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In the first round of the French election, the majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other right-wing candidates, or for the old Trotskyist war horse Jean-Luc Melenchon and other hard-line candidates.
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April 24, 2022 • 4 hours ago • 9 minutes reading • 185 comments La Republique en Marche candidate Emmanuel Macron and Rassemblement National Candidate Marine Le Pen during a televised election debate on April 24, 2022 Photo: LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP via Getty Images
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Whatever the end result, the recent French elections have already revealed the relative inadequacy of many elite concerns, from gender fluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present “climate catastrophe”. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about rising energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that cognitive elites, personified by President Emmanuel Macron, do not even have the ambition to improve their living conditions.
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The French elections reflect the main political conflict of our time. On the one hand, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clergy. On the other hand, there are two besieged and angry classes – small business owners and artisans and the huge, largely unorganized service class. The small business class tends to favor the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government to get out of their business and be left alone. Workers, meanwhile, are leaning toward the populist left, which promises to ease their economic pain.
The common denominator is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French election, the majority voted for either Marine Le Pen and other right-wing candidates, or the old Trotskyist war horse Jean-Luc Melenchon and other hard-line candidates. The establishment party, such as the center-left Socialist Party and the Republican Republic of Gol, was abandoned. The ultra-green Socialist Party of Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a deplorable performance by the former ruling party. Interestingly, voters under the age of 35 headed first to Melenchon and then to Le Pen, leaving technocrat Macron in the grim third among young people. Macron won decisively only among voters over 60.
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Perhaps, as de Tocqueville put it in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, “we sleep on a volcano.” You are still embarking on a revolt from below against the concentration of wealth and power from above seems to be gaining momentum. In the 36 richer countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the richest citizens have accounted for an increasing share of national GDP in recent years as the middle class has shrunk. Heavily indebted, mainly due to high housing costs, the middle class is “increasingly looking like a boat in rocky waters”, according to the OECD.
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One key indicator of a declining middle class is the rate of home ownership that is stagnant or declining sharply, especially among young people in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the chances of middle-class people rising to the top of the income ladder have dropped by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Life expectancy in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in a quarter of a century.
This growing class division is a global phenomenon. In 1974, the share of global corporate income that went to work was about 64%. It fell to 59 percent by 2012. This model applies not only to rich markets in the West, but also to labor-rich markets such as China, India and Mexico. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that respondents in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany were even more pessimistic about the next generation than those in the United States. Such sentiments are shared in countries such as Japan and India, where many new college graduates fail to find decent work. More than two-thirds of young people in Mumbai are pessimistic about their prospects.
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This erosion of opportunities lays the groundwork for a potential burnout of class anger, especially since the pandemic and now the Russian invasion threaten to make matters worse. Unemployment reached 32.5% in South Africa during the pandemic years, with almost two-thirds of young people out of work. Unfortunately, the story is similar elsewhere in Africa, with regional powers such as Kenya and Senegal reporting more than 40 percent unemployment. This is a recipe for chaos. Several countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East have also not repaid long-term loans and more may follow.
Even China seems ready for a class war. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, a key measure of income inequality, has tripled. China has grown from highly egalitarian to more stratified than Mexico, Brazil or Kenya, as well as the United States and almost all of Europe. China, one observer notes, is now developing “something resembling a permanent caste system.”
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Class divisions in China have become so intense that President Xi has been forced to respond with promised promises to spread wealth and reduce the oligarchy to size. There have even been some strikes and demonstrations, and new Marxist research groups have emerged in universities, events that terrify the current Mandarin regime. CCP officials have been put in the awkward position of repressing young Marxists in universities whose advocacy of the working class is in conflict with the policies of the nominally socialist government.
As it was during the Industrial Revolution, there are key divisions in society today – between what economist Thomas Pickett calls the “right of the merchant”, largely in the analog economy, and the “left Brahmin right” of large corporations and investors. In the United States, the latter group generally supports Democrats and the environmental and cultural agenda of the progressive left. In contrast, the traditional middle class – made up of skilled workers, Maine Street businessmen and small property owners – has become a mainstay of Trump’s Republican Party.
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Similar models can be seen in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, as “left” parties are dominated by highly educated professionals (although they also cultivate poor constituencies). This strategy has limitations and may not even appeal to young people in the long run. Biden has already lost a majority of young voters – the same troubled generation that helped elect him. Populist and nationalist parties in Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Poland and Slovakia performed particularly well among younger voters. In fact, many European right-wing nationalist parties are run by millennials. These parties seem to be on the rise in an inflationary, increasingly pessimistic continent.
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Voter anger can sometimes be expressed in harsh, even racist terms. But that reflects real economic hardships exacerbated by Covid and now the Russian war, fueling inflation to its highest level in 40 years. In the United Kingdom, where incomes have fallen more than ever in at least 30 years, “non-essential stores” are facing long periods of closure during the pandemic. With the rise of online retailers, many have since closed their doors permanently. In Germany, the self-employed were four times more likely to suffer a loss of income than their counterparts receiving wages during the pandemic. In the United States, about 110,000 restaurants were closed during the blockade, and about 200,000 more businesses as a whole disappeared compared to the usual erosion. It is therefore not surprising that only 16% of small business owners, according to a recent survey, think that the US federal government is doing well for them.
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By fueling class discontent, the pandemic is clearly favoring large companies, which could invest much more resources to make the necessary transition to the new reality. Large pharmaceutical companies have made lucrative profits from vaccine revenues. The CEO’s compensation has reached record levels this year, Wall Street investment bankers have enjoyed record bonuses, and giant technology companies now boast a market capitalization larger than the bloated US federal budget. As millions struggle to fill their tanks and pay their rent, sales of business jets to the growing ranks of billionaires have risen to new heights.
Perhaps the service workers are even more severely affected. As blocking and remote work have hit low-income workers in the past year in the United States, the first 25% of workers have suffered minor job losses, while nearly 30% of workers in …
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