Consider please what’s been going on in France [1] the last couple of weeks.
Less than a month ago, French President Emmanuel Macron staked his claim as the flag-bearer for globalism. In a speech to 60 world leaders at the Arc de Triomphe, he eulogized the United Nations and declared nationalism the “betrayal” of patriotism.
Last Saturday, tear gas and cobblestones flew in the same part of Paris as protesters trashed the iconic monument and demanded Macron’s embattled government withdraw a proposed fuel-tax increase. For the first time in his presidency, he backed down. It was a humbling moment for opponents of the populist revolts that spawned Donald Trump.
Hah!
While I doubt it was a “humbling moment”, (it is absolutely impossible to instill humility in a leftist), it certainly should have sounded an alarm bell for them.
The Press is telling us that the reason for the riots was the increase in fuel taxes, which came about under the guise of environmentalism. But that’s only part of the problem. I’ve been saying for some time that this is a cumulative effect, involving all of leftist policy. The kind of unrest that we’ve been seeing in France lately does not come about because of one incident, however triggered eventually.
In France we are dealing with a nation that has been beset by a government that insists on unregulated immigration, a lack of cultural assimilation upset in immigrants, Draconian taxes and regulations. I’m suggesting to you that all of this is part of the riots that we saw within the last week.
The new version of the French Open
It’s been happening all over Europe. The UK, Poland, Germany… All of them are seeing rejection of the globalist agenda, often as not, violent rejection.
I will also suggest you that what we’ve been seeing in Europe is coming here.
I’ve pointed out here before that these events in Europe should sound an alarm bell for the Democratic Party here in the US.
“The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European may disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve — but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant has no emotional reality in his consciousness. He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.
A typical American can never fully grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against ‘being pushed around’ is unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition.”
(Ayn Rand — “Don’t Let It Go”, 1971)
Translation…. the Americans have a shorter fuse on this stuff than do the Europeans have been dealing with it far longer. If nothing else the election of Trump was an indication of growing anger at the globalist agenda here in the states as represented by the Democrat Party, and by many establishment types in the Republican party as well.
We have every indication now that the Democrats are going to be overplaying their hand. Consider Adam Schiff’s comment [2] , yesterday;
Rep. Adam Schiff [3] (D-Calif.) on Sunday said that President Trump [4] might “face the real prospect of jail time” after prosecutors indicated last week that he directed illegal payments during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him. That he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Now granted, Schiff is a moron with very little credibility after telling us two years ago that there was absolute proof that Donald Trump had committed an election fraud… Proof he was never able to produce, and that lack has been confirmed by the James Comey testimony over the weekend… but it does give us a solid indication of where the Democrats are going with this.
The outcome of that overplayed hand is eminently predictable.