The Great Class Shift: How New Social Class Structures are Redefining Western Politics 2019029094, 2019029095, 9780367342111, 9780367342104, 9780429324482

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“Thibault Muzergues is an insightful observer of people and politics in the ­transatlantic space. Fluent in American and European trends, he examines the four warring sub-cultures—each pursuing their own righteous revolution—that are pulling our societies apart.” Justin Gest George Mason University, USA, Author of The New Minority “If you want to understand the new social classes dominating today’s heated political debate, look no further than this excellent analysis by Thibault Muzergues. By uncovering the structural fault lines underlying the political earthquakes since 2008, he provides the reader with a detailed map not only to the recent past, but also to navigate our political future.” Josef Lentsch Managing Partner of the Innovation in Politics Institute, Germany, Author of Political Entrepreneurship “Western societies have changed profoundly over the past quarter c­ entury. But the social sciences have not revised their categories of analysis. This is precisely the great interest of Thibault Muzergues’ book. It  invites us to rethink social stratification to better understand democratic politics in the 21st century.” Dominique Reynié Sciences Po Paris, France “Thibault Muzergues has penetrated beneath the surface of western societies to outline the new cleavages that are neither just socio-economic nor just sociocultural but a complex mixture of the two. It is an important book, written with clarity and insight and with an impressive inside knowledge spanning much of the modern west.” David Goodhart Head of Demography, Immigration & Integration at the Policy Institute, UK, Author of The Road to Somewhere

THE GREAT CLASS SHIFT

This thought-provoking book offers a new global approach to understand how four social class structures have rocked our political systems, to the extent that no politician or political party can exist today without claiming to be speaking on their behalf, and no politician can hope to win an electoral majority without building a coalition among these classes. Based on a four-fold analysis – Urban and Liberal Creatives, Suburban Middle Class, White Working Class, and the Millennials – this book shows that while many have focused on a supply-side vision of politics to explain the upheavals in our political party systems, a vision centered on demand – and the Weberian take on political parties as vehicles for class interests – is more compelling. In 2016, our political world was changed forever by the victories of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the United States. Far from being confined to the Anglosphere, however, changes have also rocked the political landscapes in Europe. As the crisis of 2008 has shaken the foundations of Western societies, shrinking the size of the previously all-powerful middle class, new classes have emerged, and with them a new political demand that new (or old) parties have tried to satisfy. This book will be of key interest to political practitioners (politicians, ­advisors/ consultants, journalists, political pundits, party builders, and government officials) and more broadly to academics, students, and readers of European and Western politics, political sociology, party politics and political parties, and electoral demographics. Thibault Muzergues is Europe program director at the International Republican Institute’s Europe Regional Office, Austria.

THE GREAT CLASS SHIFT How New Social Class Structures are Redefining Western Politics

Thibault Muzergues

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Thibault Muzergues The right of Thibault Muzergues to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Original French language copyright version remains with Le Bord de l’Eau Editions and Mich et Maf scrl (MARQUE BELGE). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Muzergues, Thibault, author. Title: The great class shift : how new social class structures are redefining Western politics / Thibault Muzergues. Other titles: Quadrature des classes. English Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029094 (print) | LCCN 2019029095 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367342111 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780367342104 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429324482 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political participation--Social aspects--Western countries. | Social structure--Political aspects--Western countries. | Social classes--Western countries. | Political parties--Western countries. | Elections--Social aspects--Western countries. | Western countries--Politics and government--21st century. Classification: LCC JF799 .M8913 2020 (print) | LCC JF799 (ebook) | DDC 323/.042091821--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn. loc.gov/2019029094 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029095 ISBN: 978-0-367-34211-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-34210-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32448-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Lumina Datamatics Limited

This  English translation has been facilitated by ALDE Party with the financial support of the European Parliament. The  sole liability rests with the author. The  European Parliament is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

To Alisa Muzergues

CONTENTS

Foreword xi Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 PART I

Class shifting: How four social classes came to redefine our electoral landscapes

13

1 In the beginning was the creative class

17

2 The suburban (and provincial) middle class: A pro-system rebellion 29 3 The new minority, or the revolt of the white working class

41

4 The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels

54

x  Contents

PART II

Falling apart or coming together?: Coalition dilemmas for election victory in a four-class system

69

5 France and the United States: From new fault lines to new coalitions 73 6 North-Western Europe: Divergent scenarios in the economic heart of Europe 85 7 Central and Eastern Europe: Power to the (white) working class 104 8 Southern Europe: The heart of the Millennial Challenge

115

Conclusion

128

Index 137

FOREWORD

Conventional wisdom in politics these days has it that “the left” and “the right” have disappeared and been replaced by proponents of “open” and “closed” societies. As is the case with many clichés, there is a grain of truth to this. In European politics, the struggle between “open” and “closed” political parties translates into a clash between pro-Europeans and nationalists. The former, of which I am one, believe that the future of sovereignty lies in sharing it at the European level, while the latter believe that the nation-state, as it was conceived in the seventeenth century, ought to remain the cornerstone of European politics. This book is taking the reader beyond this fault-line and examines the identity of the electorate – the individuals whose job it is to make a choice whose whys and wherefores are infinitely more complicated than the old left-right dichotomy of our political landscape. Thibault Muzergues poses a question that is remarkably simple (but often overlooked): if the old political divide of left and right no longer exists (at least as we know it), are the models we use to categorize voters by social class, based on their income – lower class, middle class, upper class – still valid? In other words: if Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron are located at either end of a new political spectrum (but we must also question whether they entirely are), is it still correct to affirm that the “working class” and the “middle class” still represent the primary groups of voters? Did Mr. Trump simply win over the white working-class electorate who usually voted for the Clintons? And was Marine Le Pen too radical for that electorate in France? Or are the old social  – and indeed ethnic  – c­lassifications becoming more inadequate when it comes to explaining the electoral upheavals of the 2010s? Thibault puts forward an irrefutable argument about the existence of these new social classes. The main advantage lies in the fact that these classes are less defined by their income and economic status, than by a person’s outlook on the world, or their attitude to life in general. This brings back justice to politics, in the

xii  Foreword

sense that politics now means more than following the mantra “it’s the economy, stupid”. Politics is just as much, if not more so, a question of values, both personal and public. That is what I, as a European liberal, find so attractive about this new model: it does not put people in statistic, economic, or racial boxes. It looks at a group of individuals who happen to share the same ideas. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Thibault’s fresh look gives us an image of politics that is far more dynamic. The Austrian presidential elections of 2016 are a good example. One month before the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, the initial results of the Austrian vote were cancelled for technical reasons. In itself, the result was extremely interesting, though: the pro-European candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, had secured around 50.3% of the vote, whereas the anti-European, far-right candidate, Norbert Hofer, had garnered around 49.3%. A victory just in the nick of time – albeit one that was cancelled. The result of the second vote, six months after Brexit, was far more ­decisive, and indeed incredible in many ways: Mr. Van der Bellen increased his margin of victory over Mr. Hofer from 31,000 votes to almost 350,000 votes. It was a far more decisive victory, with 53.8% of the vote. The reason for this major development can be attributed to the change in tone on the part of Mr. Hofer: in the second round, he not only revealed himself to be a Euro-skeptic, but also proposed holding a referendum on Austria leaving the EU. Many Austrians could find grounds for criticizing the way the European Union is currently being run, but do they want to see an “Auxit”? No, thanks. During the seven months that elapsed between the first, cancelled vote and Van der Bellen’s triumph, Austria had not changed in terms of social composition; the “working class” and the “middle class” were exactly the same size, as was the ethnic composition of the country. Mr. Van der Bellen increased his margin of victory significantly by mobilizing voters to get behind his “open” and pro-European program. In this context, the “malum exemplum” of Brexit served as an additional incentive. Voters who harbor a vision of an open world, a pro-European vision of Austria, were determined not to let their country make the same mistake as the British electorate. In a rapidly changing society, Brexit and Donald Trump have rapidly transformed the “closed” society choicer into a new norm, thereby incentivizing the rebellious Millennials, the Creatives, and in some cases the Suburban Middle Class to vote pro-European or at least to vote against the anti-European candidate. Thibault’s new framework is subtle and multi-dimensional, but clear, making it the perfect model for those wishing to gain a better understanding of politics today and those who want our politicians to understand how the voters think and act, what they feel, and how they interact. This is not to say, however, that politicians should try to court the best possible coalition of voters. The engine of politics is still the clash of ideas – irrespective of how we classify the faultline. And Brexit shows just how quickly our perception of what is normal can change; meaning that the rebellious Millennials and the pro-system Creatives

Foreword  xiii

can change places pretty quickly nowadays. Or, to use an English expression that French and Dutch-speakers in Belgium often use: “bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble” – “strange bedfellows”. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, “Europhoria” had become the norm. From 2005 until recent times, the anti-European movement has grown, and has by now  become firmly established. And now, with the election of Emmanuel Macron, and the numerous victories by pro-European parties elsewhere in Europe, the pro-European camp seems to be on the march once again. As a staunch pro-European, I can only applaud this, but we mustn’t rest on our laurels: we must remain conscious of the fact that the causes of Euroskepticism are a long way from having been resolved. The nationalists may be wrong about the solutions, but they are right in their criticism. In this respect, politicians mustn’t bend to the will of each individual voter, but must – and there is a subtle difference here – set themselves the goal of understanding the voters in the four groups described in this book. For too long, the pro-Europeans have made the mistake of simply rejoicing over the European Union because of what it was. What we ought in fact to recognize is that the current European Union is all too good at overly regulating the internal market and overwhelming small businesses with endless red tape. At the same time, the EU is not taking the right political measures to relaunch the European economy and to solve the problems of internal and external security, such as terrorism “from within” and the problem of refugees caused by the civil war in Syria. I would go further than that. What we refer to as the European Union is not, in fact, a union. It is still what it was a half-century ago: a more or less structured confederation of nation-states whose coordinated actions are based on the principle of unanimity. As a consequence of this, the action it takes is still too weak and too late in coming. What preoccupies us pro-Europeans even more is the speed with which the opposing view, Euroscepticism, has grown and this means that time is running out quickly for us, too. Now that the dust of the 2019 European elections has settled, we must begin reforming the Union – not simply by papering over the cracks, but by implementing profound reforms. This will involve the consolidating of the Eurozone, the reinforcing of the EU’s foreign policy and the establishment of measures to protect our borders, to create real security on a continent-wide level. All this must go hand-in-hand with profound changes within our institutions. The  primary challenges are to replace the European Commission, which has become hypertrophied, with a more restrained government, and to eradicate the rule of unanimity once and for all. In  the past, before the dawn of the smartphone era, Europe could take its time to transform itself. If we didn’t quite get it right the first time, we were always able to have a second or even a third attempt. The European Constitution, for example, was rejected by France and the Netherlands in 2005, but then, two  years later, we learnt our lessons and reworked it as the Lisbon Treaty.

xiv  Foreword

The Irish voted against (and then for) two European treaties: the Treaty of Nice in 2001 and 2002, and the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 and 2009. A process such as this would be unthinkable today. President Emmanuel Macron is succeeding two presidents who served a single term, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. One-term presidencies, once seen as the exception, are now the norm in France. The French people will not give Mr. Macron any room for error. The political center in Europe should be wary of going back to its normal everyday business. The then ruling Parti Socialiste suffered a crushing defeat in the last French elections; it had become the party of “instability”, incapable of positioning itself. It wanted to introduce reforms, but it clung to a system of social welfare that is outdated and overly generous. It  wanted to be pro-European, but it was always among the first to criticize Europe’s single market, without good grounds, for being “neo-liberal”. The  French socialists were unable to overcome these internal contradictions and incorporate them into something new. This resulted in political inertia and a total loss of credibility among voters: the Labour Party in the UK came up against exactly the same problem. The  old  campaign to remain in the European Union, was reduced to a series of alarmist warnings, as one report after another was published on the potential economic horror that Brexit could unleash. Hardly any positive arguments in favor of the EU were put forward. Cowering in fear before the might of the British tabloid press, no politician on either left or right put forward a robust defense of EU membership. Mr. Macron’s victory in 2017 teaches us that ultimately, voters are faithful to their ideals, and that the ideal of the European Union is still very much alive. This is just the start of something new, however, not an end in itself. The hard work starts now. The citizens of Europe want to vote for politicians who defend Europe, but they will only extend our mandate if we carry through on our promises. And quickly, please. Guy Verhofstadt Former Prime Minister of Belgium, Leader of the ALDE Group in the European Parliament

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The many people contributed to this book, whether unwillingly by providing me with original points of view that (in typical creative fashion) led me to the theory of The Great Class Shift (many of them are authors and mentioned in the bibliography), others willingly by their direct contribution to its writing, editing, or publishing. My first thanks go to my English-language publisher, Routledge, and in particular Andrew Taylor and his team. Andrew supported the project from the moment it landed in his inbox, and I am extremely grateful to him for guiding me through the publishing process of my first book, a much more complex (and sometimes daunting) task than in the francophone world, in particular when a literary Icarus like me seeks to be published first time in a prestigious house like Routledge. I am also very grateful to my original French-language publishers, Le Bord de l’eau and Marque belge, for their work on the original edition of the book, and their understanding in releasing the rights for an English-language version. I am also grateful to the Alliance for Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE) for their interest in the postulate of The  Great Class Shift and their unwavering support (both moral and financial) for the English-language ­version. I would like to thank in particular Jacob Moroza-Rasmussen and Philipp Hansen for their role in making it happen, along with Bram Delen (who pushed me to contact his party colleagues) and of course Guy Verhofstadt for supporting the publication including by writing its foreword in both English and French. Thanks should also go to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), for giving me the opportunity to work on so many years with political parties, a field that is often neglected by democracy promoters, but that is nonetheless crucial for the stabilization of our polities. I am deeply thankful to IRI, and in particular Jan Surotchak, for

xvi  Acknowledgments

allowing me to freely express my thoughts in this book  – if anything sounds wrong, IRI should in no way be held responsible as this book is entirely the product of my personal reflections. I am also thankful to the Europe staff in Vienna/Bratislava for putting up with the extra-charge of work I imposed on myself during the writing of the French-language and English-language versions of the book, and for enriching my theory with their own thoughts, helping me in particular for the chapter on Central Europe. Two of my IRI colleagues deserve a special mention: Alex Tarascio, who went through the hard process of translating (and improving) the original title, la quadrature des classes, into an acceptable English language version (by no means an easy treat), and Igor Merheim Eyre, who copy-edited the first draft of the English-language manuscript, and in the process greatly helped me improve the language as well as some parts of the book – I am thankful to his grammatical rigor and ideological skepticism, which greatly helped streamline the book. I would also like to thank a number of good friends who contributed to bettering my theory, whether during casual conversations or specific discussions around the book: Adrian Vazquez Lazara, Laurentiu Stefan, Mantas Adomenas, and David Park all played a key role in editing and updating the chapters on their respective countries or regions. I am also grateful to Justin Gest, also quoted extensively in this book, for leading me through the initial steps of becoming an English-language author, and Rémi Bensoussan, whose advice was important in clarifying the concept of the four classes – and to avoid ideological bias at times. Finally, I could not forget the contribution of my wife, Alisa Muzergues, to both the French and English-language version of this book. Not only has her moral support been key to going through both writing and editing processes in both versions, not only has she helped me streamline the English-language manuscript and added her own contributions to it, she has also proven to be a staunch defender of the theory of the Great Class Shift (despite hearing and reading about it on an almost daily basis for the past two years). Without her, this book would never have been published, and it is naturally dedicated to her, in the hope that it will also have some use for Ukraine to fulfill its destiny.

INTRODUCTION

I arrived into the foyer of the Hilton Miami Airport at around seven o’clock in the evening, accompanying a delegation of Austrian politicians observing the final days of the US presidential campaign. On November 8, 2016, the American people were not  just electing a new president; all the seats in the House of Representatives were at stake, too, as well as one third of the seats in the Senate, 14 governor positions, 86 legislative assemblies of the federal states, many judges, prosecutors, sheriffs, and even school boards of directors. Marco Rubio was the main attraction of this election night: the senator from Florida was running for re-election in this key US state. The  son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio was considered one of the Republican Party’s emerging talents and was regularly described inside and outside the party as a potential future president. Six months earlier, however, he had suffered a rough defeat in the primaries, with Republican voters in his home state of Florida choosing Donald Trump over him in every county except Miami. Two days later, he quit the race for the nomination, but proved his combative reputation by announcing he was going to run for a new term in the Senate. The crowd that gathered in and around the huge (at least according to European standards) hotel foyer was an interesting mixture of city-dwelling members of Miami’s Cuban-American Community, Stateside Puerto Ricans, young activists from districts with varying degrees of affluence, and senior citizens from the outskirts of Miami. There were also more rural Republicans, with baseball caps tightly pulled over their heads – they were mostly staying one night at the hotel, and some would probably enjoy Miami for a couple of days after election night. For the time being, however, they were here to show their support to one of the emerging talents of the Republican Party. For all, the election night result was seen as a foregone conclusion: as a senior staffer of Rubio’s campaign team

2  Introduction

assured me that very morning, “He [Rubio] is going to win the Senate, she’ll win the presidency, and we’ll have four more years with a Republican Congress and a Democratic presidency”. “And what if Trump wins?” I was almost ashamed of asking the question, given how certain Clinton’s win seemed in the polls. “Frankly, I don’t see a path for him to the Presidency.” “Yes, but what if he wins though?” He paused for a moment, trying to find the right words. “If he wins, then we political consultants will have to eat our hats and go back to the drawing board. Because if Trump is voted in tonight, nothing in our business makes sense anymore: not only are all the numbers and all the projections giving her a win, but our camp’s strategy over the past six months does not really make any political sense.” As night fell on the East Coast, the first polling stations closed, and practically no one in the Hilton Miami was in any doubt that Marco Rubio would be re-elected to the Senate, Hillary Clinton would become president, status quo would prevail, before the political apparatus on both sides would get ready for another race for Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020. As the first sets of results came in, it became clear very quickly that Rubio had been re-elected in Florida – his victory speech took place even before the official results of the presidential vote came in from the states on the East Coast. In his speech, the re-elected Senator expressed confidence about his country’s future and clearly intended to turn the page of the divisions that have marked the 2016 campaign both during primaries and the final race, with a speech both optimistic and unifying. A short time later, as the crowd started to disperse to follow the rest of the results at home (a strange way to celebrate the end of a campaign, but Clinton’s win seemed so inevitable!), I crossed paths once again with Rubio’s adviser. “I told you! Great win!” “Yes indeed, Congratulations! Any results in already for the presidential elections?” “Trump’s winning in Florida, but with fewer votes than Rubio. It will be over soon.” Both he and I knew it, the argument was not  altogether convincing. Sure, Rubio had taken more votes than Trump in terms of votes in Florida, and that did not necessarily augur well for the presidential candidate, but there was nothing to suggest that the opposite wasn’t true in other states. More importantly, and everyone in the American political and media sphere knows this, because of its size and social composition, Florida is the key state that sets the tone for the rest of the country: with the exception of 1992 (Clinton-Bush) and 1960 (Kennedy-Nixon), the Sunshine State has always voted for the eventual winner

Introduction  3

of the race for the White House in the post-war period. Furthermore, the electoral college system means that the results in Florida – with a large population – usually prove decisive when it comes to deciding who ultimately wins in tight races, as Al Gore and George W. Bush can testify. The prospect of a victory for Donald Trump was therefore no longer to a mere vue de l’esprit at this stage – although most of us were still incapable of grasping it. As people continued to leave the room – including journalists – a much smaller group went back and forth between the reception room and the hotel bar: a handful of activists (generally of a certain age; the younger ones had gone off to enjoy Miami’s nightlife), foreigners like us who came here for the big night and frankly had nothing else to do than follow the results from the hotel, and supporters from further afield in the state, mostly donors, who were spending the night in Miami before heading back home. At this point, the first projections for the East Coast started to come in: some of the states in the North-East, which looked safe for the Democrats just a few days before the election, did not produce the expected results. The races in New Hampshire and Maine were very tight. There  was surprising news: turnout among some “Blue” areas was lower than in 2012, crushing again more certainties. “What if Trump wins?” Most of the observers around me were still refusing to believe this possibility, despite the mounting evidence. The first major upset came in from Pennsylvania. Pre-election polls had all predicted a Clinton win there, but Trump came out on top in early exit polls. The  billionaire’s victory in the Keystone State had not  yet been confirmed at this stage, and pundits were still thinking that the vote tallies from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, urban areas with late voting seen as safe for the Democrats, could still swing the balance back in Clinton’s favor. However, voter turnout numbers confirmed that the Democratic candidate was really struggling, as some of these urban voters seemed to have come out in far smaller numbers than in previous election, whereas those from suburban and upstate areas had voted in droves. As I made myself comfortable at the bar, the person next to me took on himself to make my swing-state/electoral college education: “If Clinton loses Pennsylvania, she’ll have to take the whole of the Midwest to have any hope of winning”. A few minutes later, the first results from the Great Lakes region confirmed the trend of the early evening: Trump was very well placed in Ohio and Iowa, two swing states where, here again, fewer people in the city voted and more people from the countryside and the suburbs came out to vote. Next came the results from Michigan: Clinton and Trump were running neck and neck in a state where the Democrats held a 10-point lead over the Republicans in 2012, and a 16-point lead in 2008. Things were now  looking very bad for Clinton. The  mood had clearly changed at the Hilton Miami, and – though differently – on TV sets as well: political pundits had almost unanimously predicted a victory for the Democratic candidate. Could they – could all of us who have worked in politics for so many years – really have got it so badly wrong?

