Contrasting French Protest Culture to America's

Dating back to the French revolution of the 18th century, French culture is notorious for heavy-handed protest.  If a government decision makes the natives restless in any way, you can be sure they will take to the streets, and likely do so with Molotov cocktails in hand.  I always go back and forth between admiring the French's pluck and being appalled by it, depending upon how much wreckage they pile up protesting for their cause du jour.  In the past month, the cause that has compelled the French to violence is one that should hit close to home in nearly all developed countries, even though it probably won't......raising the retirement age.

When the French take to the streets, it usually seems to be in service of populist causes.  If the government or corporations make a move against the pocketbooks of French citizens, they can expect an uprising.  Upon seeing images of the French protesting against pension theft, my first thought was that Americans would be incapable of mustering up the energy to protest against something so practical.  There's no shortage of things that Americans on both sides of the political spectrum will protest, but most of them are connected to the culture war.  We protest about keeping our guns or protest about having them taken away.  We protest in favor of racial justice or we protest in support of the police.  We protest for abortion rights and we protest against abortion.  We protest against "stolen elections".  But let the government put forth a proposal to take hundreds of thousands of dollars away from us that we were promised and it's a safe bet that Americans will respond by rolling over on the couch and either watching the rest of their NFL game or streaming another two hours of TikTok videos.

It's fascinating to observe this dichotomy within the prism of our confused and shifting political coalitions, at home and abroad.  When Americans are burning down police stations or invading the U.S. Capitol, it's perfectly obvious which side of the political spectrum the protestors are from, but when angry French rioters burn down a police station and Bourdeaux City Hall, it's not at all clear if it's coming from the left or right, or a combination of both.  After all, French President Emanuel Macron, who pushed through the pension reforms raising the retirement age, is ostensibly from France's political left.  And the nation's long-time emissary of the political right is nationalist Marine Le Pen, a long-time advocate of preserving France's entitlement state but locking out newcomers who might endanger it.  With that in mind, it's confusing to an outside observer to speculate on whether it's Parisian leftists or backwater disciples of Le Pen pushing back the hardest on the proposed reforms.

The electoral coalitions of France, along with the rest of Europe, realigned before the United States, splitting the cosmopolitans and the "deplorables" largely over the issues of trade and immigration.  It all culminated in the surreal spectacle of hard-left French socialists casting their ballots for plutocractic investment banker Macron in back to back contests against a challenger who made entitlement preservation the centerpiece of her campaign.  The Trumpian realignment has not absolved preexisting American coalitions quite so definitively as large factions of the political right are as committed to oligarchy today as they were when Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the faces of the Republican party, but it's not at all hard to envision a decade down the road when a Democratic President leads the charge to raise the retirement age amidst howling opposition from the populist right.

There's also a legitimate question in regards to whether Macron's gambit to the raise the retirement age was the right thing to do.  American elitists who earn their paychecks in corporate boardrooms or discussing politics on cable news round tables have certainly reached a consensus that the French are spoiled and out of touch to believe they should be able to retire at age 62.  But when it comes to the people with any color of collar who've spent four decades doing repetitive motions of any kind, the notion of continuing to work just because life expectancy keeps increasing can expect to be met with greater skepticism.  

With global fertility rates plummeting and public policy engineered to incentivize even longer life expectancy throughout the civilized world, the current situation in France is a canary in the coal mine for a tectonic demographic struggle.  Add in the likelihood of artificial intelligence wiping out much of the existing middle-class employment sector and, at least in America, the requirement for employers to foot the health care bill for an increasingly geriatric workforce mandated to work more years before retirement, and it becomes quite challenging to envision how this is all supposed to come together without a death spiral.

For the time being, the contrast remains jarring between the riots in French streets over pension theft and America's indulgent national emergency about gender identity.  Particularly in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol insurrection, it's harder to imagine any kind of populist protest emerging from the left as populist protest is now associated with "those people", which will likely complicate the progressive perception on everything from French protestors burning down city buildings to the general concept of a union going on strike.  If American livelihoods were threatened with a national decree on entitlement cuts similar or more aggressive than what just happened in France, who if anybody would protest?  Depressingly, even the most strident possible scenario of entitlement reform draining trillions of dollars promised to the proletariat seems less likely to motivate Americans to protest than does some public figure being "misgendered" with the wrong pronouns.