Modern societies are characterized by easy living and an increasingly feminized and infantilized culture. The result is that modern man is no longer motivated by spirituality or honor, but purely by lower drives, such as gibs, security, and the pursuit of comfiness.

The great majority of people, and by extension just about all societies, are trying to create security and comfort for themselves. This is achieved through stable and regular social organization, and the production and distribution of goods and services.

Our vast material wealth (food, housing, automobiles, appliances, consumer electronics, software . . .) is created by relatively small groups of the intelligent and their workers. The modern state then redistributes this wealth through a stunning variety of schemes – the “public education” system, negotiated salary levels, hyper-regulation of labor, the vast welfare system for health, the unemployed, the elderly, and the poor, etc – according to that society’s values (to what extent do they value social welfare and equality, as against liberty?). These values, in turn, are to a large extent driven by the society’s degree of empathy and social trust.

I believe this simple model accounts for much of the diversity in economies and social systems across the world. Most societies are, by First-World standards, failed societies, having insufficient intelligence, social trust, and/or empathy the produce the material comfort they would wish.

Panglossians such as Stephen Pinker and The Economist will claim the world is getting better and better, so we’ve nothing to worry about. It is true that there is a lot of economic growth and improvement of living standards across the world. The important point they overlook is that the drivers for this growth are not endogenous to Third-World societies. The fact is that there is almost never full convergence between nations or between racial groups within a same society.

Rather, economic growth is occurring because of technological innovations produced by a very, very small portion of humanity, namely in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. This is evident in the materials we use everyday: your Apple computer was perhaps produced in Shenzhen, China, while your software and most-frequented websites were created in Silicon Valley. This is reflected in the production of scientific papers, which is dominated by the West and East Asia. The militant atheist Richard Dawkins has pointed out that the Islamic World contributes virtually nothing in terms of scientific discovery. As his goal is to demonize religion while voiding the far more important issue of race and genetics, he studiously omits the fact that the rapidly-expanding Black World contributes even less.

Scientific papers published by country in 2011. Source.

The technological innovations of the First World, produced in fact by a small elite within these countries, in turn drive economic growth at home and abroad through technological diffusion. There is always partial convergence as these technologies spread to the Second and Third Worlds. This convergence is partial because, just as these societies lacked the intelligence and social trust to create these technologies, so they lack the ability to organize themselves maximally to fully close the socio-economic gap with the First World.

The diffusion of First World technologies into more traditional or backward societies, which could never have produced these technologies, can certainly have novel effects. Think of Chadian tribal warfare upgraded with Toyota trucks, AK47s, and rocket launchers. Leon Trotsky, thinking of Russia’s relationship with the West, called this “combined and uneven development.”

The world’s wealthy and powerful nations are also in the habit of trying to impose their liberal-democratic political norms on other countries. However, this often leads to chaos more than anything else. Democratic competition and political pluralism is often a recipe for chaos for countries who don’t have a history of such practices. In particular in multiethnic countries, a moderate regime of stable and autocratic authority is often all that can save the society from chaos.

The economics of “high globalism” involve the abolition of national borders and the convergence of social standards so as to maximize economic efficiency. This ought to lead to further increase in overall wealth, although it is not without its problems: wealth inequality is increased (wages driven down, tax havens optimized), local businesses go bankrupt, and jobs are off-shored Worst of all, free trade reduces national sovereignty – hence why classical republicans such as Rousseau and Jefferson were autarkic protectionists, considering independence to be a prerequisite to self-government – and increases the power of the proverbial “small, rootless, international clique,” the Davos set and assorted multinational corporations in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, etc.

The Great Replacement is however primarily driven by “low globalism,” that is to say, the aspirations of the five billion humans who live, by First-World standards, in failed societies and wish for a more comfortable life for themselves and their children. These people have a certain realism: knowing that their nation will not converge any time soon, perhaps ever, tens of millions rather sensibly (from their point of view) opt to move to the West’s more prosperous and generous societies.

These dynamics work everywhere and at every level of society. The smart fractions everywhere – your doctors, engineers, and so on – choose to go the West, where they can enjoy high wages, better government, and can participate in more influential institutions. This brain drain both sets the home country further back – and they often really don’t have much margin of error to work with – but also contributes to further innovation in the West. A smart Cuban or Bangladeshi does not have to languish in his home country, where his smarts might at best contribute a bit to local order, but can join Google, CERN, or some other organization, and thus contribute to global innovation and prosperity.