4  Introduction

The final results were coming in state by state: unsurprisingly by now, Florida went to Donald Trump. Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota were still too close to call. But it was precisely in these states, the Rust Belt that constitute America’s former manufacturing stronghold around the Great Lakes, where the decision. Unsurprisingly, Illinois stayed on the Democrats’ side thanks to the city of Chicago, but all the other states brought a majority – and therefore all of their electoral college seats  – to the Republican candidate: in Ohio, a state with a profile similar to that of Florida, Trump defeated Clinton by a margin of 8 points, in Iowa by 10 points. During the course of the evening, I had sent by phone the results to my Regional Director at the International Republican Institute – a former elected official at local level in Pennsylvania, he was taking part in a conference in Italy while I had taken upon myself to live this historic night in the United States. With a much more detailed knowledge of the electoral map, he analyzed the results much more quickly than me. At about 9:30 pm, he gave his verdict, with no more room left for doubt: “it’s Trump”. The  results of the final few undecided states in the East came in later in the evening: the New  York billionaire was taking Ohio and Iowa and, thanks to the rural Western states, secured a majority in the electoral college. The massive pro-Clinton vote in the urban states of the Pacific Coast (California, Oregon, Washington) would not change anything: on that night Donald Trump staged one of democracy’s most spectacular upsets in the history of Western politics to become the President-elect of the United States of America. In the United States and in much (at least, in the political circles) of Europe, the night of November 8, 2016, remains a memorable occurrence – one of those moments that people can relate to years later by stating exactly where they were and what they felt during that time. This is so, first, because of the suspense that it generated for several hours, and of course for its final result, as unexpected as loaded with consequences. As the French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, tweeted at the time, “A world [was] melting away before our eyes”.1 That world is the only political atmosphere people of my generation lived: for this election truly marked the end of the period of triumphant Liberalism (economic, and then social) that had contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and served as the political and economic model all over the world since the days of Ronald Reagan. It had produced failures, of course, but had also achieved some great successes, such as the grandest escape from poverty for populations in East and South-East Asia in the 1990s and 2000s. Since 2008 however, this Liberal model had increasingly been challenged – courtesy of a financial crisis the like of which the world had not  experienced since the 1930s, and which rapidly turned into an economic and then a much longer and broader social crisis. Of course, before November  2016, cracks in the old system had already appeared – in the United Kingdom the success of Brexit had marked a major victory of anti-systemic forces just a few months before the US presidential election. However, Brexit could not have been decisive: no matter how momentous the

Introduction  5

event was in the long-term, the decision of a former great power standing at the periphery of a continent that is itself increasingly standing at the periphery of the World could not have the same echo as the election to the presidency of the most powerful country on the planet of a so-called “populist” candidate. The improbable character of the election results (like Brexit) also put all political professionals in a very uncomfortable situation: as Marco Rubio’s adviser had explained to me hours before the first results came in, everything we (political scientists, advisors, and strategists) had seen (or, may be, had chosen to see) in data, both qualitative and quantitative research, all pointed towards a clear win for Hillary Clinton. This polling and research data showed Clinton winning the White House even in the midst of what was, in retrospect, a mediocre campaign by the Democratic candidate, a clearly damaging email scandal, and even the opening of an investigation by the FBI (a week before the vote). Newsweek had even gone so far as to prepare a special “Madam President” edition, whose cover has now become a collector’s item.2 It was now time to get back to the drawing board and question our fundamentals on politics and election campaigns. As Brussels shivered at the prospect of uncertain elections in the Netherlands, France, and Germany in 2017, it seemed that our political software needed a serious reboot in order to at least make sense of a transition that was surely then only starting. Exactly six months later, the same elites, obviously nervous ever since the night of November 8th, 2016 uttered a sigh of relief. On May 8, 2017, after a dramatic campaign that had seen two presidents and three prime ministers (former and actual in both cases) drop out of the race, after numerous twists, turns, and a mind-blowing finale in which four candidates ended up within five percentage points of one another in the polls, Emmanuel Macron scored a decisive victory against Marine Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election, with 66.10% of the vote. The reaction in Paris and Brussels, but also in liberal circles in America, was that of a symbolic revenge to the defeat of November 2016. The feeling was understandable: had the result been different, the West might have lived a very different aftermath to the electoral upsets of 2016–2017. With Marine Le Pen leading a country where the checks and balances are far less developed than in the United States, the prospect of the continent’s secondlargest economy and largest military power leaving the Euro zone, the EU, and perhaps even NATO would have signaled the beginning of the end for the EU and for the Atlantic alliance in its primary function, namely the collective security of the transatlantic space. Now that things had – at least nominally – got back to normal, many were rather quick to turn the page, decreeing overnight the end of the “populist cycle”. At  first, they seemed to be comforted by the immediate aftermath of the French presidential election, with the crushing victory by La République En Marche in the French legislative elections, the “bromance” between Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the French president’s first successful steps on the international stage. In late 2017, it seemed clear that

6  Introduction

Europe was not going to choose a radical path of change. And even though at the time most “mainstream” politicians and pundits repeated the usual mantras “reform” and “never again”, one could feel that most observers and professionals were in actual fact indulging in a sense of self-satisfaction at having saved the EU and liberalism in Europe once and for all. The hope was that time would now do its work to quiet the storm and blunt the “populist” blades – in other words, it was time for European elites to go back to business as usual, or rather blindness as usual. This has proven to be a tragic mistake, as the 2018 triumphs of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Matteo Salvini in Italy have shown. Indeed, while one cannot talk of the irresistible progress of a populist wave in the West, there has not  been a major revenge of liberals or mainstream parties either  – rather some results of populists have fallen short of their own ­expectations – hardly a victory for the “mainstream”. The fact is that our concept of a fight between populists and progressists (to use a division Emmanuel Macron tried to impose for the 2019 European election) masks a reality that is far more complex – and probably somehow more disturbing as well. Take Germany: in the last federal election, Angela Merkel seemed to have reinforced the status of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) by ensuring a large majority over her historic Social Democratic Party (SPD) rival – despite already historically low results. But her success was also dependent on a very weak opposition (Martin Schultz, previously based in Brussels, did not necessarily have enough charisma to oust the chancellor), and Merkel’s victory did not prevent the continuing rise of Alternative for Germany (Af D), the first party to the right of the CDU-CSU to win seats in the Bundestag since the 1950s. Faced with a colorless campaign in which their primary concern – the question of migrants/refugees and their integration – was virtually absent from the political debate, the Germans were perhaps venting their silent frustration through this breakthrough by the Af D. In the meantime, the recommencement of the Grand Coalition between the two historic parties has deepened the crisis inside the SPD, to the point that the Social-Democrats have reached historically low levels of support and might now have to contend with another party (the Greens) for the leadership of the German left in the years to come. Although in a different institutional environment, France faces a similar situation: true, Emmanuel Macron came out on top in both first and second rounds of the 2017 presidential election, and the ensuing victory of his party in the legislative elections – the legacy of a legitimist institutional model reinforced by the shortening of presidential terms from seven to five years in 2000, is beyond contestation. But these results alone cannot hide the fact that candidate Macron, despite his clear margin of victory, also secured the worst result as the winner of a French presidential first round election in the past 15  years. Whereas Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2007, and François Hollande, in 2012, had garnered respectively more than 11 million (or 31.18%) and 10 million (or 28.63%) votes in the first round, Emmanuel Macron received fewer than 9  million (around 25%),

Introduction  7

which indicates a very strong degree of fragmentation in the French ­electorate. Moreover, whereas the 2002 campaign had been a “three-horse race”, with two favorites ( Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin) and a third man ( Jean-Marie Le Pen) who had emerged during the final weeks of the campaign, 2017 was most definitely a four-horse race: with a week to go before the election, and given the dynamics of the campaign, the prospect of a second-round run-off between François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or even between Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen was a distinct possibility widely commented at the time in political headquarters. While this should not in any way cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the French president – who did indeed produce a majority in the first and second round – it encourages caution with regard to his “Jupiterian” profile, or when defining who is the primary opposition force in the country. In both the United States and France, the change in the political landscape has been profound. To really appreciate this, one only needs to remember that in 2015, the French Socialist Party (PS) was in power in France, whereas the Republican Party in America was still characterized by most voters and officials by its internationalism and attachment to free trade treaties such as NAFTA, negotiated back in the day by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Today, the PS is dead in all but name, while the new Republican President of the United States has clearly put his country on the road to a form of protectionism which, though relatively limited is nonetheless very real  – and sets the tone for years to come. As for France’s National Assembly, it is dominated by MPs from La République En Marche – a political movement that did not exist one year prior to the elections, and it is sometimes hard to know which group – the center-right Les Républicains, the left-wing France Insoumise or (with a depleted presence these days in parliament, but a far greater one in the opinion polls) the right-wing Rassemblement National – constitutes the main opposition to the government; to say nothing of the media environment, where things seem to be even more fluid. This confusion serves as proof that we have not yet questioned enough our analyses: to take the case of France, the country has been accustomed over the past two decades to a bipolar system wherein the left and the right alternated in power and in opposition. This partisan system was also characterized by an increasingly strong consolidation of the main parties and a marked concentration in favor of the PS and Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP)/Les Républicains in the 2000s. More generally, the division between left and right in Europe was described for many years as a split between statist and economic liberals, between social democracy and Christian democracy (although in France the term “Christian”, too loaded from the conflicts between Church and State in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is rarely used). We must now acknowledge, however, that this division is no longer accurate: over the past few years, we have witnessed a quasi-inversion of the economic debate, with center-left governments that have become more liberal while the right of the political spectrum has turned to a promotion of economic voluntarism, while the European Far Right, and perhaps more spectacularly France’s

8  Introduction

Rassemblement National (RN) effectively have produced platforms that have been sufficiently statist to be described as “socialist” by their detractors.3 Before Macron and Trump, the lines had already started to move, and the elections of these two major disruptors of our political scenes have thus merely enacted a change that has occurred at a far deeper level. But the new political paradigm, also currently under construction, remains vague in scope. In the wake of Brexit, some have attempted to define it, with one popular explanation defending that the battleground is now  between “open” and “closed” societies, a view presented in particular by the Economist4 in 2016. According to this school of thought, the new cleavage between left and right is still (mostly) economic, but it now  pits free-trade advocates against protectionists. In  a much more sophisticated way, David Goodhart has offered another, societal dividing line between “Somewheres” and “Anywheres”.5 Both theories (in particular the latter) certainly sound appealing, and they do go a long way towards illustrating the differences between Brexiters and Remainers, or indeed the more intellectual debate behind the opposition between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. However, they fail to explain the rise of “leftist” populist movements in many countries – one that can sometimes (but not always) prove to be just as protectionist as the right-wing variety, as Bernie Sanders’s virulent opposition to free-trade agreements during the 2016 Democrats primaries attests. Neither do they fully explain the philosophical evolution of some of the continental centerright, with a partial return to a Christian identity (a position which in France clearly differentiated François Fillon from Marine Le Pen, who demonstrated a somehow surprising liberalism on the issue of same-sex marriage). But if other theories are incomplete, one still has to describe the essence of our polities’ new dividing lines. The solution that I propose in this book derives not from a study inside the anglosphere, but a more general look at our Western societies, taking a cross-analysis of the United States and France as a starting point. In fact, despite institutional differences (with the primary process in the United States making a full-blown confrontation between all actors impossible), both presidential elections have been characterized by a quasi-perfect quadripartisanship, most easily expressed in France’s presidential elections’ first round: there were not two but four political poles, with distinct values, but also, and above all, with an electoral strategy not necessarily legible to our old systems of thought (something that we also saw during the US primaries). Suffice it to say that France’s far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to give any voting instructions for a second round in which centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron faced a serious far-right challenge by Marine Le Pen, one understands clearly that old expectations were now completely obsolete. For those not closely following the twists and turns of French politics, it is worth pointing out that in 2002, in a similar situation which saw center-right Jacques Chirac challenged by far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen, the entire political class – including a Trotskyite candidate – had clearly called not only for people to form a bulwark against the Front National, but also to vote for the candidate of the system. The  French

Introduction  9

presidential elections results, but also recent developments in Germany, Spain, and many other countries on the Continent show us that the bipartisan system that had come to dominate the West is either dying (in much of Europe) or changing profoundly (in the anglosphere), with four new poles of influence now defining our political scenes. One could probably counter that the idea of a four-way confrontation is merely the product of a French tropism (which could indeed stem from France’s political culture with strong communist, socialist, Gaullist, and centrist blocs competing in the post-war period up to the 1980s), an attempt by a Frenchman to introduce his own Gallic bias to replace the much stronger (and Anglo-Saxon) two-party system that has dominated politics all over the West since at least the 1990s. I do accept that criticism, but when one takes a closer look at the situation in the United Kingdom and the United States, one can also see that these four poles have also emerged in the anglosphere, even though the more institutional organization of parties means that these are expressed in different ways: in the United States, the Trump-Clinton duel of late 2016 concealed an equally ferocious battle within each camp during (and after) the primaries, whether among the Republicans, where Trump successfully led an open revolt against the party establishment (as incarnated, in particular, by the Bush family), or among the Democrats, where Sanders led the charge against the Clintons and the Democratic establishment. In the United Kingdom, the two major parties, Labour and the Conservatives, have so far resisted the onslaught from outside challengers as diverse as the Liberal Democrats in 2010 and UKIP in the years leading up to Brexit, largely thanks to the first-past-the-post electoral system. But here too one can see a clear split within each party between moderates and radicals, be that expressed in the hard-Brexiteers and Remainers/soft Brexiters divide on the Conservative side, and between Corbynists and the Blairites inside the Labour party. The divisions are sometimes so clear, so open that they can lead us to wonder whether there isn’t now a larger range of different opinions inside these parties than there is between them. An even larger comparative view allows for a more global approach: far from being limited to the strictly transatlantic region or to the older democracies that are France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the realignment of sociopolitical forces in four quarters is in fact much broader and covers the whole of Europe and North America, with similar causes and effects – although the institutional and demographic situation of each country makes the expression of this Great Class Shift very diverse. In Germany, the realignment took time, but one can now safely pronounce the death of the catch-all party system in the country, with the formerly arch dominant center-right (CDU-CSU) vs. center-left (SPD) conundrum that used to take at least 80% of votes in each election making way to a more fluid system that allows for sudden rises in the popularity of the Greens or the Liberals of the FDP, while the new Alternative for Germany (Af D) seems to have consolidated its electorate, notably in Eastern Germany. Meanwhile in Spain the two-party oligopoly of the Partido Popular (PP) and the Spanish

10  Introduction

Socialist worker’s party (PSOE) has also brutally ended after the 2008 financial crisis, with the far-left Podemos and the centrist Ciudadanos greatly complicating coalition-building in the country – and newcomer Vox adding even more complexity to the system. What is more, these new Spanish parties have many similarities with other new actors in Europe, may they be affiliated to the far-left (like Syriza in Greece), the center-left (Robert Biedron´’s Wiosna movement in Poland), or a liberal international whose future will probably become clearer after the 2019 European elections (the Union for Saving Romania or Progressive Slovakia being some examples among many). The realignment discussed in this book is widespread and concerns the whole of the West, i.e. Europe and North America, and it involves four distinct social classes  – without their support, it is not  only victory that is unthinkable, it is political and media existence. These classes, and the Great Class Shift that results from their emergence, push the political elites to rethink drastically their positioning, with the promise of a Darwinian selection at the end of the electoral cycle: those who adapt will earn the right to continue their institutionalization and to survive until the next cycle. By contrast, the parties that refuse to adapt will die, no matter how long they have been operating. Thus, the French Socialist Party, an institution that survived all sorts of crises since (at least) 1969, is all but dead today, the result of contradictions that the party was no longer able – or simply refused – to confront, in particular the rise of new social actors that have indeed redefined our political landscape. The  point of this book is not  to provide an academic description of deep sociological trends in the West – the author is certainly not qualified for this. Rather, it should be taken as an empirical work seeking to identify these new actors from a political marketing perspective, how they have changed the fault lines in our political debate, and how they are redefining a new political order in Western politics – for at this stage, it is important to recognize that the lethal political season of 2016–2019 does not represent a transitory stage before a return to normality. On the contrary, it is the start of a process that will redefine our political space for at least the next electoral cycle, if not for a generation. And this change is long-term precisely because it comes as the logical conclusion of a social evolution initiated several years ago and accelerated by an economic crisis that has in turn accelerated the process that every industrial revolution produces, i.e. the production of winners and losers in our societies. Politics is a mirror for the divisions in our society, since by definition the primary mission of political parties is to represent the ideals of the social groups that comprises them. From there, it is easy to deduce that political divisions are nothing more than products of the interests of antagonistic “social classes”, as the Marxist school of thought supposes – and one should not shy away from using the word “class”, despite its ideological connotation; while the term of “tribes” is a useful substitute, it does not fully capture the social nature of the divisions that are currently undermining the West. However, in opposition to Marxist doctrine, I do refuse to assign individuals, almost by birth to each class – as the

Introduction  11

reader will discover in the following pages, these classes are far more fluid in their composition, their dynamic and their attitude with regard to the other social tribes than Marxists would even contemplate. In other words, while we are indeed seeing a return to social “classes” as the basis of our political differences, the relations between them are not necessarily antagonistic, largely due to the fact that there are not two but four actors competing to take or share power. To enlighten the reader on this new approach, this book will first use each of the social classes that have redefined our political landscape – how they came into being, why their members behave the way they do today and what mobilizes them. In the second part, the reader will then be taken on an electoral journey across the West, with comparisons between countries and sub regions of what makes our larger transatlantic space, to define principles of interaction between the four classes. From there it will be possible, if not to make complete sense of the situation, at least to approach it in a more rational manner, and hopefully give us a chance to express our divisions and oppositions in a more ordered, if not positive way to make our democratic societies stronger and more resilient.

Notes 1 Following an outcry in France and the United States, he deleted his tweet a few  hours later. http://www.lemonde.fr/big-browser/article/2016/11/09/electionamericaine-le-tweet-exagere-d-un-ambassadeur-de-france-aux-etats-unisdegoute_5027985_4832693.html. 2 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/madam-president-newsweek-copiessale-online-buyer-beware-n690411 3 See, for example, articles published during the 2017 campaign in French newspapers Les Echos and le Figaro: https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/cercle-166018-frontnational-un-programme-fiscal-dinspiration-socialiste-2063524.php, and http:// www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/2017/04/27/20002-20170427ARTFIG00197-en-15ans-le-programme-economique-du-front-national-a-vire-a-gauche.php. 4 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/07/30/the-new-political-divide 5 David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: Hurst & Co., 2017.

Bibliography David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: Hurst & Co., 2017.

Part I

Class shifting How four social classes came to redefine our electoral landscapes

Ever since September 11, 1789, and the French Constituent Assembly’s vote on the royal veto, during which the deputies who supported an absolute veto sat to the right of the president of the Assembly (that is, the seats of honor) while those backing a suspensive veto moved to his left, the notion of a political division between left and right has gradually taken root in most minds in the West. This  was helped by the positioning of the members of parliament in (mostly) half-circled assemblies around the world and the labels that the media invariably have to give to make sense of politics inside and outside of their countries. Yet this divide was never a foregone conclusion, nor is it natural in many countries. Without getting into an anthropological study of parliamentary customs around the world, a very quick look at a Prime Minister’s Question Time in the United Kingdom or most Commonwealth countries shows the relativity of our leftright divide in the very architecture of the parliamentary room: in Westminstertype parliaments, the party in power invariably sits to the right of the Speaker (the seats of honor), whereas the opposition is always located on his left, in a room designed to encourage confrontation (in Westminster the rows of benches face one another and the historical anecdote has it that the space in the middle is the width of two drawn swords). In  continental Europe, the semi-circular formation is a legacy of the Roman Senate, which also inspired the architecture of the US Senate – but here again, parliamentary tradition shows how artificial our left-right divide can be, as seats are chosen by the Senators on the basis of their seniority, not  their political allegiance. This  lack of seating “discipline” is a wonderful testimony to the relative independence of the Senators, but it is also the mark of a political divide that has not crystallized in physical directions: in the United States, the political debate is articulated not between “right”

14  Class shifting

and “left” but rather between progressives and conservatives. Moving back to Europe, this time with a historical perspective, the split may very well have expressed itself differently, in France at least: in the months and years that followed the September 1789 vote, the Assembly crystallized its divisions between a “Mountain” (la Montagne) whose members, seated at the top of the hemicycle, favored a centralized approach to power, and the Girondins, who were more federalist, provincial, and in the context of 1792–1793, more likely to support war. Between them stood the “Plain” (la Plaine), also called more pejoratively the “Swamp” (le Marais) which gathered the moderate MPs that stood in the lower part of the assembly. Left or Right, Up or Down (and right in the Center), many other ways to represent our political divisions are possible, and if the left-right divide has outlived the others, it is probably due to its practicality, importantly in terms of visualization. The next problem is to define who is “on the right” or “on the left”, and what makes a politician belong to either category. Here, too, a comparative approach in time and space tells us that there is no straightforward answer. Most pundits have grown accustomed over the past century to turn this question into an economic contrast between supporters and opponents of state intervention in the economy, but this has not always been the case. Going back to the French Revolution, the political conflict between Girondins and Montagnards concerned the nature of the State (federal or centralized) and the possibility of an offensive war to save the revolution. Similarly, in the United States, those supporting the rights of the federal states and those backing a strong central state dominated the debates of the young republic virtually all the way up until the Civil War (and pretty much until World War I). Depending on space and time, the left/ right marker could change position: in 1870–1875, the French left incorporated all the supporters of a Republican regime against a monarchist majority that stood on the right of the hemicycle; in 1900–1905, violent squabbling took place between the advocates of a strict and militant separation of Church and State (they sat on the Left of the National Assembly), and those on the right that defended the alliance of the altar and the throne (albeit a Republican one). In the same period, this divide mostly overlapped with another issue: the guilt or innocence of an army captain of Jewish background the infamous Dreyfus Affair. In  truth, the divide in Europe only started to crystallize to its more familiar form in the post-Great-War period, with the first full-blown successes of workers’ parties – for example, with the election of SPD’s Friedrich Ebert as Reichspräsident in 1919 Germany, or that of the first Labor government in 1924 in the United Kingdom. From then on, the preservation of a free-market (or corporate) economic model became a trademark of the right, while adherence to Marxism was seen as a staple of the left, which differentiated itself between a radical wing willing to achieve its goals through revolution (Leninist, and later Trotskyist, Maoist, etc.), and moderates convinced that socialism could be attained by democratic means.

Class shifting  15

This differentiation held up to the contemporary period and is still used, somehow lazily, by political experts and actors, although it has become much less relevant since the 1990s. With the bankruptcy of the Socialist model and the economic successes of the United States, communism, socialism, and other stateisms had lost credibility, and the Washington Consensus became a dominant system of principles driving political, social, and economic debate alike. As a result, all mainstream political parties adopted liberal economic platforms in order to have a chance of keeping or returning to power, and the differentiation between the old left and right became one of style rather than of substance. While the right generally admitted a cultural victory of the left (with the adoption of some sort of societal liberalism in the 2000s, notably, in the United Kingdom and Germany), the left went through its economic Damascene road much earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s – first, by abandoning socialism as a doctrine, for example in France, where François Mitterrand had to lead a monetarist U-turn in 1983 to save the convertibility of the French Franc against the Deutsch Mark. Only 12 years later, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin pushed his Party to change its economic platform to the extent that it remained Socialist in name only. Jospin was following the general mood in the West, as other leaders of the European centerleft such as Felipe Gonzalez in Spain or Andréas Papandréou in Greece had done the same a few years before. In the late 1990s and very early 2000s, this “modern left” sanctioned the obsolescence of Socialism: intellectually supported by the “Third Way”,1 Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder blurred the economic distinction between right and left to such an extent that the Millennium-period was marked by a virtually unanimous consensus on the principle of liberally minded reforms and the promotion of individual freedoms. Directly or indirectly, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the world as we knew it, including our perception of the political divide. From this moment onwards, the societal consensus that had characterized the 1990s weakened irremediably, leaving way to a more confrontational approach: between the pro-war and the anti-war camps, between those seeking to tighten up security and the passionate defenders of civil liberties, between the supporters of a European constitution and the defenders of national sovereignty. However, despite the strong challenges mounted by the first populists of the 1990s and 2000s (from Ross Perot in the United States to Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, or Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands), some traces of the general consensus could be found, and in the end the system as such stood firm, despite some major setbacks (such as the rejection of the European constitution in France and the Netherlands in 2005). Looking back at the 2000s, the general overview is that of a stronger (but usually contained) confrontation between the old left and the old right, with varying degrees of conservatism or progressivism in Germany, France, Poland, the United Kingdom, or the United States. The year 2008 changed everything. As with every financial catastrophe (like 1873 or 1929), the Great Recession accelerated social processes that were barely.

16  Class shifting

Note 1 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, London: Polity, 1998.

Bibliography Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: T   he Renewal of Social Democracy, London: Polity, 1998. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und gesellschaft, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1922.

1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE CREATIVE CLASS

The genesis of the great social upheaval that is now turning our political landscapes upside down is to be found in the 1990s. In this era of long-lasting economic prosperity and triumphant liberalism, technical progress and a number of political decisions triggered a series of events that then became social, cultural, and finally political trends. As we witnessed a technological revolution with the advent of the World Wide Web, the automation of factory-based jobs, globalization and free trade agreements changed our economies, with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the European Union (which truly came into being with the Maastricht Treaty, before swallowing most of the states of central Europe into its ranks in the 2000s) truly taking the shape we now know during this decade, while China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The result of all these changes has been the gradual erosion of the social fabric of the post-war period. That social model was based on a triumphant middle class, which incorporated the vast majority of the population and occupied a political center ground without which no electoral victory was imaginable. The left in both the United Kingdom and Spain had thus been forced to abandon most of their Marxist values and move towards the center in order to be able to take power, whereas the right was divided between a moderate wing that would propose a “light” version of Thatcherism to get to power, and a conservative wing that adopted a more drastic social and economic approach – the European approach being usually less radical in their scope than those of the Anglosphere, as the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions had succeeded electorally thanks to exceptional circumstances of economic and social disaster in the late 1970s (repeated strikes and noticeable decline in the United Kingdom, and diplomatic disaster with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution for the United States), which had prompted the middle class to seek out more radical solutions to their country’s problems.

