Against World-Changers

The NYT explains France:

A coarsening of public discourse and contempt for mainstream parties have politicians on both sides denouncing what they say are extreme positions by their opponents, analysts say.

They draw this subhead from a man they interviewed:

Wojciech Przybylski, president of Res Publica Foundation, a research group in Warsaw, said there had been a coarsening of political discourse and a growing contempt on both ends of the spectrum for mainstream forces.

That, he said, reminded him of Poland between the world wars, when the far left and the far right rallied, sometimes violently, against the central government.

Today, he said, both “are united against globalization and claim to be defending the so-called average man against elites.”

The loss of confidence in what they are calling "mainstream" parties was well-earned. These include both of our parties as well as they do Macron's or Merkel's. As Richard Fernandez writes, these parties internationally are trying to commit humanity to one of the greatest gambles humanity has ever taken. And they're doing it by force, against the will of the majority of humanity as well as their citizenries. 

Yet food redesign is not the almost painless step it is made out to be but rather a wrenching change for almost everyone involved in agriculture, as shown by 2024 European farmers' protests. Chief among the grievances were proposed environmental regulations (such as a carbon tax, pesticide bans, nitrogen emissions curbs, and restrictions on water and land usage) that are part of the "nature positive" agriculture initiative. The resulting protests ultimately led to the fall of many governments throughout the continent. "Angry farmers are reshaping Europe," proclaims the New York Times, "as the far right senses an opportunity".

“The graduates of elite schools that run this country have no idea about farm life, or even what a day’s labor feels like,” Mr. Monnery said. “They’re perched up there, the successors to our royal family, Macron chief among them."

Is this a case of rural know-nothings resenting their betters or are the farmers right to resist? Because 37 percent of the world's land area is devoted to agriculture, employs a quarter of the global workforce and encompasses so many varied ecosystems and social milieus, changing the way multitudes of people produce food is perhaps the greatest social engineering project in history.

No government has a mandate for that. No ordinary election could generate such a mandate in any event: all elections are for is to decide who will govern the existing polity. Elections by nature are more conservative, as they presume that the incoming party will govern an existing order. This sort of total reform of society requires at minimum something like a constitutional convention; more likely, a revolutionary war. 

So you have people, ordinary people who really are 'mainstream' in the proper sense of the term, looking at other options that will resist this revolutionary war that is being fought against them. The radicals are really the conservatives: they both propose to resist that revolution, whether from the right or from the left. The coarsening of discourse is the effect of ordinary people, who aren't so refined as the Wise, getting dragged into politics because their worlds are being destroyed by those who have made politics their profession.

Meanwhile the NYT and its ilk are in no position to talk about coarsening discourse. They're the ones who painted Mitt Romney as a dog-abusing misogynistic monster. I don't like Mitt Romney at all, but he's clearly one of that refined-discourse order, the sort of person who takes jobs with international organizations and addresses them fluently in their native French. You're the ones, liberal journalists, who coarsened the discourse in ways that ended up radicalizing the populace. It's at least as much your fault as anyone's. I can't open a paper today without reading about how your opponents are all racists and haters and liars, led by a "felon." It's the twilight of democracy if you don't get your way!

Even Joe Biden doesn't see it that way, as John Stewart points out (the whole video is a stinging indictment of the Biden campaign, without being an endorsement of Trump).

If you don't like this, stop using political power to destroy your own civilizations. As long as the political professionals keep doing that, they're going to run into opposition. They deserve to run into opposition. It is vital and important that they be opposed and defeated. 

It's also important who does it -- the Communist Party in France is one of those claiming that they'll be the successful destroyers, a claim that their résumé does at least support. You definitely don't want to be ruled by Communists, whose very similar effort to reform farming led to some 30-60 million deaths in China alone. Hopefully beating the world-changers can be done without committing yourself to another world-changing philosophy with no better track record of avoiding massive human misery. Still, it's no surprise that there's a unifying call to defeat these 'mainstream' parties from both left and right. They deserve to be defeated.