France Is The Future Of The Progressive Project

Probably, you have read about the recent round of riots in France. They began in late September, and are now in their fourth week. This round of riots features mostly students, and the stated bases for the protests certainly appear quite mundane, if not trivial, and certainly out of proportion to the scale and intensity of the riots. What are they so worked up about? They are demanding things like hiring more teachers, repair of dilapidated school buildings, more and better air conditioning and heating, universal school lunches at 1 euro, and so forth. (Here is a list of the demands (in French) from something calling itself the Union of Students.).

Meanwhile the riots have involved hundreds of thousands of participants on many days, multiple schools burned down, lots of violence, and thousands of arrests (the majority, but far from all, being high school students).

The big picture is that France has painted itself into the inevitable corner at the end of the progressive project. As much or more than any other developed country, France has bought into the model of the government as universal protector against all downsides in life. Decades into this, they have way excessive government spending, unsustainable public debt, economic stagnation, and not nearly enough money to go around to fund all the entitled interest groups. It’s a battle of all against all in a zero sum game where the only way to hold onto your share of the state handouts is to scream louder and riot more intensely than the others.

There are many accounts that can give you a sense of the scale and intensity of the riots. As examples, here is one from Washington Monthly on October 9, and here is another from Tablet Magazine on the same date. From the Washington Monthly piece:

This is week three of the largest French student protest movement in 20 years. Demonstrations that began at the entrances of high schools have snowballed into hundreds of thousands of marchers throughout the country—250,000 on Tuesday alone, according to the French Ministry of the Interior; 450,000, according to organizers—and violent clashes between protesters and police in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and other cities. . . . By October 1, there were demonstrations at over 1,000 French high schools. Students at dozens of French universities had erupted in protest, too, blocking campus buildings and closing some post-secondary institutions. . . . Countless social media videos show that some protesters have not been demonstrating peacefully. Youth have set off fireworks and even lobbed mortars at school buildings; others have hurled bottles, cobblestones, and, in rare instances, hydrochloric acid at police officers, according to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.

Only briefly mentioned in the Washington Monthly piece is that the student rioters feature a plurality of first- and second-generation immigrants, and that the far-left identitarian political party LFI (“La France Insoumise,” or “France Unbowed”) has strongly supported the protests. But WM does have this picture (credited to the AP) of student protesters atop the Monument to the Republic in Paris. WM’s caption says that the protesters are “displaying the French flag,” but somehow they don’t notice the Palestinian flag over there in the lower left.

To get more on the far Left involvement angle, you can go to more conservative news sites, like Dominic Green on October 10 in the New York Post here:

Mobs of students in the streets. Schools going up in flames. Police using tear gas and flash-ball guns. Hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests. . . . The disorder is backed by the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is second in the polls for next year’s presidential elections. . . . [O]n the streets of Paris, LFI deputy Thomas Portes was filmed shoving police officers. LFI deputy Bally Bagayoko, who has said that “violence is legitimate,” danced with a student mob at the gates of their school amid burning trash cans.

Mélenchon may view getting out in front of these protests as his ticket to getting elected President next Spring. In another view, it may be sealing his fate of defeat.

But note that until these latest riots came along, Mélenchon’s biggest issue was the effort to undo the reform of “retirements” that current President Macron put through in 2023. “Retirements” (“retraites”) is their word for the equivalent of our Social Security, a universal unfunded pay-as-you-go pension system. Until Macron’s 2023 reforms, they basically had universal entitlement to start collecting a pension at age 60. Our Social Security system by comparison currently has the entitlement to full pension at age 67, and our system is still going broke. Macron put enormous effort into getting the retirement age raised somewhat. (It’s now a complicated mishmash, mostly 62 today and increasing toward 64 by 2030, with various exceptions.). That was a big accomplishment, a huge favor to the French people. It was also not nearly enough to put the system on a sustainable footing, and at the same time the reform put a huge dent in Macron’s popularity from which he has never recovered. Of course Mélenchon wants to undo it.

So in a state that is out of money, the Left wants lots more money for education, and also lots more money for retirements. And then there’s healthcare. France has that thing that our Left views as the Holy Grail: universal (or near universal) free or nearly free healthcare. Achieved at the cost of way underpaid doctors, rationed care, declining hospitals, and little to no medical innovation. The Left thinks that the solution there is also more money. They recognize no limits, and no tradeoffs.

So let’s look at the big picture of French public finance. Per capita GDP is around $50,000 — just over half of ours. Public spending consumes an incredible 57% of GDP, compared to ours of around 38%. That means that the average French worker has around a third of the disposable income of his American counterpart. And Mélenchon and the Left want lots more public money for retirements and for education, and for health care. GDP growth stagnates. The annual budget deficit is in excess of 5%, which is a slightly lower percentage than ours — but then, our federal government can borrow in a currency that it can print, and France can’t do that.

Brivael Le Pogam is a French AI entrepreneur who has just written a long post on X on this subject that has apparently gone viral. I’ll give you a lengthy excerpt:

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. . . .

Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. . . . Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. . . . Trust me. You don’t want to be France.

Le Pogam’s next post (from October 13) is very long and in French, but you can click a translate button to get an English version. Here’s my translation of the opening sentences:

I have never been as optimistic as I am now. Not in spite of the current chaos, but because of it. I am going to explain to you why the empire of lies built by the Left is going to collapse, and why this is not an opinion but rather a matter of physical reality. . . .

In this long post, Le Pogam’s thesis is that the Left’s empire of lies is filled with contradictions and frictions, which will gradually wear down the operation of its machine; and that artificial intelligence will inevitably accelerate the contradictions and frictions and make the collapse happen more quickly.

I hope he’s right about this. But then, “more quickly” may be not nearly soon enough. When the Soviet Union fell, I thought that the likes of North Korea and Cuba, not to mention China, would quickly follow. But here we are 35 years later, and another entire generation has passed on, suffering unto their death under these horrible regimes, and all of the regimes are still around. France is not remotely in as much trouble as any of those.

And what does a collapse of the leftist program in France, or another such developed country, look like? No democratically elected government has yet succeeded through a democratic process in doing away with universal entitlements once enacted. (Maybe Argentina has recently come the closest.). Most likely the precipitating cause of such an entitlement rollback as predicted by Le Pogam would be a financial crisis, as when a France goes to market to role over a chunk of debt and nobody will buy the stuff, forcing a default. Then what? The debt holders don’t have any easy mechanism to force a reduction in other spending to get themselves paid. Refusal to lend more could to some degree force gradual adjustment through unavoidable balanced budgets. But the big banks of the world have a sorry history of quickly re-opening the lending spigot to defaulted sovereign borrowers. A default could easily be followed by a process of years or decades of gradual adjustment, without there ever being any clear reckoning.

And France has what I consider to be a big advantage over the U.S. — since they have adopted the euro, they can’t borrow in a currency they can print. The U.S. can borrow in a currency it can print, which gives it the ability to prolong the blowing up of the disaster potentially for additional decades, ending in a much bigger debacle when it all collapses.

I suspect that about zero of the voters who are about to vote for Democrats have given a moment’s thought to any of these considerations.