18  Class shifting

Stabilized by the late 1980s, the middle class had managed to create an incredibly strong connection within each nation: by absorbing a very large portion of the population (between 70% and 80%), it had made it possible to consolidate social inclusion in an era when class struggle, supported by the Soviet Union, was a social reality but also a real political issue. Indeed, the final victory of the capitalist countries in the 1980s had a great deal to do with the capacity of Western societies to allow the vast majority of their citizens to identify or aspire to join the middle class, which could be summed up with the picture-postcard image of a nuclear family living in (and usually owning) a detached or semi-detached house in the suburbs with a garden and all the modern appliances needed for a happy life: a vacuumcleaner, a washing machine, a dishwasher, an oven and a microwave, along with the couch and the television, a window to the outside world that enabled the Western middle class to witness the ultimate triumph of its model between 1989 and 1991, with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In other words, where the Soviet Union had failed in its promise to give the working class power and prosperity, the West had succeeded by ensuring that the American Dream of the 1950s would become a reality for all throughout Europe and North America, from suburban Los Angeles to the Bavarian countryside or the working-class suburbs in the “red belt” around Paris. In fact, the middle class had managed, in the 1980s, to absorb a large portion of the former proletariat: many workers had been co-opted, in a way, by a generous social protection system (although its ultimate viability in the long term was already the subject of controversy) and programs to support consumption and/or home ownership enabled the workers to contemplate the possibility of living the middle class dream. While Communism had failed to provide prosperity for its working class, the triumphant capitalism of the early 1990s, had managed to give most workers middle-class status. However, at this very time in which the middle class reached its apogee, the system started to show first signs of weakness, and the phenomenon would accelerate during the 2000s before intensifying after the financial crisis of 2008. With the Cold War over, the West found itself with no competitors for global leadership, and the Pax Americana led the way for the globalization of our economy, with the free circulation of goods, people, and capital in a world defined by a very high level of social disparities between countries: as Western workers, previously protected by borders to the east and south, were now left to face competition from foreign workers just as qualified as them but with much lower salary and social expectations. Adding to this the increased automation and robotization, with many of the tasks previously reserved for assistants, secretaries or engineers delegated to a computer, mechanical, and routine jobs progressively became far less precious than capital, as Thomas Piketty has remarkably demonstrated in his work.1 But as destruction is inevitably accompanied by an equal amount of creation, the value of manual work was progressively replaced by ideas and processes which came to play a more significant role in our economies. As the expanded West de-industrialized (for the benefit of China and South-East Asia in particular), its economic fabric changed and jobs in abstract products and services (financial services, consulting, etc.) gradually

In the beginning was the Creative Class  19

replaced industrial tasks that had become uncompetitive in our countries. The ejection of the working class from a shrinking middle class2 was to have titanic consequences for our social fabric, making the former core of a New Minority that progressively became aware of its identity after the 2008  crisis as we will see in Chapter 3. But before that, these changes led to the emergence of a new, influential social class which was to transform its economic, and then social prestige into political influence throughout the 2000s, namely the Creative Class. What is the Creative Class, and who are the Creatives? For the urban studies theorist Richard Florida, who invented the term in the early 2000s (and popularized it in subsequent years), it covers all the intellectual professions that involve the creation, with varying degrees of abstractness, of new procedures, techniques, or concepts. Its members are thus very similar to the “symbolic analysts” already identified by Robert Reich in the early 1990s,3 but Florida’s definition is broader: whereas Reich saw the symbolic analysts in industrial terms, Florida thinks more broadly of professions that involve creativity, including artists, show business or sport professionals.4 Florida’s classification also includes occupations in healthcare, law, and education, but an important clarification should be added here: while specialized doctors and lawyers, or indeed university professors, generate and manipulate symbols, concepts, and ideas, making them part of the Creative Class, their more generalist colleagues, are for their part increasingly excluded from it, and can therefore undergo social stagnation or even regression. Indeed, while being a lawyer, general practitioner, or schoolteacher was an enviable social positions in the past, this is no longer necessarily the case today: for example, GPs are confronted with an increasingly heavy workload that is making their job a routine exercise with little time to assess individual patient’s conditions, so that they often end up assessing a series of classic symptoms which in turn will require an equally classic treatment – indeed very often a generic one, as a stressed Social Security service increases its monitoring on their practice. These patients will also often come with a very partial knowledge of medicine – courtesy of Wikipedia and medical ­websites – and will ask the doctor not to diagnose and cure them, but to prescribe the medicine they believe they need, based on the information they have managed to cobble together online about their symptoms. The process increases the routine element of GPs’ work, and is also applicable to other professions such as generalist lawyers or primary and secondary school teachers. In other words, where the working class creates value by making concrete things (i.e. concrete objects or agricultural products), where the service class creates value by providing a service to the community (i.e. cutting hair, cooking, etc.), the Creative Class creates value by producing ideas that are then transformed into software, films, processes, or applications. And as the Creative Class has grown, it has brought with it an invisible but profound cultural revolution – rising with an economy whose growth is now dependent on ideas, creativity, and knowledge. Indeed, as the knowledge economy has grown, mainly thanks to technical revolutions (with the commercialization of the Internet connection in the 1990s, and smartphones with their instant connectivity from the end of the 2000s),

20  Class shifting

the Creatives have seen their numbers soar to the point that they now form an entire social category of their own, a class which, according to Florida, included, in 2013, at least “300  million workers in 82 countries where the figures  are ­available”,5 i.e. up to 35% of the population of the United States and most countries in Western Europe. If we subtract from this total the “generalist” professions to which I have just referred, the population of the Creative Class potentially represents 20%–30% of Western societies. As they have grown in numbers, but also in financial weight, the Creatives have gradually become aware of their existence and political power after the mid-1990s: we find them behind the wave that carried Barack Obama to power in 2008, and in the 2010s and/or, as solid supporters of both Justin Trudeau in Canada and Emmanuel Macron in France. From a socio-economic phenomenon, the Creatives have evolved into a larger cultural trend, before accessing to political (and moral) power, defining many of the social changes we have witnessed over the last ten years. But before examining the political impact of the Creative Class, however, one needs to understand its mentality, its codes, and its vision of the world. For sure enough, the Creatives have built a culture of their own, turning a lot of traditional totems and taboos of Western societies on their head in the process. To understand their impact, a term familiar to French ears will give some of the major contours of this new social class: in Paris and the big urban centers in France, Belgium, and Quebec, a member of the Creative Class is a “bobo”, the “bourgeois bohemian” described by David Brooks in 2000.6 A  subject of both fascination and rejection, the bobo is not just the new urban rich that have taken over the Eastern parts of Paris that used to be home to the French capital’s working class. It is also a cultural phenomenon whose existence has transformed the West’s values system. To quote Richard Florida, “The Creative Class is the norm-setting class of our time. And the norms of the Creative Class are different from those of more traditional society. Individuality, self-expression, and openness to difference are favored over the homogeneity, conformity, and ‘fitting in’ that defined the previous age of large-scale industry and organization”.7 Indeed, the industrial era was defined by a need for standardization, conformity, and assembly line work consisting in a repeated sequence of exercises with varying degrees of complexity, with clearly established hierarchies and chains of command: “The traditional vertical corporation, with its top-down hierarchy, was based on a factory model of information flow and work flow. There were bosses who required separate areas for privileged communication, and workers who followed routines and were put into standardized spaces to discourage deviation. Bosses and subordinates alike were literally required to think inside the box. The Creative Economy is premised on the rapid generation and transmission of ideas across the enterprise. This world of tight deadlines, uncertainty, and discovery – of knowledge creation, teamwork, and building of each other’s ideas – requires the interactive space heretofore found only in the design studios or scientific lab”.8 Out go the rigid hierarchies, the standardized and compartmentalized offices and the shift-work system: our Creatives need horizontal chains of command,

In the beginning was the Creative Class  21

open-space offices designed to accelerate communication. The  resulting flow of ideas is supposed to be the result of informal brainstorming sessions or on-worksite leisure activities. Everything is made to reinforce the employee’s creativity, which explains why companies like Google, a flagship of the creative economy, offer their employees spaces in the workplace where they can play table football and other games, or vast green spaces to go for walks and bike rides with colleagues, the idea being to keep each employee for as long as possible within an environment that enables everyone to exchange in a relaxed atmosphere with each other. As long as this “other” is a work colleague, of course, for the creative process is perceived here as a way of generating new, productive ideas that will then create value and become  bankable. Thus, the creative economy, relying on technological changes and the smartphone in particular, has blurred the boundary between work and leisure so much that the two have become fused together entirely in the more ultra-creative professions. Just as Creatives will remain constantly connected to their workplace via their smartphone and tablets (thus rendering obsolete the idea of having a personal office, with some preferring to switch between working at home and in the office, or even opting for itinerant workspaces, particularly in California), “leisure is undertaken not for its own sake but to enhance the creative experience – which for the Creative Class, is work”.9 This development in working organization has enormous cultural consequences, of course: to the extent that people are constantly (and at the same time never entirely) at work, the idea of a 40-hour week, of a nine-to-five shift work, is losing part (if not all) of its meaning. This explains the Creative Class’s support, for example, for opening shops and commercial zones on Sundays, enabling them to avoid having to plan ahead for their weekly grocery shop, or shopping session. Given that work can sneak into everyday life at any moment, it is preferable to live in a city that never sleeps (like New York, one of the flag-bearers of the Creative Class) rather than to impose on oneself norms and opening hours that serve no other purpose than to slow down individuals’ creative potential: when one draws up a timetable to go shopping, one is producing a mental effort on a non-creative activity, and therefore wasting time. The cultural changes brought about by the rise of the creative economy are not limited to the relationship with work, of course. The Creatives have a strong penchant for diversity, considered a source of creative ideas; they therefore tend to flee from the conformist environment of suburban neighborhoods, synonymous with homogenization of life. The Creative therefore migrates in the opposite direction to his predecessors: whereas the city-dwellers of the 1960s and 1970s fled the run-down city centers to settle in the suburbs, Creatives have recolonized the downtown areas10 even if to do so they needed to invert their commuting routine from home in the city center to work in suburbia – this is the case for many affluent Silicon Valley employees who now enjoy free transport services (paid for by Google, Apple, and others) from San Francisco to their workplace in the Bay Area, for example. What is behind this re-appropriation of formerly run-down downtown areas? Beyond the current fashion trends and the current appeal of post-industrial urban decors, verticality provides another

22  Class shifting

explanation – as population density favors the rapid communication of ideas. But to be fully effective, density require diversity – to allow Creatives to confront their ideas, and build new ones. Diversity transpires in every aspect of Creatives’ everyday life – and explains the resulting bobo’s penchant for exotic food and his or her high level of tolerance for minorities. The Creatives therefore feel a need to return to run-down areas formerly frequented by minorities (this is the case of the new bobo-lands that have become Hackney in London, the 19th District of Paris, but also the old city-centre of Lisbon, where the local working-class population has often been expelled by the AirBnB-ization of whole areas – allowing the cobbled streets of the Bairro Alto to become a Disneyland for Creative tourists), but also create more vertical environment with more population density, as proximity is precisely the thing that encourages contact, communication, and therefore the circulation of ideas. What better way to achieve this than to have a dense urban environment with large Parisian apartment buildings, or New York skyscrapers, allowing for the clustering of households, and the exchange of ideas, but also the presence of services within walking distance (hospitals, schools, restaurants, etc.)? In  their quest for diversity but also for time, the Creatives want to maximize their experience as far as p­ ossible while limiting travel time, hence the desire to work at home whenever possible and to have all the necessary services within walking distance or within easy reach by bike or public transport. This in turn explains the strong desire of the Creative Class to pedestrianize the city centers, a worldwide phenomenon that has transformed into staple anti-car policies in many of Europe’s major cities, including Paris where former and present mayors Bertrand Delanoë and Anne Hidalgo have reversed many of the moves that had been made to facilitate the circulation of vehicles in Paris: transforming the City of Lights into a nightmare for car-users, but into a place more breathable and walkable to downtown inhabitants. The city may be their territory, but the Creatives’ system of values is also based on openness and diversity (a source of ideas and hence of innovations), through which they celebrate difference and individuality. As a result, they very often take the floor to defend and protect all minorities – whether ethnic, religious, or sexual, at times without much thought to the majorities, very often considered at worst as oppressing, at best as conformist. Among all these minorities, the LGBTQI probably constitute a sort of “most favored” status in the Creative narrative. Indeed, Richard Florida created an “LGBT index” to measure the correlation between acceptance of homosexuality in an area and the presence of the Creative Class in a given urban space: “we see a strong and vibrant gay community as a solid leading indicator of a place that is open to many different kinds of people. If gays feel comfortable in a place, then immigrants and ethnic minorities probably will, too, not to mention eggheads, eccentrics, and all other non-white-bread types who are the sources of new ideas. As Bill Bishop puts it, ‘Where gay households abound, geeks follow’”.11 This  particular symbolic status in the genesis of Creatives accounts in many ways for the early mobilization of artists and liberal circles to extend gay rights,

In the beginning was the Creative Class  23

and in particular same-sex marriage, which in the United States had become a major issue first pushed by Hollywood, before the Obama administration made it a major Democrat cause in the United States.12 Although pushed by different groups, Europe witnessed a similar evolution, with governments on the left (in France or Spain) but also on the right (in Germany or the United Kingdom, for example) of the political spectrum adopting same-sex marriage bills supported by the Creative Class, occasionally in the face of very strong opposition from more traditional parts of society. Politically, the rise of the Creative Class and its demands to recognize diversity have thus resulted in the multiplication of gestures aimed at repairing perceived injustices towards minorities, who then repaid the favor by strengthening “progressive” electoral coalitions (led, of  course, by the Creative Class and its interests). A striking example of targeted minorities policies was one of the decisions by the Obama administration that garnered the most media coverage after the setback of the 2016 midterms, which had ended in disaster for the Democrats with the loss of the Senate, underlining the need to remobilize the Democratic base. The policy in question consisted in allowing women to serve in combat units engaged in the US Army, a victory presented at the time as a “historic” moment in the battle for gender equality.13 In its euphoria, the President’s press release forgot to mention that this measure, as important as it was for those who have benefited from it ever since, only concerned a small minority of women (whether members of the US military or not), whereas the problem of unequal pay, for instance, much harder to solve, had not  been addressed by a single concrete measure besides programs designed to raise awareness during the Obama presidency. As is often the case when matters of identity are raised, symbolic impact takes precedence over much more meaningful policies aimed at social transformation. The  reader will probably have realized by now  that one of the main characteristics of the Creative Class is their education  – in fact, most Creatives are university-educated. But despite all their degrees, they cannot escape their own contradictions. Besides the question of minorities, their penchant for diversity also hides a subconscious desire for standardization promoted all over the world: a trip to a “bobo” or “hipster” restaurant in Paris, Tokyo, or Bratislava provides ample evidence of this: from the neo-industrial décor featuring brickwork (or bare enamel) and metal pipes, to the quirky, mismatched furniture and tablecloths, to the menu options with gourmet burgers, hot-dogs, and the infamous quinoa salad, now rivaled in hype by the poke bowl, one is always under the impression of eating in a Brooklyn restaurant, as all these elements conform to the standards of “hype” design of post-modern American eateries. Although the Creatives usually like to portray themselves as people who seek out difference and diversity, they are increasingly shutting themselves inside uniform frameworks that end up standardizing their way of life, from the food they eat to the music they listen to (thank you Deezer and iTunes Genius!), without forgetting the political ideas they promote, of course. In the same vein, Creatives’ internationalism and demands to celebrate diversity are often challenged by an equally strong desire to accelerate standardization: thus a program to defend LGBTQI rights will expect legislation

24  Class shifting

on same-sex marriage to be aggressively pursued immediately after the first successful gay pride in a country in South Eastern Europe, for example (while it took no less than 45 years to go from one step to the next in the United States), without much thought given to local specificities or circumstance. This ideal of standardization (even in the promotion of diversity) also transpires in the Creatives’ vision of International relations: the latter do not accept that their ideal of a global Kantian community governed by a common international law is not (or at least not yet) a reality, and therefore reject any calls by the “realists” to look at the global stage in a more Hobbesian way, to greater acknowledgement of the sovereignty of states, or even of the malevolent potential of certain countries. All that matters is the behavior (real, or perceived as real) of the interlocutor: if the country is contributing, or seems to be contributing, to the construction of the universalist liberal international paradise, it will be celebrated as a model, and its defects quietly pushed aside from any discussion. If it seems to question the international values and norms, it will be vilified and the Creatives will organize boycotts against these agents – whoever does not comply with the desire of an international order subject to rules therefore risks humiliation, isolation, or both. In  this international standardization process, the Creatives are also helping to create a new aristocracy that speaks a different language to that of the local folks, who, for their part, remain tied to the place they live and work in.14 This is especially visible in continental Europe, where English has become the lingua franca of all international communication within the EU, and Creatives impose English wherever they go, including on holiday: on travel, they will find other Creatives in international (or boutique) hotels to speak English, will ask local shopkeepers information about their products in English, and order their food or coffees in bars and restaurants in English. As a result, in order to please a creative tourist market that has never been as uniform as today, tourism professionals will offer standardized services that will correspond to the “unique” tastes of each Creative. While actively promoting diversity at home and abroad, the Creatives are thus often unconsciously homogenizing the world, and this despite the demand for authenticity initially expressed by creative travelers. This  has of course enormous consequences, the most important one being the widening gulf separating the new Creative elite and the rest of the population, with the Creatives imposing codes on indigenous societies in the name of universal values that are not  always shared. The  result is paradoxically a ghettoization of territories, with globalized centers that progressively become a closed community pretending to welcome diversity, while the poor and the minorities are actually being driven out of these areas where they used to live by rising rents and living costs, a process that is finalizing today in much of Paris’ Eastern Districts and London’s Northern and North Eastern boroughs. This  raises the point of inequality, probably the greatest contradiction of the Creative Class: indeed, the Creatives may be characterized by their social liberalism and an (unfeigned) desire to protect the poor and the minorities, but they are

In the beginning was the Creative Class  25

also economic liberals and the winners of globalization. Over the past decades, they have therefore supported at the same time social programs for the urban poor and the opening up the economy to international competition – a process that has destroyed jobs, but that has also reduced consumer prices, and enabled the creation of new jobs in the service sector. The subsequent fall of the working class (which will be the theme of Chapter 3) has therefore been to the advantage of the Creatives but has also favored the creation of a Service Class, identified by Florida as specializing in the provision of services to other people. These services are of course directed to all, but have been particularly useful to the Creatives, who are increasingly subcontracting basic tasks that were once the preserve of the family circle (such as childminding, cooking, gardening, etc.).15 This Service Class, which may include 45%–50% of today’s population, is composed of all the professions consisting in providing a service (in return for a payment) and involving a routine work: we can include in this category hairdressers or gardeners (although the top-members of this professions may well belong to the Creative Class), sales assistants in department stores, but also professions in healthcare and education, since a high level of studies no longer necessarily equates to a high level of respect in society, and since the family that receives medical care or education can take the liberty of giving advice, or even orders, to the doctor, nurse, or schoolteacher. In  a world where the middle class is shrinking day by day, there is less and less room for a middle situation: one can belong to the Creative Class that is reaping the benefits of globalization, a working class increasingly under stress to produce material goods at cheaper prices, or to a service class living mostly in run-down urban areas and only benefiting a small amount from Creatives’ opulence, despite a proximity that workers no longer enjoy. Available data testifies to the large inequalities among these three sociological groups: in the United States, members of the Creative Class have an average income of $70,714 a year; by contrast the working class earn half as much ($36,991 per year), while the average annual income of the service class is even lower, standing at $29,188 a year.16 It is not so much that the classes have become poorer (their median real income has generally stagnated over the last forty years); rather, the Creative Class has become much more affluent, and this wealth has not been beneficial to the other classes at all. The new world created by the new global elites is thus spectacularly more unequal, not  because the poor have become poorer (although one can argue that the stagnation of their income coupled with the decay of many social services and infrastructures equals de facto to impoverishment), but because the rich have become (much) richer, without redistributing their income. And while this new state of affairs might be tolerable in a time of economic prosperity, the Great Recession of 2008 and the slow growth years that followed have made the situation much more intolerable, de-legitimizing the social and political order consolidated by the Creatives. Thus, pockets of poverties develop next to extremely affluent neighborhoods, leading to a paradox described by Richard Florida in his later works: “across the United States, inequality is not just a little higher, but substantially higher,

26  Class shifting

in liberal areas than in more conservative ones. All of the twenty-five congressional districts with the highest levels of income inequality were represented by Democrats, according to a 2014 analysis”.17 In a world characterized by more inequality and social stress, it seems obvious that other social groups would organize challenges to the creative order. Marxist theory would of course see in the Service class a new lumpen proletariat to be educated to liberate itself from the yoke of its masters. Yet, as often with Marxist thought, the practice so far has not followed the theory. As we will see in the next chapters, so far opposition to creative liberals such as Justin Trudeau or Barack Obama have been organized around three other social groups, which by no means form a consistent body: the first group, the Suburban Middle Class, form what is left of the old middle class and has found in the “bourgeois boorish” (or “boubours”) an urban champion; the second group, the New Minority consisting in the white working class, and a peripheral lower middle class that has pauperized in the past decades, has redeveloped its class-identity during the crisis and has found defenders in parties like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally, formerly known as the National Front) in France, or Alternative for Germany; the third group, more recent, is composed of “Millennials”, young people frustrated in their ambitions by the economic crisis and their elders’ late departure from the jobs’ market. A striking feature here is the complete absence of the Service Class in this nomenclature. There are a number of reasons for this state of things: first, the Service Class is extremely diverse in its composition  – it includes fast-food restaurant waiters, janitors but also small entrepreneurs (sometimes on comfortable incomes) such as plumbers or gardeners, and general practitioners, school teachers, or nurses. In light of this description, the common aspirations of professionals in each of these areas are seldom to be found, beyond the fact that their aim is to provide services to other people – to the Creative Class of course, but also to all other citizens, which makes a potential antagonism between the Service and Creative Class much more difficult to theorize, let alone materialize: the relation between the two actors is far more complicated than in an industrial-age factory for example, where roles were well-defined and exclusive, with strict lines of demarcation being drawn between the industrialists and the workers. Furthermore, given the level of educational qualifications needed today to become a general practitioner, it seems doubtful that GPs would be inclined to compare their social condition and aspirations with that of a department store assistant, for example. The Service Class may well be a sociological reality, but it is very far from becoming a political force. This  is also because the Creative Class, conscious of the social inequalities and the poverty they live next to, has somehow co-opted those members of the service class they live next to in urban centers, by offering to defend their right to dignity and sometimes redistribute a share of its wealth in these urban areas. The result has been the inclusion of parts of the Service Class in the Creatives’ political platform – and a further division into the urban beneficiaries and the non-beneficiaries of Creative patronage, with many members of this lumpen proletariat evolving into a group that, in the words of the Marxist French

In the beginning was the Creative Class  27

demographer Hervé Le Bras, “defends its masters rather than its class”.18 Ethnic minorities are often the main beneficiaries of this policy plan, and this explains their higher visibility during the Democrats’ election campaigns in the United States during the last decade: as they became a key-demographic of the Obama electorate, very large sections of the Afro-American and Hispanic community have become major pro-establishment actors in the Democratic primaries of 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a large share of the vote. Without their support, she would probably have lost the primaries to Bernie Sanders. One might wonder whether this political attraction (which can sometimes be taken for an obsession) for the fate of minorities makes sense. It does, and of course a sense of shared guilt is part of the equation, as these minorities often live next to the major conurbations where Creatives flock (while the New Minority is left to experience decay far from the public eye), but this should not rule out a more cynical reading of the situation, wherein one could see in the Creatives’ policies a way to buy social peace. A more neutral explanation lies in the very nature of the Creative Class, and contributes to the realization of its vision, in a way that is as sincere as it is the expression of self-interest: since the Creatives need diversity to promote their creativity, one could expect them to naturally promote social minorities, which allows them to kill two birds with one stone: as they will feel less guilty for having created more inequality by redistributing their income to the most deprived social categories, they will also reinforce diversity in their environment – the same diversity they need to create the concepts, applications, and systems that they will then be able to convert into ideas and experiences that enrich their personal (and economic) well-being. While in theory this model might provide some sort of balance (at least in urban centers), it completely obliterates the fact that large chunks of the population in the West still live outside of the main urban centers. As we will see in Chapter 3, the most peripheral of these populations, both in economic and geographical terms, are now  leading the most extreme revolt against the Creative order. But they are not alone: in fact, the cultural revolution currently promoted by the Creative Class – consisting in rejecting uniformity in order to allow differences and individuality to express themselves, or in opting for a hedonistic life instead of a Protestant work ethic – is now being challenged by a larger part of the population that feels threatened not economically, but in its identity. The next chapter will therefore examine how the Suburban Middle Class came to organize the first challenge to the creative order, leading to a new urban phenomenon, the boubour.

Notes 1 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 2 According to the urban studies theorist Richard Florida, the proportion of American families living in urban areas that can be described as middle class fell from 65% to 40% between 1970 and 2012 – with the rest of the urban population increasingly cramming into ghettos for the rich or the poor; see Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 7 and p. 99.

28  Class shifting

3 Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, New York: Vintage Books, 1992. 4 Richard Florida, The  New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 217. 5 Richard Florida, The  Rise of the  Creative Class (revisited), New  York: Basic Books, 2012, p. 268. 6 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The  New Upper Class and How They  Got There, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 7 Richard Florida, The  Rise of the  Creative Class (revisited), New  York: Basic Books, 2012, p. 10. 8 Ibid., p. 107. 9 Ibid., p. 144. 10 Richard Florida, The  New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 123. 11 Richard Florida, The  Rise of the  Creative Class (revisited), New  York: Basic Books, 2012, p. 238. 12 https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-st-0628-media-gay-marriage20150628-story.html#page=1 13 http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/03/politics/u-s-m ilitar y-women-combat-­ positions/index.html 14 One will of course see in this contrast the opposition between “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” described by David Goodhart. See David Goodhart, The  Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: Hurst & Company, 2017. 15 Richard Florida, The  Rise of the Creative Class (revisited), New  York: Basic Books, 2012, p. 47. 16 Ibid., p. 42. 17 Richard Florida, The  New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 90. 18 Hervé Le Bras, Le Pari du FN, Paris: Autrement, 2015, p.  106  – the exaggerated terminology (which may also testify of the demographer’s frustration at seeing the Marxist theory wrong yet again), ought not to distract us from the fact there is today a clear divide in political behavior between poorer groups – beyond the divide between countryside and urban areas, one has witnessed divisions within urban areas between those hoping to become beneficiaries of the system, and those left behind. As a result, the infamous banlieues outside of Paris and minority areas within the French capital have split their votes between pro-system candidate Emmanuel Macron and leftwing rebel Jean-Luc Melenchon in the 2017 French presidential election.

Bibliography David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (revisited), New York: Basic Books, 2012. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It, New York: Basic Books, 2017. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere:The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: Hurst & Company, 2017. Hervé Le Bras, Le Pari du FN, Paris: Autrement, 2015. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, New York:Vintage Books, 1992.

