Washingtonians are often asked what it feels like to watch the second age of Trump dawn. Oddly, it does not feel much like his first arrival in 2016. It feels more like Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1992 – less a political than a social revolution, in which philosophical habits will be broken along with political hierarchies. This particular social revolution owes most of its energy to a revulsion against woke. That is the source of the new era’s promise and danger.

Trump left office only four years ago. Washington rejected him – somatically, as in a botched organ transplant. Having squeaked into power on an anti-establishment platform, he arrived in the capital to find the establishment bloodied but unbowed. Hostile neighbours on Tennyson Street hung rainbow flags in front of the house where his vice-president Mike Pence was staying during the transition. By the CVS drugstore at Connecticut Avenue and McKinley, activists waved signs at honking motorists throughout December. The day after the inauguration in 2017, over 200,000 women, decked out in “pussyhats” and led by establishment celebrities from Scarlett Johansson to Emma Watson, descended on the Mall. It shook the city: it was the largest collection of protest marchers since the Vietnam War, and drew a considerably larger crowd than the inauguration ceremony. The mood was defiant.

There’s none of that now. The mood in Washington’s progressive neighbourhoods is more one of muttered commiseration. (And they are all progressive neighbourhoods: in the capital city, Harris defeated Trump 93 per cent to 7 per cent.)

The country no longer wants the establishment’s advice on its choice of president. Democrats can blame their own spite. Not content to defeat Trump at the ballot box, as they had in 2020, they set out to defeat him in the courts, lending their support to a number of court cases as election season heated up. They wound up doing grievous harm to their party and country.

One was a civil case against Trump for defamation, in which he was ordered to pay $83m in damages to the claimant, E Jean Carroll, for accusing her of fabricating her allegation that he had sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. In a second civil case, Trump was accused of frauds centred largely on the overvaluation of a New York City apartment on a loan application and ordered to pay $355m.

Elsewhere, in criminal proceedings, Trump was convicted of what Harris and her campaign liked to describe as “34 felonies”. By this, prosecutors meant one perfectly legal hush-money payment, mislabelled by Trump’s accountants as a “lawyer’s fee” – a misdemeanour, even if you assume it was a mislabelling. It was turned into a felony through the use of a never-before-deployed technicality, and multiplied by 34 by turning each monthly instalment into a separate crime.

The result was revolutionary, and not in the way Democrats intended: anyone with a sense of fair play would be tempted to vote for a fellow who had been, as the playwright David Mamet put it, “raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered and shot”. But at this point, to do so would be to declare the judicial system corrupt. In the end, half the country did just that: suburbanites wore T-shirts with Trump’s mug shot on them. Grannies danced giddily on TikTok: “Here’s how it feels to vote for a convicted felon!”

The country is floating free of its laws. That is what gives the present its feeling of open-ended promise and peril. If Trump decides to investigate the Biden administration’s connection to these cases, will it be sauce for the gander, or a sign of authoritarian tendencies? Hard to say. Every elected official poses some risk of turning authoritarian. Mostly, we assume it’s one in 100, or one in 1,000. But the more discontented an electorate is, the higher a risk it may run.

People were more discontented than we were led to believe. The Biden administration’s approval ratings sank to the low 40s after the first summer of his presidency and never really recovered. Barack Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau revealed recently that even as Biden clung to the nomination in mid-summer, his internal polling showed him getting wiped out from coast to coast. Biden passed a $1.9trn Covid stimulus bill in the face of warnings from Larry Summers and other economists that it would spark inflation not seen since the 1970s. It did. The administration spent unprecedented sums, proclaimed it was transforming the country and led the Western alliance to war – while the president himself remained largely out of public view. The biggest question historians will ask about the Biden presidency will be: was he actually president? Or was he the figurehead for a junta of a few aides, each with free rein over one policy domain?

In Biden’s cognitive absence, the major parties traded places. It was the culmination of a long process. As the industrial age became the information age, the commanding heights of the economy moved from factories to universities. Democrats, with their near-ubiquitous academic dominance, became the party of wealth and empire. Those are both assets. Being the party of dogma is not. Somehow in the Biden administration, Republicans became the cooler of the two. They were suddenly the party of common people, not to mention of peace, and the Democrats’ resort to the courts had conferred on Trump an appealing outlaw status. Trumpian “cool” is a complicated phenomenon: the Hollywood screenwriter and Trump convert Sasha Stone has a whole Substack devoted to it. Jemima Kelly of the Financial Times has written well about its sociology.

The sympathetic reception of Trump and other Republicans on three-hour podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, through which a lot of young people get their news, also helped. After decades in which “sound bites” got ever shorter and ever more superficial, the process has gone into reverse. We have re-entered a world in which people will spend all afternoon listening to a politician. Trump has an idiom that resonates. He’s like a comedian – he has about three hours’ worth of material, and he’ll give a 90-minute “weave” of it at one of his shows. Or he’s like the most successful TikTokers, who don’t waste their time editing a video to perfection but put out ten and see what works. Output is key. We may be reverting to the three-volume Trollopean saga after having tired of the finely chiselled Beckettian gem; to the Lucullan blowout after having grown famished on nouvelle cuisine. There’s something spontaneous and robust about it. And male. The veteran journalist and Trump foe Joe Klein complains of “the subtle and relentless feminisation” of the Democratic Party, from which he recently parted ways.

Beyond his impatience with woke, Trump doesn’t understand politics in ideological terms. In his debate with Harris, he suggested Biden issue a “bill” to tighten security on the southern border in a way that made plain he didn’t really know what a bill was. So Trump is not on the “right” – he’s an entertaining populist who is trusted by many people who believe, with good reason, that their country is becoming less equal and less free.

[See also: Donald Trump’s industrial revolution]

During the campaign, the most devastating advert Trump ran was a clip of Harris defending taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for transgender prison inmates. This was a play for what used to be called the “Nascar” vote – that of conservative, white, rural Southerners who attend auto races. But Trump cast his net wider. The spot aired non-stop on American football games and also UFC, the mixed-martial-arts fighting league. Football games are equally beloved of black and white people. UFC hits an even broader demographic – white kids in the exurbs, immigrants who follow the star fighters who come from the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russian-speakers who know who Hasbulla is and admirers of the eccentric black champion Jon Jones, who shared his belt with a beaming Trump, attending a championship bout two weeks after his election. Few people older than 40 have even heard of it. Trump and UFC go way back.

In this younger America, a vaguely “gangsta” politician can make more sense in a discussion about human rights than the left-wing lawyer Harris. It’s not that UFC viewers disapprove of trans activism as a political opinion, though most of them probably do. It’s that the woke vision of the United States – in which a monoculture of heterosexual white men lords its “privilege” over everyone else – doesn’t accord with their reality. Over the last three years, 51 per cent of the babies born in the United States have been non-Hispanic whites. Even if there is such a thing as white privilege, it is a problem that demographic change is likely to solve. Trump won 21 per cent of black men – double his previous performance and the best Republican showing since 1972. For all the ambient academic yakking, the 2024 election was the least racially polarised of the post-civil-rights era.

