That cartoon is from an article about Macron’s first election humiliation in 2022 after being elected President in 2022, having seemingly outfoxed the rise of the LePen right wing and the steady collapse of the old Left parties by creating a new “centrist coaltion”. But five years of waffling left the young tyro (he was 39 when first elected) exposed badly even though he’d just won re-election against Le Pen:

The result of the election is much worse for Macron than almost anyone anticipated. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National increased its representation from nine seats to 89. The Mélenchon coalition of ultra-leftists, communists, greens and socialists will end up with around 131 seats, up from 17 in 2017. Macron, who warned voters in almost hysterical terms against electing extremists of the left and right, needed 289 seats for his Ensemble alliance to preserve his majority. He’s won 245, losing 154 of his deputies elected in 2017.

Ne bouge pas then on all his grand plans. Macron’s party was called En Marche, which means “On the Move”. This article contains a pretty good summary of what led up to this, with Macron’s primary problem being that he never actually built En Marche into a political party, let alone a force. It was basically a repeat of the 2017 elections where voters who weren’t that keen on Macron in the first round, rallied behind him to defeat the dreaded Far, Extreme RightTM candidate, Marie Le Pen, and a ramshackle coalition was formed to stop that, as would be true again in 2024.

And with all these recent elections Le Pen’s support has continued to grow because there is a growing discontent with the French status quo represented perfectly by Le Pen, especially among people younger than 50. Here’s the 2022 breakdown.

Is it any surprise that the 2024 French Parliamentary elections were even more chaotic, driven by Macron’s fear of his further decline and the rise of the Right in the EU elections, putting together a coalition even shonkier than its predecessors.

But France is no exception. It’s those last two highlighted blocks above from 2022t are interesting to me because they represent something that’s happening across the Western world. A repeating pattern where the Left claims it represents the poor, the working class and the oppressed – while they actually win elections via the affluent professional class who live in the urban/suburban areas.

In Britain it was Brexit, followed by many former Labour seats switching to the Tories. In the USA it showed when Hillary lost in 2016 by ignoring the “Deplorables”, and Biden won by getting enough of them back – but in both cases they were overwhelmingly supported by the sort of people now voting for Macron in France.

The “affluent professional class”? The technocractic class? The elites? The Bourgeois-Bohemians (“bobos”)? The laptop class? The ruling class?

Having used all of these over the years – the recently crafted “laptop class” being a favourite as it perfectly described millions of people who were quite happy and able to sit at home doing their jobs, so were fine with the C-19 lockdowns – I’m going with Gentry Class, as that encapsulates not just their technocratic and economic power but also a set of attitudes, including those towards the “Deplorables” or the “River of Filth”, captured succinctly here by Lefty reporter Glenn Greenwald in 2022:

Sounds like Pennsylvania and the rest of the “Rust Belt” of the Midwest, where – surprise, surprise – the same story can be told (American Socialism and its Discontents). That 2020 article was about the specific aspects of American socialism, which are now being reflected by “socialist” parties across the West:

American socialism does not defy but rather kneels before the bourgeois. It may criticize individual autonomy in the market for producing inequality, but its concern is mainly that inequality infringes on the autonomy of other individuals, their capacity for self-creation.

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you President Macron, President Obama and Biden, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, NZ PM Jacinda Ardern, Australian PM Anthony Albanese and now British PM Keir “Two Tier” Starma – and possibly President Kamala Harris.

They, and their elections, are well summed up here.

In the first nine months of 2020 the wealth of Bezos (Amazon), Zuckerberg (Facebook) and the Alphabet/Google founders, increased by tens of billions of US dollars. Bezos went from $US 120 billion to over $200 billion.

Because of lockdowns and myriad other social restrictions, a government response to Covid-19 that forced people indoors and online for everything from doing their work to ordering their groceries (and everything else).

And who got destroyed by this? Little people who owned small businesses. The numbers of such that have gone down in the USA over the last year is astounding, and those that are left are barely hanging on.

All this caused me to simply laugh when I read Chris Trotter’s missive in 2021, When It Comes to Covid, the “Little People” Cast a Big Shadow., in which he did his usual casting of good and evil between the neo-liberal business people who he claimed wanted open borders and business-as-usual and the “little people” who wanted to be safe.

