Democracy Is Sacred - Except When It Isn't

Justin Raimondo
Dec. 03, 2018

On both sides of the Atlantic the regnant elites have launched a furious regime change campaign not all that different from the ones they started in the former Soviet republics. The formula seems to go like this: hold an election in which the full resources of the EU states and their upper classes are brought to bear on one side of the question. Vilify dissenters as more than likely agents of Vladimir Putin.

On the British side the government of Prime Minister Theresa May, which has been all along pretending to be in favor the people’s decision to leave the EU, has effectively sabotaged the process with so many exceptions, amendments, other concessions to Brussels that they might as well have stayed in.

Shocked by their defeat, the Remainers have been scheming and plotting and demand a new election – and are presumably willing to keep voting until they get the “right” result.

But events are overtaking them: the right-wing populist upsurge that threatens the very existence of the EU is not quite through making waves. The French “yellow vests” have arisen from the rural and poorer sections of the countryside. These are France’s forgotten as Macron raises the petroleum price by 15% – one third of that in the name of stopping global warming.

But there is more to Macron’s sudden descent into villainy – when only yesterday he was the hero of the anti-nationalists. He wears his arrogance like a cloak, held tightly around him. He refused to negotiate with the yellow vests, smearing them as “having a brown coloration,” meaning fascist inclinations. However, the main labor unions are meeting with the leaders of the movement and as many as 80% of the general populace saying they intend to join the movement.

A similar movement of French truckers disrupted the placid social democratic surface of French politics at the beginning of the decade. And before that there were the Poujadists, radicalized bourgeois protesting taxes and regulations.

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