Actually, most countries are now affected by this, including ones which used to be immune. Smart French people go where economies are growing and taxes are not punitive, moving to London, America, or even the Gulf states and Singapore. China, despite having low average wages, is already stripping Taiwan of human capital by enticing businessmen to move to the mainland (a development which seems to be leading to the island’s economic stagnation). Peripheral Europe in general, both southern and eastern, is being brain-drained at a truly alarming rate, their smarts being hoovered up by northwest Europe, Germany and Britain in particular (although Brexit appears to be slowing this process).

The result of the global brain drain, contra the egalitarian theory of universal convergence, is to further increase and entrench the inherent inequalities between nations.

Of course, the great majority of people who are moving to the West are not skilled, educated, or gifted. They and their children displace the native people, replace their culture, and disproportionately use welfare and commit crimes. We can see, looking at the counter-example of Japan, how peaceful and socially harmonious Western societies would be if they had not accepted tens of millions of Hispanic, African, and Islamic immigrants.

I like to give credit where credit is due. The left-globalist newspaper Libération – co-owned by Édouard de Rothschild, the Franco-Israeli media-mogul Patrick Drahi[1], Bruno Ledoux – recently reported an interesting piece of information: a sharp 20% rise in the non-terrorism-related homicide rate in France over the last two years.

France’s homicide rate had already spiked in 2015-2016, with the November 2015 Bataclan terrorist attacks which killed 130 people (and seriously wounded 99), mostly at a rock concert featuring Eagles of Death Metal, and the 14 July 2016 (that, is Bastille Day) suicide-by-truck which killed 86 people (and wounded 456) by brutally ramming pedestrians on Nice’s iconic Promenade des Anglais.

There have been no major terrorist attacks in France since then. There have been many “minor” ones however. Some stabbing or shooting by some deranged Muslim, usually leading to their own death and anywhere between zero and a half-dozen murders, is now too banal an event to merit much notice. The perpetrators have, happily, been too incompetent to kill many people. Nonetheless, the list of murders by Islamists is not negligible: the 85-year-old Catholic priest Jacques Hamel was gruesomely beheaded on 26 July 2016, a policeman was shot to death on the Champs Élysée on 20 April 2017, two women were stabbed to death while their assailant shouted “Allah Akhbar” at a train station in Marseille on 1 October 2017, and a man was stabbed to death in Paris on 12 May 2018.

France, as Donald Trump has pointed out, is no longer France and we can no longer enjoy nice things in this country without the risk of Muslims and Africans murdering people on the street at random. The Islamist murderers particularly like attacking at major landmarks, such as churches, museums, airports, and so on. Rather than secure the existence of the indigenous French people, the authorities prefer purely cosmetic and/or liberticidal measures, such as putting up bullet-proof glass in front of the Eiffel Tower or expanding the state’s already vast array of spying and censorship legislation.

The repetition of such incidents can give a misleading impression of a country. While Islamic immigration to Europe means that every West-European is now a potential victim of Islamist terrorism, the fact is that the average European city remains very safe despite their diversity, far safer than those of the United States, let alone of Brazil. It is obvious that Europe would be even more peaceful if we had not allowed Third World immigration, but really, Europe has remained very peaceful.

The latest figures suggests that this may be changing. As Libération points out, despite the lack of major terrorist attacks since 2016, the homicide rate according to official statistics has not gone down. This means that the level of day-to-day run-of-the-mill murder has gone up by 20% over the last 12 months, about 150 more killings annually than in preceding years. As Libération writes:

This statistic is striking. Because it shows . . . a break with 15 years of decline or stagnation [of homicide]. Because it echoes developments seen in neighboring countries. But also because it was completely overlooked by the Ministry of the Interior.

There have also been upticks in crime in Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands in recent years. The case of Germany was obviously linked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s illegal welcoming of one-million-plus migrants into the country in 2015. The authorities now claim the crime spike has completely subsided, now that the migrants have “settled down” so to speak, although we can ask to what extent the data has been massaged for political reasons.

