this leave us presently? Nancy Fraser suggests that are living in an interregnum. There is no dominant hegemonic bloc at the moment. Ever the con man, Donald Trump ran on a reactionary populist platform, promising to improve the material lives of his supporters. He’s ended up governing, instead, as a hyper-reactionary neoliberal, a bait-and-switch that was all-too-willingly backed by congressional Republican (and a few Democrat) neoliberals who were more than willing to look the other way where anti-democratic, legally-dubious, and neo-fascist misbehavior is concerned so long as they could continue to serve the interests of the corporate constituency who, in our post-Citizens United political environment, own them. Instead of dismantling neoliberal economic policy in favor of policies to help working people, Trump’s GOP offered tax cuts for the rich, attacks on affordable healthcare, a ballooning deficit, and repeated cries for more austerity. The sheer excess of the tax cuts for corporations and the rich (effectively 40%) under current economic conditions is, according to the Marxian economist Richard Wolff, reminiscent of the opulence of the succession of Kings Louis prior to the French Revolution. That it would come as a surprise to anyone that the billionaire grifter ended up supporting the interests of wealthy elites at the expense of poor, working, and middle class people is a testament to the power of a long-hegemonic ideology.
Trump’s populist betrayal affords an opportunity, given that a “hegemonic gap” still exists in the vacuum of a failed progressive neoliberalism. That opportunity is to convince Trump’s followers to reject their “crypto-neoliberal” faux-allies to join other economic populists in supporting the progressive populist option that Senator Sanders championed. It’s economically populist like the platform Trump promised but failed to deliver, but universalist and inclusive rather than protectionist. It would entail demonstrating (which shouldn’t be difficult at this point) that no amount of border wall construction or scapegoating of foreigners is ever going to restore middle class jobs and the American Dream they feel they’ve been cheated out of. Doing this is, in my opinion, what is required to resist fascism seriously. This is the alternative offered by the growing contingent of democratic socialist and economically progressive voices that ran for and won office in the 2018 midterms.
To be successful, this economically progressive/democratic socialist alternative has to avoid the seducements and entrapments of neoliberal ideology, which is a quite formidable challenge. What happened with Syriza in Greece provides a cautionary tale in this regard (see the piece I wrote on neoliberalism and democracy in 2017). Neoliberal ideology not only has unlimited post-Citizens United “money as speech” supporting it. It’s also backed by decades of hegemonic weight, leading even very smart, informed people to view what is ultimately an ideology as natural, commonsensical, and inescapable–something for which, to quote Margaret Thatcher, “There Is No Alternative” (TINA).
These latter neoliberal dangers, of course, are the driving force behind a retrograde opportunity Trump’s betrayal also affords–the one we’ll see the liberal centrists attempt to pull off in 2020. By the liberal centrists, I mean the Rubinite/Clintonian New Democrats and their supporters who’ve controlled the Democratic party since Bill Clinton’s presidency; also people like the reliably swing-voting Blue Dogs ( Democrat enough to push through the Affordable Care Act, but Republican enough to unite with the GOP to kill the single payer option for the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies before it comes to a vote); the No Labels PAC-funded Problem Solvers Caucus, who recently held Nancy Pelosi’s speakership hostage in exchange for a weakening of House majority power; and finally, also that ever-shrinking, endangered species of ‘moderate’ Republican, like these three former Kansas Republicans, who remain committed neoliberals but who no longer have the stomach for the Trumpian fascist turn.
These liberal centrists will attempt to prop up a dysfunctional neoliberal capitalism in deep systemic crisis a bit longer, dragging out the mass scale human suffering it produces for the benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. They’ll do so by attempting to reinstate the lost status quo ante of progressive neoliberalism. Using unlimited corporate money, they’ll attack not only Trump but also progressive challengers to their left. Since progressive neoliberalism has already been dethroned (i.e., is no longer widely credible) as the dominant hegemonic bloc, propping it up a bit longer merely prolongs the interregnum. More importantly, as Nancy Fraser argues, “To reinstate progressive neoliberalism, on any basis, is to recreate—indeed, to exacerbate—the very conditions that created Trump. And that means preparing the ground for future Trumps—ever more vicious and dangerous.” In other words, it offers an anti-anti-fascist solution, and one that’s guaranteed to fail even if it ‘wins’.
