Stephen R. Turley - Uprising: How the Yellow Vest Protests are Changing France and Overturning the World Order

I t all seemed to start as a protest against escalating gasoline taxes. Thats at least what the media largely reported in November of 2018, as massive crowds began to assemble in Frances cities. But it didnt take long to recognize that something far surpassing any particular tax or regulation was surfacing on the streets of Paris, Marseille, Metz, Nice, Bordeaux, and in Toulouse. Indeed, protestors wearing the characteristic yellow vest began spilling over into Brussels, Portugal, the Netherlands, the UK, and even Canada. It soon became apparent that this was no mere protest; this was the makings of a worldwide uprising.

At the time of this writing, for nearly five months, what has been called the Yellow Vest Uprising has dominated the political scene within France and has effectively crippled the Macron presidency. Thus far, there have been 11 recorded fatalities, and, according to the newspaper, Libration, 109 protesters have been seriously injured, including 18 who have become blind in one eye and four who have lost a hand. Needless to say, there have been thousands of arrests, and Paris has been a mess with graffiti-scrawled over monuments and shattered glass and burned cars. The Uprising is without question an absolute wildfire that has grown beyond the containing capacities of police authorities, who have often relied on counter-measures of escalating violence, which has only seemed to fuel the anger and the resentment.

As for Macron himself, the Yellow Vest Uprising has been a political disaster. Even before the Uprising, only about 25 percent of the population approved of his leadership, while 71 percent said they had no confidence in him at all. But as soon as the protests reached their second and third weeks, Macrons approval rating dipped to an embarrassing 18 percent. Things had become so bad that Newsweek headlined their coverage of the demonstrations with the question: Will Macron survive?

But that question has been increasingly eclipsed by the far larger question that more and more pundits are asking: Will the globalist political order survive ? As each week goes by marked by renewed protests, more journalists and scholars are beginning to realize that the Yellow Vest Uprising poses nothing less than perhaps the single greatest threat to the globalist world order that we have yet seen. I was particularly struck by an article on the Australian site Adelaide.com written by contributor Andrew Hunter, who makes a very interesting argument: he notices quite rightly that the Yellow Vest Uprising is emphatically not a partisan movement. Its not representing any particular party or political platform or policy. In fact, the Yellow Vest Uprising has nothing to do with any political cooperation at all, and therein is the whole point! The protestors simply dont believe that any solution to their economic and cultural predicaments can be found in the current structures and its elected representatives, and this is why the Yellow Vest Uprising is such an existential threat to the globalist world order. What makes the Yellow Vest Uprising so dangerous to the current world order is that their unrelenting demands find virtually no possible solution within the given globalist structures and its representative elite .

For example, if we were to draw parallels between the Yellow Vests and say the Popular Front uprising in the 1930s, we would immediately notice that the Popular Front identified with the political leftwing; they self-consciously aligned themselves with the French Communist Party, Workers International, and the Radical and Socialist Party. As such, the Popular Front was responding to their contemporary problems by advocating solutions provided by their current political structure. This is simply not the case with the Yellow Vest Uprising. Theyve rejected an alliance with any established French political party; it appears that most of its participants either didnt vote in the last presidential election, or they voted for Le Pen and the National Rally. Given that a majority of French citizens approve of the protests and the cause for which they stand, and given that these demonstrations have spread throughout Europe and even into Canada, we may, in fact, be looking at that movement that finally hits at the heart of globalist establishments so as to bring them down once and for all, which for Hunter means the end of liberal democracy and liberal democratic institutions.

Now, let me note where I think Hunter goes awry in his analysis. Hunter rather carelessly asserts that the Yellow Vest Uprising poses a very dire warning for what he calls democracies. By democracies, it is rather clear throughout the article that hes referring to the particular kind of democracy that is allowed indeed thats mandated by globalization, and hence, by implication, hes talking about a dire warning for globalization itself. However, populist movements such as the Yellow Vests are emphatically not anti-democratic; the data is in on this, and its unfortunate that it seems that Hunter has not availed himself of these studies. What these studies have demonstrated is that populists are not against democracy itself; in 2017, Pew Research found across Europe and the United States that an average of 90 percent of their populations saw democracy as a good way of governing their countries. And a World Values Survey found the same totals. The super-majority of Europeans, which other studies have found to include at least 25 to 30 percent committed nationalist populists, feel very, very good about democracy. Democracy isnt going anywhere.

What nationalist populists are very concerned about are certain aspects of democracy, which is fundamentally different than being opposed to democracy itself. In fact, as Eatwell and Goodwin have documented, far from being anti-democratic, national populist voters want more democracy; they want more referendums, and they want more politicians who are actually going to listen to their concerns and who will, in turn, give more power to the people and less power to established economic and political elites. Nationalist populists are far more interested in direct democracy rather than the kind that derives from Brussels which so often overrides the concerns of the populations of sovereign nations.