The increases in Britain, particularly London’s murder rate overtaking New York City’s, and France are if anything more significant in that these are probably not linked to massive recent migrant flows, but simply indicate the society getting more violent in general. We see increases in (non-terrorist) murder rates in France:

England & Wales:

And the Netherlands:

As indicated by the charts, Western Europe is not however particularly violent compared even with the 1990s or early 2000s. I notice that many nationalists seem to think that civil war is just around the corner in Europe, but generally speaking, the evidence does not bear this out. I am also skeptical of this simply given my experience living in major European cities, which are very diverse, and in which I have never felt unsafe, notwithstanding the undoubted bad neighborhoods, occasional terrorist attacks and petty criminality.

I for one think that multicultural consumerist social-democracy is, materially speaking, quite viable: spy on people, take away their guns, give them free money from the government so as to purchase the necessary food and electronics, and most people will simply be quite docile, including NAMs. Our societies have gotten pretty good at making sure everybody has a tolerable amount of stuff, despite the rising tide of color.

But, the recent evidence suggests we may already be hitting the limits of the pacifying powers of the Western European Nanny/Police State. If the rise in crime continues, it will be interesting to see how fast it increases, along with the steady increase in the Afro-Islamic population. Passed a certain threshold, a snowball effect seems quite likely as soon as the White Liberal State is no longer able to babysit so many NAMs. Then, we might have an American or even Brazilian type of situation, but I’d guess we are decades away from that.

Notes

[1] In addition to Libération, Drahi also owns the magazine L’Express, the radio station RMC, and the business television channel BFM TV. During last year’s presidential elections, Drahi’s media were frequently accused of giving disproportionate and excessively favorable coverage to candidate Emmanuel Macron.

The printed word is really not enough to get a sense of a person. For that, you really need to meet them, talk to them, do things with them for a while. If you can’t actually meet a person, perhaps the next best thing is to see some films about them, a complete audiovisual experience. I recently watched two films about former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose populist and spectacular but superficial brand of politics may become more and more prevalent in the coming years.

Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro (“They”) is ostensibly dedicated to the twilight years of Silvio Berlusconi. We follow an ambitious young southern Italian who wants to make it big in Rome by meeting with “Lui” (Silvio) and being made a Member of the European Parliament [sic]. He and his wife hatch a scheme: they will organize a massive party with the young and the beautiful in front of Berlusconi’s villa in Sardinia.

The first hour of the film is full of sex, nudity, and partying, almost one long music video. There is an shockingly casual, and perhaps realistic, portrayal of rape. After an hour, we finally meet Berlusconi, looking quite convincing as a ghastly botoxed mummy, played by the excellent Toni Servillo, who also starred in La Grande Bellezza. This Berlusconi is a prankster, a charming sleazebag, witty, and also quite pathetic in old age, a man so beholden to his festive and sexual appetites that he simply cannot act his age.

Loro is not an insensitive hit job. Rather, it is disappointing in another way: the film is not in fact about Berlusconi, let alone his political career, but he is used as a pretext for Sorrentino to explore his favored themes of debauchery, young females, and declining old men, with a few Christian references thrown in. Having also watched Youth and some of The Young Pope, I can say that Sorrentino is consistently strong on visuals, personalities, and dialogue, but is distinctly uninterested in plot. In the case of Loro, the film’s structure is rather disjointed and the concluding images (featuring rescue workers after an earthquake and Christian imagery) rather out of keeping with the rest of the film. (I saw the two-hour-and-thirty-minute international cut, not the three-hour director’s cut, which was released in Italian cinemas in two parts.)

This is by no means a bad film but, as a friend told me, it is rather derivative of Sorrentino’s previous work and in particular of Bellezza. Berlusconi does give an interesting speech during an argument with his wife. While his wife is frustrated with her husband’s philandering and seeks peace by hiking amid the Buddhist temples of Asia, Berlusconi tells her that he cannot abide formalism or monkish piety, and that one must follow one’s instincts and one’s passions, embracing life, even, in effect, if that leads to constant political corruption and sexual escapades. The point is noted.

As I wanted to actually learn about Berlusconi’s life and career, beyond the rather superficial and hostile news headlines of the international media, I also decided to watch My Way, a documentary about his life by the (Italian-speaking) American journalist Alan Friedman. Friedman was given unprecedented access to Berlusconi with 25 filmed interviews, given during the former prime minister’s year of community service following his conviction for tax fraud. At the beginning of the film, in heavily accented English, Berlusconi tells us that he is speaking to Friedman because: “I trust him.”

