President Trump recently turned to twitter to express his opinions on the Paris riots. The President, and a lot of his followers who vehemently oppose environmental regulations , looked to the events in Paris as further validation of their beliefs.The belief that environmental regulations hurt people, it costs them money and working class people hate it. While it is true that the riots started after the Macron government introduced tax hikes on fuel in an effort to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions, to solely pin the whole movement to that singular hike is lazy. So, without hesitation, our President tweeted exactly that — he blamed the Paris Agreement for the whole movement.
But this was not a movement against climate change. If I have noticed anything since 2016, it is that Western society focuses too much on what’s on the surface, without looking into the deeper, underlying causes of events. We focus on the symptoms, and not the cause. Blaming Bernie Sanders, solely for 2016, while ignoring events like Brexit, the National Front in France, is testament to that. So it worries me that the discourse regarding the French riots are following along the same lines, and if we are not careful, France could be the next democracy that falls to a right-wing populist, something they narrowly escaped in their last election.
This is a movement against neoliberalist policies that have hurt the working class, while enriching the elites, for decades. For instance, the government of France, for decades have refused to build on the public transit systems of rural France. Paris remained well funded, well organized but the rural community that include the bulk of the working class have seen no such benefits. They have been put in a position where driving is the only option they have, in terms of getting from one place to another. New York is similar in that the city has a complicated network of public transport spearheaded by the MTA, but Long Island does not have that same benefit. President Macron, in the past, have called union leaders lazy and while the poor people of his country suffer, he continues to stick to his business-friendly agenda. I wrote in a previous piece that neoliberalism is one of the reasons why we have seen far-right populists rising up in established democracies. France is in that danger now and it will continue to be if President Macron continues on the path he started on. The movement have already gotten the support of far-right, Marine Le Pen, who, no doubt, look at the event as a frustration people have against the state. But it is not the state itself the people are protesting against, they are protesting the fact that they have been left out of the political process. They are protesting because they think that those in government undertake measures without considering the burdens it puts on the working class. They are protesting tax cuts for the wealthy, they are protesting paying taxes for benefits they do not see.
If the French people do not get a viable alternative to neoliberalism, they will flock to Le Pen in their next election and we will continue to wonder how that happened even when all the signs pointed to it. Why? Because our discourse always focuses on the wrong things.