2 THE SUBURBAN (AND PROVINCIAL) MIDDLE CLASS A pro-system rebellion

On October 25, 2010, the citizens of Toronto, Canada, elected as their mayor Rob Ford, a highly controversial municipal councilor who was loathed by the Creatives. Ford, a billionaire-turned-politician known for his outspokenness, had built his electoral success by relying on the mobilization of voters in the city’s suburbs against George Smitherman, the darling of the Creative class. Liberal and openly gay, Smitherman was a typical product of the local progressive political establishment.1 Ford’s term in office was a godsend for the city’s journalists, who made him a regular client of  articles  about his  eccentricity, but also countless gaffes and controversies (including drug addictions), making him a pre-Trumpian punching ball to many liberal Canadians.2 But one of Ford’s most symbolic projects is very telling about the rebellion of Suburbia against the Creative class: early in his first term, the mayor’s team announced a plan to develop a gigantic shopping mall, complete with monorail and Ferris wheel in the Port Lands, a former industrial area located right next to the city center on the banks of Lake Ontario. The site was a dream location for the development of an expensive residential zone for the Creative Class, with a potentially vertical urban environment, an ideal industrial zone ready to be converted into loft spaces and other creative workplaces, to say nothing of the famous industrial bricks and conduits that one would expect in any post-industrial restaurants of North America. Adding to this the proximity of Lake Ontario, everything about the place seemed to suggest it was destined to be Toronto’s new Brooklyn. And yet, far from a Creative paradise, the mayor’s vision was a kind of suburban Disneyland, a gigantic middle finger pointed in the bobos’ direction, just a short distance from the city center. They might have let the kitsch and outdated nature of the monorail and Ferris Wheel pass, although the concept seemed to come right out of a 1990s episode of The Simpsons. What they could really not stomach was the gigantic mall at the heart of the project. In fact, with this mega-mall, Toronto’s suburbanites were marking their presence in the city

30  Class shifting

center, recolonizing it, and directly challenging to the Creative Class. With this project, the message was clear: if you scorn us, if what you want is to impose your values on us, then we are going to put up a fight and resist while we still have the numerical advantage over you. The  project was eventually dropped, but Ford’s approach in Toronto was to find numerous echoes in North America. The almost simultaneous election of Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin in the United States, with a controversial style and spirit similar to Ford’s, coupled with a “classic” low-tax and small government economic agenda confirmed the emergence of a new political movement on the right, which deliberately portrayed itself as anti-Creative. This same wave of sentiments towards the Creative Class was to constitute part of Donald Trump’s winning coalition in the 2016 election, but not necessarily its demographic heart – this was not to be found in suburbia, but in peripheral and working class areas, where the working women and men form a separate “class” of their own, which will be treated in the next chapter. In the meantime, let us examine this Suburban Middle Class, as it was the first one to provide a systematic cultural opposition to the Creatives.3 As a social reality, the Suburban Middle Class precedes by a long time the Creative Class. Its origins in North America can be traced to the first half of the Twentieth Century, through the expansion of the Fordist organizational model for mass production (and mass consumption) and the New Deal, which allowed a large middle class to emerge. In  Europe, the idea of the Middle Class was present before World War II, but it really became a social reality after 1945, when national governments decided to sustain its emergence. The idea was that giving a large middle class a share in the system was the best way to safeguard and guarantee social harmony – thereby consolidating the social order against challenges from right or left. This  model of middle-class support was at the heart of the post-war reconstruction project (and indeed was the international philosophy behind the Marshall Plan) and the following Trente Glorieuses in much of Western Europe. The economic model based on demand rather than supply was abandoned a long time ago due to economic contradictions that became obvious in the 1970s, but the idea of the middle class has not. On the contrary, it has evolved from the idea of access to the American Dream to the consolidation of an economic, political, and cultural system based on the middle class. For sure, this system is no longer to be found inside the big urban conglomerates, where the Creatives and the Service Class have moved in, but outside of them, in the still affluent city suburbs, and in medium-sized towns outside the major urban centers. This is the kind of affluent suburb and residential districts that the Baby Boomers have built and Generation X have grown up in, and that have been deserted by the Creative Class. In this “old world” of Suburbia, there is no place for a cult of difference, quite the contrary: the rule is to integrate into one’s surroundings, with a house that is neither too small (so as to look well-off to the neighbors) nor too big (to avoid the kind of attention that leads to burglary), with a nuclear family household equipped

The suburban (and provincial) middle class  31

with the latest electrical household appliances, including smartphones and broadband, an optional pet, and of course and at least one car. In fact, the automobile is the indispensable tool of the Suburbanite to get from home to the groceries, the workplace, the sports club, or anywhere else. For unlike the Creative Class, the Suburban Middle Class lives outside the dense urban centers: its members need space for their gardens (and potentially swimming pools), and distance from the place of work in order to disconnect home and office life. In fact, the Suburban Middle Class (or at least what is left of it) has built and kept an impermeable wall between work and personal or family space, and mixing the two is out of the question. In Suburbia and Western Europe’s provincial heartland, the weekend is sacrosanct, and the sheer thought of sacrificing happy family routine is heresy, even in order to discover a new “experience”. The reason why this routine is so powerful in the minds of the Suburbanites is that it represents the very ideal of the American Dream as it has been thought of in the years that have followed the Great Depression and World War II. This is the concrete idea of a mass heartland constituting the political center of the country, with a ­classic ­western family that is neither too wealthy nor too poor and lunches every Saturday or Sunday (the same restaurants), before enjoying a collective or individual hobby, may that be gardening, indoor (or outdoor) games, sports, music, etc. The Suburban Middle Class’ entire life is based on routine, and it prides itself on living up to its standards as far as possible – which makes it highly respectful of the concept of law and order. The suburban bourgeoisie does not accept to be disrupted in its habits, good or bad, starting with the automobile: an instrument of torture for so many Creatives, who would like to see it banned outright from their neighborhood, it is on the contrary a symbol of emancipation for the suburban middle class: without it, it is impossible to go to work, take one’s children to school, or do the shopping on a Saturday or a weekday evening. The distance from home is too great, and even if it were short, why would one want to hide one’s new BMW from the neighbors anyway? In Suburbia, the automobile has remained a status marker for the middle class. Now, as in the past, driving a big car is not just a practical necessity to take the family from home to wherever one needs to go, it is also a way of showing colleagues and friends one’s personal success, and a way to tick the boxes to show that one’s lifestyle is indeed complete, as it corresponds to the classic canons of the American Dream. The idea of discovering Paris in an old Citroen 2CV or London in an old Austin Mini, a business concept with clear appeal to the Creatives, is surely incongruous for the suburban bourgeoisie: what is the point of spending (much) money to go around a place in a vehicle that is uncomfortable, unsafe, and small, when one can instead drive in one’s own comfortable and spacious modern car? The  middle class has built up its own routine and system of values, which have by now become traditional values, and it intends to preserve them, in the same way that it has attempted to pass them over to their children – who just like them in the 1960s (for many of the Suburban Middle Class are indeed Baby Boomers) have kept some of them, but completely rejected others. Among these

32  Class shifting

values, individualism and self-respect are of course present, but they come after respecting one’s family and neighbors. The Suburban Middle Class’ set of values is centered around a still very protestant work ethic: with a clear distinction between work time and home time, emphasis is put on work during the day: therefore the suburban bourgeois cannot understand that members of the family who have left to live elsewhere do not spend part of the working day in the office and find themselves having to work at the weekend (the result of poor timemanagement, according to them). They  do not  understand either when these urbanite hipsters who after having lectured them about tolerance and a car-free life, tell them about their lives full of creative experiences, travel, and good times they have enjoyed during the day – because as everyone should know, daytime is for working, not playing video games or having table-football parties in the office. The protestant work ethic that values work as an end in itself is a major value in the life of the Suburban Middle Class. Work is indeed seen as the key to all success: without it, nothing is possible, and if someone has not been successful in life, it is above all because one has not worked hard enough. It has hopefully by now become clear to the reader that this system of values is often standing at the complete opposite of that supported by the Creative Class, which sets the two groups on a collision course. The resulting contrast is a source of constant tension, reproduced in a caricatured, but remarkable way in the comedy movie Why Him by American director John Hamburg: an American dad, who owns and runs an ailing printing company in Grand Rapids, Michigan (a typical Suburban/Provincial Middle Class lair), takes his family to California to visit his daughter Stephanie, on her way to integrate into the Creative Class as she studies in Stanford. The reunion has been arranged to meet Stephanie’s boyfriend, a video games producer whose fabulous wealth is only matched by his whacky eccentricity. The  contrast between the Michigan dad and the Californian future son-in-law is the subject of most of the film’s gags. Of course, this is a Hollywood movie, and everything turns out well in the end: the whole family reconciles to the music of Kiss, a band old enough to be able to bring back good memories to America’s aging middle class, but also eccentric and “vintage” enough to create interest in the Creative Class. It is worth noting, though, the happy end only unfolds once clear victory has been handed by the film director to the eccentric Creative millionaire, after he exposes his future father-in-law’s intolerance and rescues his stationary store  – with the social consequences of the company’s future restructuring remaining safely hidden from the viewer. This  happy ending is of course the not-so-creative result of a Hollywoodian vision of life (at least as it stood in 2016): from the beginning of the movie, there was no doubt about who would come out on top of the conflict between the two camps. And therein lies the rub: feeling that its dominant position is increasingly challenged by the Creatives, the Suburban Middle Class has had enough of being portrayed as a retrograde group standing in the way of progress or a vestige of the past  – particularly as many of its members are approaching

The suburban (and provincial) middle class  33

retirement. Pigeon-holed as Conservatives by the politically correct urbanites of the Creative society, they have decided to be true to this new epithet and are now seeking to preserve the values that made them successful, and which seem to be all challenged by the rise of the Creative Class. The feeling of urgency is heightened by the awareness of the Suburban Middle Class’ demographic decline – once ultra-dominant in society, it is now diminishing as time goes by  – because of the rise of new, successful classes, but also the pauperization of some of its own. There is therefore yet another contradiction in seeing the Suburban Middle Class defending values central to a model that is no longer delivering for all, something that the Provincial Bourgeois is seeing every day, if only in their family circles, as they see that their children and grandchildren are finding it harder than they did to get a foothold in the job market; and when they do so they often find positions whose title goes beyond common understanding: micro-finance consultant, community manager, program officer in a democracy promotion NGO, etc. This perception of threat in the Suburban Bourgeois’ way of life of course has a translation in politics: every attempt by the Creatives to create a religiously more neutral environment in public spaces will immediately be perceived as “War on Christmas”; every action directed at the national symbols, may these be France’s “Tricolore” or America’s “Star Spangled Banner” will be taken as a personal affront to the country as a whole, any new rule or tax imposed on automobiles, and any Creative frontal attempt to legalize same-sex marriage will be met by an equally strong civil mobilization to protect “the traditional family”. One can see here a number of issues that have risen along the 2010s and have produced radicalization for a numerically smaller Middle Class, pushed out of the epicenter of politics (although it often retains a primus inter pares position). The examples of Scott Walker and Rob Ford, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, are of course striking, but so was the surprise victory of François Fillon in the French Republican party’s primary in 2016. Coming from practically nowhere in the last few weeks of the race to become the French center-right’s candidate for the French presidential election, Fillon beat long-time favorite Alain Juppé and former President Nicolas Sarkozy in a remarkable race that mobilized four million voters. But beyond this surprising victory, Fillon’s positioning is no less remarkable. In fact, the candidate had consciously or unconsciously ticked all the boxes to attract the Suburban Middle Class electorate, from his Barbour clothing to his discourse against same-sex marriage, not forgetting ethics: work ethics, of course, but also morality itself, to create a contrast with Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversies: in the Fillon household, as in any good bourgeois family, justice is no laughing matter, and the use of public money is certainly to be taken seriously, and most importantly with honesty. Of course, during the presidential campaign itself, when a rather different reality emerged as revelations were made as to the candidate’s wife employment as a parliamentary advisor earning a generous salary for projects that seemed to have never taken off, the resulting scandal would challenge the candidate’s credibility.

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François Fillon’s candidacy, deliberately centered on the myth of references to regime founder Charles de Gaulle and the Trente Glorieuses, certainly had a specific appeal towards the Suburban Middle Class, which still forms a relative majority in the French electorate, if only because it contains a large percentage of the nation’s pensioners. But another interesting and controversial aspects of his campaign is also very telling about the intellectual evolution of this category of the population: from beginning to end, Fillon’s campaign relied logistically on the support of the anti-same-sex-marriage mobilization of 2013–2014, La Manif pour tous (“The Demo For All”, a name created to echo the government’s chosen name for same-sex marriage, the Mariage pour tous). Beyond the controversies created by a proximity between the candidate and the movement which turned into a full dependence of the campaign structures on the Manif pour tous towards the end of the campaign, a remarkable feature of this alliance is that it has marked the return of religious issues and morals in the debate in France, not least because this marked a break from a century of secularization efforts in French politics, but also because it reflected a return, albeit more in terms of identity than faith, by Europe’s Suburban Middle Class to religion (the movement is far older in North America). Indeed, confronted with what it perceives as a covert but an unacceptable attempt by the Creative Class to neutralize religious symbols in the public sphere, a large portion of the middle class has felt that its very way of life is now t­ hreatened – however, this reaction should not be mistaken: this is not an attack on their faith, as the advanced de-Christianization of Europe remains a salient reality, but an attack on their identity.4 From this angle, the visceral reaction, particularly in the suburbs and the countryside of many Western countries, to the debates about the presence of Nativity Scenes or Christmas trees in public places (relayed today by the theories about the “War on Christmas” in the English-speaking countries, particularly the United States) takes a more meaningful dimension, and so does the opposition to same-sex marriage, with many activists of the Manif pour tous portraying the bill as a challenge not to the civil conception of marriage, but to its religious meaning  – let us remember here that for all their history of anticlericalism, French people are nonetheless very marked by their Catholic heritage. Thus, for French people (in particular in suburban and rural areas), a wedding is usually pictured as starting with a brief ceremony at the Town Hall, followed by a longer and more moving mass, whose end marks the beginning of festivities. This  return to a nominal religious identity in Europe has also been the results of the terrorist attacks that have marked the period 2015–2016, particularly in France with the Paris and Nice attacks, but also the brutal murder of a French priest in his church by ISIL terrorist on July  26, 2016  – while French and European churches did not start filling up after it, this particular attack (and its barbarity) it had a lasting traumatic impact on the French Catholic community (including the 53% of French people who are non-practicing believers) and has contributed to strengthen the idea among people identifying as Catholic or Christian that their community and way of life is threatened – hence also the

The suburban (and provincial) middle class  35

idea that this community might one day become a minority in its own country.5 Confronted with the perception of loss of identity, which is seen as resulting from an alliance between the Creative Class and religious minorities to alter or even destroy its way of life, a portion of the middle class is therefore returning to Christian identity, just as the freshly urbanized workers of 19th Century Europe  turned to nationalism to challenge the acculturation of the city and the factory.6 The return of Christian identity in politics has also been strongly expressed all over Europe, including in the heavily de-Christianized region of Central Europe, and exploited with remarkable zeal by its politicians, most spectacularly by Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, whose calls to defend European Christianity7 have very often had much more success across the continent than his vision of “illiberal democracy”. However, this return to religion in Europe should be taken with a pinch of salt, as the continent is not likely to be on the eve of a religious awakening similar to the rise of the born-again Christians in 1980s America. In fact, despite the return of Christian identity (and values) in the public debate, church service attendance has not risen noticeably, and young people continue to identify less and less with Christianity across the West.8 In  the meantime, despite its success among France’s center-right, the anti-same sex marriage Manif pour Tous is dividing French public opinion (including the middle class) just as much as it is mobilizing its Christian militant core.9 In the same way, the popularity of political parties that claim the application of Christianity as a base of their policymaking is continually in decline, not least in Central and Eastern Europe, despite the success of individual politicians claiming to defend that very faith: thus the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) scored its worst historic result in 2016 (4.94%) and is no longer represented in the Slovak Parliament, while its Czech sister organization, KDU-CSL has not passed 7% support in any legislative election since 2006. In  the meantime, Hungary’s Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) is only a sidekick of Viktor Orbán’s much more powerful Fidesz and only owes its continued existence to the latter’s popularity. The  bigger issue, however, lies elsewhere. Even if Europe is not  about to live a religious awakening capable of overspilling into its very much secularized political landscape, Christian identity has clearly become an identification factor in European politics. This is specifically the case for the Suburban Middle Class: although its members still do not go to church, they do see the Cross as a rallying point to safeguard their identity. This  explains the excellent results François Fillon scored among Catholics in the French 2017 presidential elections, despite the news stories that clearly damaged his image among the larger public.10 The current trend is therefore not an offensive by religious authorities against secularization (even if that is what some radical Christian activists would like to see), but rather a return of religion as an aspect of people’s identity, which then transpires in European public opinion. There  is an interesting paradox there, insofar as many members of the Suburban Middle Class come from the very Baby Boomer generation that strongly reduced the cultural importance of the

36  Class shifting

Church in Europeans’ daily life. But faced with changes over which they no longer have control, and feeling threatened in their identity, many are nominally returning to Christianity as a factor of recognition between “them”, the Creative cosmopolitan city-dwellers who accuse them of impeding progress, and “us”, the real country that built its way of life and intends to defend it against the Creatives’ perceived forced acculturation. In this effort, the Suburban Middle Class has found an ally, even a spokesperson, in the figure  of the “boubour”. The  term, initially coined by French anthropologist and brand strategist Nicolas Chemla,11 describes a trend in fashion and urban culture, but also a socio-political phenomenon. It is in fact a double abbreviation (like the bourgeois bohemian “bobo”), and it is used to describe the “boorish bourgeois”, a retro macho type that has come back from the 1970s with a vengeance to set a new anti-bobo counter culture. In this sense, the boubour defines itself in opposition to the Creative Class. But he is as much of an antibobo as a post-bobo: indeed, the boubour does not exist merely as a (primary) reaction to the Creative Class; beneath his anti-intellectual and “retro-macho” façade, he is perfectly aware of his behavior (and its potential to shock the bobo), and he uses his boorishness consciously to challenge the Creatives’ taboos and perceived hypocrisies. In fact the boubour’s primary mission is to force his bobo colleagues to face their contradictions: may they be the rise of inequality in the city, the rising cost for products like quinoa which have the consequence of making it a cash crop and therefore its consumption by indigenous population more difficult, the homogenization of a standardized urban culture, or the sexual faux pas of creative film directors or politicians who openly promote respect for women’s right but turn out to behave very differently when they are far away from cameras. As Chemla points out, “In this free-for-all society, the philosophy is each man for himself, and the path is finally clear for the triumph of the openly bourgeois and very much boorish boubour, who no longer wants to be annoyed by urban Teletubbies and their quinoa”.12 The boubour wants to get rid of the (perceived) pretense that we all live in a wonderful world of harmony between nations and universal rule of law, that those “poor Muslims are the first victims of terrorism” (this may be true from a universal point of view, but the boubour’s horizon remains national, not global); his behavior is made to make us realize that the world is a brutal Hobbesian place, not a Kantian paradise, and he is absolutely ready to play the bad, brutal bully to help us understand that. The boubour demonstrates his boorish side in every aspect of life, from his musical tastes (out goes the vintage folk of the Lumineers, the boubour wants heavy sound and good old rock bands even more so if these are in favor of the right to bear fire-arms, like the Eagles of Death Metal13), to his clothing style (the urban boubour opting for Philipp Plein, the more rural type choosing Barbour), and of course his way of life: “[with] a motorbike backfiring like a primal scream, a pre-civilizational or post-apocalyptic aesthetic, the boubour seems to be in a perpetual quest for a primary, primitive, primate state with childhood and impulse as the only horizon of happiness”.14 As is becoming clear to the reader, the rise of the boubour

The suburban (and provincial) middle class  37

is also the rejection of nuance, of the extreme (and occasionally, let’s admit it, a little superficial) compassion of the Creative Class, of gender policies and their effects on society, and of multicultural politics – here, the predominantly urban phenomenon of the boubour aligns itself culturally with the Suburban Middle Class: like the provincial bourgeois, he is rising up against the Creative Class and its societal reforms, and his counter-revolution seeks to get back to a lost Eden, namely the 1970s. Indeed, as Chemla points out, “the seventies are the last decade of undivided triumph for the Western bourgeois male, the last decade of complete freedom and pleasure, with no excuses, no limits, no remorse and no culpability”.15 Most importantly, “the nostalgy of the seventies is for a form of libertarianism and boundless hedonism, when the spoilsports were not challenging the flourishing and dominance of the straight bourgeois male yet. At that time, feminists were already passionate about their cause but not politically visible yet, gays were starting to mobilize but were not  yet demanding to assert their right to exist, and the ethnic minorities, having only just broken free from colonization, were keeping a fairly low profile. The associations for the protection of families, children and the victims of road traffic accidents, and the public health scaremongers, had not yet managed to start their drive to regulate and ban everything”.16 It has become clear by now that the boubour is, just like the Suburban Middle Class, attached to the past and sees the pre-Creative Class era as a lost paradise to be re-conquered. That is why it has rallied massively behind different boubour spokesmen like Rob Ford, Boris Johnson, or Viktor Orbán, artists like Jesse Hughes, the lead singer of Eagles of Death Metal, and political pundits like Milo Yannopoulos in the anglosphere, or Eric Zemmour in France. The commonalities among all these profiles are striking: they are all urban leaders, and logic would expect them to belong to (or at least tolerate) the Creatives. It is worth pointing out that many of them actually came close to be accepted by the Creative Class: in his pre-Brexit career, Boris Johnson was certainly a lifelong passionate Eurosceptic, but he was also elected twice as Mayor of London, a city that is hardly winnable without substantial support from the Creative Class (as former and subsequent Conservative candidates have experienced before and after him); in the same way Viktor Orbán emerged in the post-communist political landscape of Hungary as a promising young liberal in the 1990s, before turning to conservatism and illiberalism. But either by political calculation or because their experiences changed them (something that pundits do not emphasize enough in their study of politicians), these leaders then morphed in the 2000s or 2010s into the defenders of the provincial bourgeoisie, championing their interests against the agenda of the Creative Class. And because these boubours have so often sat alongside the Creatives in their urban environment, they know all their codes, their way of life, their paradoxes and weak points. This is precisely why their attacks are so violent, and often effective: the boubour knows his opponent, sometimes better than his opponent knows himself, and he is therefore able to hit instantaneously where it hurts. The violence of these attacks, and the form of

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class betrayal conducted by the boubour makes him a mortal enemy to the bobo, as repellent to him as he is admirable to the Suburban Middle Class. The boubours and the provincial bourgeois thus have a common agenda: to unmake the Creative Class’s societal transformation of the late 2000s and early 2010s. But is this rebellion systematic? After all, historically the province has always tended to be a national pillar of tradition and conservatism down the ages, whether in the United States where the countryside and suburbia remained originally unmoved by the 1968 cultural revolution, or in France, where the provinces made the choice in 1870 – following French defeat against Prussia – to elect a monarchist Assembly while Paris opted for a much more radical option that would go down in history as the Commune (and give its name to communism). In its modern version, the Suburban Middle Class is also used to be considered as the political center, and this is why its radical outlook is certainly surprising. In reality, despite its epidemic rejection of the Creatives’ societal agenda, both boubours and Suburban Middle Class remain deeply attached to the system, and look to maintain it: In 2017, France, one of the first politicians to concede defeat and throw his weight behind Creative Class candidate Emmanuel Macron was François Fillon, the boubour candidate. A  few months before, the provincial and suburban middle class had opted to support Donald Trump, not necessarily because of policy (although it was important to some), nor because of the then billionaire candidate’s crude behavior, which could hardly be described as bourgeois. Donald Trump only managed to take over this electorate in part towards the end of the primary, and then more systematically during the fall of 2016 when America’s Middle Class came to reject massively the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. As we will see in more detail in the next few chapters, there are two distinct electorates in the Trump coalition, and its middle class component, relatively educated and attached to good manners, is fundamentally a supporter of the system and, though it seeks a cultural return to an idealized past, it certainly does not aim to upset the economic order: to get back to France’s 2017 election, both François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron used the terms “reform” and “modernization” as a positive term, whereas the two other main candidate, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, used it negatively. These modernizing “reforms” are above all economic and their philosophy remains liberal: support for the private sector, tax cuts (namely to reward “honest citizens”, i.e. the middle class), and of course the fight against abusers of the system, the frauds who are stealing the hard-earned cash of the “law-abiding folk who pay their way” (again, generally the middle class). Here, the fact that in most countries, individual social fraud is far less costly for the state budget than the losses caused by big corporations’ legal tax optimization (among them the notorious GAFAM – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) is of little importance. What matters is perception, and it is much more comfortable for the Suburban Middle Class to be able to point at an identifiable, personified enemy, than to challenge a system on which most have thrived for the past decades.

The suburban (and provincial) middle class  39

With a stake in the current system, that still guarantees it a long-term income, and even sizeable rents (even though these are increasingly open to question in continental Europe, for example in the taxi and pharmacies sectors), and knowing full well that its continued well-being will (or already does) depend on the survival of the pensions system, the Suburban Middle Class is no revolutionary class; it is trying, on the contrary, to preserve it as much as possible, including by opposing all forms of societal adventurism, and by supporting classical liberal economic reforms, at least as long as they do not affect the heart of its economic interest – acute observers of French politics have witnessed over the years how entrenched interests such as those of the French pharmacist have successfully organized to defend their monopoly on drugs sale. Beyond the particular interests of specific categories of the Suburban Middle Class, the general drive consists in making the system more perennial by reforming it in one’s image, so as to strengthen as far as possible the middle class’s role in society. In short, to quote the favorite aphorism of Tancredi in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change”.17 This conservative attitude is effectively the opposite of a much more radical critique of the Creative order articulated by defenders of a social group that has lost everything in the globalization process. This white working class, in perdition, is at the heart of the New Minority, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 On this as on many other electoral subject, electoral maps are sometimes more telling than tables or even articles. That of the Toronto 2010 local elections clearly shows the electoral divide between downtown and suburban votes, in a configuration that is to be found in most elections in urban and suburban areas across North America and Europe. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_mayoral_election_2010#/ media/File:Toronto_Election_2010_Map.svg. 2 A reasonably detailed analysis of the numerous controversies surrounding Rob Ford can be found in the following website of the Toronto Life media https://torontolife. com/city/toronto-politics/rob-ford-the-weirdest-mayoralty-ever/. 3 In the original (French-language) version of the book, I used the term “Provincial Middle-Class” to describe the same category of the population, that represents the middle class of outside the city centers, which can be just as much Suburbia as the  towns and villages further away from the main urban centers. The  choice of using the term “provincial”, also very loaded in French, was a deliberate one, and corresponded to my personal status – I am myself a proud provincial, born and raised in a small town in the South West of France, and had no shame in describing (and to a certain extent relating to) the people in the following paragraphs as provincial, using a term often used in pejorative terms in French (except for those provincials like me who choose to wear this epithet as a badge of honor). In  order to avoid useless polemics, I use the term “Suburban” in the English version, except where there is a need to be more precise, in which case I will mark the difference between “Suburban”, “Provincial”, and “Suburban and Provincial”. 4 In his study of Christianity in Europe, Olivier Roy has remarkably shown the difference between religiosity in Europe (which continues to fall), and the nominal return to religion as folklore, which defends external religious signs in the name of identity but continues to encourage a strict separation of church and state – see Olivier Roy, L’Europe est-elle chrétienne, Paris: Seuil, 2019.