We have good historical analogies for where the United States now finds itself. The election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 was when the European “ethnic” immigrants of half a century before finally made their presence known in an American election, and were converted into “ordinary” Americans. For an implausibly long time, Americans had thought of themselves as – with a few exceptions – a bunch of overseas Englishmen. The exceptions then became the majority. Perhaps this is the election when the next wave of immigrants – Latin Americans, Asians and others – begin this process.

Like the Mafia, wokeness is held not to exist by its adherents. One Guardian writer believes that in today’s culture war, “only the right is really fighting”. Another from the New Left Review website writes of “an ill-defined ‘war on wokeness’ in public education”. But woke isn’t ill-defined: it is the maximalist exploitation of American civil rights law, which renders almost any citizen sue-able for violations of others’ rights to equality.

Woke tends to demand re-education of adults, and to seek control over the education of children – an aspiration that puts it at loggerheads with the majority of American parents, and which would not have been democratically realisable in the demographic configuration of just three decades ago. Since 1990, the percentage of married adults has fallen from 67 to 53. Part of that is the rise of cohabitation, but not all – whereas only 29 per cent of adults were “unpartnered” in 1990, 38 per cent are today.

The key conflict between parents and civil rights law comes, naturally, over sex. Parents insist on the lead role in teaching their children about sex. They envision a compromise with progressive sexuality that goes something like this: it’s OK by me if gay people get married, or if people cohabit out of wedlock, but not for my child to be educated or recruited into these practices. Meanwhile, those historically marginalised, like gay people, must recruit allies, must proselytise. Breaking the parental monopoly of sexual morality is a priority.

The same conflict plays out everywhere that parents seek to limit sexual instruction and materials in schools: when Russia legislated against teaching young children about homosexuality, Western activists called it a “gay propaganda law” and the Obama administration mulled boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi over it. Florida governor Ron DeSantis passed a similar law. It, too, was given a nickname (the “Don’t Say Gay” law) by its enemies. Virtually every “book ban” decried by American progressives involves decisions on what books to stock in school libraries.

Even leaving aside the emotional complications of adolescent sexuality, it is easy to see the politics of transgenderism will be explosive. Where schools can credibly claim final authority over children’s sexual education, parents will lack the standing to prevent their 15-year-old daughter from having “gender affirming surgery”. Where parents retain that authority, such surgery looks like mutilation – indeed, it looks like madness, like a political horror, like the worst violation of human dignity permitted in the West since the Second World War. You can say that this is the view of “unsophisticated” parents, but it is actually the view of people not locked in to the elite power structure, with its reputational incentives and punishments.

The difference between the aftermath of Trump’s first election and his second is that in 2016 we were given to understand that an unrepresentative “right-wing” coalition of “legacy” Americans (white people) had briefly come to power before their inevitable submersion by a tsunami of non-white immigrants. These newcomers would form their natural solidarity along the lines laid down in civil rights legislation, viewing their interests as analogous to those of black people. What a lot we have learned about America since! It appears the newest Americans also see their natural solidarity along non-racial lines, viewing their interests as analogous to those excluded by moral condescension as well as racism.

The United States is slowly becoming a nation of JK Rowling-ites. A telling index of this cultural shift was the decision of the Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to remove the pronouns from her X bio. Future historians will snicker at this pronouns custom, the way we look back on various expressions of proletarian zeal under Soviet communism. These things are always funnier in retrospect. The trans issue will have to be compartmentalised from other civil rights issues and resolved, or it’s going to take a whole bunch of other sexual and civil rights down with it.

Civil rights law continues to give woke a legal foothold, but it remains to be seen whether it can advance when deprived of a cultural foothold. While woke did not arise under the Trump administration, it was during its course that it reached a climax: #MeToo in the first year of his presidency (2017); Black Lives Matter in the last (2020); to say nothing of the campaigns to change the names of beloved sports teams (the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians). All Americans, Republican and Democratic, have been surprised by a revolution that is social more than political. They find themselves somewhere in the long, slow process of learning to be a free people again.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor for the “Claremont Review of Books” and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” (Simon & Schuster)

[See also: Angela Merkel’s first principles]

From across the Atlantic it appears Britain faces bigger problems than just its Tory party. No doubt the past decade has seen the sorriest run of prime ministers in the country’s history. But America is in the same boat. Of our last four presidents, three would sit comfortably on most people’s list of the worst ten ever. The problem is structural, international and dangerous: it is a ruling class that cannot connect with the wider public, whether through well-meaning misunderstanding or cynical cupidity, and yet cannot be replaced.

To an American, what makes the photo is not the absent Sunak but the revenant Cameron. For a decade, Brexit voters had believed themselves on a journey out of bondage, led by a succession of less and less plausible Moses figures, and now from behind the mask of the last of them emerges the face of the pharaoh they fled. British intellectuals should be in a delirium of joy. Cameron was ousted as part of the most ambitious uprising against an elite in any Western country since the Second World War. Intellectuals sneered at the revolt and rallied to the class it sought to topple. It is their class, too. “Europe” was sacred to the British elite in all its branches.

This election is – once again – about Brexit. One cannot say Brexit “failed”. Britain won back a considerable measure of formal sovereignty. But that alone did not do what Brexit was meant to. There was a constitutional obstacle, in the form of the EU, to the recovery of British democracy. But once that obstacle was overcome, a new obstacle, a sociological one, was revealed. Brexit was a protest against the way the country had been democracy-proofed. But the EU turned out to have been an expression of democracy-proofing, not an ultimate cause of it. Society had reshaped itself around plutocracy, bureaucracy and suppression of dissent.

Theresa May understood none of this. “Sovereignty” was not a word in her vocabulary. Negotiating the so-called Irish backstop, Britain took all the responsibility for avoiding a “hard border” between the Irish Republic and the North, agreeing to EU customs checks in British waters, lest British goods be smuggled into the EU over the Irish land border. This was surreal. Why not British customs checks in Dublin, for there was no less risk of EU goods being smuggled into Britain! May’s negotiators, led by Olly Robbins (later of Goldman Sachs and the “global strategic advisory firm” Hakluyt), really did try to get the best deal for Britain they could – by their lights. As they saw it, the priority was not to claim the prerogatives of British sovereignty, but to minimise the “damage” of British sovereignty.

An American cannot avoid a word about an ex-compatriot; gifted, untrustworthy Boris Johnson, who will have a not-ignoble place in Britain’s history books. Since politicians lose prestige and credibility when they permit themselves to be lied to, Johnson’s fellow Tories had reason to collaborate in his ousting, even understanding they could do a lot worse. (Which they promptly did.) But that’s all. British pundits dressed up the investigation and removal of Johnson for attending a couple of lockdown-violating parties as some kind of triumph of constitutional principle. To Americans it looks more like impeaching Bill Clinton for adultery – pure political humbug.