He was quite wrong to do so. Friedman wrote a book as well as making the film based on the interviews. While I cannot speak of the book, the film maintains a consistent tone of hostility and/or superficiality. Every piece of information is prefaced by Friedman’s reciting the various allegations against Berlusconi, without giving much information to assess their validity. He always begins with the media’s image of Berlusconi as a clownish fraudster, rather than from the man himself, who obviously (whatever his obvious flaws) also must have considerable qualities to have become a media mogul, billionaire, and third-longest-serving prime minister of Italy (1994-1995, 2001-2006, 2008-2011). Friedman’s narration is artless and the editing rather amateurish.

All that said, the subject’s personality cannot help shine through anyway. One understands Berlusconi’s original appeal: salesmanship on a massive scale. First as a developer and salesman in the booming 1970s Italian property market. Then by founding Italy’s first private television stations, circumventing the state ban on private national channels, by creating several local channels simultaneously airing the same shows. Apparently Berlusconi’s content was a lot more interesting to the masses than the stale government programming. (In passing, the state’s total control over national television into the 1970s gives us some sense of the bourgeois-democratic regime’s cultural and indeed authoritarian power in the years after World War Two, not counting the official legislation criminalizing Right-wing activity.)

Berlusconi, like U.S. President Donald Trump, simply has an instinct for the center-right “normie,” the actual working man and woman, whether heading a family or not, the people who own televisions, drive a car, and have a mortgage to pay. On which, see his legendary “Thank goodness for Silvio” (Menomale che Silvio c’è) ad for 2008 elections, which he won. He is not shy, a beautiful young Berlusconi sang to cruise-ship audiences in the 1960s. He is a brilliant showman. After buying the A.C. Milan football club, he arrived to watch his team’s first game in a helicopter blazing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Berlusconi’s success as a businessman reflects the materialism and superficiality characteristic of the postwar democratic West, his power derives from the masses’ bottomless desire for things and for spectacle.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Berlusconi in effect converted his media appeal and economic clout into political capital. My Way does give a sense of the man’s charm, brashness, and sordid sense of humor. Nonetheless, one can’t help laughing at his jokes and enjoying his company. We see him give a pep talk to his football players. Berlusconi tells a black player that he would like to meet his wife, because she is so beautiful, adding that he needn’t worry as he’s already “too old.” He tells a fifty-year-old man that he looks great, adding however that he still doesn’t look as a good as Berlusconi himself. This is funny, but Berlusconi, who was almost eighty during the interviews, does look like an awful case of plastic surgery.

Berlusconi gives us a tour of his gorgeous villa at Arcore (20 kilometers from Milan), showing his collection of Renaissance paintings, classical Greco-Roman sculpture (some given to him by Muamar Gaddafi from Libya), and a whole room of paintings of . . . himself, apparently given to him over the years by his many admirers. Among these we are shown a heroic painting of Mussolini, with Berlusconi weakly protesting that this shouldn’t be filmed, lest they give the wrong impression.

Anyone with an understanding of the realities of heredity and ethnicity knows, as the saying goes, that “demography is destiny.” To understand this is easy, to actually act upon these demographic trends is, however, quite difficult. It is very hard to get your citizens to make more babies and even hard to get the “right” ones to do so.

In ancient times, the societies which survived tended to be those who overwhelmingly valued and facilitated child-rearing, including early marriages and a sexual division of labor (women staying in the home). Today, such practices are considered oppressive, but these made perfect sense in their context. As Ezra Pound observed:

An ethic based on a belief that men are different from what they are is manifestly stupid. It is stupid to apply such an ethic as it is to apply laws and morals designed for a nomadic tribe, or for a tribe in the state of barbarism, to a people crowded into the slums of a modern metropolis. Thus in the tribe it is well to beget children, for the more strong male children you have in the tribe the less likely you are to be bashed on the head by males of neighbouring tribes, and the more female children the more rapidly the tribe will increase. Conversely it is a crime rather worse than murder to beget children in a slum, to beget children for whom no fitting provision is made, either as touching their physical or economic wellbeing.[1]

Reproductive and familial imperatives, mandating that the right people reproduce in the right numbers and in the right way, can be found in most traditional societies, and is still reflected in religions such as Hinduism and Judaism. In the Western tradition, the ancient Greeks went furthest in turning the religiously-inspired imperative of reproduction into a self-conscious and rational biopolitics. All this long predates Darwin. The Christians too, at their marriage ceremony, implore God: “Unite them in one mind; wed them into one flesh, granting to them of the fruit of the body and the procreation of fair children.”

