ANALYSIS: VRAI. Macron Just Doesn’t Get It. “He and others on the left are being swept along by world-historical forces they do not fully understand.”

From the beginning I’ve been a supporter of Macron and his desire to extend economic globalization. But here’s the problem: The West is experiencing a loss of relative status, due to diminished power and influence. Western societies, including France, are being transformed by immigration beyond what many of their native-born citizens had expected. The rising prominence of terror, migration and security issues have boosted some of the less salubrious sides of the right wing. Add to that mix wage stagnation and the increasingly common view — held by 91 percent in France — that today’s children will not have better lives than their parents. Finally, the decline of organized religion, especially pronounced in Western Europe, has created a spiritual vacuum and a crisis of meaning.

In response, people want something beyond more income redistribution (what the left is offering) or more globalization (what the pre-populist right used to offer). People want ideas and inspiration, and when no good new ideas are put forward, the current default seems to be nationalist ideas, including of the less tolerant variety.

Actually, what they seem to want is a chance to do better, which the French system simply won’t allow. And if Claire Berlinski’s report is anything to go by — the violent minority assortment of communists, socialists, and anarchists aside — France is experiencing something very much like our 2009-2010 Tea Party protests. Then, like now, legitimate concerns about taxes and spending and the Leviathan State were dismissed by the intelligentsia as latent racism, nativism, fear of “the other,” etc.

I don’t pretend to fully understand what’s going on either, but a little less condescension might go a long way.