There are myriad reasons that are unique to each nation, but one feature common to all is a gap that steadily opens up between at least two or more parts of society and which cannot be resolved by politics.

In this respect there are two nations that have such gaps, France and the USA.

In the case of France it can be seen most clearly in the announcement by one Éric Zemmour, conservative columnist, historian, writer and television pundit, that he is running for President in 2022. I don’t expect him to win but he will not be ignored, least of all by the ruling class of that nation, of whom he is one. In this Claremont Review article is a lengthy look at Zemmour and it starts with this rather remarkable bit of information:

Emmanuel Macron, frequent butt of Zemmour’s on-air contempt, was calling to commiserate. Zemmour had been accosted by a thug that afternoon while walking home from a fruit stand on the rue des Martyrs. The whole of political Paris was talking about it. For decades Zemmour, 63, has warned the public that France is being submerged by Muslim immigration and smothered by political correctness. In so doing, he has been acclaimed as a historian and author, and revered as a truth-teller. He has also been reviled in the press and hauled into court for inciting racial and religious hatred. Now he was being harassed in the street. That alarmed even Macron.

Macron, once the “golden boy of the Socialists” had left years ago to lead a new party, La République en Marche (“Republic on the Move,” or LREM), and had sold himself as the alternative to Marine Le Pen, who had inherited (and renamed) the National Front (F.N.), the populist and nationalist party founded by her father (the article goes into that history also). But even Macron has started to feel strange and frightening new pressures:

Faced with an increasingly anxious public, Macron has sought to strike a populist tone. His interior minister Gérald Darmanin, and his education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, are both conservatives of a sort. In the wake of the George Floyd riots and demonstrations in the United States, Macron made a forthright announcement that France “will tear down none of its statues.”

That pressure had already shown up in the the 2017 campaign which saw the collapse of France’s two establishment parties, the Socialists and the Républicains and in that now-famous phonecall with Macron:

In the course of 45 minutes of passionate back-and-forth, Macron told Zemmour that a president who spoke like that would drag the country into civil war. Zemmour cut him off. “I told him that if we continue to follow his policies we are headed for civil war in any case.”

In the case of France the pressures relate to several things. There is a growing disconnect with the EU, which basically overrides the French Constitution, thanks to none other than France’s own former President Sarkozy, who quietly committed France, by treaty, to the very EU arrangements that had just rejected at the ballot box by the French people.

Then there is the growing Islamic population:

Last summer, Causeur magazine released a set of maps that the government consulting group France Stratégie had been using. They showed a growth of immigrant populations in all French cities that was almost incredible. In vast stretches of Seine-St-Denis, burial place of France’s kings and queens, 70-80% of the children under 18 are born of immigrants from outside of Europe.
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The maps sent shock waves through France when they were published, but what is most striking is that the outrage took the government consultants by surprise. They had been using the maps for two years to develop plans to fight residential segregation. It had apparently not occurred to them that, in the public’s view, the main problem was not the distribution of the immigrant population but the sheer size of it.

Furthermore, nobody apparently has much confidence that laïcité – the system of secularism imposed at the turn of the last century to topple the Catholic Church from its position of cultural and educational dominance – will also tame Islam.

But there’s also this, and it connects directly to the USA:

On one side are the “winners” of globalization—the super-rich and protected minorities. On the other are globalization’s losers—the newly precarious middle and working classes.
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By 68 to 32, members of LREM and top executives believe globalization is good for France. Members of all other parties and people at all other income levels disagree. Only 26% of French people trust the media. Only 16% trust political parties.

It is this overall loss of faith in the institutions of a nation, perhaps even in the nation as it is conceived by Macron’s ruling class – a class duplicated in every nation across the Western world – where the greatest danger lies. But I can see what Macron meant about Zemmour’s talk when held in public:

“The first thing you need to understand about France,” he said in September, “is that we are the country of civil wars. We’ve always had civil wars: the wars of religion, the French Revolution, the Commune of Paris, the battles between collaborators and résistants after World War II.”
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The reason France has civil wars, according to Zemmour, is that it is, like the United States, a created nation. It is a place where people dispute principles, and conflicts can end when disputes over values are settled.

This past October, Zemmour passed Le Pen in the polls. Read the whole thing.