In modern times, one cannot however rely on such coercive traditional cultural norms to maintain fertility rates. Most people rebel against them (perhaps, in a few centuries, we will find that small groups that manage to maintain traditional fertility, such as the Mormons and Orthodox Jews, will inherit the Earth). Moderns find it difficult to raise fertility.

The French were greatly concerned about their demographic decline in the nineteenth century, by which they went from being Europe’s preeminent power to merely one great power among several, vulnerable for the first time to German hegemony. France’s various pro-natalist policies were quite ineffective however, although perhaps these eventually bore fruit with the country’s strangely long-lasting postwar baby (France maintained replacement-level fertility long after that it had collapsed in most of the rest of Europe).

Only a few modern countries, it seems to me, have been successful in raising or maintaining fertility: these include Fascist Italy, the Third Reich, and Israel. In each case, pro-natalist policies are not taken in isolation, but reflect an encouraging total context in which children are valued by the entire society and culture, as enabling the survival and power of a particular people.

Since the eclipse of Darwinism after 1945 and of communism after 1989, few European countries have really attempted to raise their fertility rates. Today, serious efforts are being made in more and more countries swept by “national-populist” revolutions: namely Hungary, Poland, and most recently Italy. Hungary is the country which has undergone the most profound and lasting of these revolutions since Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010. I would like to go over Hungary’s various natalist policies and consider their degree of success.

Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies has written an impressively comprehensive account of Hungary’s demographic policies and evolution. In it he points out that Orbán has organized a political and indeed constitutional refounding in Hungary centered on the family and descendance:

[I]n 2011, Hungary adopted a new, and extremely controversial, constitution. Criticized by many international organizations as consolidating too much power around the ruling party, the document was Hungary’s first democratically produced framework for governing. It includes statements such as, “We trust in a jointly-shaped future and the commitment of younger generations. We believe that our children and grandchildren will make Hungary great again,” and, “We hold that the family and the nation constitute the principal framework for our coexistence,” and “We bear responsibility for our descendants.” It also includes strong language committing the country to historic national heritage, Christian identity, and community values. Moreover, Article L of the constitution, which, again, is the basis of Hungarian government today, says,

Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman… and the family as the basis of the nation’s survival. Hungary shall encourage the commitment to have children. The protection of families shall be regulated by a cardinal Act.

Orbán’s Hungary then has to some extent rejected a purely individualist conception of democracy, which sees human beings only as fleeting and interchangeable atoms, to a notion of the citizen as incorporated in a particular family, a particular nation, and a particular chain of generations. In doing so, Orbán has recognized basic biological realities and moved towards what he calls an “illiberal democracy.”

Personally, I prefer the term “communitarian democracy.” But in any event, the Hungarians have constitutionally founded their state on the basic Aristotelian principle of community: that one can only consider individual well-being starting from the well-being of the whole, of the community of which he is necessarily a part, and which will outlive him.

Since 2011, Hungary has adopted a wide array of measures to boost fertility and support families. Stone writes:

First of all, in 2011 and 2012, Hungary changed the structure of their tax exemptions for children, providing new deductions that saved families between $400 and $1,500 on their tax bill per child, depending on how many kids they have. A similarly-generous deduction in the U.S., given our higher incomes and our different tax rates, would mean the introduction of a between $4,000 and $16,000 per-child tax deduction.

Previous research by academics suggests that this increased tax exemption for kids probably did boost birth rates. They estimate that the policy change caused between 6,000 and 18,000 more births from 2011 to 2013.

Stone notes that support to families has reach an unprecedented level with the introduction of a new family-housing subsidy in 2015:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Emmanuel Macron, the current president of the French Republic, is a weird dude. Now, after just 18 months in power, he is also a very unpopular dude. The French media have been making much of the fact that Macron’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe, has been slightly more popular than the president in certain polls. But really, what we are seeing is an almost perfect parallel collapse in popularity of both personalities

That French presidents are unpopular is nothing new. However, there is a secular trend in them getting unpopular more and more quickly upon getting into office. True, Macron is not as unpopular after 18 months as was the hapless and squishy François Hollande, who could deliver on virtually none of his Socialist economic promises. However, Macron as collapsed in popularity more quickly than Nicolas Sarkozy did, who was a one-term president.

