An Open Letter to Neo Liberals Happy About Macron’s Victory
The ideology that you have shoved under the rug will come back to bite you with a vengeance
By
David Gottfried
In this tape we see Robert Kennedy as the antithesis of Macron. While Macron exudes mushy moderation and an abhorrence of commitment and passion, Kennedy wears his heart on his sleeve. We know what he loves and we know what he hates. And we know what he will die for.
The first few minutes consist of light, introductory humor. But keep listening. He builds up to a glorious crescendo. A few highlights of the speech are reviewed at the end.
Many watered-down, phony progressives herald Macron’s victory, in the French election, as a victory for competence and pragmatism over ideology.
Of course, he is superior to Le Pen, but then again that’s like saying getting sick with Covid is preferable to getting sick with the Black Death.
He packaged himself as the sleek, post-modern, unromantic but good-looking nerd to make us succeed in our high tech, low- sexed, politically correct world.
People have the idea that Macron is “with it” and “hip” because he avoids ideological commitment. However, the idea that it is somehow more intellectually honest and up to date if one were to deplore ideology is really not new: It was very big in 1960, when Daniel Bell wrote “The End of Ideology” and JFK ran as the sort of Democrat who was just too chic and upper crust to echo the pro working-class refrains of Roosevelt and Truman. Ah. but the smug Harvard yard la di dah centrism of Jack and Jackie was torn apart by the publication of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” the deaths of little black girls in an Alabama Church, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Indochinese peasants by the United States military during the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1960’s, we listed to another Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and he told us that the hottest places in hell were reserved for those people who did not raise their voices in an hour of moral agony. Bobby made us understood what centrist complacency was. It was cowardice.
Also, although Marcon has always campaigned as if he were some sort of post ideological, technocratic mandarin who is above nitty gritty economic conflicts between the rich and the poor, he has been knee-deep in that stuff and it’s clear who is master is.
He is beholden to the upper class and their acolytes of the admiring upper middle class. Whenever the French state has had to choose between the continental welfare state or the Anglo-American ideology of the poor houses of Charles Dickens, Marcon has shown that he has a soft spot for kicking workers in the shins like a penny-pinching parson with heaps of gravitas and not a flicker of grace.
Macron will probably continue to eviscerate the protections of the French welfare state, and we will see a regression to the “good old days” when elderly people worked in factories, people were injured on the job and received no compensation and bosses could make workers jump through hoops of fire because things like unemployment insurance did not exist.
And then, after things are as just as merry as they were in the days of the merry films of 1933, the French may choose between Hitler and Stalin.
PS.
A few highlights of Kennedy’s speech:
The opening few minutes are uneventful, but soon enough he sounds more like someone running for the President of SDS than the United States. At about six minutes into the tape, he quotes a “seditionist” who said, “The more riots that come out of our colleges, the better the world will be for tomorrow.”
From about 16.00 to 18.00 minutes into the speech, while he is talking about economics, he seems to be giving us an intellectual and academic, but most of all poetic, version of the philosophy of George Harrison and John Lennon.
And towards the end, while he is raging about the Vietnam War, he says, “I don’t want to be a part of the United States and have them say of us what they said of Rome, they made a desert and they called it peace.” When was the last time you heard a candidate for the presidency dare to say that he did not want to be a part of America?
His son, RFK Jr, is no saint, but his work calling out the corruption and grift of Plandemic from his Children's Health Defense organization is an honour to his father.
On the French front, I voted for Marine Le Pen in the past two two elections. I loathe Macron; he's cut from the same general WEF pattern as my other national 'leader', Justin Trudeau. I look forward to when they're removed from their offices as all the putrid corruption of Plandemic comes to light.
Great line about centrist ideology, which is, of course, none at all. Bobby was and still is my hero. I’ll be listening to this one.