Probably things will get less stable when the Tories go. Farage could inherit a Trumpian prominence. A Remainer Keir Starmer remains. Sometimes, as under Reagan or Blair, the broader the majority the narrower the governing programme, since the best-organised factions tend to be those with the crudest aims. With a 450-seat majority, pressure to court Brussels will mount. A return to the EU is more than imaginable.

The conservative lurch in recent continental elections makes British readmission more, not less, attractive to Brussels. Britons understand the EU no better than they did. Thanks to new Covid-related and Ukraine-related bond issues, Brussels is armed with instruments of financial pressure that make it much more intrusive than it was in 2016. Everyplace is Greece now.

The public clearly has strong private hunches about Brexit that accompany its intemperate public judgements. It is a commonplace to say that Johnson won his great 2019 majority on the strength of the public’s support for Brexit and disdain for Jeremy Corbyn. That’s wrong. Brexit was the thing. When Theresa May snubbed Brexiters in her 2017 campaign she brought Corbyn to within a whisker of Downing Street. Reclaiming sovereignty through Brexit, however traumatic, really did make the country more democratic, and has spurred follow-on claims. That is why, except on immigration, Britain shows signs of moving left as the rest of Europe moves right. The situation is more volatile than it looks.

This article is part of the series “How to fix a nation”

 A strange posthumous role in the new Cold War has thus been assigned to a novelist who went awol from the old one. Kundera was a sex novelist. Until he left Czechoslovakia in his forties, he spent more of his career building communism than he did resisting it. In half a century of French exile, Kundera cared more about the Great Divide between the sexes than about the Iron Curtain that had fallen across Europe. His specific sexual ideas – which tightly link domination and arousal – come off today as repugnant, repugnant to the very Western “values” we claim are at stake in Ukraine. In exile, Kundera insisted again and again that he was a writer, not an ideologue. Is his posthumous politicisation a zealot’s misreading? Or are we missing something? 

Almost everyone who calls Kundera as a witness on behalf of the Western cause in Ukraine cites his essay “A Kidnapped West”, which appeared in the French journal Le Débat in 1983. There Kundera speaks of Europe as “une notion spirituelle”. It is often assumed that Kundera had a vision of the Cold War like that of Czesław Miłosz, for whom the whole Eastern Bloc was a prison house of nations. But this is wrong. The essay concerns the division of Europe into two cultural spheres – one Roman, using the Latin alphabet, the other Byzantine, using the Cyrillic. The problem is that three specific nations that had been more or less bound to the West by the Habsburg empire have wound up on the wrong side of the divide. Kundera refers to the world he is describing as “polono-hongro-tchèque”.  

It is an idiosyncratic and, Kundera admits, reactionary conception, this central Europe. By no means does Kundera think all the Eastern Bloc countries belong to it. The uprisings of Hungary in 1956, of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and of Poland in 1956, 1968, 1970 and the 1980s, for instance, would have been “unthinkable” in Bulgaria. Following Conrad, Kundera rejects the idea of a “Slavic soul”. For him, Bulgaria and Russia belong to a different civilisation. 

But he is equally vehement in calling the West a different civilisation, too. He even refers to central-European culture (baroque, drawn to the irrational, musical) as the “opposite pole” from that of France (classical, rational, literary). The problem, back when Kundera was writing, was that the USSR, on flimsy pretexts of pan-Slavism and anti-fascism, had trespassed into a “foreign” cultural area. Kundera did not envision that the United States, on flimsy pretexts of human rights and promoting democracy, would one day carry out this trespass in reverse, launching an invasion in 1999 to wrest territory from “Cyrillic” Serbia and, in this century, projecting power from the Cyrillic strongholds of Bulgaria and Ukraine.  

It is striking in retrospect how perfect is the overlap between Kundera’s cultural map of central Europe and the roster of Eastern Bloc novelists that the American novelist Philip Roth assembled for Penguin in his Writers from the Other Europe series in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Writers from “an” Other Europe would have been more like it. Of the 17 titles in the series, only one – by the Serbian Danilo Kiš – came from the Cyrillosophere. All the others were from Kundera’s “polono-hongro-tchèque” island, and Kundera himself accounted for four of the titles, more than anyone. This was his introduction to a mass anglophone audience. 

The sex-focused Kundera came across as a sort of Czechoslovak incarnation of Philip Roth. There was an untapped hunger for Eastern Bloc novelists who were accessible in this way. The Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, living in curmudgeonly exile in Vermont, bestriding Slavic literature like a colossus, was wearing out his welcome. In excoriating American decadence at his Harvard commencement speech in 1978, he made it clear that, once his own country was freed of communism, he would drop the West and reaffirm all his homeland stood for. Western consumerism could build no pontoons of mutual understanding with such an interlocutor.

[See also: The West can no longer make war]

Kundera, by contrast, was what his adopted countrymen called an homme à femmes. Skirt-chasing was his private passion, his philosophical specialisation, his literary subject. He wrote the kind of novels that Americans had been groomed to like for a generation. Sex, in the hands of a fine observer like Kundera, was as good a means as any for showing the sad shabbiness of communism: in Life Is Elsewhere, the hero, Jaromil, foregoes an unrepeatable erotic adventure because it would require him to reveal his grubby underpants. Sex offered plenty of scope for Kundera’s gifts as an aphorist: “Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love,” we learn in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  

And sex is an occasion for bawdy scenes and gags: an exhausted womaniser likens his avid young mistress – forever shouting “Faster, faster”, “Gently, gently” and “Harder, harder” during sex – to a coxswain. A nude-obsessed muralist, having painted a woman turning her enormous rump towards the inmates of a government work camp, defends it as an allegory of “the bourgeoisie making its exit from the stage of history.”

The Joke, which sold 100,000 copies in Czechoslovakia when it was published in 1967, did all these things in a taut and disturbing way. Ludvik Jahn, a budding academic, has a crush on Marketa, a beautiful but overly earnest colleague. When she attends a two-week party training course and gushes in a letter to Ludvik over the “healthy atmosphere” of the place, Ludvik, writes back, in a fit of jealousy and loneliness: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” And that joke destroys his life.  

Ludvik feels he has lucked out when he discovers he will be tried by Zemanek, the party chairman at his university, a man who knows him well, knows his sense of humour, and knows his feelings about awkward Marketa. But Zemanek arranges to have Ludvik expelled not only from the party but also from his profession.

Kundera was in and out of favour with the Czechoslovak regime. Zealous backer of the Stalinist takeover in the late 1940s. Expelled from the Communist Party (rather like the protagonist of The Joke) for some ill-considered remark in the early 1950s. Readmitted a few years later. Publication of several social-realist and pro-regime plays, poems and stories. Increasing independence in the years leading up to the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of 1968. Officially in good standing until the early 1970s.  

