It is amazing how effectively the French political class is able to suppress polling about the Yellow Vests. This suppression coincided with March 23, when President Emmanuel Macron deployed the army, unveiled even harsher measures of repression and banned of urban demonstrations. The latest poll I can find, from a month ago (even though this is the most important issue in French society) still has their approval rating at 50%, and that follows months of anti-Yellow Vest propaganda.
But being a Yellow Vest and merely supporting the Yellow Vests are two different things entirely. After all, the latter can be appeased even more easily than a right-wing Yellow Vest can be bought off. The Yellow Vests are the cultural majority but not the political majority.
Therefore, what the Yellow Vests are is this: they are the nation's political vanguard party.
However there is no "nation" anymore. There is no more political and economic sovereignty in Europe, and that is a concrete, structural, "rule of law" reality and not hyperbole.
The prime adulthood of France, and 41-year old Macron exemplifies this 100%, is full of people who grew up being culturally inculcated into blindly and hysterically supporting not modern socialist democratic ideals, but instead the neoliberal empire known as the European Union, and also the even more undemocratic banking empire known as the Eurozone.
Therefore, there is no "France" for the Yellow Vests to be as they should raised upon the People's shoulders and put into power nationwide; the Yellow Vests, thus, have to be a pan-European movement in order to succeed in their aims. We are talking about an order of magnitude, here.
The reality is that the Yellow Vest movement reflects the same schizophrenia as most Western governments and societies: this is succinctly encapsulated by a favourite phrase and policy of the West's "humanitarian intervention" (whatever that is as though nations were dogs which were humanely euthanised).
Vesters are certainly clearer than most this is why they are the vanguard party, i.e. the most enlightened local leaders but they also partially suffer from the tremendous cognitive dissonance and intellectual fog caused by the intersection of European neo-imperialism, bourgeois-centered European Enlightenment ideals, and the undemocratic concepts and political structures of the liberal democratic European Union empire.
Yellow Vests, especially on the right-wing of their spectrum, are often so blinded by their "glorious" view of France's (bourgeois) "revolutionary history that they have not updated their political thought in 200+ years they don't want to admit their revolution was not enough; that they probably need a true revolution before a 2nd revolution; that the CRs of Chain and Iran should be their model.
And yet they do admit this".
Simply review number 7 on the list of their 25 primary demands: "Rewriting a Constitution by the people and for the interest the sovereign people." It's the latter part which would require a revolution in French/Western culture because it is obviously rooted in socialist democratic ideals; the people were not sovereign in US and French Revolutions (the only Western nations to have revolutions), as non-Whites, women and the poor, landless masses were all most glaringly excluded, of course.
This "they do but they don't" is exactly why French society is both "revolutionary" in self-conception but incredibly reactionary in practice.
It would take a Cultural Revolution to sort out these issues, and that is what the Yellow Vests are truly asking for; it is the leftist ones which are willing to slough off the ancient husk of 1789, not the right-wing Vesters.
Any way you look at it, two things are clear: the Yellow Vests still have very far to go, and victory will look like Cultural Revolution.
Series Conclusion
This series emphatically demonstrated that China's post-1980 economic success did not start with Deng Xiaoping's reforms but instead was built upon on the Cultural Revolution's hugely successful creation of human, educational, and economic capital in China's rural areas.
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