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5 This is a perception – see on this subject the analysis by Jérôme Fourquet, Le meurtre du Père Hamel, une onde de choc chez les Catholiques français, IFOP Focus N. 165, July 2017. http://www.ifop.com/media/pressdocument/987-1-document_file.pdf. 6 See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983. 7 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pmvictor-orban-europe-response-madness 8 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/21/christianity-non-christianeurope-young-people-survey-religion 9 https://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/2850898/manif-pour-tous-trois-ans-plustard-le-sondage-qui-montre-que-meme-chez-les-catholiques-et-les-sympathisantsde-droite-l-adhesion-au-mouvement-s-essouffle-jerome-fourquet 10 http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/politique/2017/08/14/31001-20170814ARTFIG00004fideles-a-fillon-rallies-a-macron-le-dilemme-des-catholiques-de-droite-pendantla-presidentielle.php 11 Nicolas Chemla, Anthropologie du Boubour: Bienvenue dans le monde bourgeois bourrin, Paris: Lemieux, 2016. 12 Ibid., p. 39. 13 The Eagles of Death Metal got their fame into the European mainstream as the band playing during the terrorist attack on the Bataclan Theatre in Paris on November 13, 2015. Originally much interviewed and discussed by the French press in the days that followed the attack, the national media’s attitude radically changed when band leader Jesse Hughes declared in the French press that casualties would have been lesser if people had been allowed to bear firearms. See http://www.slate.fr/story/114179/ jesse-hughes-eagles-death-metal-armes. 14 Nicolas Chemla, Anthropologie du Boubour: Bienvenue dans le monde bourgeois bourrin, Paris: Lemieux, 2016, p. 51. 15 Ibid., p. 100. 16 Ibid., pp. 96–7. 17 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (1957), Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969, p. 40.

Bibliography Nicolas Chemla, Anthropologie du Boubour: Bienvenue dans le monde bourgeois bourrin, Paris: Lemieux, 2016. Jérôme Fourquet, Le meurtre du Père Hamel, une onde de choc chez les Catholiques français, IFOP Focus N. 165, July 2017. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (1957), Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969, p. 40. Olivier Roy, L’Europe est-elle chrétienne, Paris: Seuil, 2019. Arjen Siegman et  al., No Robots: The  Position of Middle Class Households in Nine European Countries, Rijswijk: Quantes, 2018.

3 THE NEW MINORITY, OR THE REVOLT OF THE WHITE WORKING CLASS

In the 2014 French municipal elections, Marine Le Pen’s Front national (FN) won 14 towns with a population of over 9,000 (eleven if one does not count the towns in which Le Pen’s allies of the Ligue du Sud were elected), despite the farright movement’s historic difficulties to gain a second-round absolute majority at any level in France. Beyond these historic results, a more systematic analysis of the FN’s scores clearly shows its two geographical power bases, one in the French South-East, a historic bastion since its emergence in the 1980s, and one in the North-North East, the former industrial heartland of France. This  workingclass terrain has been conquered more recently but has become fertile ground for France’s far-right. Still looking at the 2014 electoral map, the historic prevalence of the Southern FN remained clearly visible then: at the time, despite encouraging results in the North and a shock victory in the first round in the town of Hénin-Beaumont, the second round had clearly shown that the old FN was still much more capable of delivering an absolute majority to the party, as its candidates won in ten Councils in the South, while the northerners had only managed to win an absolute majority in four towns: Hénin-Beaumont, Mantes-la-Ville, Villers-Cotterêts, and Hayange.1 Three years later, the second round of the presidential election had inverted the relationship between the historic heartland of France’s far-right and its newly conquered fiefdom: in the context of disappointing results for the National Front, the only two départements where Marine Le Pen had achieved an absolute majority were in the North of the country, in Aisne and the Pas-de-Calais. Moreover, among the few towns which had given the far-right candidate a majority, the northern ones had usually delivered her best scores: thus, whereas in the Southern town of Orange (30,000 inhabitants) Le Pen had “only” gathered 51.85% of the vote, she netted a majority of 61.56%, one of the highest scores in France, in Hénin-Beaumont (comparable in size to Orange, with 26,000 inhabitant but with a different sociological composition).2

42  Class shifting

How can we explain this geographical shift? There are a number of explanations. The first has to do with Marine Le Pen herself, who upon taking over the leadership of the far-right from her father placed the emphasis on social issues and immigration rather than France’s colonial past or the defense of Christian values, subjects closer to the heart of the far-right in southern areas. Beyond the ideological choices due to the generational change in the leadership of the party, one can see a more tactical move: in the years 2010–2017, it seems that a conscious effort, piloted by Marine Le Pen’s then-advisor François Philippot, was made to stick as close as possible to the aspirations of the working-class vote in the North-East of France. This in turn has led to the consolidation of a fiefdom that until recently had voted for Socialist, or even Communist candidates to represent them, both in the city hall and in parliament. This  geographical change has a much deeper impact on French politics. The far-right vote in France has moved from a predominantly petit-bourgeois, xenophobic vote (corresponding to its national historic DNA, from Boulanger to Poujade) to a potentially much broader social base, as French demographer Hervé Le Bras points out: “The  new départements with a higher vote for the FN are all, without exception, in regions that are undergoing economic and social difficulties. The original malaise that had found a sticking point in the presence of foreigners or in criminality, has thus evolved towards an economic and perhaps social substructure”.3 Of course, this spectacular shift from a historic, intellectual base of the extreme-right to a broader electoral support is not new: it was one of the chief reasons why Jean-Marie Le Pen had pulled off a surprise victory in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, knocking off center-left rival (and sitting Prime Minister) Lionel Jospin. But from the very first moment Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the party, the FN’s political operatives shifted the party’s strategy, as they realized that immigration and law and order topics were not sufficient to ensure the long-term growth of their movement. Incidentally, this new audience had already been identified by Jean-Marie Le Pen on the night of the first round of the presidential election in 2002, when he declared after his upset qualification to the second round: “don’t be scared to dream, you, the little ones, the under-class, the excluded”.4 He would repeat this mantra with more or less success over the next few years, but his niece would make it the heart of her political platform. Calling upon the losers of globalization to support her was to make Marine Le Pen the leader of a clearly anti-capitalist party, despite the fact that, back in the 1980s, her father Jean-Marie had been a staunch defender of Thatcherite reforms in the French economy. Has the far-right become “the party of the working class”? The  question itself is usually enough to make what is left of the European left flinch, but it is nonetheless a reality that has been studied in detail and in the long-term by many scholars and think-tanks, not least by the French left-of-center Fondation Jean-Jaurès: as Jean-Philippe Huelin noted already in January 2013, the success of Le Pen’s appeal to the working class had already become apparent during the previous presidential election of 2012: “That year, all the polling institutes had

The New Minority  43

Marine Le Pen leading in the first round among workers (with 28%–35%), in front of François Hollande (21%–27%) and Nicolas Sarkozy (15%–22%)”.5 2017 only confirmed the trend: in February–March, the percentage of working-class people intending to vote for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the presidential had reached 43%, far ahead of Emmanuel Macron (17%) or left-wing candidates Jean-Luc Mélenchon (15.5%) and Benoît Hamon (12%).6 From a party of small entrepreneurs, the Front national  – since 2018 rebranded as the National Rally – has thus to a large extent transformed itself to become the champion of the working class. Like in many other countries, it is of little importance that Marine Le Pen has spent most of her life in a manor in Saint-Cloud, or that she seldom had to practice law before entering in politics. What really matters here is the connection she has managed to build with the working class, notably through her style and political stance, which have allowed her to position herself as the only defender of the historic working class, a category of the population in rebellion against a political class (and often the historic unions)7 that they feel have betrayed them. Marine Le Pen is not  an isolated case. In  the same way, Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) has now become a working-class party, as shown during the 2017 elections campaign where the party presented itself as die soziale Heimatpartei, the social homeland party. Further North, the cartography of the support for Alternative for Germany (Af D), which entered the Bundestag in September 2017, also reveals a heartland in the working-class areas of the former East Germany (the party achieved 26.9% of the vote in the Leipzig area, for example8); as for the referendum on Brexit, here again an analysis of the electoral map reveals a similarity between the zones of highest support for Brexit and those with large presence of working-class people, primarily in England and Wales; this is even more evident in cosmopolitan London, where the only boroughs to have given Brexit a majority are also the most historically working class and are all located on the city’s periphery: Barking and Dagenham, Havering, and Bexley, Sutton and Hillingdon.9 The shift in the working-class vote from the left to what is generally qualified as the far-right is therefore not a purely national phenomenon, but a much more profound and global one. The question then is to account for this massive shift in the electorate. To do that, the first step is to clarify the notion of the working class, and expand its strict definition to also include the categories that together with it form the “New Minority”, a concept first used by American scholar Justin Gest,10 which can englobe the new electoral heart of what is usually defined across the West as “right-wing populism”. Unlike the Creative Class who produce ideas, or the Service Class who produce services, the term working class covers all professions that involve the production of goods and tangible objects, whether primary resources or finished products. This production necessitates a form of labor that is manual to a greater or lesser extent (and which may be delegated to a machine) at a factory, in a workshop or, in agriculture: many farmers in Europe had joined the middle

44  Class shifting

class during the period 1960s, often thanks to the generous subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and all-powerful co-operatives and unions (first of which the French FNSEA, which dominated the CAP policy-making for decades before the 1990s). But the new generations of farmers and fishermen, much less protected by the CAP than before, have been more exposed to market fluctuations, making their social trajectory to resemble more that of the industrial working class. This explains, for example, why support for Marine Le Pen and her National Rally has soared over the past ten years in France’s rural areas, which were once the exclusive playground of the French center-right.11 The example of the French farmers is indeed striking, because it corresponds to a more global reality: until the 1990s, the working class had been progressively co-opted into the middle class, most recently with government programs encouraging home ownership. But co-optation is not  assimilation, and the working class certainly did not  lose its identity. On the contrary, while abandoning some particular features (such as collective action and trade unionism), workers have remained true to very specific cultural traits that are now even more salient because they were ignored by the majority of the population over the past decades. In fact, while the working class shares with the Suburban Middle Class a taste for uniformity (with the idea that people must assimilate into their community, may that be in the factory, the town or, in the past, the union), its relationship with the question of law and order is quite different: while the bourgeoisie has historically displayed a quasi-religious respect for upholding the Law and respecting the rules, most members of the working class take a different view. Having grown up in the twentieth century with the idea of a class struggle against a bourgeoisie that (at least according to theory) was in control of the state, most workers still believes that police and courts are not necessarily the instrument of a blind justice, and therefore that it can (and will) be manipulated by the elites to support an unfair system. Thus, for the working class, the law must be subordinated to the idea of justice (particularly social justice): if a situation is legal but unfair, then the use of illegal methods to remedy it is often deemed to be acceptable in order to redress the balance. This is why, for example, the occupation of a factory or the sequestering of its directors – a recurring occurrence over the past twenty years in the social history of France – is seen as acceptable by a majority of workers, while the middle class will see in it an inadmissible assault on law and order. In the same way, the same disconnect was clear in France during the Yellow Vest movement in 2018, where the activists (most of them with a working-class background) remained indifferent to the urban violence committed in Paris and other major cities, while the suburban and provincial middle class quickly grew horrified by images of profanation of such national symbols as the Arc de Triomphe. Moreover, while the middle class remains in general attached to family values, and to a lesser extent religious tradition, the workers are far less sensitive to these issues as the number of children born out of wedlock and single moms tend to suggest12 – there are of course, notable exceptions such as Poland, where the relationship between the Catholic Church and trade unions during

The New Minority  45

the communist period has led to a very specific working-class social conservatism, which finds its expression today in the social program of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. This lesser attachment to the traditional family also explains the far-right’s silence during the controversies over same-sex marriage in France in 2013–2014: while the country was tearing itself apart on the issue, Marine Le Pen stayed very discrete during the debates, first because she knew that a position could only bring trouble inside her own party, but also because she understood that her new electoral heart cared little about this issue. The picture that emerges is that the working class, despite some integration in the late twentieth century into the middle class, has retained its own identity, which is based on the legacy and the narrative of the working-class struggles of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, often passed on from generation to generation in workers’ communities. After a period of integration into the mainstream, the contraction of the working-class population following the de-industrialization of a large part of the West has had a boosting effect on that identity: threatened by extinction, the old working class has re-appropriated its codes and traditions. Furthermore, this identity has expressed itself predominantly as a White Working-Class identity, for as we saw in Chapter  1, the minorities have for the most part been co-opted into the Service Class, and are now part of electoral coalitions that is often allied with the Creative Class. The result of this re-­d iscovered workers’ pride is the return of a “svoy” culture, to use the Russian term: “us against them”, a motto that has transformed itself into a culture during the heydays trade-unionism, and that has been passed on discretely among the working class in Eastern Europe, before and during the transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy. There is an “us”, the community of workers (here again, an idealized picture of the working-class struggle from the two previous centuries), and them, the bosses, the profiteers, the strikebreakers, in short all those who are preventing the workers from making a decent living from the fruits of their (by nature physical) labor. These values may look tainted with an old-style Marxism and out of touch with our non- or post-communist culture, but one should remember that this is where the working class comes from – with an integration in the collective psyche of stories and values from the “glory years” of the 1950s and 1960s, when workers flew from one social victory to the next through social actions strikes that were often violent, but also led to agreements favorable to the unions: when borders are closed and there is not enough workforce to fill in all the employment positions, it is much easier for workers to collectively and effectively apply pressure for wage increases and improvements to working conditions. But while working-class culture has lived on, the position of its members in society has deteriorated almost continuously since the late 1970s. Since then, the demand for manpower in the factories has fallen significantly, as a result of the automation, but also the opening of markets to global competition (to take one example, in the 2000s, American corporations closed no fewer than 2.9 million jobs in the United States while creating 2.4 million abroad,13 often in Mexico, a

46  Class shifting

member of the North American Free Trade Agreement). While these technical and commercial evolutions have on the whole been beneficial to many people, it has become clear today (thanks in no small way to the electoral victories of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016) that this consumer advantage was acquired at the expense of the indigenous working class, who have shrunk in size and visibility14: while those who left their community in time joined the Services Class or managed to be absorbed in the Suburban Middle Class, as workers left the old industrial centers to find new jobs, those who stayed behind in the old industrial centers have seen their once thriving communities decline and their life worsen. As a result, these communities not only face marginalization, but sometimes have to toy with the idea of their extinction, as Justin Gest brilliantly describes in The  New Minority, a fascinating study that follows an immersion of several months spent in two devastated working-class communities in the United Kingdom (Barking & Dagenham, in Greater London), and in the United States (Youngstown, once the US capital of steel, in Ohio).15 This process of marginalization has been so complete, from a sociological as well as geographical view point, that new working-class “ghettos” have appeared all over the West, in the Anglosphere, in Western Europe, but also all around the former communist bloc, where entire cities that once thrived on industry (especially heavy industry) are now practically left on their own; in these dilapidated communities, the new white “under-class” is left on its own device: as a result, strangers are often looks suspiciously, and most problems and disputes are resolved in-house, far from the public eye – not just because that is the culture of the land, but also because public services have vanished from these areas. These communities have for a very long time suffered their decline in silence, witnessing alone their decadence in peripheral areas: too far away from the citycenter for the Creative Class, too run-down for a middle class not interested in living near brownfield lands. This is the heart of the Peripheral France described by French geographer Christophe Guiluy,16 which gave Marine Le Pen a relative majority in the first round of the presidential election, with Hénin-Beaumont, a former mining town with one of the highest unemployment figures in France and resulting high levels of poverty, one of its flagship examples,17 or the American “Rust Belt” that played a crucial role in Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. In  a different way, these peripheral areas not  only include strictly working class areas but also those peripheral zones which in France include the Rhône valley between Camargue and the outer suburbs of Lyon, or the valley of the Garonne river between the suburbs of Toulouse and Bordeaux, where a new Le Pen support zone has been taking shape for several years now. In these regions, the working class is not necessarily numerically large, but it is joined by a large number of former members of the lower middle class, who through their lack of specialized or higher education are less mobile and much more vulnerable to the ill-effects of globalization. Residing as they do in peripheral areas, a long way from the big city centers that bring jobs in the services sector, this small middle class is currently subject to pauperization and poverty: access to jobs that require

The New Minority  47

few qualifications has plummeted spectacularly since the 1990s, and the closure of numerous social services previously available in their communities is further complicating their life: the process started early with post offices and hospitals in the 1980s and 1990s, and was completed when the local tobacconist, newsagent, or pub had to close – indeed, one of the striking feature of the Yellow Vest movement in France was that the roundabouts occupied by so many rural Gilets Jaunes became places of socialization that replaced the closed local cafes.18 These peripheral rurals are acutely aware of their vulnerability, and now amalgamate with the working class (with whom they often share common feature, including a rejection of the rule by the more educated) to form a New Minority that no longer expects anything from the authorities and feels that they have nothing left to lose. One might wonder why members of this group very often choose to support candidates on the right rather than to the left fringes of the political spectrum; in fact, while such a popularity does make sense for the former lower middle class – it has indeed been the electoral heartland of right-wing surges in 1880s and 1950s France with the boulangistes and poujadistes, the White Working Class has historically gravitated in the left’s orbit, with many of the areas now  voting for Marine Le Pen being former Socialist, or even Communist strongholds. The  key to understanding this major electoral change resides not  so much in changes within the working class, but in the alignment of the modern far-right messaging to is aspirations: Jean-Marie Le Pen had started the movement when he proclaimed himself the spokesman of the “the small people, the under-class, the excluded” in the early 2000s, and this new positioning initiated a shift in the base of support for the French far-right from the cities and their inner suburbs towards the peripheries and the countryside, in other words towards the geographical margins of the country.19 But this shift only became possible once the White Working Class, already in difficulty in the 1980s, saw its aspirations no longer relayed by the traditional left, who made the conscious choice to represent the interests of others, namely those of the Creative Class and the minorities, who were then growing at a far higher rate in electoral terms. After trying to keep both populations in its coalition, New Labour and the other modern social democratic parties definitely abandoned the demographically less powerful force – by then, it had become clear that the interests of creative and working-class segments of society were opposed to one another: in the context of de-industrialization, the labor market became saturated, and immigrant populations – often not unionized – tended to find themselves competing with the white working class. Having to choose between two electoral heartlands, Tony Blair and the other modern progressists chose the ascendant electorate, and abandoned the White Working Class. There was nothing inevitable in this cultural shift. After all, white workers had already taken a firm stance against immigration and its consequence on wages, with the left duly following suit  – it is worth mentioning here that in the early 1980s, the French Communist Party took the lead to limit

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immigration and the settling in of North African populations in working class districts, as historians Stéphane Courtois and Marc Lazar recall in their History of the party: “On December  24, 1980, communist activists and elected officials in Vitry, in the Marne Valley, led by the mayor and the [party] federal secretary, bulldozed a household of immigrant workers. In  Ivry, [a town continuously under Communist control from 1925 to 2015, except during German occupation in 1941–1945], the municipality implemented measures that penalized immigrants once their numbers reached a certain level. In  February  1981, Robert Hue, the communist mayor of Montignylès-Cormeilles in the Val d’Oise  [and future presidential candidate for the party in the 1995 presidential elections], organized demonstrations against a family of Moroccans suspected of being drug traffickers…” 20 These policies, implemented openly and under media supervision, can surprise a 2020s reader, as popular wisdom now considers the far-left as a natural defender of minorities and migrants. But these policies, implemented by senior communist cadres, were followed to answer a demand by their core electorate, and an economic reality. In fact, just like the opening up of markets to international trade, immigration has had a real negative effect on the working class, which explains why the latter has tried from very early on to defend itself against it, without much success until recently. From the mid-1980s onwards, leaders of the historic center-left realized that it was electorally more promising to turn their parties into defenders of immigrants (who are effectively right at the bottom of the ladder and below the working class), which meant de facto abandoning the White Working Class to their fate. However, these workers did not  disappear. And while many temporarily took refuge in abstention, their living condition continued to worsen and they found themselves competing not  only with foreign manpower outside his national borders, but also with recently arrived populations who were far less demanding in terms of payroll or working conditions: in his book on The Populist Explosion, the journalist John B. Judis, who can scarcely be described as right-wing, 21 takes the example of how practices of the meat-packing industry affected working-class communities in the American Mid-West: “until 15 or 20 years ago, meatpacking plants in the United States were staffed by highly paid, unionized employees who earned about $18 an hour, adjusted for inflation. Today, the processing and packing plants are largely staffed by low-paid non-union workers from places like Mexico and Guatemala. Many of them start at $6 an hour. According to a Pew Report, by 2005 between 20% and 25% of the workers in these plants were undocumented”. 22 This  is not  an isolated scenario, but a general trend across the West: while automation and globalization have encouraged factories to move out of Western countries – thereby drying up the employment market for manual jobs – immigration has put further pressure on the standards of living for the Western working class, thereby accelerating its pauperization.

