Remember how they said he would hold back the populist tsunami and save the EU from the pesky public’s anger? The Economist even published an image of him walking on water, the nutters. Now we know that, far from defeating the populist thirst for change, Macron has inflamed it. His aristocratic attitude, his preference for rubbing shoulders with the likes of Barnier and Merkel over your average French citizen, his pursuit of eco-signalling government policies with not a single thought for the impact they might have on ordinary people, have intensified the populist moment. Macron will go down in history not as the president who switched off public fury but who intensified it.
And the second reason this revolt is important is because it suggests that no modern orthodoxy is safe from the populist fightback. Not even the environmentalist one.
For years we have lived in a climate of ‘You can’t say that’. You can’t criticise mass immigration — that’s xenophobia. You can’t oppose the EU — that’s Europhobia. You can’t raise concerns about radical Islam — that’s Islamophobia. You can’t agitate against climate-change policy — that’s climate-change denialism, on a par with Holocaust denialism, and anyone who dares to bristle against eco-orthodoxy deserves to be cast out of polite society. And yet now, in this populist moment, people are daring to say precisely these unsayable things. They’re standing up to the EU. They’re demanding that immigration become a democratic concern rather than something worked out for us by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. And now they’re even grating against the hitherto unquestionable religious-style diktat that we must all drive less, shop less and do less in order to ‘save the planet’.
https://outline.com/DBEtNf
And the second reason this revolt is important is because it suggests that no modern orthodoxy is safe from the populist fightback. Not even the environmentalist one.
For years we have lived in a climate of ‘You can’t say that’. You can’t criticise mass immigration — that’s xenophobia. You can’t oppose the EU — that’s Europhobia. You can’t raise concerns about radical Islam — that’s Islamophobia. You can’t agitate against climate-change policy — that’s climate-change denialism, on a par with Holocaust denialism, and anyone who dares to bristle against eco-orthodoxy deserves to be cast out of polite society. And yet now, in this populist moment, people are daring to say precisely these unsayable things. They’re standing up to the EU. They’re demanding that immigration become a democratic concern rather than something worked out for us by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. And now they’re even grating against the hitherto unquestionable religious-style diktat that we must all drive less, shop less and do less in order to ‘save the planet’.
https://outline.com/DBEtNf
