I am not a political man by trade. I'm a man who reads the news over coffee and then argues with it, which is the same job without the salary or the security detail. Lately the news has been France, where high school students have spent the better part of a month blocking school doors, marching by the tens of thousands, and, in more places than anyone would like, setting fire to bus shelters and trading rocks for tear gas with the riot police. It started in mid-September over school conditions, the cuts in the government's new budget, and the plain fact that a lot of French classrooms are in poor shape. That's a fair complaint. I've never been mistaken for a scholar, but even I would rather the roof not leak while I'm failing algebra under it.
Well, that's not quite where the story stays. A Fox News Digital investigation counted fifty organizations taking part in the protests, backing them, or amplifying them abroad, and only fifteen of those were student or youth groups. Several of the fifteen are communist youth movements. The rest of the roster is labor unions, political parties including La France Insoumise and the French Communist Party, activist outfits, and a media operation called BreakThrough News, funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American-born tycoon living in Shanghai, which has been telling the world this is a historic uprising against austerity. Even France's education minister said the movement had changed in nature. None of that means every teenager holding a sign is a Marxist. Most of them, I'd bet, just want a working heater and an earlier lunch. But the kids want better schools, and a good many of the grownups marching beside them want a different country, and those are not the same project.
Back in 2010 a scholar named Angelo Codevilla wrote a long essay called America's Ruling Class, and it has aged better than most of us. His argument was that the people who run this country, Republicans and Democrats both, along with the agencies, universities, foundations, and the companies that do business with all of them, have come to treat government power as something they own rather than something we lend them. They'll fight like cats over which party gets to drive. They're a lot less interested in giving back the keys. And they tend to see ordinary citizens less as the source of their authority than as a management problem.
Put that next to France and a pattern shows up that doesn't need anybody whispering in a back room. The revolutionary wants the existing institutions discredited, and disorder does that for him. The establishment wants more authority, and disorder does that for it too, because frightened people will sign off on things calm people would laugh out of the room. Nobody has to coordinate. I ran a repair shop in Brunswick for nineteen years, and every shop owner knows there are two ways to keep the bench full. You can do good work and let word of mouth carry you, or you can do the kind of work that brings the customer back in six weeks. The second way pays better in the short run, and nobody has to plan it. The incentives plan it for you.
Consider the fellow in the middle of all this. He wants to go to work, raise his kids, keep his roof patched, and cut his own grass without filling out a form about it. He has no use for revolutionary theory, and he'd be just as happy never to learn the name of a single assistant deputy undersecretary. Then the streets fill up, the shops board their windows, and his phone spends every evening showing him fire and masks and somebody warning that civilization is about to come apart. He gets nervous, and nervous is useful to people who want something from him. The revolutionary tells him the unrest proves the whole system is rotten and has to be rebuilt from the ground up. The establishment tells him the unrest proves it needs more money, more programs, more surveillance, and more latitude to use them. Those are opposite sales pitches, but they close the same way, with him handing over a little more of his money, his say, and his confidence that he can run his own life.
France gives you a look at where that road leads. The movement started in the schools, and the organizers brought the banners, but some of the worst burning came out of the suburbs that ring Paris, places like Aubervilliers, where a great many of the young men are the French-born grandchildren of people the government invited in decades ago and then mostly forgot about. Nobody there is running this movement. They're the kindling. A generation raised in tower blocks the ministries never visit, with too few jobs and plenty of grievance, makes a ready pool of foot soldiers for anyone who shows up with a cause and a target, and the revolutionaries know exactly where to recruit. Nobody in Paris planned it that way. The officials set the policy, never lived with what it produced, and left the cost on the curb for somebody else, and every fire those kids light now becomes another argument for more police, more programs, and more authority for the same people who built the tower blocks. The revolutionary gets his fire, the establishment gets its emergency, and the kids get the arrest records. That isn't a plot. It's the shop that does the kind of work that brings the customer back, carried out at the scale of a nation.
There's an irony in the collectivist pitch I've never been able to get past. The people loudest against concentrated power keep proposing arrangements that concentrate an awful lot of it, just in different hands. Somebody has to decide what the collective purpose is, somebody has to run it, and somebody has to have the authority to make the holdouts go along. The trouble with the throne, apparently, was never the throne. It was who was sitting on it. Codevilla saw the same instinct in our own credentialed class, which tends to think government exists to steer the rest of us toward outcomes it has already picked. The street revolutionary and the career administrator would disagree about almost everything at dinner, but they share one quiet frustration, and it's a population that insists on minding its own business.
It doesn't stop at the French border, of course. These groups share money, media, and talking points across oceans, and some of the same networks show up on American campuses and street corners. There's already talk of a Europe-wide school strike against military spending on November 20. Plenty of Americans who show up at a protest are there for honest reasons, and treating every one of them as an agent of Shanghai is the same mistake in a different hat. The tell I watch for is simpler than that. When compromise starts getting called betrayal, when disagreeing gets called oppression, and when every institution has to sign on or be torn down, the argument has stopped being about schools or wages or anything else on the sign. It's become an argument about who gets to rule. The revolutionaries' answer to that is them. The establishment's answer is that they already do. Neither one is the answer I'd pick.
The better response is less exciting and a lot more work. Judge a grievance on its merits, and if the schools are falling apart, fix the schools. Call arson arson, however good the cause on the banner. Stop assuming every problem needs a new office with a new acronym on the door, and stop mistaking a diploma for wisdom or a loud voice for moral authority. Here in Glynn County, I'd wager most of my neighbors, whichever way they vote, would sooner argue across a fence than hand the argument off to somebody in a building with a flag out front, and that's a good sign. Self-government is a lot like any skill worth having. You keep it by doing it, badly at first and then a little better, and you lose it the moment you decide someone else would do it for you.
The barricades always come down eventually. It's the emergency powers that tend to stay for supper.