The New Minority  49

For those who have had no other option but to stay in these now peripheral communities, the last 30 years have been a long downward spiral. The process often started with major factory closures in the late 1970s and 1980s, before social services closed town progressively in the 1980s and 1990s – finally, the communities would see their last places of socialization disappear with groceries or local pubs ceasing activities after the 2008 financial crisis. As working-class standards of living decreased, their frustration increased exponentially, even more so as their marginalization has taken place amid universal indifference: the right had historically cared little about their fate, and the left now seemed to be too preoccupied with defending the same (sometimes undocumented) immigrants that they came into competition with for jobs. To  be fair with center-left leaders of the time, their focus on migrants and minorities is not  undeserved from an ethical point of view: in the battle for compassion, studies suggest that white workers are less disadvantaged than minorities, and members of the New Minority are actually aware of this, as Justin Gest discovered during his two immersions in British and American working-class communities. During these experiences, he proposed the following test to his interlocutors: showing them a drawing made up of concentric circles representing the different strata of society (the  smaller circle, in the center, was for the most influent sections of society, and the largest one, furthest away from the center, contained the most deprived classes), Gest asked each of his interviewees to point out where they thought their place was before, and in today’s society. While most pointed towards the edge of the circle, none of them pointed to the outer circle  – either for yesterday or today. This  shows well that members of the New Minority are therefore aware of the fact that they are not the most deprived members of society – but, and this is the other important feature of Gest’s experiment, they feel that their position has weakened, to the point that they now fear to be dragged down to the very bottom. Acutely aware that people around them are more marginalized than them, may it be the drug-addict criminals in Youngstown, Ohio, or the immigrants of Barking  & Dagenham in the United Kingdom, they now  imagine themselves (or their children) being dragged down to the lower echelons of society. The New Minority does not live in campsites, nor does it sleep in the streets; its members know that they are not on the bottom rung of the social ladder. Those who end up voting for the new far-right come from the next deciles up, those that have seen their living conditions deteriorate to the point that they are now afraid of falling into the very bottom. 23 Experienced not only personally, but also collectively as a national ­tragedy – notably thanks to the alarming news stories circulated by the media that have a particular resonance to them as it corresponds to their personal fate, this experience of decline is something that the working class now refuses to tolerate. Having withdrawn into abstention for years, they are ready to join political groups that at least show willingness to listen to them. The aim, as one very often heard on the

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campaign trail in the United Kingdom or in the United States, is to “take back control” – of their lives, but also of their countries. The question of immigration is not necessarily seen as a local issue: although some communities, such as Barking or Dagenham in the United Kingdom, or Calais in France, are directly confronted with it, most places that vote for the far-right in Europe feature very few immigrants, as the latter usually settle in places where job opportunities exist (which is not  the case in these peripheral areas). Rather, immigration often becomes the symbol of the disappearance of any mechanism to control their destiny: the overriding feeling is that the state has completely abandoned their community, hence a desire to take a grip back on things before they disappear. Their idea is that of a return to the golden age of the 1960s, the Trente Glorieuses or the triumphant New Deal, when the working class had a status and when white workers, protected and esteemed, could earn enough money to provide for their families. Make America Great Again. In Donald Trump’s now-famous slogan, each word is of course important. But its most powerful word is the last one: “again” stands for a rejection of decline and a return to a golden age, the promise to revive the community (a genuine obsession for those who have refused to leave these once thriving areas). It was this “again” that made Trump’s campaign a success: with a rough talk that workers could identify with, Trump broke a number of taboos that had kept the New Minority silent for so long, described for the first time in years issues they were facing daily, and offered solutions that they had been waiting to hear: taking back control over the borders, rebuilding the infrastructure (creating low-skilled jobs in the process), and bringing back social services, which they deem to have been unfairly dispossessed, in the words of John B. Judis, to be replaced by “programs like the Affordable Care Act that they thought primarily benefited minorities and the poor”24 (whom they deem to be even more marginalized than themselves; therein lies a real paradox, but one that became clearly visible during the debates over Obamacare in the period leading to the election of Donald Trump). With such an agenda, Donald Trump managed to remobilize a whole section of American society that had given up on politics, simply because his early positioning was matching their own interests, for the first time in years. The result was a record turnout in the Republican primaries, with no less than 14.8% of the Republican electorate turning out to the polls, a record since at least 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. 25 Many of these new voters came from the working class, and were more often than not former Democrat voters (including many who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012): to take one striking example, Mahoning County, Ohio (next to Youngstown), a Democratic stronghold until recently, saw no fewer than 6,000 people defect from the Democrats to the Republicans during the 2016 Primaries, a 16% swing that would have gigantic consequences during the Presidential elections. Far from an isolated case, Mahoning set the standard for many areas across the Rust Belt, who switched in favor of Donald Trump as his discourse appealed directly to this electorate.26

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Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage: these “populist” leaders who mobilize the working-class vote so well have at least one thing in common: they all belong to the upper class. The president of the United States was a real estate magnate and the star of a hugely popular reality show before entering politics; the French presidential candidate has mostly inherited the political enterprise of her father and has lived in a manor house for most of her life. Finally, Farage comes from a more modest background, but his fate does not have much in common with the working class either: his father worked in the city, and he himself started out as a commodities trader in the mecca of British finance – one could hardly imagine more far-removed location from the daily lives of the former Ford plant employees in Dagenham. This makes residual popularity in working-class communities all the more striking – though not necessarily surprising. Indeed, they are popular among these publics because they have been able to drop the technocratic language of mainstream politics and talk in a manner that is familiar to the common folk (i.e. a member of the New Minority): and as they are the only politicians who dare to speak in such a direct language, this gives them an advantage over their competitors when courting the working-class electorate. Beyond questions of style the main appeal of these three politicians (and so many other “populists” in Europe) is their ability to discuss issues that the working class faces and to propose solutions that answer their two primary demands: the closing of the borders AND the return of the welfare state. Thus, while retaining anti-foreign overtones in its discourses, far-right leaders have been able to gain a new popularity by shifting their economic positions from the right (scrapping the income tax, for example, was part of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s platform in the 1990s, while Nigel Farage’s UKIP originally supported a flat tax during the same period) to the left, with the emphasis placed on defending the nation’s social model of old. It should also be noted that sometimes, the process has gone the other way, with left-wing politicians in Central Europe (notably Robert Fico in Slovakia, or Liviu Dragnea in Romania, whose parties both belong to the Socialists and Democrats political family in Brussels) keeping their social discourse but hardening up their rhetoric against migrants and Brussels. By combining these two features, the new “populists” give the working class a role it had lost in the public debate over the past few decades: beyond the question of electoral victories or defeats, it is becoming more and more difficult for candidates to ignore subjects such as migration or social dumping, which until recently were regarded as taboo. For a social class that had been marginalized for 30 years, this return to political prominence may be worrying in the sense that it greatly disturbs the political chessboard. But it is nonetheless remarkable and somehow healthy for a democracy that is supposed to give everyone a voice, regardless of their level of education or social status. In the spotlight since 2016, the New Minority is not the only social class that feels marginalized by the system: for the past few years, the Millennials have emerged as a distinct demographics, pushing new issues and new approaches on the leftside of the political scene.

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Notes 1 http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/elections-municipales-2014/20140330. OBS1874/municipales-ces-villes-qui-tombent-aux-mains-du-front-national.html 2 https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Elections/Les-resultats/Presidentielles/elecresult__ presidentielle-2017/(path)/presidentielle-2017/index.html 3 Hervé Le Bras, Le pari du FN, Paris: Autrement, 2014, p. 113. 4 See Bruno Cautrès, in Michael S. Lewis-Beck et al., The French Voter: Before and After the 2002 Elections, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004, p. 74. 5 Philippe Huelin, Où en est le vote ouvrier, Fondation Jean Jaurès Publication, January 10, 2013; https://jean-jaures.org/nos-productions/ou-en-est-le-vote-ouvrier. 6 Jérôme Fourquet, « Radiographie des votes ouvriers », publication for the Fondation Jean Jaurès, March 27, 2017; https://jean-jaures.org/nos-productions/radiographie-desvotes-ouvriers. 7 On this subject, see in particular the study by Justin Gest on the residents of Youngstown, Ohio – the theme of the betrayal by the elites, including the unions, is very much in evidence here. Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 8 https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/sep/24/german-elections-​ 2017-latest-results-live-merkel-bundestag-afd 9 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36612916 10 Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 11 https://www.challenges.fr/election-presidentielle-2017/le-vote-des-agriculteursen-passe-de-basculer-a-l-extreme-droite_457375 12 On this subject, see David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: Hurst & Co., 2017, pp. 193–210. 13 Figures  from the US Trade Department, quoted by John B. Judis, The  Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 158. 14 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (revisited), New York: Basic Books, 2012, p. 203. 15 Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 16 Christophe Guiluy, La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires, Paris: Flammarion, 2016. 17 See Haydée Sabéran, Bienvenue à Hénin-Beaumont, Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 18 https://www.lepoint.fr/invites-du-point/osmont-gilets-jaunes-les-ronds-points-del-amour-16-12-2018-2279623_420.php 19 Hervé Le Bras, Le pari du FN, Paris: Autrement, 2014, p. 105. 20 Stéphane Courtois and Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000, p. 407. 21 John B. Judis is one of the founding editors of the “Socialist Revolution” in the late 1960s, and his commitment to left-wing politics has continued ever since, even though he has often shown a very high level of skepticism in the newest trends of identity politics; Today, Judis is also the former senior editor of “The New Republic”, a newspaper that is firmly on the left of the American political spectrum. 22 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 42. 23 See Hervé Le Bras, Le pari du FN, Paris: Autrement, 2014, p. 121. 24 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 77. 25 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/10/turnout-was-high-in-the2016-primary-season-but-just-short-of-2008-record/ 26 https://votingwars.news21.com/working-class-whites-break-from-democrats-tochoose-trump/

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Bibliography Stéphane Courtois and Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000, p. 407. Justin Gest, The  New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere:The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: Hurst & Co., 2017. Christophe Guiluy, La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires, Paris: Flammarion, 2016. John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016. Hervé Le Bras, Le pari du FN, Paris: Autrement, 2014. Michael S. Lewis-Beck et al., The French Voter: Before and After the 2002 Elections, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Haydée Sabéran, Bienvenue à Hénin-Beaumont, Paris: La Découverte, 2014.

4 THE MILLENNIALS, OR THE LEFT’S NEW REBELS

While Donald Trump was rocking the stage of the US Republican primary debates in late 2015 and early 2016, another “populist” phenomenon,1 this time on the left of the political spectrum, was stirring up the primary process in the Democratic Party. Against all expectations and despite the backing of her party’s entire establishment, Hillary Clinton found herself in great difficulty as an obscure independent candidate from Vermont, the self-proclaimed socialist (a heresy in the land of triumphant capitalism), Bernie Sanders, challenged her candidacy to the presidential election. Sanders came close to delivering yet another major upset in the primary, but the more effective mobilization of the Democratic establishment (and the system of super-delegates) delivered the votes that Clinton needed to be the party’s nominee. In many respects, the sedition of the Democratic base against the party’s establishment had many similarities to that of the Republican Party: an open rebellion against a leadership that had been dominated for three decades by the same political dynasty (the Clintons on the left, the Bushes on the right), a common hostility to the mainstream support for laissez-faire economics and international trade, and a clear contrast between “the people” (yet another “us”), and “them”: the 1% who had benefited from the crisis and consolidated their fortunes on the back of ordinary folks – a terminology that Donald Trump had also adopted when he described “the Swamp” to be drained. But another interesting similarity was striking: in both early stages of campaign, one could find very few supporters coming from ethnic minorities. This may seem surprising for Bernie Sanders, as the left of the Democratic Party has embraced identity politics much more thoroughly since the election of Donald Trump. But paradoxically, back then these minorities did vote for Clinton in large numbers, so much that they contributed to sealing her victory as she carried key states in the South (where African American representatives have a major influence in internal Democratic politics) and above all

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  55

the state of California, where the Democratic Party’s Hispanic supporters played a key role in defeating of Sanders, whose support and activist enthusiasm came primarily from a white, educated base inside the party. This certainly does not mean that the Trump and Sanders electorates were identical. As we saw, the former’s core support came from the peripheral United States, in a population that had little access to higher education. On the contrary, Sanders drew the bulk of his support from university campuses. His electorate was not  just primarily white, it was also (and above all) young and educated: students, but also young professionals frustrated by the crisis and the sense that America was no longer delivering on one of his key promises: justice. Many of these Millennials had supported Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012, and the most radical of them had already taken part in “Occupy Wall Street” in 2010–2012. This revolt against “the 1%”, the wealthiest people in America, is actually the true starting point of the “Sanderista” rebellion. It was to cost Clinton dearly during the presidential election campaign, but it will probably change the face of the Democratic party in years to come. Six months later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the French young and university-educated surprised many of their elders by voting in very large numbers for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, bringing the colorful leader of the far-left France insoumise coalition close to the second round of the presidential election. Mélenchon is certainly no pro-American, but the parallels between his campaign and Sanders’ are striking, with a similar anti-elite rhetoric, the same hostility to free trade, and above all the same core target electorate. In fact, a distinctive feature of the France insoumise project is the enthusiasm it has generated among Millennials, the generation born between 1982 and 1996, which is now in open rebellion against the system and voted en masse for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election: the left-wing candidate may have ended in fourth position overall, but the 18–24-year-olds did put him in first place with 30% of the vote, while he netted 24% of the vote among 25–34-year-olds (which gave him second place among this demographics).2 The  trajectory of the youth vote is actually very similar in France and the United States: in both cases, Millennials had voted massively for the Left candidate in 2012 (François Hollande in France, Barack Obama in the United States), but at the same time they also started to unplug themselves from the mainstream through social movements: in the same way that Occupy Wall Street had mobilized young citytypes, the Nuit debout movement of 2016 gave a young, disaffected urban public a sort of class consciousness that was to be translated in 2016 by a massive support for Mélenchon. According to French journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely, “one of the constituent elements of Nuit debout is striking: the movement was very largely dominated by a homogeneous social group, namely young graduates in the Paris area who felt downgraded or destined for social downgrading”.3 Far from being a French-only phenomenon in Europe, Nuit debout actually followed a pattern seen not only in the United States, but in many countries across Europe: both Greece’s Syriza or Spain’s Podemos originated in the social movements that

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followed the 2010s financial crisis in Southern Europe4 – movements primarily led by young people aged between 18 and 35. These young people have become the new core demographics that is redefining our political codes, this time on the left of the political spectrum. Along with age, education (in universities, that is) is the other main characteristic of the Millennials, also known as Generation Y (in opposition to Generation X, born between 1960 and 1981) or “Generation Me”, to borrow the term coined by American psychologist Jean Twenge.5 Another striking feature is that these Millennials were until recently considered to be the very future of the system against which they are now rebelling. In 2012, the “father” of the Creative Class Richard Florida described them in these terms: “young recent graduates are the workhorses of many sectors of the creative economy. They have the most up-to-date skills in highly specialized fields like computing, consulting, or turbo-finance, and being young and unattached, they are able to work ridiculous hours”.6 Because they were well-educated, not  so numerous, and because they were the first to grow fluent in the new information technologies, Millennials were the star children who were about to be co-opted into the Creative Class, thereby sealing the latter’s triumph. Back then, many indicators seemed to confirm this assessment: people were hoping at the time that the financial crisis would still be of little social consequence, and as Generation Y was entering the political game by providing enough votes to secure the victory of Creative Class politicians (may they be Barack Obama in the United States or François Hollande in France), their penchant for diversity, their universitycultivated creativity, their individualism, and their unique aptness to analyze (and use) the new symbols in social networks, all signs pointed to a quick integration into the Creative Class. According to many Democratic strategists, the triptych Creative Class/Minorities/Millennials was about to guarantee a solid long-term majority for Democrats over the next 30 years, similar to the one they enjoyed from the late 1930s to the late 1960s.6 Yet, as Cassely explains in his survey of young graduates’ malaise: “[this] generation of young, dynamic workers, had a violent wakeup call when they transitioned from their fantasy of avant-garde of globalization [built during their university life] to the reality of being little more than foot-soldiers of the Microsoft Office suite”.7 Instead of ending up in the high-powered jobs that they were promised during their student years, Millennials have found themselves (unsurprisingly for anyone but them) parked in what they consider “bullshit jobs”, and parked in openplan offices or cubicles in nine-to-five office jobs. In this environment, they have had to face the harsh reality of their work: instead of analyzing the symbols that their university professors sometimes promised to them from Day One, they found themselves transmitting small pieces of information to other colleagues in a chain whose purpose generally escaped them – this has led some of them to leave these jobs, whose ultimate purpose they cannot understand, for more simple, authentic occupations such as cheese makers, wine sellers, or hair-dressers. To their defense, the Millennials who went (and sometimes accepted) the harsh realities of taking

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  57

on these “bullshit jobs” were the luckier ones: as American pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson explains, if “young people with a degree can’t find good jobs; young people without a degree can’t find jobs at all”.8 The reality of this social marginalization, in particular when compared to the Millennials’ sky-high expectations of their future during their student years, is fueling their frustration, and this frustration encourages them to rebel: this time, teaming up with Creatives is out of the question, and Generation Y is taking matters into its own hands to shape reality according to its own values and its experience. This experience is centered above all on Millennials’ time at university. It should be noted, they are the most well-educated generation in history, and they have spent more time than any other in our educational system.9 This has had an impact on their way of thinking: more time spent at university means a later start in their adult lives (including when it comes to marriage, home-ownership, or parenthood). It also means that Millennials’ views have to some extent been shaped by their professors, in particular those who studied social sciences and humanities. Millennials are also the first generation to be brought up in the cult of individualism – as Jean Twenge notes, “since GenMe’ers were born, they’ve been taught to put themselves first. Unlike the Baby Boomers, GenMe didn’t have to march in a protest or attend a group session to realize that their own needs and desires were paramount. Reliable birth control, legalized abortion, and a cultural shift toward parenthood as a choice made them the most wanted generation of children in American history”.10 Right from the outset, their lives are therefore centered on themselves, with caring parents often involving them in their decisions (such as which car to buy, or even decisions about their love lives), and with school curricula that have increasingly focused on the development of their personality. In Northern Europe and North America, selfesteem programs were very much in fashion from the 1980s to the 2000s, and they have instilled in the minds of children and teenagers the idea that they were special and that they could do anything simply because they believed in themselves – the idea being that everyone can become a pop star by believing in oneself, even if one only knows to sing out of tune.11 And because they grew up with the notion of being special, many of them naturally thought that they would become rich (and sometimes famous) very quickly. The  shock was all the greater when they arrived in the jobs market and realized that they were not  more special than other colleagues and previous generations. Having internalized their uniqueness, they therefore (logically) came to believe that they deserved a special treatment. In other words, and to caricature the situation by using a famous John F. Kennedy quote, whereas the Baby Boomers learned to ask what they could do for their country, the millennials grew up asking what their country (or their environment – teachers, parents, etc.) could do for them. At the point when they entered the labor market, after long years of studying, Millennials therefore felt that their status as the best-educated generation in History would mean a quick progression in their professional life – resulting in many misunderstandings and frictions at work: in the United States, the number of workplace incidents involving incessant (and often unrealistic)

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requests for promotions from Millennials has gone through the roof since the late 2000s, so much so that most Human Resources departments have had to adapt accordingly, for example by changing their evaluation methods or offering extra levels of progression (with possibilities for upgrade every year) to young graduates, in order to keep them at the company and avoid inter-generational conflicts in the workplace. Of course, this desire for quick promotion is not  only due to the way Generation Y was educated. In an age when pop-stars and footballers under the age of 21 are elevated to the status of demi-gods, and people like Sebastian Kurz (Chancellor of Austria at 31 years old) or Mark Zuckerberg (born in 1984 and whose fortune is now estimated to be worth $53.8 billion according to Forbes magazine12) have become career path models, it should not be too surprising to see young people wishing to emulate these young role models. If anything, this willingness to go high and fast is reinforced by technological developments that have affected our way of life over the past decade: Millennials, indeed, are the first generation that grew up with the Internet. For them, access to knowledge is instantaneous, thanks to Wikipedia; to buy anything, anywhere in the world only requires a credit card and a couple of clicks thanks to Amazon and other online stores. Not  only can the item be purchased immediately, it is usually delivered within less than a week, i.e. instantaneously when compared to the timescale that previous generations operated in. In this context of shrinking distances and timescales, and while the Internet and smartphones have completely changed our relationship with knowledge and skills, can they really be blamed for thinking that they could speed through the stages of their professional lives in the same way as they have been taught to lead their lives? If the relationship with time was not enough, the digital revolution has also had more far-reaching consequences on the daily lives of Generation Y: social networks have also altered human relationships, which have become both more numerous and more distant: whereas previous generations could often count their “friends” on the fingers of one hand, young people today have hundreds of friends on their Facebook network, to say nothing of the “followers” they acquire on Instagram or Snapchat (because they usually stay on Facebook only for their parents). As a result, they often find little difference between close friends, with whom they spend their daily lives, and their circles of acquaintances on the Internet, with whom they share intimate things, taking for granted a discretion that often explodes back in their faces (or not) – before Kim Kardashian popularized the term, the sex-tape was originally a practice in fashion among young people on social networks. This also means that relationships are necessarily more distant: to the extent that physical contact takes up a smaller place in Millennials’ everyday lives (often compensated by a far trashier love life, with the proliferation of hook-ups and Tinder dates), the attitude to others has changed. This is true in everyday life, but it also has consequences in politics: in a face-to-face argument with another person, the sense that things are about to degenerate into a mud fight is generally enough to lead at least one of the interlocutors to moderate

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  59

his discourse – at least if there is some sort of friendship or respect between the arguers. On the Internet, the interlocutor’s reaction is invisible and abstracted, and reactions are first interiorized before getting translated into words, typed in a mechanical way on one’s computer. The effects are even more devastating as one is always only one click away from the ultimate insult – blocking someone or deleting them as friend. The reality of social networks has actually had a radicalizing effect on the young generation, already prone to embrace more far-­reaching ideas (before criticizing their “socialism”, Baby Boomers might want to pause and reflect on the causes they defended back in the late 1960s and early 1970s). Millennials have also built a different relationship to private property thanks to social media: they have indeed learned a lesson from the Creatives about the importance of experiences in terms of living a full life, and they are therefore taking pride in putting these before the possession of objects or property.13 This  trend is actually visible on social networks, where the posting of a faraway (and potentially very expensive) trip experience on Facebook or Snapchat has taken over pictures of new acquisitions (cars, phones, for example) among Millennials – this is of course made easier by the fact that the main products of consumption beyond clothes, i.e. music, films, and books can be digitally downloaded and their enjoyment is therefore completely dematerialized. Property has taken an additional hit with the emergence of the collaborative economy: indeed, since the arrival of services like Uber and Taxify, it is no longer necessary to own a car (or spend ages tracking down taxis) to drive or be driven from point A to point B. Similarly, in the age of shared apartments (due to skyrocketing property prices in Creative cities), Millennials are all the more skeptical about investing in real estate: first because they rarely see access to it in the first place, but also because they decide to spend money on travel, with low-cost flights and AirBnB taking a part of their budget that could otherwise have been devoted to lodging themselves. The Internet has reduced the importance of private ownership in the minds of Millennials, and the experience of the late 2000s is not bound to contradict it: when a Millennial has seen his or her parents work hard and get into debt to buy a house that all of a sudden loses half of its value simply because it is the year 2008, the concept of property owning will be taken with a slight pinch of irony (itself another characteristic of the Millennials). Cynics may add that perhaps the main reason Generation Y no longer cares about property is that these young Europeans and Americans, brought up in the age of the triumph of capitalism, are spoilt. There is a lot of truth to this: given that they have never found themselves in need of essentials, given that many of them have never had to imagine a war in their own country (or to internalize the prospects of a nuclear war), they are in a position in which morality and rejection of temporary possession is easy – although that rejection is not that complete, for they are downloading things like never before on the Internet, and freely “give” information of a very personal nature to companies so that they can spend time on social network. Perhaps their skepticism on private property stems from the fact that they have by now realized that their

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ambitions would never be satisfied. In  the United States, the real salary of young graduates today is 2.5% lower than it was in 2000,14 even as they have to pay back student debts that their parents did not  have to pay (those have sky-rocketed over the last two decades, at least in the Anglosphere). The sad reality is that young people’s quality of life has been falling for 15 years, while their aspirations have grown exponentially: whereas in 2012, 68% of US highschool students expected to work in liberal or managerial professions at the end of their studies (a rise of more than 40% compared to 1970), the proportion of these positions in the American workforce has stagnated over the same period, staying at 20%.15 In  the same way, while these same high-school students expected to earn a salary of US $73,000 a year upon leaving college (and to see them rise to $150,000 once they were established in their careers), the graduates must now face a much harsher reality: in the United States, the median household income in 2009 was only of $50,000, i.e. less than half the amount to which these young people aspire to.16 Even more worryingly, while median incomes have stagnated over the past decades, those of young people have in fact fallen: as Twenge points out, the distribution of salaries between age categories has changed profoundly between 1984 and 2011, with pays increasing on average by 37% for the over-35 years old, while young adults had to cope with a 44% reduction in their purchasing power.17 Millennials’ frustration with the system is not only perceptive or relative. All over Europe, the unemployment rate among young people is generally double that of the general population: 6.4% in Germany for the under-35s as opposed to just 3.9% for the population as a whole; 38.7% for young people in Spain, as against 17.7 % for the rest of the country; 35.1% unemployment among young people in Italy, whereas the unemployment rate for the population as a whole amounts to 11.3%; and 23% for the under-35s as against 9.6% for the workforce in France as a whole.18 These levels of unemployment (and therefore the threat represented by possible future unemployment for those who have a job) partly explain why the incomes (and status) of young graduates are naturally being dragged down, and the trend has been amplified by the economic crisis of the 2010s: if jobs are harder to get, young people have to accept lower salaries, but also jobs that do not correspond to their qualifications. Thus, as journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely points out, “Almost 35% of those who obtained a Master’s degree after 2007 were objectively downgraded in 2010, i.e. they did not have a managerial position”.19 After being brought up with the idea that they were going to have a better life than their parents and an even more heroic destiny than their grandparents of the Greatest Generation,20 Millennials now have to face a much less satisfactory reality: despite their ambition, their enthusiasm, and their ideas, they are rather a new silent generation, a socio-economic category that is paying the full price of the economic crisis, just like the New Minority. And while they have indeed mostly kept quiet, hoping to jump on to the liberal bandwagon in the years 2008–2012 (an eternity for a generation that lives in instantaneity), their patience has now reached its limits: the time is no longer to

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  61

waiting, but to rebelling. Under these circumstances, it should be no surprise to see Millennials attempting to upset a status-quo that is not working for them, may that be with Alexis Tsipras, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Their radical political vision aims to profoundly transform society and an economic system that they reject because it is not  working  for them. At  the social level, Generation Y is still the heir to the Creative Class, but it intends to reinforce the cult of difference that the latter has promoted since the 2000s: Millennials have already been at the vanguard in the struggle for the rights of same-sex couples – indeed their rise in American and Western European opinion has tipped the latter towards overall support for same-sex marriage.21 Their attitude towards immigration is also much more progressive than the rest of the population, and this time often at odds with it: whereas most of their elders show at least some signs of anxiety over migrations, a significant majority of educated Millennials support openly welcoming migrants,22 including when they are illegals. A  tolerant generation towards racial, religious, or sexual minorities, Millennials are nevertheless far more inclined to extreme intolerance when confronted with intellectual difference: over the past few years, campuses across the Anglosphere have struggled with countless boycotts against professors who had dared to express views that went contrary to students’ totems or taboos – the worst perhaps being that the same students have won many of their fights as university directors put their staff on leave or terminated them in order to safeguard peace on the campus.23 In equally spectacular shows of stubborn intolerance, many US university campuses transformed themselves into fortresses of anti-Trumpism during the 2016 elections, a somehow logical development that nevertheless started to verge on insanity towards the end of the campaign and after it, as Trump supporters often ended up being ostracized or intimidated on campus,24 and as minor disagreements or incidents sometimes degenerated into full-fledged riots or witch hunts.25 The aftermath of the November 8 surprise victory of the Republican candidate was of course much more painful: some tutorials had to be canceled for several days to allow time for weeping groups to form so that students could shed tears together in safe spaces and ask their explanations from professors: how could the American people have betrayed them by electing Donald Trump? As the liberal journalist Nicholas Christof has stressed, these young people (and their professors) “champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us – so long as they think like us”.26 This intellectual intolerance has become a real problem and led many to reject some professors as uneducated hicks, for example Samuel Huntington – on some American college campuses, the mere mention of his name is enough to remove all credibility from an argument, “because Huntington is a racist” – the supreme insult which allows the Millennial to shut down any debate which, if examined more systematically might well challenge some of his preconceptions – a dangerous idea indeed.