In the few sections remaining I want to suggest that we use the framework of understanding provided by Nancy Fraser as something of a practical roadmap for deciphering the moves on the political gameboard coming out of the 2018 midterm Blue Wave and heading toward the 2020 election.
Lament for the Washington Consensus
Despite what I’ve shared above, and given how pernicious the ideological seducements of a hegemonic bloc can be, I am well aware that there are progressive Democrats who will take great umbrage toward what I’m about to write. I imagine the following retort. These liberal centrists–at least the Democrat ones–aren’t as economically regressive and plutocratic as I’ve painted them to be. Many of them are incredibly progressive. They’re anti-racist. They advocate for trans rights. They fought for gay marriage. They defend reproductive rights. They’re trying to protect immigrants. They’re the people behind the #meToo movement for crying out loud!
The progressive accolades in the latter part of this retort are are of course true. The opening apologia (that they’re not cold neoliberals) is simply false. That’s why the odd couplet progressive neoliberalism has been so effective.
To illustrate my point, and before diving in, I want to share a speech that former President Barack Obama gave as part of a panel discussion not a month ago (November 27, 2018). This was in the course of a panel discussion with James Baker (Ronald Reagan’s White House Chief of Staff and later his Treasury Secretary, and George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State). The occasion was the 25th anniversary gala and fundraiser for the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston (a pro-corporate think tank). You can watch the conversation in its entirety yourself here, although if you are a progressive fan of President Obama I will warn you that it’s hard to watch. For a synopsis of the key points with transcripts I suggest you watch here. I watched the conversation earlier this week and I confess that I was shocked by President Obama’s candor.
Obama and Baker shared their lament about the dissolution of the neoliberal Washington Consensus that reigned, as Obama stated, “between Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and certainly elements of my administration […].” Both men admitted that they’d gotten a “little smug” at the end of the Cold War. They even shared a joke at the expense of Francis Fukuyama regarding The End of History. President Obama acknowledged that the consensus, and the global capitalism it fueled, destroyed jobs in areas hit hardest by economic globalization, left a lot of people behind, lead to the massive increase in inequality we’ve seen, and helped to fuel the rise of the far right.
There is nothing shocking about these claims which, after all, any careful student of geopolitics already knew. What was shocking was hearing the words come out of President Obama’s own mouth, acknowledging and owning the accusations and admitting, despite these harsh conclusions, that he still considers himself to be a part of the consensus. He even went so far as to complain, only weeks after publication of the IPCC’s urgent and alarming report about climate change, that he hadn’t received appropriate credit for increasing oil production every year he was president (“That whole, ‘Suddenly America is the biggest oil producer’ — that was me, people!”), and for making Wall Street rich (“Just say thank you, please.”).
I mention this conversation between two American liberal centrists (one Democrat and one Republican) as an indication of what we can expect from the centrist mainstream wing of the Democratic Party as the 2020 election approaches. In essence, what we’ll see is a reenactment of the struggle Nancy Fraser described in discussing progressive neoliberalism‘s initial hegemonic rise. It again will attempt to put down two main rivals: it will attempt to destroy, not a residual New Deal coalition dating from the time of FDR and the Great Depression, but instead the rise of a Green New Deal coalition emerging out of the Great Recession. And it must also defeat not simply a reactionary neoliberalism, but a hyper-reactionary neoliberalism. And our job, if we hope for the continued ability to hope, is to keep this from happening.
