6 May 2018 (Serifos, Greece) – This weekend Gideon Lichfield (founder of Quartz and a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine) blogged:
Some 10 days ago, two promising, charismatic young leaders went to ritually commune with the blue-collar masses. Emmanuel Macron, whom France will probably elect president on May 7, went to a Whirlpool plant in Amiens, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped in at a Ford factory near Detroit.
Macron’s visit will be remembered chiefly because his right-wing rival, Marine Le Pen, got there first and upstaged him, casting him as an elitist out of touch with the common worker. Zuckerberg’s visit, while a lot less dramatic, may be remembered because it was the first in a 30-state tour that looks suspiciously like the start of a possible campaign for the US presidency.
What made the two visits similar was their incongruity. Each involved a man who claims to speak for the future paying homage at a temple of the past – the factory. Macron was evidently trying to look alert to voters’ worries about globalization, since Whirlpool plans to move its plant to Poland. Zuckerberg seemed to be trying to look sensitive to fears of automation (though his admiring comment about how assembly-line workers performed the same set of tasks “every 52 seconds…650 times a day” also read like a veiled warning: what could be a more perfect job for a robot?)
In reality, globalization and – to a larger extent – automation have already claimed many manufacturing jobs in the West and will doubtless claim more. Let’s face it: if factories can be brought back from Asia and eastern Europe, they will be staffed by machines.
And oh, the irony. The futility. As Gordon suggests, no politician (or would-be politician) is yet willing to confront voters with the impending reality, nor prepared to make the hard political decisions it will inevitably entail.
Over the last two years I have focused on the French elections. And European populism in general. Nothing focuses the mind on politics better than when you have money at stake. Having offices and staff in Athens, Brussels, and Paris … with the dubious honor of paying beaucoup of taxes in those locations … I tend to read the local political press or have my colleagues follow it for me.
But what makes France a wee bit different … and more akin to the U.S. elections last year … is this loss of labels. To so many French citizens the left, the right, the center, the “whatever” are all the same. And that “whatever” really distills all of their disappointments: nobody is standing up for “us”. And I will get to the “us” in a minute.
About 2 years ago I was involved in a massive e-discovery case in France that involved assembling a team to collect electronic files, paper files and other information at over 16 locations across France: Brest, Gard, Lille, Nantes, Paris, Strasbourg, Toulouse, etc., etc. We quite literally traveled the entire country.
During that time I had the opportunity to speak with scores of people of different educational and social backgrounds, some fortunate and some rooted in poverty. I also began to understand the power of Le Pen and the National Front.
And in a way it is so simple. Yes, the issues are complex but the National Front has figured out how to mobilize “the invisible”. They have railed against poor working conditions and unemployment, laying all the blame on immigration or the European Union. In the absence of any attempt by the left to discuss their suffering, people will latch on to the false explanations offered by the far right. The French writer Édouard Louis, who came from a very poor area of France, explained it this way in his book about growing up in rural France:
My father had felt abandoned by the political left since the 1980s, when it began adopting the language and thinking of the free market. Across Europe, left-wing parties no longer spoke of social class, injustice and poverty, of suffering, pain and exhaustion. They talked about modernization, growth and harmony in diversity, about communication, social dialogue and calming tensions. My father understood that this technocratic vocabulary was meant to shut up workers and spread neoliberalism. The left wasn’t fighting for the working class, against the laws of the marketplace; it was trying to manage the lives of the working class from within those laws.
Louis wanted to bear witness to the poverty and exclusion that were part of everyday experience in France. He was struck and troubled that the life he knew all those years never appeared in books, in newspapers or on TV. Every time he heard someone talk about “France,” on the news or even in the street, he knew they weren’t talking about the people he had grown up with. He grew up in a town where nearly everyone worked for the same factory. But after several waves of layoffs and after the factory was moved out of France, most of the people around him were out of work and had to survive as best they could on welfare.
Note: Louis’ book is a novel and was recently issued in English under the title “The End of Eddy”. But it is an instance of what is sometimes called autofiction, which has been the source of some of the most interesting English-language fiction of the past decade. There is a long tradition of such writing, especially in French: behind all such novels lies the example of Proust; the works of the French novelist Hervé Guibert and the American Edmund White.