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But this highly selective tolerance is not only the result of a long university career. It  is also an expression of the frustration felt by Millennials in relation to their elders, whom they accuse of being racist and egotistical: after all, didn’t they build their situation on the backs of minorities (to whom they are now  asked to apologize) and young people by giving themselves privileges financed by debt – a debt that Generation Y knows it will have to pay? There is indeed much truth in these accusations: yes, the position of minorities forty years ago was largely less enviable than it is today, and yes, the Baby Boomers (and to a lesser extent Generation X) benefited from extremely favorable circumstances when starting out in life, with no mass unemployment, free university education, and the ability to buy a house and a car at a relatively low price (and inflation levels that meant that they would not pay what they had signed up to when contracting mortgages). Today, Millennials have to go into debt for a year to buy a phone, and for ten years to access higher education (which will not even guarantee them a decent living, as Alissa Quart demonstrated in her account on the new – predominantly young – Middle Precariat 27). But in their quest for generational justice, Millennials often forget that what they want is not only to redress past and present injustices, but to transfer the burden from one generation to the next, in order to build an order favorable to themselves – in other words, and while they indeed hold very deep convictions about social justice, Millennials are like others defending their own interests as they fight against injustice, perceived or real. The  Millennials’ ambitious revolt against the current state of society is therefore not devoid of self-interest. Frustrated at not having been integrated straight away into the Creative Class, they are rebelling against it. Outraged by the egoism of the white worker who financed his social advances on the back of a lumpen proletariat of ethnic minorities, they are seeking to restore justice by making the white man pay for his (neo-)colonial crimes. Incensed by the advantages that the Provincial Middle Class has obtained to achieve a status that may have paid for a comfortable life in their youth but that they know will be difficult for them to achieve, they are now blaming their elders (with the parents often in the frontlines to receive the accusations) and asking them to pay for having deprived them of their dreams – a worrying trend in that matter is the increasingly large proportion of young people that are now rejecting the idea of financing their elders’ retirements. 28 They therefore share with the New Minority a desire to “take back control”. But unlike the White Working Class, who would like to see the world get back to what it used to be 40 years ago, Millennials would like the world to get back to what they thought it was going to be during their student years. And unlike the workers who hold both the elites AND foreigners or immigrants responsible for their ills, young people only condemn the elites, the “one percent” (and other globalization winners) who have deprived them of the prosperity to which they believed they were entitled to. In  their revolt against the system, Millennials therefore lend their support to leaders who appear to be genuinely “authentic”,

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  63

and not the traitorous “champagne socialists” who used them in their student years by courting their votes but abandoned them once their electoral victories were secure. One can thus understand somewhat better the appeal of young men like Alexis Tsipras or Pablo Iglesias (who come from the same generation as them or appear to do so), but also of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon: the latter may be veterans of politics but they have stayed true to their left-wing militancy for years if not decades, and seem to not have been bought into the system – not in their rhetoric, at any rate. In this sense, their discourse about social justice, access to jobs for the youth and confronting the problem of student debt are far more appealing to them than the somehow old-fashioned Marxist discourse they sometimes use, and which only helps to strengthen their authenticity. The resulting new fondness for Marxist rhetoric, including in the United States, should not fool the outsider though: it is a “yes for Socialism, but certainly not for Communism. While Generation Y wants more redistribution, it is also profoundly distrustful of the state: according to a study by the World Economic Forum, the nation-state is the least-trusted institution among Millennials in terms of honesty and fairness, two values that are fundamental to their notion of what governance should look like. 29 Thus, the promise to right the wrongs (against them and against the minorities) is far more important than the somewhat outdated rhetoric of some of the leaders of the new “far-left”. This explains why accusations of Marxism leveled against them by the traditional parties have often backfired; on the contrary, being accused of belonging to the “loony left” usually seems to galvanize young people: they feel that they now have nothing to lose in rallying a radical option, and see in leaders of an economically interventionist but socially libertarian left people that talk the same language as them. What matters here is not the suspicion that a naive Generation Y is being used by a new socialist left that only pretends to care about their problems and is in fact old-school and statist, but the fact that the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Pablo Iglesias have been the only ones discussing the subjects that really matter to Millennials, notably by breaking societal taboos that were built to their detriment in the 1980s and 1990s (for example student debt). Millennials have certainly managed to bring their preoccupations to the forefront of the political stage  – occasionally at the cost of a compromise with far older political forces, which are not necessarily on the far-left. While Jeremy Corbyn and Pablo Iglesias each have historical ties to the old Marxist school in their respective countries, one cannot say the same for Beppe Grillo, who originally mobilized many young Italians against the establishment with his Five Star Movement. While some leaders are certainly using young people to promote themselves and their party in a recomposed political landscape (as one has hopefully understood by reading the previous chapters, they are not alone in this case), young people are also using these leaders to bring their own issues and their own plans for society to the forefront of the political debate. The question that emerges is, of course,

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whether these Millennials (like the three other classes) are capable of imposing this agenda to the others, particularly in a political landscape now dominated by (at least) four dominant social tribes... The taxonomy discussed in this book is an attempt to restore some meaning to a political world that has suddenly become uncertain, if not incomprehensible to many of us. Throughout the West, the old political systems that we have got used to live with for decades are melting down. As new fault lines replace the old ones, so do our certainties – and that of our political party systems. The first victim of this re-composition is the bipartisan political conundrums that had become the norm in much of the West (exceptions exist still, principally in the Anglosphere, where the old parties have managed to survive so far, for different reasons). More often than not, in continental Europe, the political game consists of a much more atomized political landscape, in which four parties or more have to co-exist and find majorities that are now much less stable than in the past. The resulting instability, tribalization, and radicalization should certainly be a cause of concern in our political debate. However, they should not hide the fact that the origin of this atomization is the end of the overarching middle class and the emergence of the four classes that have been the subject of the first part of this book: the Creative Class, the Suburban Middle Class, the New Minority, and the Millennials. These four classes have pushed their issues and views of the world so successfully over the past few years that they have fully monopolized the public debate. Today, no candidate, no party can emerge without establishing an almost filial relationship with one of these classes: the spectacular rise to power of candidates like Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, or Emmanuel Macron cannot be conceived of without a discourse that stuck to the Creatives’ vision of the world. Similarly, Mark Rutte’s successful campaign in the Netherlands, as well as François Fillon’s surprise victory in the French center-right primaries of 2016 cannot be explained without the strong relationship these individual candidates built during their campaign with the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class. Finally, the rise of the two major protest forces against our current system, with a renovated far-right that has gone left economically (with Marine Le Pen in France, the FPÖ in Austria or Af D in Germany) and a new far-left led by young leaders like Pablo Iglesias in Spain or older ones like Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, is linked with the coupling of their discourse with the current mood of the two rebel classes, the New Minority and the Millennials. Some may argue that this division between carefully categorized sociopolitical “tribes” has more to do with divination than social science, and that the reality is far more complex: indeed, it is true that not all Millennials voted for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 US primaries – the less educated and more marginalized among them actually voted in large numbers for Donald Trump, for example. In  this particular instance, the effect of sociologically (and often geographically) belonging to the “New minority” proved stronger than purely generational considerations. More generally, though, we must see this taxonomy in a non-deterministic way: given that every individual is different, it would be

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  65

impossible to “define” them all without taking into account certain aspects of their personality or behavior that they share with others – making them groups, tribes, and ultimately social classes. No categorization is perfect, and not every individual will fit neatly into one of the four boxes I have just described. I myself do not: born in December 1979 (which, considering a long course of study almost puts me in the Millennial category – and I was clearly one upon in my first jobs in the 2000s), I grew up in a small town in the South West of France, with a father working as a dentist and a mother that gave up her professional career to take care of her children – features that clearly put me in the camp of the Suburban, actually Provincial Middle Class. Between 1998 and 2011 I lived in global cities (London and Paris), and since 2011 I have been working in an internationalized environment whose codes correspond to those of the Creative Class. My date of birth and a long time in university put me in a similar bracket to the Millennials; my social origins and upbringing clearly point to a Suburban Middle Class background. Finally, my current professional position puts me closer to the Creative Class. I cannot say, therefore, that I belong exclusively to any one particular class, and I can combine the traits of these three “classes” without necessarily identifying with them altogether – indeed, the fact that I can relate in one way or another to any of these classes has pushed me to write this book, where others would more naturally belong to a particular side and defend it. The thing is that, as an individual, my belonging to a part of the Creative Class that relates to the Suburban Middle Class is the result of my personal experience, not  of a pre-determined categorization. For  example, had I chosen not  to go into higher education, I would probably have ended up in the New Minority, as some of my high school friends have; in the same way, had I been less fortunate in my career path despite good studies, I could just as well end up voting with Millennials for a new left – indeed some of the friends with whom I campaigned for French center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 ended up campaigning for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2017. No-one is ever fully in control of their fate, but the personal choices we make at any given moment can lead to different long-term results – like for example the class to which we belong, which to a large extent determines how we behave at the ballot-box. By contrast with the Marxist theory of the classes, which leaves little room for people to escape their social condition, the class taxonomy at the heart of this book does not deny the right of each individual to be different, and move from class to class depending on his or her own experience: some individuals do correspond perfectly to the description of each classes (and indeed, many Facebook friends politically active on social networks from 2016 to the present have been invaluable inspirations to this book), but many others do find themselves inbetween classes, and capable of “switching” from one to the other during their lives. In many ways, those are the new swing voters, as their changing experience will very often tip the terms of the battle to the advantage of one class or the other. This will not prevent each class from having a specific type of collective behavior, but this fluidity changes the terms of membership within each group.

66  Class shifting

Moreover, where the Marxists perceive an unavoidable conflict between the classes, the reality that I am about to describe in the second part of this book shows a much more complex relationship between social tribes inside the Great Class Shift. In fact, while each class is currently trying to impose its own particular vision of the world – which can only stem from disdain (at best) in relation to the other classes, they do have to co-operate in order to exercise power. In fact, as there are not two, but four “teams” involved in this game, the current relationship between the political actors that represent these classes is much more complex than in a duel. The interaction between the four “classes” will therefore vary depending on time and space, and it is the evolution in these relationships that is the subject of the second part of this book.

Notes 1 The  word populism should be interpreted here in its initial sense, i.e. a political movement that puts itself forward as the representative and defender of the “little guy” against the elites  – see John B. Judis, The  Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New  York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016. 2 Ipsos/Sopra Steria poll conducted on April 19–22 on voters in the 1st round of the 2017 French presidential election, https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/files-frfr/doc_associe/ipsos-sopra-steria_sociologie-des-electorats_23-avril-2017-21h.pdf. 3 Jean-Laurent Cassely, La Révolte des Premiers de la Classe: Métiers à la con, quête de sens et reconversions urbaines, Paris: Vox, 2017, p. 76. 4 See Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca, Movement Parties Against Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2017. 5 Twenge defines the age brackets as follows: the baby-boomers, born between 1943 and 1960, Generation X which comes next, between 1961 and 1981, and the ­millennials/ Generation Y, born between 1982 and 1996, which she calls “Generation Me”. See Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable than Ever Before, 2nd ed., New York: Atria, 2014, p. 33. 6 The jury is still out on whether this coalition can indeed form itself in the long-term, as all three demographics remain very largely committed to a center-left to left vision of politics, at least in the Anglosphere. 7 Jean-Laurent Cassely, La révolte des premiers de la classe: Métiers à la con, quête de sens et reconversions urbaines, Paris: Vox, 2017, p. 57. 8 Kirsten Soltis Anderson, The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up), New York: Broakside Books, 2015, p. 136. 9 See the study by the Pew Research Center on this subject: http://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2015/03/19/how-millennials-compare-with-their-grandparents/ft_​ millennials-education_031715/. 10 Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled  – and More Miserable than Ever Before, 2nd ed., New  York: Atria, 2014, p. 25. 11 Ibid. Twenge spends a significant portion of her book denouncing the Self-Esteem programmes and the long-term consequences of them for children. 12 https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/ 13 https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2015/06/01/nownershipnoproblemnowners-millennials-value-experiences-over-ownership/#3cb4a81e5406 14 Study by the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in John B. Judis, The  Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 85.

The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels  67

15 Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled  – and More Miserable than Ever Before, 2nd ed., New  York: Atria, 2014, p. 212. 16 Ibid., p. 216. 17 Ibid., p. 303. 18 Source: Statistica – the figures are from the summer of 2017; for youth unemploy­ ment, see: https://www.statista.com statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-­ countries/; for general population rates, see https://www.statista.com/ statistics/268830/ unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/. 19 Jean-Laurent Cassely, La révolte des premiers de la classe : métiers à la con, quête de sens et reconversions rbaines, Paris: Vox, 2017, p. 68. 20 See for example: http://switchandshift.com/why-millennials-are-the-new-­g reatestgeneration; the term “Greatest Generation” was popularized by Tom Brokaw to describe the pre-baby-boom generation that went through the Great Depression and helped win World War II. This tells a lot about the ambition of Millennials to ­surpass their elders. See Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation, New York: Random House, 2005. 21 According to the Pew Research Center, no less than 75% of the under-35s in the United States were in favor of gay marriage in 2016  – a percentage that secured a majority among the general population (similar numbers are to be found in Western Europe). See http://www. pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/. 22 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-attitudes/german-­ attitudes-towards-migrants-are-a-matter-of-generation-idUSKCN0SR1TY20151102 23 http://time.com/3848947/dear-universities-there-should-be-no-safe-spaces-fromintellectual-thought/ 24 The most recent example, from February 2019, saw a Trump supporter being physically assaulted by another student at Berkeley College, a top university famous fort he left-wing engagement of its students (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ video/2019/02/21/conservative_student_assaulted_on_uc_berkeley_campus_told_ he_is_encouraging_violence.html). This extreme case, however, should not hide the more subtle problem for many students and their teachers of dealing with ­people who did not  share their ideas. See for example this editorial from the times of the Trump election, which encapsulates campus dilemmas that led to ostracizing Trump supporters on campus: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/­opinion/2016/11/14/ trump-liberal-college-campuses-michigan-yale-glenn-­reynolds-column/93765568/. 25 For more details on these incidents and their causes, see Greg Lukianoff and Jonatahan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, New York: Penguin Press, 2018, notably pp. 81–121. 26 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/opinion/sunday/the-dangers-of-echochambers-on-campus.html 27 Alissa Quart, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, New  York: Ecco, 2018. 28 See Dominique Renyié et  al., 2011, La Jeunesse du Monde, Fondapol, 2011. http:// www.fondapol.org/sondages/france-%E2%80%93-2011-la-jeunesse-du-monde/. 29 Annual Global Shapers Survey conducted for the World Economic Forum, p.  21; available at http://www.shaperssurvey2017.org/.

Bibliography Kirsten Soltis Anderson, The  Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up), New York: Broakside Books, 2015. Jean-Laurent Cassely, La Révolte des Premiers de la Classe: Métiers à la con, quête de sens et reconversions urbaines, Paris:Vox, 2017.

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Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca, Movement Parties Against Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2017. John B. Judis, The  Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016. Greg Lukianoff and Jonatahan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, New York: Penguin Press, 2018. Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable than Ever Before, 2nd ed., New York: Atria, 2014.

Part II

Falling apart or coming together? Coalition dilemmas for election victory in a four-class system

Despite the incredible technological advances of mankind over the past half millennium, some laws of physics still (and may well forever) escape our control: even if we get to understand how they work, things such as time, gravity or our own mortality only have a limited amount of flexibility and are expected to remain integral parts of our lives at least for the foreseeable future. While we can try to better understand how they work, we can never fully control them. This  “natural law” exists in politics, too, and despite institutional differences, some rules remain unquestionable, at least in representative democracies. One of these laws is majority rule: to be able to govern, one needs a majority – of members of parliament and/or senators in parliamentary regimes, a majority of votes (or sometimes electoral college members) to become president or to win a referendum… In short, a majority, qualified or simple depending on constitutional rules, to achieve political victory. This majoritarian principle is an unchallenged pillar of our Western democracies, and while the elites, when they can, want to contain this principle so as to avoid mob rule, all they can really do is to tame it, as they cannot escape from this fundamental law of democracy. The co-existence of the majority principle and the new reality of four rival classes competing for power therefore present a problem: unless one class is far more numerous than the others put together (or that its capacity to mobilize its electorate is far greater), then our four classes will have to supersede the disdain they have for one another and cooperate in order to take power, and then keep it democratically. The  alliances will therefore be coalitions with another class, but also against one or more. In each country, new coalitions must therefore be formed between the four classes to win an election or a vote – and very often in countries like Spain or Belgium, the recurring governmental instability is very often the result of difficulties to put and keep these coalitions together.

70  Falling apart or coming together?

In  a contest with four participants, game theory becomes very useful to explain the potential political combinations to attain a majority: while the position of each “player” (party or candidate) is defined by his electoral result or electoral potential (result in the first round, in the primaries, position in the polls), his interaction with the other players will make him either win or lose the vote that he needs to win or keep a majority, and therefore power. If one supposes that the power relationship is balanced among the four parties, a player who mobilizes his own base and allies himself with a loyal partner and/or mobilizes this second electorate has a good chance of being able to form a government majority, especially if his opponents are unable to get  along with one another or mobilize the classes they are supposed to represent. This is exactly what happened in 2016 in the US presidential race: moving away from a purely working class and peripheral electorate, Donald Trump managed to mobilize large chunks of the Suburban Middle Class against Hillary Clinton and thereby win crucial swing states – whereas the Democratic candidate did not mobilize enough Millennials in Philadelphia, Miami, or the college towns of Madison (Wisconsin), Gainesville (Florida), or Athens (Ohio) to win. In theory at least, a myriad of coalition scenarios is possible, if only one can imagine an alliance of three classes against one, or the mobilization of ultramajoritarian classes against one two or three others. But in the real world, these alliances usually feature a combination of two classes which, coupled with a lesser mobilization in other classes, are sufficient to guarantee final victory. This  limits the field of possible coalitions to six, without presupposing the electoral weight of each component of course (any coalition being potentially thought in reverse order depending on the weight of each class in the electorate): • • • • • •

Creative Class/Suburban Middle Class Suburban Middle Class/New Minority Suburban Middle Class/Millennials Millennials/Creative Class Creative Class/New Minority New Minority/Millennials

Some of these coalitions will seem more probable than others: indeed, the a­ lliance between the New Minority and the Suburban Middle Class u ­ nexpectedly tipped the scales in favor of Brexit and Donald Trump in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2016. Others will seem more difficult to envisage: the Millennials and the working class may seem too much at odds with each other – and indeed no electoral coalition has thus far managed to bring these two groups together, even though a former Italian government did include a post-election coalition ­featuring two of their champions. But that does not mean that nobody is trying, as the signals sent by French far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the “ fâchés pas fachos” (or “non-fascist rebels”) testifies. In fact, it is perfectly reasonable, at least

Falling apart or coming together?  71

in theory, to argue that this positioning makes sense, as many members of the white working class were voting for communist candidates 30 years ago. As we will see in the next chapters, only the coalition between the Creative Class and the Minority has not been envisaged – and although its likelihood appears low and counter-intuitive, one cannot rule out that a political party or a leader will try to build it one day, without guarantee of success, of course. What matters here is that all these combinations are possible and, as will become clear in the next chapters, nearly all of them have been tested in the Western world, with more or less success. This  leads to another fundamental question: if four classes do define the current political field and a coalition of at least two classes is needed to win a majority, is there an ideal combination, and what are the keys to building it? As one might expect, the answer to this question is not  straightforward, for while Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump (like others) succeeded in getting elected by making a two-class coalition, they did so by adopting radically different positions, and appealing, at least initially, to different electorates. Nonetheless, one can determine which combinations are the most likely, which ones work less well, and, above all, what are the factors that can maximize the chances of success for a politician wishing to mobilize and coalesce them in their pursuit of electoral success. To do this, there is no other tool available than the comparative approach, but one must also take into account the fact that the starting points are not necessarily the same everywhere: each country has its own political traditions, its electoral rules, but also its sociology, with power relationships that differ, and each of this factor will have an impact on which coalition works best at a given moment. For example, one might imagine there could be a higher proportion of Creatives in some countries than in others, and this will of course have a direct impact on each coalition’s potential. To better isolate the factors that might contribute to the success or failure of this new type of coalition-building, there is therefore no other choice but to compare experiences via using the filter of institutional and sociological differentiation. The second part of this book will do just that, starting with two countries that, despite very different institutional setups, and historic trajectory share at least a relatively similar sociology: the United States and France. The  four classes are, indeed, very much present in the American and French societies, and the political restructuration in both countries is already well-advanced, because each of them possesses a politician (or group of politicians) defending them. The  analysis will then move on to North-West Europe, where fairly similar sociological balances have led to different results in space and time. Finally, we will dwell on two regions with a marked imbalance between the classes: Central Europe, where the New Minority is still in a strong demographic position, and Southern Europe, where despite a demographic crisis the Millennials have seen their numbers soar as a result of the crisis. The comparisons within and between these regions will then allow to isolate the factors that can influence the success of a political party or personality in this altered political landscape.

5 FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES From new fault lines to new coalitions

France and the United States have featured so heavily in the first part of this book that it seems logical to start this comparative study by looking in more detail at the two countries’ political destiny over the past few years. Beyond the author’s background, the historical, cultural, and philosophical links that bind these two countries need no introduction. From the crucial role played by the Frenchmen of the marquis of La Fayette in the battle of Yorktown to the Anglo-American landings in Normandy that liberated France and much of Europe from the Nazi yoke, from Tocqueville to Hemingway (and not forgetting Piketty today), from the statue of Liberty to Saint-Germain jazz, the two countries share a rich story of back-andforth exchanges, a remarkable situation considering that they do not share the same language or indeed religious background. This is also why the Franco-American relationship is a mix of attraction and repulsion: whereas France still fascinates America (particularly the East and West coasts) for its art de vivre, fashion and cultural legacy, it is also disdained for its special taste for state interventionism and centralism, its “strike culture”, its categorical refusal to accept the wearing of any religious symbols in the public sphere (one might recall the controversies around the wearing of a Burkini in the summer of 2016), and of course for its constant pretense to punch above its weight in foreign policy. Of course, all this will not prevent the same conservative thinkers (and their progressive counterparts) from regularly quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, and other French thinkers in their works. On the other hand, French critiques of the United States are equally abundant – Americans might argue that they may well be the fruit of frustration at seeing the divergent paths of the two countries since their respective revolutions, the Americans having used it as a starting point for their country to reach its historical pinnacle, while its revolution failed to give France its soughtafter “number one” role in the World. However, France’s repulsion for America is just as schizophrenic as on the other side of the Atlantic: the French will of course

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denounce genetically modified crops and the unhealthy American diet, but will continue to go to American restaurants, as the record number of McDonalds’ in French cities and towns suggests (the Creatives’ more delicate palates will opt for “gourmet burgers” in urban bistros – again the fruit of Franco-American cultural exchange). They will also denounce Donald Trump and the show business side of American politics but will continue deifying his predecessor and his family (though they are every bit as American as the current president), while at the same time gorging themselves on the various bits of celebrity tittle-tattle provided by Paris Match. Finally, while some of their intellectuals might proclaim their never-ending contempt for the decadent American Empire,1 this won’t prevent the French elites from sending their children to the best universities or on internships in New York, Miami, or San Francisco, and relying on literature from Washington’s think-tanks to refine their arguments, while the rest of the population continues to binge on American series on TV or on Netflix. Lately, the two countries have come to share much more in their politics – not necessarily in terms of political fault-lines, but certainly in terms of political developments and marketing. In  fact, French political life has very much Americanized in recent years, in terms of style but also of techniques, for example with the introduction of open primaries for the left in 2012 and then the right in 2017, and the advice of numerous consultants who were involved in the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders in 2016 to Emmanuel Macron, Benoît Hamon, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon a year later.2 This is not surprising, given that the intellectual ties (mainly, but not exclusively, on the left) between the two countries have only strengthened since the mid-2000s, and the trend will probably continue, as the American and French societies, though very different in terms of social issues and divisions, have followed parallel trajectories in recent years – including in terms of electoral sociology. In fact, each of the four social groups of the Great Class Shift has found a champion to represent them during the last presidential cycle on both sides of the Atlantic. And in both stories, the basic storyline has remained the same, although the scenario differed. Regarding the forces at play, both countries witnessed a remarkably clear divide between the four classes and their champion: in the United States, during the primaries, the Creative Class was represented by the Democratic establishment and Hillary Clinton, the Suburban Middle Class originally split its support between the “establishment” Republican candidates ( Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio for the more moderate; Ted Cruz and Ben Carson for the social conservatives) before gradually rallying around Donald Trump, who secured the backing of the New Minority very early on. As for the Millennials, they were at the heart of the Bernie Sanders campaign and greatly defined his political agenda (notably, but not exclusively through his proposals for a reduction of student debt 3). And although each of these actors clearly articulated the aspirations of their classes during the primaries, the campaign during the fall became a fight not to win the moderate voter, but rather to form a sociological coalition outside the political center to win the contest.

