More on the Riots

Adam Nossiter’s New York Times article about the “yellow jacket” riots in France, completely supports the observations I’ve made here in posts and in comments. First, about those yellow jackets. In France they are legally-mandated driving equipment. Consequently, the jackets identify the wearers as drivers.

Second, unlike the riots of recent years these rioters are not North Africans and/or sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants living in the urban banlieux:

The “Yellow Vest” protests he is a part of present an extraordinary venting of rage and resentment by ordinary working people, aimed at the mounting inequalities that have eroded their lives. The unrest began in response to rising gas taxes and has been building in intensity over the past three weeks, peaking on Saturday.

With little organization and relying mostly on social media, they have moved spontaneously from France’s poor rural regions over the last month to the banks of the Seine, where they have now become impossible to ignore.

They are not left or right. They are anti-Establishment whether left or right:

None of the Guéret protesters expressed allegiance to any politician: Most said politics disgusted them.

“They are all the same,” Mr. Dou said.

When Guéret’s mayor, Michel Vergnier, a veteran Socialist with decades of connections in Paris, went to see the protesters, they were not welcoming.

“There’s a rejection of politicians,” Mr. Vergnier said. “They are outside all political and union organizations.”

I think they more closely resemble the pro-Trump voters in the United States than they do previous political protesters in France.

Anne Applebaum, after observing that these protesters met and organized using the Internet, remarks:

With their origins firmly in cyberspace, the gilets jaunes aren’t connected to any existing political parties, although several are already trying to claim them. François Ruffin, a “far-left” politician with a vitriolic dislike of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has already appeared in gilets jaunes marches. Marine Le Pen, France’s “far-right” leader, has also leaped to their defense, and some suspect her followers — or maybe people with even more extreme agendas — may have been responsible for turning what had been peaceful protests in Paris on Saturday morning into violent riots on Saturday night. But any claims of affiliation are opportunism, because the movement itself has named no leader. It has instead appointed eight spokespeople, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and can’t be characterized as belonging to a single party, or even to a single social group.

Rather than an ideology or a clear philosophy, the gilets jaunes seem to share a set of attitudes, as well as what might be described as an aesthetic. They are angry about the green taxes that have raised gasoline prices, and they don’t like the speed limits on French roads. They are angry more generally, and this is part of why a movement that didn’t exist a month ago became consolidated so quickly: Anger is one of the things that travels quickly on social media, a form of communication that favors emotion; it’s also one of the things that brings people together in a world where trade unions, church organizations and political parties are fading in importance. One of the protestors has declared, “All of you” — meaning the political class in its entirety, far-left, far-right and centrist — “are no longer needed.”

What if anything will result from this is difficult to say but it seems to me to be a very important development.

8 comments… add one
  • Ben Wolf Link

    …members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desparately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
    At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…
    One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

    Richard Rorty, ignored and forced to the margins of academia by people who think the best use of their time is producing studies of spatial distribution of voting booths, wrote that in 1999.

    Meanwhile “democracy experts” (they know who they are) in good standing can’t figure Trump out two years after he was elected.

  • steve Link

    What percent of these are French farm workers? They are heavily protected and subsidized? How many of these are rail workers joining in because their well compensated jobs, with great benefits, are being cut back a bit?

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/the-guardian-view-on-frances-transport-strikes-make-or-break-for-macron

    Steve

  • What I’ve read (including in French language sources) is that the gilets jaunes began as rural French coming to Paris (in particular) to protest gas taxes and other regulations but have since been joined by railway workers.

    It will become a revolution if they’re joined by the police.

  • Ben Wolf Link

    RT has been useful in understanding the rage because they’ve actually bothered to interview protestors. And they’ve been very open that they’re pissed taxes are being shifted from the wealthy to the lower-middle classes and working poor, they’re pissed about unemployment and stagnant wages, and sick unto violence of the patriarchal contempt they endure from the metropolitan professional élite.

  • Tying in with another of my posts today, nobody is doing the math on climate change reforms. How high will taxes need to go to achieve the desired effect? The point I have repeatedly made is that gas taxes and carbon taxes are regressive while carbon production is progressive with respect to income. In other words I don’t think that you can actually reduce emissions enough with taxes of the sort that have been proposed. Impose progressive taxes on the number of total square feet of residence, for example, starting at, say, 3,000 sqft. Or on cumulative HP of vehicles owned.

  • steve Link

    Ben- Did you ever read the benefits and working hours and pay for the railway workers? You do realize that the agricultural workers are already heavily subsidized and protected? I am not saying they don’t have some merits to their complaints. They are seeing what we are seeing, that growth in the economy largely benefits a tiny part of the population. That said, it sure feels like some of this is people trying to hold on to their own special interests.

    Steve

  • Ben Wolf Link

    How high will taxes need to go to achieve the desired effect?

    It depends on what resources are needed and whether one wants to rely on taxation for this or that. I don’t support market-based solutions and so don’t prefer the route of taxation for moving resources into a Green New Deal.

  • It depends on what resources are needed and whether one wants to rely on taxation for this or that.

    The specific topic in this is the use of gas taxes and carbon taxes as a method for motivating people to change their behavior so as to reduce emissions. I’m skeptical that will work for the reasons cited and think that those who think it will work need to ‘fess up and say how high these taxes must be to have the desired effect.

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