I heard this same story about Louis’ father repeated countless times in many cities across France. Geographically, the National Front has seen its progress slow in historic bastions of the southeast, along the Mediterranean coast, while it has grown steadily-drawing in large part on working-class votes-in the industrial North. But the notable evolution of the National Front electorate has been its proletarianization. Beginning in the mid-1990s and steadily increasing thereafter, the percentage of voting French workers who intend to cast their ballots for the Front now stands at 42 percent. Macron’s weak showing among working-class voters is emblematically identical to Le Pen’s share of senior executives (13 percent).
And while a vast majority of the French cite their allegiance to the European “idea” or “project,” the opposition vote instead reflects preoccupations with jobs and benefits – including worries about unemployment (60 percent), excessive economic liberalism (19 percent), and insufficient social protections (16 percent).
With a big hat tip to Grey Anderson for providing the detailed vote/poll analysis noted above.
And there is another interesting dichotomy. Macron is very much a proponent of high-tech. The entrepreneurial community has found a kindred spirit. He has been only too happy to associate himself with France’s burgeoning tech scene, hoping its open-mindedness and can-do attitude would reflect back on him. Said one tech entrepreneur I spoke with:
Macron has a deep understanding of how digital transformation is profoundly changing the economy and society. We think of Macron as the guy who disrupted politics. And we like that.
But, alas, not everyone in France likes disrupters. The left has attacked Macron’s embrace of technology and modest de-regulation, saying it amounts to the “Uberization” of society, or the erosion of workers’ rights. It is a line now echoed by Le Pen. Because to many people in France, especially those attracted to the far right, France’s tech entrepreneurs are the epitome of a globalized elite: highly educated, socially liberal and footloose.
Yes, a vote for the National Front is of course a vote tinged with racism and homophobia. Something many will admit. But for many these elections really mean a chance to fight this sense of “invisibility” I noted above. A fight against the minds of the bourgeoisie who think their existence doesn’t count, isn’t real.
I saw this same feeling across America. When I was in Chicago last summer, Gabe Zeptum, a sociologist who studied the rise of the Tea Party, explained it as people who saw themselves betrayed by “line-cutters” – black people, immigrants, women and gays – who jumped ahead of them in the queue for the American dream. Southerners feel patronized and humiliated by northerners who tell them whom to feel sorry for, then dismiss them as bigots when they do not. They feel they are victims of stagnant wages and affirmative action but without the language of victimhood: struggling Southerners are not “poor-me’s”. They believe that they are honorable people in a world where traditional sources of honor – faith, independence and endurance – seem to go unrecognized. Well, until Donald Trump began offering hope and emotional affirmation.
The clincher for me was at a Trump rally (yes, I attended one) where I met one chap … one of the few literate in the bunch … who talked about the “Trump Train”. He talked about Trump’s “track record of success” (I was not there to argue) and he admitted “yes, he has a foul mouth and talks like a sailor and treats women crappy and I will never agree with him on everything”.
But then the money shot:
The thing is nobody has been able to fix my problem and this man tells me that he can. I believe him and I am going to hire him to do the job. We Donald Trump supporters don’t agree with everything that he has done in the past and we all wish that he would make it easier for us to stand up and fight for him but the Trump Train continues to grow and grow and grow. Automation. Globalization. Bullshit fiscal policy. It’s killing us.
The tide of populism sweeping Europe and the United States is a consequence of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “the principle of the conservation of violence.” When you’re subjected to endless violence … especially mentally, in every situation, every moment of your life … you end up reproducing it against others, in other situations, by other means.
If you had an opportunity to watch Marine Le Pen in the candidate debate this past Wednesday you saw her try to imitate some of Donald Trump’s antics. She managed to channel his aggressiveness, contempt for facts, provocations, rabid boastfulness and bouts of unleashed absurdity.
Yes, yes, yes. Media fact-checkers were busy dismantling most of her claims on the euro and on industrial policy, but Le Pen’s gamble was that brutal cynicism and vulgar personal attacks – including on Macron’s private life, when she said “playing the teacher and the student” wouldn’t work out with her – would help demonstrate she’s in tune with popular rage.
But there are limits to opprobrium and stigma to rebuff such actions. Today, writers, journalists and liberals bear the weight of responsibility for the future. Because alternative facts, used as a political weapon, are here to stay in the fabric of western democracies. They are the vehicle whose purpose is to channel popular anger.
To persuade people not to vote for the likes of Marine Le Pen, it’s not enough to show that she is racist and dangerous: everyone knows that already. It’s not enough to fight against hate or against her. We have to fight for the powerless, in a language … with a real purpose and intent, not just words … that gives a place to the most invisible people – people like those I met in America and France.