The Blue Wave and the Road to 2020
As Democratic momentum grew in support of the midterm Blue Wave last fall a certain progressive neoliberal narrative began to take shape. The gist of the strategy was basically to play up the progressivism, but to coyly ix-ne on the eoliberalism-ne. Out of the progressive neoliberal toolkit you had available the full force of New Left progressivism to use as a cudgel. And as an awful, fascistic, “pussy-grabbing” chauvinist, Trump makes an easy target. He’s a racist. He’s a homophobe. He’s a misogynist. He’s a danger to the transgender community. He’s a white supremacist. All so, so true.
As for the economic populism Trump ran on? No no. Don’t go there. To every think piece that suggests Trump’s supporters voted out of “economic anxiety” you must object. No! Trump’s supporters voted for Trump because they’re…(re-apply progressive cudgel here). They’re racists, they’re nazis, they’re misogynists, they’re a “basket of deplorables,” etc. Why is reactionary-fascist politics popular? Because haters gunna hate.
The general idea was that this Blue Wave of Democrats were going to wash away those alarmingly irresponsible Republicans who’d gotten cozy with the fascist president. At some point Robert Mueller will strike his hammerblow, and he’ll prove that Trump is also a usurper, that the reason the Democrats didn’t prevail in 2016 is because of collusion with foreign governments and widespread Russian election meddling. This part is key. This is the collusion narrative, and the DNC has a lot of its eggs in this basket. For DNC water carriers like Rachel Maddow it’s been the only thing worth talking about for two years. There are other impeachable crimes that the Mueller investigation may uncover. Obstruction of justice, for instance. Violation of the Emoluments Clause. Nevertheless, the collusion charge is the important one.
If Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election, that means Hillary Clinton wasn’t beaten at the polls by an incompetent reality television star with fascist instincts. It means she was robbed. And if Hillary Clinton was robbed, then the charge that she was a weak candidate and that the Democratic Party’s progressive neoliberal platform was out-of-touch with voters isn’t necessarily true. In other words, the collusion narrative offers cover for otherwise having to rehash embarrassing economic questions raised against a neoliberal candidate who give $657,000 speeches to Goldman-Sachs because “that’s what they offered.”
Challenges from the economically progressive and democratic socialist left obviously prove even more difficult to check on economic grounds. Unable to grab any economic tools from the progressive neoliberal toolkit without risking getting throttled on economic policy, again the centrist Democrats reached for the progressive cudgel, insisting, in the lead up to 2016, that “old white man” Bernie Sanders had a black problem and a woman problem (to which Briahna Gray, to her credit, played a continual game of identity politics whack-a-mole to disprove). And worse from Gloria Steinem (women who like Bernie are “boy crazy”), Madeleine Albright (women who don’t vote for Hillary are going to hell), and John Lewis (who never “bumped into” Bernie Sanders during the Civil Rights era). I wrote about this whole phenomenon in detail last summer in a piece entitled The Neoliberal Left is an Anti-Left.
When the progressive cudgel couldn’t be used on a democratic socialist Latina woman (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the narrative had to switch to one explaining how democratic socialist (i.e., neoliberalism-challenging) economic proposals were all so much idealistic and unwinnable “pie in the sky” (TINA). What is needed instead is good old stodgy, even-keeled moderate centrist incrementalism.
Of course Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer needs to walk back efforts to champion Medicare for All. “I’m going to support a plan that can pass […],” he insists. By “can pass” it would not be at all cynical to assume he means “meets the requirements of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.”
Similarly, of course there will be no select congressional committee on a Green New Deal, despite a very recent poll that reveals that 81% of registered voters–including 64% of Republicans–support Green New Deal provisions. When the terrifying IPCC report suggests that radical intervention is needed within the next dozen years, including not only the cessation of fossil fuel usage, but actual carbon capturing efforts like massive reforestation if we want to literally save organized human life on earth, the centrists will say it sounds like some old fashioned incremental change is what’s needed. We’ll slide into this climate change problem–test the waters for the fossil fuel lobby, so to speak. We’ll call up Kathy Castor (D-Fla) to resurrect the defunct House panel on climate change. And unlike other congressional committees it will be advisory only, with no subpoena power. And no, of course we won’t block membership to representatives who are funded by fossil fuel interests. That’d be an affront to the First Amendment!