[See also: Simone de Beauvoir and the art of loss]

There is a dissident feel to his fiction, but Kundera was an ambiguous kind of dissident. In an autobiographical (presumably non-fictional) section of the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he remembers the day in 1950 when the regime hanged four opponents of the regime, including a Socialist deputy and the critic Zavis Kalandra. Young Stalinists danced in the streets. “I knew that I did not belong to them but belonged to Kalandra, who had also come loose from the circular trajectory and had fallen, fallen, to end his fall in a condemned man’s coffin,” Kundera recalls, “but even though I didn’t belong to them, I nonetheless watched the dancing with envy and yearning, unable to take my eyes off them.”

It is one of the appealing things about Kundera that he did not claim to have been a historical protagonist. He is a more controversial figure in post-communist Czechia than he is in the West. Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma and other more engaged dissidents thought him a trimmer. In 2008 the historian Adam Hradilek accused him of having informed on a young man staying in a university dorm in 1950. The story is probably true in fact, but untrue in spirit. The man Kundera gave up appears to have been an American agent on a mission.

Given Kundera’s Stalinist sympathies at the time, it can be argued that his course was the patriotic one. But it won’t do to cast Kundera – the way Berman does – as a defender of memory and truth against oblivion and lies. He was an indefatigable and aggressive manager of his own reputation, silent as a clam about his life in Czechoslovakia, lawyerly in negotiating interviews, and severe with longstanding friends and girlfriends who possessed old letters he had sent them. “To publish what an author has chosen suppressed,” he wrote in 1993, “is as much a violation as suppressing what he has chosen to publish.”

The Joke does not end with Ludvik’s disgrace. The latter, “comic” part of the novel concerns Ludvik’s attempt to avenge himself on Zemanek by ravaging Zemanek’s wife, though Ludvik feels “revulsion” for her. She has, as he sees it, a “vocation as sexual prey”.

Here we arrive at an unavoidable complication when we talk about enlisting Kundera in various humanitarian crusades. Western ideas about sex have changed since the 20th century. Kundera’s vision of sexuality is about as distant from the new one as it could possibly be. Sometimes it is just a matter of his having libertine ideas which jar in our more puritan time: the one principle that is firmly asserted somewhere or other in almost every Kundera book is that a woman who complains about being two-timed by her husband or boyfriends is being unreasonable.  

“The management of a woman’s mind has its own inexorable rules,” muses Ludvik: 

“anyone who decides to persuade a woman or to refute her point of view with rational arguments is hardly likely to get anywhere. It is much wiser to grasp her basic self-image (her basic principles, ideals, convictions) and contrive to establish (with the aid of sophistry, illogical demagoguery and the like) a harmonious relation between that self-image and the desired conduct on her part.”

The problem with Kundera is not just a matter of the characters he draws or the ideas they express – which, it should go without saying, a fiction-writer need neither avow nor disavow. The problem is rather Kundera’s entire conception of what sex is, and of what can be found out by exploring sexual interaction. 

It was a literary assumption of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s that sexuality was an insufficiently examined interstice of human character where all sorts of liberating and terrifying truths about humankind could be found out. Kundera was a brilliant discoverer and dazzling imparter of paradoxes about sexual desire, nowhere more concisely than in his story “The Hitchhiking Game.” In it, two lovers on a long drive brutalize and wound each other by fantasizing that they are strangers, but cannot stop because it thrills and arouses them so much. One of the characters towards the end of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, who believes that “rape is part of eroticism,” mentions discussing with friends what the most common thing women say during sex is. By common agreement, it is “No.”

What does this mean? Does it mean men are heartless to women? Or does it mean women enjoy being overpowered? These are the kinds of questions that motivated people to read Kundera in the 1980s. Whether because we have become more decent or less free, people don’t think this way any more, or are less willing to tolerate speculation on such matters. It turns out that a very thin line separates the brave “explorer of sexualities” and the contemptible brute, and many who live as sexual pioneers will be remembered as reactionaries and deviants. Love is love, we say, but we never believe it for long.  

Westerners today have a harder time than those of half a century ago in understanding Kundera’s vision of sex. But they will at least find familiar the power structures of 1960s Czechoslovakia. No contemporary Westerner would say: “Imagine being hounded from your job for an ill-considered joke!” Today, because the Czechoslovak government banned Kundera’s books 50 years ago, we wave them around as a symbol of Western freedom and the justice of the Ukrainian cause. We’re wrong to. If these books didn’t already have the status of classics, the chance they’d be published today by a reputable house in New York would be nil.  

[See also: Milan Kundera’s identity crisis]

Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the DNC, said the change “elevates diverse communities”. By this he means that South Carolina’s Democratic electorate is about 60 per cent black. But there is another, not unrelated reason for favouring the Palmetto State over the Granite one. South Carolina is amenable to the direction set by national party leaders. In the last two nomination races it became a bulwark for protecting the candidate of the party’s establishment – Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 – from an upset at the hands of the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders.

That his own party should feel the need to close ranks against an 81-year-old whose two previous bids for president ended in defeat tells us something about the contradictions of today’s centre left. The global information economy moved the main source of wealth creation in developed economies from factories to progressive universities. When that happened, revolutionaries, intellectuals and union bosses found themselves sharing centre-left parties with outright plutocrats. Most made their peace with money, sometimes at the price of hypocrisy. But there have remained in these parties a few who were intensely unrelaxed about people getting filthy rich: Oskar Lafontaine and Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France.

[See also: Ron DeSantis supporters are overlooking something critical – he’s boring]

Corbyn has been purged from the Labour Party, the others exiled into smaller radical parties, such as Die Linke in Germany, La France Insoumise and Podemos in Spain. In the American two-party system, that’s impossible. So Sanders’s position is ambiguous. For most of his career he has called himself a democratic socialist. He campaigns as an Independent, not a Democrat. This involves a bit of posturing. In his last three races to represent Vermont in the US Senate, Sanders has run virtually unopposed in the Democratic primary, winning upwards of 94 per cent of the vote – but then refused the nomination. Sanders votes reliably with the Democrats, and the Democrats just as reliably campaign for him and provide him with powerful committee assignments.

On the evidence of his new harangue, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, he is a partisan more than a revolutionary. But he continues to spit poison at the arrangements the Democratic Party has made with the country’s rich. The bitterest intraparty debates of recent years have put Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Biden loyalists against Sanders’s people. And Sanders’s people include some of the most charismatic younger Democrats in US Congress: conspicuously, the 33-year-old New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Sanders has an unlikely youth movement. He is old: born in 1941, he attended the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech. He is blunt, hammering the same statistics and anecdotes in speech after speech in his honking baritone. He is so lacking in humour as to make Corbyn seem almost madcap by comparison. He neither reads nor theorises much. These traits have all wound up being pluses. They come over as forthrightness.

