In the wake of Kamala Harris’ coronation in Chicago—with all the ecstasy in the Democratic Party and the media about the new anti-Trump champion being described as “energetic,” “exciting,” and “forward-looking”—let me spit in the soup.
Rest assured, I am neither a Trumpist nor a Trotskyist. I do not in any way wish for the restoration of a quasi-savage creature to the White House. As a left-wing social democrat, I do not dream of a leftist revolution provoked by the election of a plutocrat who never ceases to exploit the alienation of ordinary people convinced that no one listens to them, that no one finds them valuable. If Trump is elected, in two years, this furious proletariat will be disappointed by the results, and it will not be to a nice Bernie Sanders, to my taste, that it will turn for help and sympathy.
But the Democrats’ arrogance—the self-confidence they have displayed in their own goodness and moral superiority since President Biden announced that he was conceding his candidacy to his vice president—reinforces my belief that their gloating and confidence are premature. Even if they do manage to win at the polls in November, I fear that the do-gooders who dominate the Biden-Harris administration—those who rubber-stamped Harris’s nomination as Biden’s replacement—will reap a deeper, more toxic and dangerous defeat later.
Traveling in Europe this summer, I noticed much the same attitude—and arrogance—in the UK and France, where the left has apparently been revived. The landslide victory of the Labour Party in the UK and the partial and unexpected victory of the New Popular Front (NFP) in France were a godsend for the better-educated and more affluent classes. Finally, they are relieved, the right and the populists pushed back and democracy, for the moment, saved from open racists and hidden fascists. A decoy that sounds a lot like the joy aroused by Kamala Harris. “The problem is that they don’t get it,” was the rightful trumpet Marianne on the cover on July 9. According to Natacha Polony, “if these elections [françaises] of 2024 only serve, once again, to close the lid on the pot, by saying to ourselves that, thank God, “we avoided the worst”, we are heading for disaster”. These remarks are supported by those of Guillaume Roquette, of Figaro : “For the upper classes […]the people and the ordinary majority do not exist […]we just have to block those who claim to be so to make the subject disappear.” Between Great Britain, France and the United States, there are differences, of course, but, in the pot, there are striking similarities: working class stripped by “free trade” of stable, unionized and well-paid industrial employment; immigration of poor undocumented immigrants, who compete with citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder with a substantial surplus of labor, which lowers or freezes wages; destruction of traditional culture by shopping malls and big stores detached from the city, as well as an Internet detached from reality. Not only did the Yellow Vests seek to repeal a fuel tax increase, but they also wanted to reestablish a sovereign and regulated city center with, at its true center, human fraternity rather than the market economy.
This is fertile ground for the machinations of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. Very easy for the “intellectual elites of the left”, explains Natacha Polony, to hammer home “that if the working classes sometimes express their concern about the riots and looting […]it is only under the influence of a few far-right media outlets.” And again according to Guillaume Roquette: “Insecurity is just a feeling; the refusal of immigration, a phobia; the rejection of globalization, childishness.” Same in America – it is always the fascists of Fox and Elon Musk on X who sow racism and violence, and not the ideologues of liberalism advocating a globalization that pits the worker of Lille, Akron and Manchester against his counterpart in Hangzhou and Tijuana. Are we really surprised by the riots in England after the murder of three little girls in Southport, wrongly attributed to an Islamist immigrant? It is more surprising that the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, seems deaf to the issue of mass immigration, legal and illegal, which partly caused Brexit and which, in the last election, generated more than 4 million votes for the Reform UK party and its leader, Nigel Farage.
“I will devote myself to the emergence of a social-democratic current in society,” declared the pro-European Raphaël Glucksmann, new darling of the caviar left and member of the NFP. “I am convinced that this is the future.” Really? Is he aware of the current reality? For each of the two rounds, the former National Front and the far-right union obtained more than 10 million votes, clearly ahead of the NFP. “Refusing to look into the causes of the rise of the National Rally,” writes Hadrien Mathoux, still in Marianneit is only delaying his takeover.” It is exactly the same situation in the United States for the Democratic Party: refusing, in 2016, to acknowledge the anger against Clinton’s NAFTA policy already brought us Trump once. Let’s hope that Mr.me Harris has more wisdom and know-how than Mr.me Clinton.