Finally, in a time when a reactionary-fascist aspiring President has captured a major political party machine and the rest of us are suppose to be “resisting,” liberal centrists will insist that now is the time to “come together as a nation” to “heal” and reject all of this “tribal divisiveness.” That’s a desirable goal. The way to do it is to join together to address our collective social, economic, and environmental challenges. But that’s not what the gesture aims to accomplish. It is, instead, a call for the old center-right neoliberals in the Republican Party to join forces with the center-left neoliberals in the Democratic Party to crush these angry populists on the “far-right” and the “far-left” so that the proverbial 1% can keep all of the money until global warming drives the species to extinction. Charming, no?
The Liberal Centrist Dream
The path is clearly being paved. In two years, running roughly the same progressive-neoliberal playbook that Hillary Rodham Clinton used, we’ll elect a new sensible, moderate, centrist-incrementalist president. Who will it be? Neoliberal Joe Biden? Neoliberal Beto O’Rourke? Neoliberal Kamala Harris? Maybe Hillary herself if she’ll run again. And then what?
The dream, I suppose, is that the Europeans will join us by cobbling together various center-right and center-left TINA parties into Third Way style coalition governments. And magically the Pax Americana will be restored. We’ll all go back to being successful entrepreneurs, making money and posting beautiful photographs of our perfect lives on Instagram. We’ll champion various economically-benign progressive causes like (to paraphrase the Max Planck Institute’s Wolfgang Streek), helping women of high status secure high status executive positions in high status corporations, educational institutions, and the government, and by ensuring the tiny wealthy elite that owns the vast majority of the world’s power and resources offers a ‘fair’ arrangement by demanding that a representative minority of those elites consist of people of color in percentages that reflect the demographics of the wider population.
We’ll also re-commit to the Paris Agreement that President Obama signed up for while he was increasing oil production every year that he was president, and a combination of market incentives, green capitalism, and non-binding commitments will be just enough, and just in time, to preserve a habitable world for our children and grandchildren. Life will go back to the way it used to be before American nazis ran over their fellow Americans with cars, stabbed them to death on commuter trains, and shot them dead in Synagogue.
It’s a lovely dream, isn’t it?
Emmanuel Macron as Hillary Clinton: A Final Thought
I want to leave you with a final thought which illustrates, I think, why the progressive neoliberal centrists still fail even if they win. It’ll also set the stage for my next installment, which will focus more internationally on the crisis of liberal centrism throughout the world.
In an odd way, the fact that many Americans don’t realize that progressive neoliberalism has failed and cannot (should not!) be resuscitated has much to do with the fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t become president. We still have fantasies concerning how great things would be now had she only won. Of course, if she really had won we would suffer under no such delusions. The failure of progressive neoliberalism would be clear.
It’s possible to learn this lesson, however, by considering France’s progressive neoliberal president, Emmanuel Macron. In a sense sufficient for our little thought experiment, Emmanuel Macron is Hillary Clinton had Hillary Clinton actually become president. It might be interesting to ask in this context, how are things going for President Macron? Not so well it turns out. Just ask the gilets jaunes (yellow vests). What began as a protest against a hike in diesel fuel taxes by Macron–a tax that hit working class people particularly hard–has become a major popular movement. French protesters donning the yellow safety vests all French drivers are required to carry soon barricaded the streets, May ‘68 style. Hundreds of thousands of them. This began on November 17. To date the protests are still happening.
What’s interesting about the gilets jaunes is that, much like Occupy Wall Street, they’re not identified with a political party or ideology. This is a general economic protest by, as superbly illustrated by the yellow vest, “everyman/everywoman”.
Many of these people voted for Macron to keep Marine LePen’s neo-Fascist National Front from taking power. And Macron won. Why, then, aren’t the French people happy now? Might there be some sort of problem with France’s progressive neoliberal centrist government? Do we Americans have to go one more round with progressive neoliberalism to seriously ask this question of our own government? Ideologies die hard.