Let’s stipulate that his assertion might have been true for New Zealand, since we have no Google or Amazon of our own(Trade Me perhaps?). But I’m suspicious of such a claim given the butchers and fruit & vege shops that were forced to close while the supermarkets stayed open. The neo-liberals he targets here are the same people as Bezos and company, who profited from the C-19 lockdowns more than anything else in their profitable history.

After all the ideal world of Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk is a person who does nothing but sit at home attending to Facebook and X (Twitter) while ordering all their stuff from Amazon. Perhaps online “fighting” is useless, despite the endorphin kicks? Perhaps this is why there’s no real fight left in the Left for these issues.

But the Great Chinese Lung Rot Pandemic was merely one example of another key aspect of the Gentry Class Elites.

Their utter fucking incompetence, which shows up almost all the time now.

It shows in matters small like the Democrat Party screwing up their own Iowa caucus counts in early 2020, or California Governor Newsom being “surprised” at nobody bothering to stop a theft that happened while he was shopping in a store, or teaching Afghanistan women Dadaist Art and Gender Studies – and in matters large like the Covid responses described earlier, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Net Zero Plans, the Secret Service bungles protecting Trump, and fantastic amounts of waste in government spending. And now FEMA screwing up post-Hurricane.

Not just government either, as law professor Glenn Reynolds recently summarised in Our Crisis of Institutional Competence – with Boeing currently top of the private sector bungle list and the recent bungle by software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world. And one of the reasons is explained here in an article suitably titled, Our Mad Aristos, which may sound wierd when talking of private sector capitalists but is entirely appropriate when talking of groups into which President Macron would fit like a glove:

The tech elite today, as well as their Wall Street allies, no longer resemble the entrepreneurs of the past. The masters of our increasingly “woke” corporate elites are, for the most part, now second-generation bureaucrats presiding over the wealthiest, most pervasive monopolies on the planet. Controlling 90 percent of a market like search (Google), operating system software (Microsoft), dominating the cloud and on-line retail (Amazon) or 90 percent of phones (Google and Apple) does not turn executives into-risk takers but acquirers.

Three tech firms now account as well for two-thirds of all on-line advertising revenues, which now represent the vast majority of all ad sales. Once paragons of entrepreneurial vigor, these firms, as Mike Lind has noted, have morphed into exemplars of “tollbooth capitalism,” which receive revenues on transactions that far exceed anything they lose in failed ventures and acquisitions.

Thus it should be no surprise that progressives in government circulate between that and these outfits, or NGO’s that are plushly funded by them.

Overall the new “enlightened” rich have consistently outraised and outspent the political “right” in recent years by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. By 2017 billionaires like Tom Steyer, and powerful foundations like Rockefeller, Doris Duke, Walton, MacArthur, Hewlett, Packard and George Soros’ Open Society have poured hundreds of millions to leading progressive groups; in comparison, the largest right-wing foundation, Heritage, attracted fifty percent or less in funds than most of the big progressive non-profits. Jeff Bezos, amidst his pandemic bonanza, announced $10 billion in gifts aimed mostly at woke and green non-profits.

They’re actually destroying the very system that created them, but they’re so rich that they are immune to their own insanities

However, that immunity is not just a product of wealth; it’s now the system. Reynolds concludes that a part of the reason for these public and private sector problems is that even at levels far below that of the Bezo’s or Zuckerberg’s of the world, nobody gets fired or suffers in any real way from their screwups. Quoting one Nico Colchester, who talked about “crunchy” and “soggy” systems:

Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became. Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get.

At the top of our rich societies are the Gentry Class of course, who don’t suffer “crunchiness” when they screw up, as Reynolds had already noted in 2017 after Trump’s win:

An election’s turn might see some moving to the private sector — say as K street lobbyists or high-priced lawyers or consultants — while a different batch of meritocrats take their positions in government. But even so, their status remained unchallenged: They were always the insiders, the elite, the winners, regardless of which team came out ahead in the elections.
…
To the privileged and well-educated Americans living in their “bicoastal bastions,” things seemed to be going quite well, even as the rest of the country fell farther and farther behind.