Sanders does not just favour high taxes on the rich as a means to fund “education” or another noble cause – for him, the taxes are an end in themselves. They help “tackle wealth inequality, address the long-term damage done by systemic racism, and free up working Americans to create, innovate, and strengthen the United States”. The bills he sponsors carry names such as the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act.

Good old Marx-influenced leftism has the advantage of being more capacious than the contemporary culture-war kind: Sanders wastes little time on arguments about abortion, pronouns and critical race theory, believing those can be subsumed under his general message of fighting the powerful. He can be heretical. Representing a rural mountain state, he has been at best a fitful friend of gun control.

More than most senators, Sanders has a realistic idea of what today’s working class is and who is in it – not so much miners, smelters and lathe-turners as shirt-folders, aisle-swabbers and sheet-changing home health workers. His picture of American oligarchy is less vivid but reinforced with powerful statistics. Three of the richest Americans – Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – own more wealth than half the US.

When Sanders was a boy, the average CEO earned 20 times what one of his workers made; today’s average CEO outearns his workers by 400-to-one. “Billionaires should not exist,” he repeatedly stated during his 2020 presidential campaign. You can see why younger voters like that. Older progressives have been waiting for the country to reject oligarchy and rediscover its true identity; for the kids, oligarchy is the country’s true identity. A Bernie Sanders rally has the atmosphere of a countercultural music festival.

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is meant to impart to readers some of the excitement of the campaign trail – and of Sanders’s hyperactive chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee in the first two years of the Biden administration. It is a means of passing the torch to some Democratic candidate of the next generation. Unfortunately, campaigns translate poorly into books, and Sanders’s more poorly than most. Take his outrage that three Wall Street investment funds – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – control $20trn in assets, an amount equal to the gross domestic product of the United States. Travelling from Pittsburgh to Youngstown to Cincinnati in the heat of a fast-moving presidential race, you can rattle off that statistic three times in the same day and it will sound fresh every time. But you cannot say it in three different chapters of the same book without exasperating readers. The podium-pounding parallelisms of campaign oratory are soporific on the page. So is the detailed enumeration of Sanders’ $6trn infrastructure plan from early 2021, too utopian ever to have much practical effect on the Senate debate. The book is often a stultifying bore. You could even call its repurposing of a hustings work-product for private sale an act of capitalist exploitation.

[See also: Where did America’s recession go?]

Sanders has a sense the information economy is enabling new forms of exploitation: “The wealthiest and most powerful Americans,” he writes, “employ teams of analysts and counsellors to help them keep tabs on every economic and social trend and then, when they see where things are headed, they start investing in ‘what’s next’… By the time the average American catches on, the rules have already been rigged.” For Sanders “uber-capitalism” is more a mood than a system. “To those who say that, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, there is not enough to care for all the people, our answer must be: ‘That’s absurd. Of course there’s enough!’” he writes. “With the explosion of new technology and productivity that we are experiencing, we now have the capability to provide a good life for every American.”

Here, Sanders has something in common with the British “luxury Communists” of the Corbyn years – counting on “new technology” to make decisions about redistribution less difficult than we fear, and political clashes less heated. And in describing the US as the “wealthiest country in the history of the world”, what exactly does Sanders mean? The US government is $31trn in debt. Particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine it has been using the world’s financial infrastructure as a tool of US foreign policy – from the Belgium-based Swift bank-transfer system to the Western-held central bank reserves of Afghanistan and Russia. The day may be coming when the world withdraws its trust from US-run global institutions, and with it the exorbitant privilege that permits the US to run up such debts.

There is a good deal of nostalgic, church-bake-sale progressivism in Sanders’s world-view. For him, European countries (even the UK) are places where people do things in a better and fairer way than the US. Sanders takes little account of how these countries have themselves been straitened and coarsened by the same global-capitalist conditions he identifies at home, and overwhelmed by migration into the bargain. Instead, it might as well be 1974. Northern Europe remains a particular model for Sanders, especially in education. “Instead of telling young people to be quiet, and discouraging dissent,” he writes, “Finland encourages them to recognise their roles as leaders in the society they will inherit.” (Those who have met Americans may be surprised at the suggestion that they require coaching in self-assertiveness.) Sanders’s ideal in most other matters is Norway, coincidentally also Donald Trump’s archetype of a non-“shithole” country.

Sanders and Trump led parallel movements. Each was as much concerned with breaking up the racket in his own (adopted) party as in governing the country. Sanders was curious about Trump. At least he was curious about why in 2020 Democrats, the old party of the workers, only gained votes from 28 per cent of white working-class men and 36 per cent of white working-class women. Leaders of striking unions frequently told Sanders that large majorities of their members were voting Republican. He doesn’t blame those voters. He believes they are angry at the way “the Democratic Party has abandoned them for wealthy campaign contributors and the ‘beautiful people’”.

Up to the limits of his competence, Trump was a more committed party rebel – such as when he called George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen”. Sanders, on the other hand, has been a stout defender of the Biden agenda, hailing him as the “most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt”. You might say so if you focused only on quantities of federal money disbursed. But much of that money has been directed to corporations through grants and tax incentives that would be anathema to Roosevelt. Sanders himself describes the central plank in the 2022 Chips Act – about $50bn to “reshore” microchip manufacturing from Asia – as a “giveaway” to Big Tech.

Where Sanders outperforms Trump is in cutting through political polarisation. A poll last summer found he had the approval of 41 per cent of Independents and 18 per cent of Republicans. Perhaps he strikes voters as less disruptive than Trump. Or perhaps he strikes them as more disruptive. For the American public is receptive to Sanders’s message that the rich must be brought to heel – at least 60 per cent would like to see them taxed more aggressively.

[See also: American hubris]

The most extraordinary aspect of Sanders’s career is that this rather limited politician, destined in most times for the role of gadfly, twice came quite close to becoming the so-called leader of the free world. You wouldn’t say he came within a hair’s breadth. But in 2016 it required the Democratic Party’s anti-democratic system of “superdelegates” to stop him. In 2020 it needed a party-brokered near-simultaneous withdrawal of all moderate candidates to clear the field for Biden. In retrospect, his challenge was like that of Brexit: the country was ready for him, the political class was not.

The final necessary act was to purge his own party and turn it into a vanguard organisation that could be rallied behind him. That is what Dominic Cummings managed to do for the Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in late 2019. That is what electoral uprisings require. The American party system is not amenable to being harnessed that way. Those who got a scare from Bernie Sanders are taking steps to ensure it becomes even less so.

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism
Bernie Sanders
Penguin, 304pp, £22

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In France, a property expert has done something almost as improbable. Christophe Guilluy calls himself a geographer. But he has spent decades, as a housing consultant in various rapidly changing neighbourhoods north of Paris, studying gentrification, among other things. And he has crafted a convincing narrative tying together France’s various social problems – immigration tensions, inequality, deindustrialisation, economic decline, ethnic conflict and the rise of populist parties. Such an analysis had previously eluded the Parisian caste of philosophers, political scientists, literary journalists, government-funded researchers and party ideologues.

