Well, it's more like: Comme-ci, comme à §a.
Why? "Identity politics" is, of course, the term that immediately comes to mind, though that term oversimplifies, particularly regarding the French context. As C. J. Hopkins put it: "Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising." Scares and confuses.
Historically, the core definition of the left has been solidarity with the working class (everyone who depends on wages to live), which includes the majority of people of all races and genders. But a new definition has taken hold among American/Western/college-educated liberals and progressives, as well as socialists and marxists, who are perceived and think of themselves as on the "left", and it has given rise to a new pattern of solidarity. These leftists have trained themselves to quickly embrace movements defined in terms of race and gender. Critical interrogation will come from within an assumed position of solidarity, and it will usually be in terms of those categories: Does your racial justice movement x have the right attitude and/or demographics in terms of gender?
Much less frequently and urgently, and virtually never as a condition of support, will a race or gender movement be interrogated regarding its position--its attitude and demographics--in terms of class.
There's a different default setting for working-class movements. They will almost always be looked upon with suspicion, until and unless they prove their attitudinal and demographic race and gender bona fides to the satisfaction of American/Western/college-educated "leftists." That interrogation has effectively become a prior condition of solidarity for working-class movements. Leftists have adopted a kind of checklist of concerns, and class has moved way down.
So that's been affecting the slow uptake of left support and coverage of Yellow Vest movement, which is, centrally and unashamedly, a working-class movement. Though the spark was a hike in the diesel gas tax, the flame quickly engulfed a wide range of issues. Far from being an "anti-tax" revolt, as some on the right and the left rushed to characterize it, Yellow Vest has called for the re-imposition of the wealth tax that Macron had so kindly abolished for the French elite. Fundamentally, it's an eruption of a lot of people who are rightly raging about economic inequality.
Diana Johnstone sums it up well:
The gasoline tax was the last straw in a long series of measures favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of the population". Briefly, the message was this: we can't make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up, and our incomes keep going down. We just can't take it any more.
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