Is Paris Burning?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

What is happening in Paris?

It looks like one more stage in the general collapse of the left, following in the footsteps of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Granted, Macron's government is centrist, not leftist, but the nominal cause of these riots is high gas prices due to carbon taxes, and the protesters are apparently flooding in from the conservative countryside.

Gandhi supposedly said that fundamental change comes about in three stages. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

This seems to have been the trajectory followed by the modern “right,” and we are at the “fight” stage. Or maybe now past it. Not long ago, in Canada and Europe, you just did not hear any but a limited set of “politically correct views” anywhere in the media. A vast range of possible views were simply and literally publicly unspeakable. Then voices like Rush Limbaugh began to be heard. And they were mocked and ridiculed. Then as they demonstrably gained a large audience, the Fox News and National Post stage, they were declared dangerous, racist, fascist, “far right,” alt-right, “white supremacist.” Leftists poured into the streets wearing black masks to disrupt. They began mobbing people in restaurants. They began campaigns of lawfare against rightists. They began strong-arming through a leftist judiciary.

This looks bad, but is actually a sign of desperation. Nothing else has worked. You would not need to resort to an activist judiciary, for example, or a rogue bureaucracy, if popular opinion was with you. You do not need to use force and intimidation if you can count on winning elections or arguments. We now seem to be at the stage at which an overall, if still slender, majority of the population in the developed world are actually “far right.” Making this description a contradiction in terms.

Probably it is already really more than a slender majority. The average person can always be cowed into pretending to accept and believe the socially acceptable line, out of fear of ridicule or other social consequences. If everyone else is using the Nazi salute, he does not want to be  seen not using the Nazi salute. If he is told that only racist bigots and uneducated antisocial egotists are against carbon taxes, for some time, he can be counted on not to express opposition to carbon taxes, no matter what his real views, for fear of being declared a racist bigot and an uneducated antisocial egotist.

But when allegiance is maintained by fear and intimidation, it can collapse quickly and violently.

And there, perhaps, we are.