Guilluy is none of these. Yet in a French political system that is as polarised as the American, both the outgoing Socialist president, François Hollande, and his Gaullist predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy sought his counsel. Marine Le Pen, whose Front National dismisses both major parties as part of a corrupt establishment, is equally enthusiastic about his work.

Guilluy has published three books, as yet untranslated, since 2010, with the newest, Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut (roughly: “Twilight of the French Elite”), ­arriving in bookshops last autumn. The volumes focus closely on French circumstances, institutions and laws, so they might not be translated any time soon. But they give the best ground-level look available at the economic, residential and democratic consequences of globalisation in France. They also give an explanation for the rise of the Front National that goes beyond the usual imputation of stupidity or bigotry to its voters.

Guilluy’s work thus tells us something important about British voters’ decision to withdraw from the European Union and the astonishing rise of Donald Trump – two phenomena that have drawn on similar grievances.

***

At the heart of Guilluy’s inquiry is globalisation. Internationalising the division of labour has brought significant economic efficiencies. But it has also brought inequalities unseen for a century, demographic upheaval and cultural disruption. Now we face the question of what – if anything – we should do about it.

A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s leading educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals – the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other “symbolic analysts”, as Robert Reich once called them – who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions and renew its prestige.

Cheap labour, tariff-free consumer goods and new markets of billions of people have made globalisation a windfall for such ­prosperous places. But globalisation has had no such galvanising effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years – Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers – are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified”, haunted by the empty shopfronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.

Guilluy doubts that any place exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve previously understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.

Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris are lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalisation. Somehow, the rich parts of France have failed to impart their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the problem, at least for certain politicians and policy experts, involves coming up with a clever short cut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wifi, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there is no reason to expect that Paris (and France’s other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class, or to assume that broad-based ­prosperity will develop elsewhere in the country (which happens to be where the majority of the population live). If he is right, we can understand why every major Western country has seen the rise of political movements taking aim at the present system.

***

In our day, the urban property market is a pitiless sorting machine. Rich people and up-and-comers buy the private housing stock in desirable cities and thereby bid up its cost. Guilluy notes that one estate agent on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris now sells “lofts” of three square metres, or about 30 square feet, for €50,000 (£42,000). The situation resembles that in London, where, according to Le Monde, the average monthly rent (£2,580) now exceeds the average monthly salary (£2,300).

The laid-off, the less educated, the mistrained – all must rebuild their lives in what Guilluy calls (in the title of his second book) la France périphérique. This is the key term in Guilluy’s sociological vocabulary, and is much misunderstood in France, so it is worth clarifying: it is neither a synonym for the boondocks nor a measure of distance from the city centre. (Most of France’s small cities, in fact, are in la France périphérique.) Rather, the term measures distance from the functioning parts of the global economy. France’s best-performing urban nodes have arguably never been richer or better stocked with cultural and retail amenities. But too few such places exist to carry a national economy. When France’s was a national economy, its median workers were well compensated and well protected from illness, age and other vicissitudes. In a knowledge economy, these workers have largely been exiled from the places where the economy still functions. They have been replaced by immigrants.

After the mid-20th century, the French state built a vast stock – about five million units – of public housing, which now ­accounts for a sixth of the country’s households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but it’s all more or less affordable. Its purpose has changed, however. It is now used primarily for billeting not native French workers, as once was the case, but immigrants and their descendants, millions of whom arrived from North Africa, starting in the 1960s, with yet another wave of newcomers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East arriving today. In the rough northern suburb of Aubervilliers, for instance, three-quarters of the young people are of immigrant background. Again, Paris’s future seems visible in contemporary London. Between 2001 and 2011, the population of white Londoners fell by 600,000, even as the city grew by one million: from 58 per cent white British at the turn of the century, London is currently 45 per cent white.

While rich Parisians may not miss the presence of the middle class, they do need people to serve tables, trim shrubbery, watch babies and change bedpans. Immi­grants – not native French workers – do most of these jobs. Why this should be so is an economic controversy. Perhaps migrants will do certain tasks that French people will not – at least not on the prevailing wage. Perhaps employers don’t relish paying €10 an hour to a native Frenchman who, ten years earlier, was making €20 in his old position and has resentments to match. Perhaps the current situation is an example of the economic law named after the 18th-/19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say: a huge supply of menial labour from the developing world has created its own demand.

This is not Guilluy’s subject, though. He aims only to show that, even if French people were willing to do the work that gets offered in these prosperous urban centres, there would be no way for them to do it, ­because there is no longer any place for them to live. As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public – which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidised servants’ quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.

***

At the opening of his new book, Guilluy describes 21st-century France as “an ‘American’ society like any other, unequal and multicultural”. It’s a controversial premise – that inequality and racial diversity are linked as part of the same (American-type) system and that they progress or decline together. Though this premise has been confirmed in much of the West for half a century, the assertion will shock many Americans, conditioned to place “inequality” (bad) and “diversity” (good) at opposite poles of a Manichaean moral order. This disconnect is a key reason American political discussions have turned so illogical and rancorous. Certain arguments – for instance, that raising the incomes of American workers requires limiting immigration – can be cast as either sensible or superstitious, legitimate or illegitimate, good or evil, depending on whether the person making them is deemed to be doing so on the grounds of economics or identity.

At a practical level, considerations of economics and ethnicity are getting harder to disentangle. Guilluy has spent years in and out of buildings in northern Paris (his sisters live in public housing), and he is sensitive to the way this works in France. A public-housing development is a community, yes, and one can wish that it be more diverse. But it is also an economic resource that, more and more, is getting fought over tribally. An ethnic Frenchman moving into a heavily North African housing project finds himself threatening a piece of property that members of “the community” think of as theirs. Guilluy speaks of a “battle of the eyes” fought in the lobbies of apartment buildings across France every day, in which one person or the other – the ethnic Frenchman or the immigrant’s son – will drop his gaze to the floor first.

Most places where migrant and native French cultures mix, Guilluy expects, will evolve as did the northern Paris suburbs where he works. Twenty years ago, these neighbourhoods remained a hub of Parisian Jewish life; nowadays, they’re heavily Arab. The young men living in them feel a burning solidarity with their Muslim brethren in the Middle East and often a loathing for Israel. Jews have faced steady intimidation in northern Paris since at least 2002, when the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks overlapped with the Palestinian “second intifada”.

Violence is rising. July 2014 saw a wave of attacks on Jewish businesses and synagogues in the suburb of Sarcelles. Jews have evacuated some municipalities north of Paris where, until recently, they were an integral part: Saint-Denis, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Stains, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Trappes, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Le Blanc-Mesnil. Many Jews still live safely and well in France, of course, but they cluster together in a smaller number of secure neighbourhoods, several of them on Paris’s western edge. Departures of French Jews to Israel run to about 7,000 a year, according to the Jewish Agency of France. The leavers are disproportionately young.