The English-speaking Macron said he wanted to turn France into a “start-up nation.” A bold ambition, but it’s worth remembering that 90% of start-ups go bankrupt.

I personally don’t understand the French electorate on these matters. Macron in particular did not promise anything other than to deliver more of the same policies, albeit with more youth and more vigor, as a frank globalist. Who, exactly, was excited at his election but is disappointed now? People with a short attention span or susceptibility to marketing gimmicks, I assume.

It is hard to talk about the French media without getting a bit conspiratorial, at least, I speak of “structural conspiracies.” Macron’s unabashed, “modernizing” globalism certainly corresponds to the id of the French media-corporate elites and to top 20% of the electorate, let us say, the talented fifth. He was able to break through the old French two-party system, annihilating the Socialist Party and sidelining the conservatives. The media certainly helped in this, preferring him to either the conservative François Fillon or the civic nationalist Marine Le Pen.

However, the media have to a certain extent turned on Macron, perhaps because he believes his “complex thoughts” cannot be grasped by journalists with their admittedly limited cognitive abilities. Turn on the French radio and you’ll hear stories of how the so-called “Youth With Macron,” whose twenty- and thirty-somethings were invited onto all the talk shows just before Macron became a leading candidate, were actually former Socialist party hacks with no grass roots. Astroturf. I could have told you that.

Macron has made a number of what the media call “gaffes.” When an old lady voiced concern about the future of her pension, he answered: “you don’t have a right to complain.” He has also done many things that anyone with just a little sense of decorum will be disgusted by. The 40-year-old Macron, who has a 65-year-old wife and claims not to be a homosexual, loves being photographed with sweaty black bodies.

June 21, 2018: the Élysée Palace, is turned into a gay African discotheque for a today, with presidential blessings. The Palace was initially built in 1721 for the military commander Louis Henry de La Tour d’Auvergne. A desecration.

Macron appearing with vibrant “future Montaignes” in the Caribbean.

Macron heterosexually sharing a moment with said French youth.

While Macron enjoys black bodies, he does say some sensible things. He has some realism. Macron has said that African political instability, poverty, and emigration to Europe will never be controlled unless African women have less children: “When countries still have seven to eight children per woman, you can decide to spend billions of euros, but you will not stabilize anything.” Macron has repeatedly made these comments, showing that like Bill Gates, he understands that a Black Planet with 4 billion Africans (as currently projected to be happen this century according to U.N. projections) will be a big, big problem. Macron is bold in this respect: even Viktor Orbán has not gone so far as to tell black people how they should breed.

In another “slip,” Macron recently said that all the French marshals of the First World War would be celebrated in the upcoming centennial commemorations of that great and terrible conflict. Including, he said, Marshal Philippe Pétain because despite his “dreadful choices” in the Second World War, he had been “a great soldier” in the First. This is objectively true, although Macron was forced to backtrack in the face of “media outcry.”

Macron should have known better. He had previously got into trouble while on an official visit to Algeria for saying that France had committed “crimes against humanity” there in the days of colonialism. As his spokeswoman Laurence Haïm pointed out, the problem was not the offense this caused to French nationalists, but to the Jewish community:

What poses a problem is the term “crime against humanity.” There is a monopoly. . . . I think it is generational. In any case, there is a problem on the expression “crime against humanity” which for many people in the Jewish community can only be said relative to the Shoah.

In the background, one can hear one of Macron’s aides helpfully interject: “It’s a copyright.” (Using the English term, that’s “co-pee-rhaïte”!)

So there’s that. But, in terms of policies, I cannot say that the people who supported Macron have any right to complain. He is doing what he promised, that is to say, steaming full straight ahead on the globalist course with, a bit more forthrightness and, he hopes, competence than his Socialist or conservative predecessors.

In truth there are no solutions. There is nothing he can do to make the elitist and gridlocked European Union more effective, nothing he can do to improve the “human capital” in the Afro-Islamic banlieues, and not much he can do to improve the economy which the French people would find acceptable. A bit more of labor flexibility here, a bit of a tax break there, oh wait deficit’s too big, a tax hike in some other area too, then. Six of one, half a dozen in the other. Oh, and they’ve also passed more censorship legislation to fight “fake news” and “election meddling” and other pathetic excuses the media-political class across the West have come up with for their loss of control over the Narrative.