Guilluy has written much about how little contact the abstract doctrines of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” make with this morally complex world. In the neighbourhoods, well-meaning people of all backgrounds “need to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethnocultural questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred and violence”. Last winter, he told the magazine Causeur:

“Unlike our parents in the 1960s, we live in a multicultural society, a society in which ‘the other’ doesn’t become ‘somebody like yourself’. And when ‘the other’ doesn’t become ‘somebody like yourself’, you constantly need to ask yourself how many of the other there are – whether in your neighbourhood or your apartment building. Because nobody wants to be a minority.”

Thus, when 70 per cent of Frenchmen tell pollsters, as they have for years now, that “too many foreigners” live in France, they are not necessarily being racist; but they are not necessarily not being racist, either. It’s a complicated sentiment, and identifying “good” and “bad” strands of it – the better to draw them apart – is getting harder to do.

France’s most dangerous political battles play out against this backdrop. The central fact is the 70 per cent that we just spoke of: they oppose immigration and are worried, we can safely assume, about the prospects for a multi-ethnic society. Their wishes are consistent, their passions high; and a demo­cracy is supposed to translate the wishes and passions of the people into government action. Yet that hasn’t happened in France.

Guilluy breaks down public opinion on immigration by class. Top executives (at 54 per cent) are content with the current number of migrants in France. But only 38 per cent of mid-level professionals, 27 per cent of labourers and 23 per cent of clerical workers feel similarly. As for the ­migrants themselves (whose views are seldom taken into account in French immi­gration discussions), living in Paris instead of Bamako is a windfall even under the worst of circumstances.

In certain respects, migrants actually have it better than natives, Guilluy stresses. He is not referring to affirmative action. Inhabitants of government-designated “sensitive urban zones” (ZUSs) do receive special benefits these days. But because the French cherish equality of citizenship as a political ideal, racial preferences in hiring and education took much longer to be imposed than in other countries. They’ve been operational for little more than a decade. A more important advantage, as the geographer Guilluy sees it, is that immigrants living in the urban slums, despite appearances, remain “in the arena”. They are near public transportation, schools, and a real job market that might have hundreds of thousands of vacancies. At a time when rural France is  getting more sedentary, the ZUSs are the places in France that enjoy the most residential mobility: it’s better in the banlieue.

In France, the Parti Socialiste (PS), like the Democratic Party in the US or Labour in Britain, has remade itself based on a recognition of this new demographic and political reality. François Hollande built his 2012 presidential victory on a strategy outlined in October 2011 by Bruno Jeanbart and the late Olivier Ferrand of the socialist think tank Terra Nova. Largely because of cultural questions, the authors warned, the working class no longer voted for the left. The consultants suggested a replacement coalition of ethnic minorities, people with advanced degrees (usually prospering in new-economy
jobs), women, youths and non-Catholics – a French version of the Obama bloc. It did not make up, in itself, an electoral majority, but it possessed sufficient cultural power to attract one.

***

Guilluy came to the attention of many French readers at the turn of the millennium, through the pages of the leftist Paris daily Libération, where he promoted the American journalist David Brooks’s book Bobos in Paradise. Guilluy was fascinated by the figure of the “bobo”, an acronym combining “bourgeois” and “bohemian”, which described the new sort of upper-middle-class person who had emerged in the late-1990s tech-bubble economy. The word may have faded from the memory of English-language readers, but it stuck in France. You can find bobo in any good French dictionary, alongside bébé, dada and tutu.

For Brooks, “Bobo” was a term of endearment. Our nouveaux riches differed from those of yesteryear in being more sensitive and cultured, the kind of folk who shopped at Restoration Hardware for the vintage 1950s Christmas lights that reminded them of their childhoods. For Guilluy, as for most French intellectuals, “bobo” is a slur. These nouveaux riches differed from their predecessors in being more predatory and less troubled by conscience. They chased the working-class population
from neighbourhoods it had spent years building up – and then expected the country to thank them.

In France, as in America, the bobos were both cause and effect of a huge cultural shift. The nation’s cultural institutions – from its universities to its television studios to its comedy clubs to (this being France) its government – remain where they were. But the sociology of the community that surrounds them has been transformed. The culture industry now sits in territory that is 100 per cent occupied by the beneficiaries of globalisation. No equivalent exists any more of Madame Vauquer’s boarding house in Balzac’s Père Goriot, where the upwardly mobile Rastignac had to rub shoulders with those who had few prospects of advancement. In most parts of Paris, working-class Frenchmen are just gone, priced out of even the football stadiums that were a bastion of French proledom until the country’s World Cup victory in 1998. The national culture has changed.

So has French politics. Since the age of ­social democracy, we have assumed that contentious political issues inevitably pit “the rich” against “the poor” and that the fortunes of one group must be wrested from the other. But the metropolitan bourgeoisie no longer live cheek-by-jowl with native French people of lesser means and different values. In Paris and other cities of Guilluy’s fortunate France, one often encounters an appearance of civility, even consensus, where once there was class conflict. But this is an illusion: one side has been driven from the field.

The old bourgeoisie hasn’t been supplanted; it has been supplemented by a second bourgeoisie that occupies the previously non-bourgeois housing stock. For every old-economy banker in an inherited high-ceilinged Second Empire apartment off the Champs-Élysées, there is a new-economy television anchor or hi-tech patent attorney living in some exorbitantly remodelled mews house in the Marais. A New Yorker might see these two bourgeoisies as analogous to residents of the Upper East and Upper West sides. They have arrived through different routes, and they might once have held different political opinions, but they don’t now. Guilluy notes that the conservative former French prime minister Alain Juppé, now the mayor of Bordeaux, and Gérard Collomb, the Socialist running Lyons, pursue identical policies. As Paris has become not just the richest city in France but the richest city in the history of France, its residents have come to describe their politics as “on the left” – a judgement that tomorrow’s historians might dispute. Most often, Parisians mean what Guilluy calls la gauche hashtag, or what we might call the “glass-ceiling left”, preoccupied with redistribution among, not from, elites: “We may have done nothing for the poor, but we did appoint the first disabled lesbian parking commissioner.”

Upwardly mobile urbanites, observes Guilluy, call Paris “the land of possibilities”, the “ideapolis”. One is reminded of Richard Florida and other extollers of the “Creative Class”. The good fortune of Creative Class members appears (to them) to have nothing to do with any kind of capitalist struggle. Never have conditions been more favourable for deluding a class of fortunate people into thinking that they owe their privilege to being nicer, or smarter, or more honest, than everyone else. Why would they think otherwise? They never meet anyone who disagrees with them. The immigrants with whom the creatives share the city are dazzlingly different, exotic, even frightening, but on the central question of our time – whether the global economic system is working or failing – they see eye to eye. “Our immigrants, our strength”, was the ­title of a New York Times op-ed signed by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, after September’s terrorist bomb blasts in New York. This estrangement is why electoral results around the world last year – from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump – proved so difficult to anticipate. Those outside the city gates in la France périphérique are invisible, their wishes incomprehensible. It’s as if they didn’t exist. But they do.

***

People used to think of the economy as congruent with society – it was the earning-and-spending ­aspect of the nation just living its life. All citizens inhabited the same economic system (which isn’t to say that all took an equal share from it). As Guilluy describes it, the new economy is more like a private utility: it provides money and goods the way, say, a power company provides electricity. If you’ve always had electricity in your house, what’s the worry? But it’s quite possible to get cut off.

For those cut off from France’s new-economy citadels, the misfortunes are serious. They’re stuck economically. Three years after finishing their studies, three-quarters of French university graduates are living on their own; by contrast, three-quarters of their contemporaries without university degrees still live with their parents. And they’re dying early. In January 2016, the national statistical institute Insee announced that life expectancy had fallen for both sexes in France for the first time since the Second World War, and it’s the native French working class that is likely driving the decline. The French outsiders are failing not just in income and longevity but also in family formation, mental health and education. Their political alienation is striking. Less than 2 per cent of legislators in France’s National Assembly today come from the working class, as opposed to 20 per cent just after the Second World War.

Unlike their parents in Cold War France, the excluded have lost faith in efforts to distribute society’s goods more equitably. Political plans still abound to fight the “system”, ranging from the 2017 Socialist presidential candidate Benoît Hamon’s proposals for a guaranteed minimum income to those of his rival Emmanuel Macron, the former economics minister, to make labour markets more flexible. But these programmes are seen by their intended beneficiaries as further proof of a rigged system. The welfare state is now distrusted by those whom it is meant to help. France’s expenditure on the heavily immigrant banlieue is already vast, in this view; to provide yet more public housing would be to widen the invitation to unwanted immigrants. To build any large public-works project is to do the same. To invest in education, in turn, is to offer more advantages to the rich, who are best positioned to benefit from it. In a society as divided as Guilluy describes, traditional politics can find no purchase.

With its opposition to free trade, open immigration and the European Union, the Front National has established itself as the main voice of the anti-globalisers. At regional elections in 2015, it took 55 per cent of workers’ votes. The Socialists, Républicains, Greens and the hard left took 18 per cent among them. In an effort to ward off the Front National, the traditional parties now collude as often as they compete. In the second round of those regional elections, the Socialists withdrew in favour of their Républicains rivals, seeking to create a barrage républicain against the FN. The banding together of establishment parties to defend the system against anti-system parties is happening all over the world. Germany has a “grand coalition” of its two largest parties, and Spain may have one soon. In the US, the Trump and the Sanders candidacies both gained much of their support from voters worried that the two main parties were offering essentially the same package.

Guilluy has tried to clarify French politics with an original theory of political correctness. The dominance of metropolitan elites has made it hard even to describe the most important conflicts in France, except in terms that conform to their way of viewing the world. In the last decade of the 20th century, Western statesmen sang the praises of the free market. In our own time, they defend the “open society” – a wider concept that embraces not just the free market but also the welcoming and promotion of people of different races, religions and sexualities. The result, in terms of policy, is a number of what Guilluy calls “top-down social movements”. He doesn’t specify them, but they would surely include the Hollande government’s legalisation of gay marriage, which in 2013 and 2014 brought millions of protesters opposing the measure on to the streets of Paris – one of the largest demonstrations in the country since the Second World War.

French elites have convinced themselves that their social supremacy rests not on their economic might but on their common decency. Doing so allows them to “present the losers of globalisation as embittered people who have problems with diversity”, says Guilluy. It’s not our privilege that the French “deplorables” resent, the elites claim; it’s the colour of some of our employees’ skin. French elites have a thesaurus full of colourful vocabulary for those who resist the open society: repli (“reaction”), crispation identitaire (“ethnic tension”) and populisme (an accusation equivalent to fascism which somehow does not require an equivalent level of proof). One need not say anything racist or hateful to be denounced as a member of “white, xenophobic France” or even as a “fascist”. To express mere discontent with the political system is dangerous enough. It is to faire le jeu de (“to play the game of”) the Front National.

***

In France, political correctness is more than a ridiculous set of opinions; it’s also – and primarily – a tool of government coercion. Not only does it tilt any political discussion in favour of one set of arguments; it also gives the ruling class a doubt-expelling myth that provides a constant boost to morale and esprit de corps, much as class systems did in the days before democracy. People tend to snicker when the question of political correctness is raised: its practitioners because no one wants to be thought politically correct; and its targets because no one wants to admit to being coerced. But it determines the current polarity in French politics. Where you stand depends largely on whether you believe that anti-racism is a sincere response to a genuine upsurge of public hatred or an ­opportunistic posture for elites seeking to justify their rule.

Guilluy is ambivalent on the question. He sees deep historical and economic processes at work behind the evolution of France’s residential spaces. “There has been no plan to ‘expel the poor’, no conspiracy,” he writes. “Just a strict application of market principles.” But he is moving towards a more politically engaged view: that the rhetoric of an “open society” is “a smokescreen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes”.

It would be wrong, though, to see Guilluy as the partisan of any political project, let alone “playing the game” of one. Ideologically and intellectually, he is difficult to place. Sometimes he sounds like Paul Mason, author of the 2015 book PostCapitalism. That is, he looks at the destruction of working-class sources of power (from trade unions to industrial jobs) not as unfortunate collateral damage of the past thirty years of economic policy but as the overarching goal of it. He is more interested in how people act (where they move, the jobs they take, the way they form families) than in the opinions they spout. In a French context, he would be seen as among those in left-wing circles on whom certain civilisational truths once considered “conservative” have dawned. These include the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the philosopher Michel Onfray and the political philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa, who has been heavily influenced by the American historian Christopher Lasch. Guilluy, too, acknow­ledges Lasch’s influence, and one hears it when he writes, in La France périphérique, of family and community as constituting “the capital of the poor”.

Guilluy’s work is the most successful attempt to tow French political sociology out of the rut that it has been mired in since the Cold War and to direct it towards the pressing matters of our day. The “American” society that Guilluy describes – unequal and multicultural – can appear quite stable, but signs abound that it is in crisis. For one thing, it requires for its own replication a growing economy.

Since Tocqueville, we have understood that our democratic societies are emulative. Nobody wants to be thought a bigot if the membership board of the country club takes pride in its multiculturalism. But as the prospect of rising in the world is hampered or extinguished, the inducements to ideological conformism weaken. Dissent appears. Political correctness grows more draconian. Finally the ruling class reaches a dangerous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its
legitimacy, but also a sense of what its legitimacy rested on in the first place. l

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. This article was first published in the quarterly magazine City Journal