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In France, the differences among the actors were just as stark, but the confrontation among these four visions of society was perhaps expressed with even greater clarity. All were in direct competition with each other for the first round of the presidential election in 2017, with Emmanuel Macron positioning himself as the champion of the Creative Class (or candidate of the “Startup Nation” – at least at the beginning of the campaign4). The  Suburban Middle Class largely rooted for François Fillon, while Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon quickly defined themselves as the defenders of the two rebel classes, the New Minority and the Millennials, respectively. The mirror effect between the two countries is all the more remarkable given the parallel electoral coalitions that had carried Barack Obama (in 2008 and 2012) and François Hollande (in 2012) to power – both had brought together the Creative Class, Millennials, and ethnic minorities to carry victory on election day. Despite the obvious differences between Obama and Hollande, the mechanisms at play in these victories were fairly similar, starting with a rejection of the policies and personalities of George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy. But the similarities of the progressive candidates did not  stop there, as their programs featured many common elements, including the promotion of diversity, with for example the rallying of both candidates for same-sex marriage, which became an issue in both countries during and after the electoral campaign. In fact, calls to promote diversity cherished by Millennials and Creatives alike were the cement that held these coalitions together and distinguished them from their adversaries, who, for their part, were calling for a greater homogenization of society. But in spite of the discourses about equality and diversity, one striking feature of these coalitions was their inegalitarian nature. Indeed, it is clear in each case that the relationships among Creatives, minorities, and Millennials were not balanced: in the context of 2008 and 2012, not all Millennials had yet reached political maturity, and they were therefore unable to vote en masse, which limited their impact on the candidates’ programs. Furthermore, the 18–35s were still at that stage (although less and less so as time went on) the well-behaved foot-soldiers of globalization, and many had not yet discovered the reality of the real world beyond campuses: they were thus less autonomous and less rebellious. As for the minorities, they did not control the political agenda either: while they make a far bigger proportion of the total vote in the United States than in France (not least thanks to the spectacular growth of the Hispanic vote in the 1990s and 2000s5), they very often followed rather than defined the general public debate. The notable exception is of course the Black Lives Matter movement, but its agenda remained focused on the treatment of the African American community in America and it seems to have refrained from putting forward an englobing political program for American society beyond the issue of race (although it is a central one in American politics). Furthermore, while the Hispanic population’s demographic dynamism of recent years has undisputedly had consequences over the political mood in the United States, this does not  necessarily bear on the electoral or political balance of the United States. In fact, a striking feature of “the Hispanic vote” (one should actually speak of a

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plurality of Hispanic votes) is the heterogeneous nature of these populations,6 with great differences, for example, between Texan Hispanics, Floridian Cubans, or Californian Mexican Americans, which as a result makes it difficult to talk about a monolithic Hispanic voting bloc. Indeed, the bet made by Democrat strategists that Hispanics would vote as a bloc has been at the origin of several miscalculations leading to defeat for the American left, may it be in the presidential elections of 2016, or in the Texas senatorial election of 2018. Meanwhile in France, where the relative weight of ethnic minorities is far lower, despite numerous polemics in the media, minority groups form an estimated 10% of the population,7 which limits their capacity to impose their own agenda, even when they all join forces in support of one candidate, as seems to have been the case for François Hollande in 2012. Consequently, the coalitions that backed Obama and Hollande were dominated by the Creatives who were able to frame the debate in France and the United States, at least at the start of the Obama and Hollande presidencies. Both winning coalitions started to crumble between 2011 and 2013, not least due to the gradual marginalization of Millennials in the economic sphere and their radicalization in the political arena. In the United States, the movement began as early as 2011, with the Occupy Wall Street campaign against “the greed and corruption of the 1%”. The emergence of an anti-establishment movement within the youth vote had alarmed the Democratic campaign teams at the time, and in 2012 they had to shift Obama’s positioning towards the left to mobilize this key electorate for his coalition. As John Judis recalls in his book The Populist Explosion, “in the 2012 election, Obama borrowed from Occupy Wall Street’s rhetoric to pillory Republican Mitt Romney. And Occupy’s radicalism would recur in a more organized form – when a Vermont senator would decide to run for president in 2016”.8 Indeed, despite the 44th US president’s efforts between 2012 and 2016 to keep the support of the under-35 electorate (with strong support for same-sex marriage and the Black Lives Matter movement, and active campaigning on all matters related to gender, including in the much publicized “bathroom wars” around transgender use of public toilets in the spring of 20169), Millennials decided to go their own way during the primaries: despite President Obama’s firm support for Hillary Clinton, Generation Y came out in high numbers in support of Bernie Sanders and his promises of equality and radical solutions to the problems faced by the young, not least student debt. And when it didn’t get what it wanted (taking the view, not totally unjustified, that it had been tricked by the system of superdelegates10), it followed Hillary Clinton with little enthusiasm during the rest of the campaign. Indeed, studies of results on November 8, 2016, by age bracket show that although the Democrat was ahead among young people (55% for Clinton, 35% for Trump, those who voted Republican being mostly young white people without a college education whose belonging to the New Minority had more impact than their age), her advantage was certainly not as big as what Barack Obama had achieved in 2012 – where he beat Mitt Romney with 60% of the vote against 35% for the Republican candidate.11 The 5% differential, representing votes lost to third party candidates – the Green

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Jill Stein and the Libertarian Gary Johnson, is part of the equation that led to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in an extremely tight race. The loss of key states like Pennsylvania, in particular, can be explained by a lesser mobilization for Clinton among Millennials in campus cities, where young people did not turn out to vote in the numbers that had been expected by the Democrats’ campaigners.12 Conversely, in the Keystone state and more generally all over the Midwest, Donald Trump performed remarkable results in mobilizing the votes of the two other classes, namely the New Minority and a Suburban/Provincial Middle Class whose negative attitudes towards Barack Obama’s second term in office seem to have been fueled not so much by same-sex marriage than by the incidents of 2016 with the transgender bathroom wars and the kneeling during the national anthem during NFL games in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. As discussed in the first part of this book, the candidacy of Donald Trump gained very early support from the White Working Class, and the latter unsurprisingly supported its champion in remarkable numbers: in Ohio, for instance, people in Portage county (a working-class district adjacent to Youngstown) voted for Donald Trump in their droves, giving him a lead of more than 8 points over Clinton (52.1% versus 43.5%) – the same county had given Barack Obama a majority in 2012 (51.4% versus 48.2% for Romney).13 The  mobilization of the Suburban Middle Class was more uncertain: its members were not convinced by Trump’s style and language, which the working class electorate liked so much, and one might have expected that the scandal of the “Access Hollywood” bus tape, in which the then-reality-show star could be heard using particularly crude language about women might have had a demobilizing effect on this demographic. But while the tapes had a short-term effect on his ratings, the middle class in the end rallied around the Republican candidate, with different motives: the desire to see the back of Obamacare was certainly an argument (the Affordable Act had led to increased insurance costs for many in this demographic over the previous years), and so was the promise of systematically appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court (something that President Trump has since then lived up to, with the appointment of Brett Kavannaugh in 2018, for example). But the Middle-Class vote was above all a rejection of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, with the controversies surrounding her family for several years, such as the financing of her husband’s foundation, being all re-activated at inopportune moments for her during the campaign. The reasons for the vote were many, but the results were clear for the middle class, as the figures collected by the Pew Research Center14 show: in 2012, the 57 American counties with a majority of Middle-Class households had voted almost equally for Democrats (30) and Republicans (27). In 2016, Donald Trump not only won a majority in all the 27 counties acquired by the Republicans in 2012, but also took 18 of the remaining 30 counties from the Democrats. It will come as no surprise to readers that most of these areas are in Midwest and North East American swing-states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin), the very same ones that decided the election in 2016.

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Exactly six months later, France headed to the polls for an equally divisive election that produced a quite different result – although it followed a similar sociopolitical canvass. The French race showed more clearly the confrontation between the four classes, as they battled directly during the first-round campaign. But despite this significant difference, the end result was also very close: where the US presidency was ultimately decided by 80,000 votes spread over three States,15 less than 5% of the vote separated Creative Class candidate Emmanuel Macron, who came first with 24.01%, and fourth-place Millennial champion Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19.58%). Even more interesting though was the battle for second place, which was even closer, as Mélenchon came only 500,000 votes and less than 2% of the vote short of qualifying to the second round, his 19.58% comparing with Marine Le Pen’s 21.30% – with boubour candidate François Fillon in the middle – despite the scandals, he came within 1.30% of qualifying, with a final score of 20.01%. While the gap between these four candidates (and in particular the second and the third) is minimal, that between this leading pack and the seven other candidates was far bigger: Mélenchon netted 5 million votes (or 14 points) more than Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon, who came fifth with 6.36% of the votes16 while the other candidates were left even further behind. Why such a result? For the top four candidates, their fairly similar scores can be attributed to their ability to mobilize each of the four classes discussed in the first part of this book: each of them managed to present themselves as the champions for the Creatives (Macron), the Suburban Middle Class (Fillon), the New Minority (Le Pen), and the Millennials (Mélenchon). Their appeal and capacity to speak as the uncontested spokespersons of each class had in turn a devastating effect on all the other political offers: between the four of them, the “class” candidates account for more than 85% of the electorate, while the seven other candidates netted less than 15%. This explains at least in part the very disappointing result of official socialist candidate Benoît Hamon (who, let us remember, represented the incumbent party): having arrived late in the campaign after the January primary of the ­center-left, he was unable to position himself as the spokesperson of any one particular class: Emmanuel Macron had already secured the Creative vote in the autumn with his talks of making France a “startup nation”, while the Nuit Debout electorate had already shifted in large numbers towards Mélenchon before the socialist primary. Beyond the particular case of the Hamon candidacy, the Socialists’ fate had already been sealed early in 2017: as discussed earlier, the electoral coalition that had allowed its candidate to triumph in 2012 had disintegrated, and its inability to choose in time between them led to the disastrous results of 2017. The inability of the Socialist Party to choose a camp during the later years of the Hollande presidency led to a vacuum that was ultimately filled by far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon who captured the Millennial vote, while Emmanuel Macron had managed to rally around him the Creative Class during the course of 2016. Once his base electorate had been consolidated by January 2017, he could start building up his coalition and extend his appeal to the largest of the four classes in France, namely the Suburban Middle Class.

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The boubour candidate François Fillon was to unwillingly help Macron in this effort: his campaign had already started to misfire on the very next day after his triumph in the French Republican primary, with his impressive polling figures already suffering a steady decline starting in December 2016.17 But January was to prove fatal to the candidate of the center-right with the “Penelope-gate”, a political-financial scandal involving allegations that members of his family (including his wife Penelope) were given paid public-funded jobs that involved little or no actual duties, seriously undermining the credibility of the candidate. However, as crippling as it might have been in other campaigns, this scandal was not immediately fatal to Fillon. On the contrary, it crystallized the support of the most hardcore boubour electorate, who deliberately refused to believe the accusations made against their champion, despite mounting evidence and the withdrawal of support from leaders of his own party. The Suburban Middle Class therefore stuck with their candidate in very large numbers, making sure he would never fall below 15% support in opinion polls (and therefore remain within shooting distance of a qualification to the second round). Nonetheless, and this is a crucial detail, for a small portion of the middle class (particularly women and the more suburban, as opposed to provincial, part of this demographic), the suspicions of dishonesty proved too big a test for their class solidarity: a Protestant ethic being a significant trait of the Suburban Middle Class (even in a Catholic country like France), François Fillon had been successful at gaining the confidence of many suburban voters by appealing to their respect for deontology and decency in the Republicans’ Primary.18 The accusations leveled against him therefore prompted the less-conservative part of his electorate to break away from him, and Emmanuel Macron was then able to attract their support, insofar as his liberal economic program was compatible with that of the Suburban Middle Class. This  voter transfer was limited due to the differences between the opposed social agendas of the two candidates, but the bridges proved solid enough to give Macron a small but decisive advantage over his rivals. His victory in the first round can thus be attributed first of all to his capacity to mobilize the Creative Class, but also to recover a small portion of the Suburban Middle Class that had been lost by François Fillon during the campaign. In the same way, the results of the second round are easily explained by using the logic of the four classes. Marine Le Pen had managed to qualify, thanks to a remarkable mobilization of the working and peripheral lower middle-class vote, but could not extend her base sufficiently towards any of the three other classes – from the moment this became clear, and despite some alerts during the two weeks separating the two rounds, Le Pen had little chances of winning. In fact, as François Fillon immediately called on voters to rally against the Front National and vote for the candidate of the Creative Class, Macron gained a decisive advantage, as this immediately shut the door on a Donald Trump-style coalition. As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he could allow himself the luxury of not giving any instructions on how to vote: Millennials had learned from a young age to associate the name Le Pen with intolerance, and were not going to vote en masse for

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the nationalist candidate. They might decide, at worst, to abstain in the second round (and many did indeed) or to vote for Emmanuel Macron, but there was little chance of them turning out to vote for Marine Le Pen. Thus, Mélenchon’s positioning, though criticized at the time, made sense as it allowed him to position himself as the true opponent of the president he had not appealed to vote for, a stance he continues to cultivate to this day. The Great Class Shift was therefore very much at the heart of both American and French campaigns in 2016 and 2017. Their emergence set the agenda and sometimes the tempo of the campaign, and their levels of mobilization in many ways decided elections whose result was as close as controversial  – with the exception of the second round of the French presidential election, where the Front national’s disastrous second round campaign allowed for a very temporary coalition of three classes to elect Emmanuel Macron. Finally, each candidate’s ability to consolidate their class and to seal, at least partly, a coalition with another class was the key to both Trump’s and Macron’s victory, even though the alliances were different in the United States and France: in the former, Donald Trump managed to rally behind him the New Minority and the Suburban Middle Class to defeat a more vulnerable Democratic coalition gathering the Creative Class and the Millennials. In France, Emmanuel Macron consolidated his position as the candidate of the Creatives very early on, before taking advantage of the troubles of François Fillon to enlarge his base and include a portion of the Suburban Middle Class in his coalition. The focus of the then-candidate on economic issues greatly facilitated this transfer of support, which proved crucial in giving him a decisive advantage in the first and second round. Three years after their swearing into office, one might wonder if these two winning coalitions still hold. The 2016–2017 electoral years in both countries have shown that increased volatility is one of the trademarks of the era we live in, but looking at the recent past from the Great Class Shift perspective can bring some logic (if not predictability) to recent developments, and to anticipate possible scenarios as America is already preparing for its next electoral cycle. For about a year, a striking feature of both Trump’s and Macron’s presidencies was their capacity to consolidate their electorates, despite the immediate coalescing of a substantial opposition, suggesting that the days of traditional honeymoon period between presidents and the people were over. In fact, both presidents ratings stayed very stable in their first year in office: the US president’s aggregated approval ratings continuously stayed in the higher 30s, before moving to the lower 40s in 2018 – notably thanks to the economic boom that the United States have gone through during that year, for which a good number of Americans are crediting Donald Trump’s tax breaks.19 In the meantime, Emmanuel Macron’s numbers initially followed the same stable trajectory, with approval ratings hovering around 40% until July 2018.20 One needs to explain the sharp decline in popularity that followed for president Macron, but it is worth looking in details at these early ratings, as they suggested in both countries a remarkable consolidation of both presidents’

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electorates. While Donald Trump is maintaining his dominant position among the New Minority with his posturing and tough line on immigration, he has also managed to keep the trust of major parts of the Suburban Middle Class, who have appreciated his delivering on the nomination of conservative judges to the Supreme Court and were often net beneficiaries of the Trump tax cuts. This showed during the 2018 midterm elections, which Donald Trump purposefully politicized and transformed in some places into a referendum on his person, with some bad results, notably in the House of Representatives, but also victories that were anything but unexpected for many Republicans, particularly in Senate races. In this sense, the Senate victories of Rick Scott in Florida, Josh Hawley in Missouri, and Mike Braun in Indiana, all in states that Donald Trump must win if he is to be re-elected, are certainly a hint to the president’s strategy for 2020: these three seats were hotly contested (and were all held by Democrats elected in 2012 with Barack Obama), and in all of them the president not only endorsed the candidates but attended MAGA rallies to support them. His strategy for 2020 is therefore clear: to earn victory through the consolidation of his coalition, something that Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton have achieved before him in 2012, 2004, and 2016. The path for Donald Trump’s re-election is narrow, though: in the absence of new electorates agglomerating around his candidacy, the president must presumably make sure that all his 2016 voters do come back to vote in 2020, which is not a given, as parts of Suburban America have flipped back to the Democrats during the midterms,21 notably through a women vote that may be worrying for the GOP establishment. These trends seen in the midterms have yet to be confirmed though, and much of the campaign will depend on the Democrats’ primary, which will be more than ever a contest of personalities: if the Democrats’ candidate manages to bring together the traditional coalition of Millennials and Creatives in sufficient numbers while splitting the middle-class vote between a more provincial component loyal to the incumbent and a suburban wing that would vote Democrat, then Donald Trump will likely be defeated. If on the contrary the president manages to keep the support of a large Section of the middle class, he will be in a position to be re-elected. On the other side of the Atlantic, Emmanuel Macron’s ride has become bumpy after the summer of 2018 and the Benalla affair, which saw presidential security officer (and deputy chief of staff ) Alexandre Benalla involved in a beating up of demonstrators during May 1, 2018 rallies. The initial scandal triggered a wave of revelations about Benalla receiving favors aplenty, giving the impression that the new president was in the end behaving like his predecessors (and monarchs of old). This upset the balance that had allowed the French president to keep the loyalty of the Creative electorate while satisfying increasing numbers of the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class. Until then, the president had in fact earned a large chunk of support from center-right voters who had voted for François Fillon in 2017. The IFOP poll conducted six months after the first round of the French presidential election, asking about vote intentions if the race were to be re-run, showed that Emmanuel Macron would not only win the first

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round, but would extend his lead over his rivals, gaining four points (up to 28%) of voter intentions, mostly to the detriment of François Fillon who would have lost five points in such a configuration (both Melenchon’s and Le Pen’s numbers stayed stable).22 After the Benalla affair, the dynamic changed, as the Creatives started to doubt the capacity of the president to behave in a fully transparent fashion.23 In this sense, the promise of a brand new Macronist world vanished for major parts of his electorate during the summer of 2018. In order to control the damage in the Creative Class, the president therefore changed his discourse, putting it more in line with the Creatives’ agenda, for example by promoting a new carbon tax, which would in turn unleash the revolt of the Yellow Vests. The latter were the product a confrontation between the Creative vision of the world (and its willingness to tax cars to pay for an energetic transition that seems to be mostly to their own benefits) and that of the New Minority, for whom the tax came to symbolize the contempt of the elites towards their situation. And while Millennials sometimes chose to side with the Yellow Vests, some of them contributing to the cohorts of protesters that ransacked the centers of Paris and other creative cities in November–January 2019, the Suburban Middle Class, originally sympathetic to the Yellow Vests, grew more and more hostile as the movement turned violent, thereby providing a balance for the president to change the tide of sympathy for the movement, with great difficulties and at the price of concessions that certainly weakened his hand at EU level.24 Can Emmanuel Macron regain ground after such a damaging succession of riots? His position on the international stage is certainly damaged, but this is not the subject of this book. The drop in opinion ratings is equally worrying for him, but one should remain cautious: there is still a long way to the next presidential elections in 2022, and many things can happen that could either boost the president’s ratings to regain the trust he lost within the Creative Class and the Suburban Middle Class, or worsen his position in the longer-term. Indeed, the results of the European elections tend to confirm that, despite criticism, Macron has somehow consolidated support in the Suburban Middle Class thanks to a message of order, thereby putting the French traditional right in disarray,25 while losing support among some Creative supporters who voted for the Greens in 2019. The writing is certainly not on the wall, but Emmanuel Macron still has the initiative: opinion polls tend to show that the Yellow Vests movement has not  fundamentally changed the political landscape in France, which remains dominated by our four classes: Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National remain a stable base of support among the New Minority, while different elements of the left (including Jean-Luc Mélenchon) and of the center-right (whether Les Republicains or the small party Agir!, a center-right ally to Macron) battle it out for the support of the Millennials and the Suburban Middle class, respectively. As long as the two latter classes will remain under a contested leadership, and as long as Marine Le Pen will not be able to enlarge her support beyond her class, the French president will retain the initiative and the capacity to rebuild an electoral coalition to take him to the second round, where he would have to

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build another coalition to beat his opponent. In any case, Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump will need to take into the equation the same Suburban Middle Class that was the key to their victory in 2017. This Middle-Class support seems indeed to remain crucial in deciding the electoral fate of candidates in France and the United States, but as the next chapter will show, it has also played a key role throughout of North Western Europe in the past electoral cycle.

Notes 1 Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 2 See for example the role played by Sophia Chikirou in the campaign of JeanLuc Mélenchon  – Chikirou started out working for the Sanders campaign in the 2015–2016 primaries: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-18/ here-s-how-bernie-sanders-is-playing-a-role-in-france-s-election. 3 https://berniesanders.com/issues/its-time-to-make-college-tuition-free-and-debt-free/ 4 https://www.forbes.fr/politique/presidentielle-et-le-candidat-des-start-up-­emmanuelmacron-fillon/ 5 See on this subject the results of the surveys conducted by the Census Bureau in the United States  in 2010: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_ census/cb11-cn125.html. 6 The  many surveys on the Hispanic populations agree on the fact that this demographic is very difficult to categorize, for as it has grown in size, it has become increasingly diverse – including in its political choices. See the surveys by the Pew Research Center: http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/06/19/diverse-origins-thenations-14-largest-hispanic-origin-groups/, or this study by the same institute on the Hispanic vote in the presidential election of 2016, during which, against all expectations, Donald Trump achieved a higher score than Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in 2012: http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/10/11/ the-latino-vote-in-the-2016-presidential-election/. 7 Statistics on ethnicity are banned in France – but by a process of extrapolation (using statistics on religion, for example, though these are only partial, and do not  take into account populations originating in central Africa, for example) put forward estimates that are of course only approximate, but can provide an order of magnitude. The CIA World Factbook estimates that Muslims make up between 7% and 9% of the total population of France, whereas the Pew Research Center put the figure  at 6.9 million people, i.e. about 10% of the total population. See the two organisations’ respective websites: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/geos/fr.html#People, and http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/ the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/. 8 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 61. 9 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/2016-bathroom-bills-politicsnorth-carolina-lgbt-transgender-history-restrooms-era-civil-rights-213902 10 The “superdelegates” system that made Sanders’ breakthrough much harder to transform into a victory provoked so many problems within the Democratic Party that it was abandoned in 2018. See: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/ democrats-rules-superdelegates-sanders. 11 For complete figures and an exhaustive comparison between the youth vote in 2012 and 2016, see the studies carried out by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) on their website http://civicyouth.org/ an-estimated-24-million-young-people-vote-in-2016-election/.

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12 See http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/Yes-you-can-blamemillennials-for-Hillary-Clintons-loss.html. 13 These figures are available on all the major American daily news websites, where data crunching is a popular pastime among political geeks. See for example the New York Times’s sites for 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2012/results/states/ohio. html, and for 2016 https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/ohio. 14 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/08/gop-gained-ground-in-middle​-classcommunities-in-2016/ 15 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-willbe-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/?utm_term=.09807ef51169 16 Source: Official results published by the French Interior Ministry: https://www.interieur. gouv.fr/Elections/Les-resultats/Presidentielles/elecresult__presidentielle-2017/(path)/ presidentielle-2017/FE.html. 17 See the aggregate results of the opinion polls throughout the Republicans’ entire postPrimary period, for example: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_­ sondages_ sur_l%27élection_présidentielle_française_de_2017#cite_note-22. 18 Fillon’s positioning made sense, as his main challengers were Alain Juppé, convicted by a French court in for public funds misuse in 2004, while Nicolas Sarkozy was facing charges of illegal campaign financing in 2012, which prompted Fillon to declare “would one imagine [founder of the French Vth Republic] General de Gaulle indicted?” The declaration came to haunt him a few months later, when he was himself indicted in the middle of the campaign. 19 The website Real Clear Politics aggregates and updates on a daily basis all the results of the polls conducted by the large American institutions on the national market, including those that concern the president’s popularity – see: https://www.realclearpolitics. com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html. 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Emmanuel_Macron_ presidency 21 See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/08/the-2018-midterm-votedivisions-by-race-gender-education/ for developments in the women’s vote, https:// eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/11/08/midterms-suburbsrepublicans-democrats-trump/1921590002/ for the flip in Suburban America. 22 http://www.lejdd.fr/politique/sondage-voici-ce-que-donnerait-la-presidentielleaujourdhui-3470771 23 http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/politique/2018/07/26/31001-20180726ARTFIG00245l-affaire-benalla-ou-la-revanche-de-l-ancien-monde.php 24 For  a more thorough analysis on the positioning of each class in the Yellow Vests ­movement, see my interview to newspaper L’Opinion in November 2018: https:// www.lopinion.fr/edition/politique/thibault-muzergues-ralliement-classe-­moyenneaux-gilets-jaunes-est-169783. 25 See the analysis of French pollster Bruno Jeanbart of OpinionWay on changes in the En Marche electorate between 2017 and 2019: https://www.opinion-way.com/images/ sondage-opinion/Le_Figaro_-_Analyse_B._ Jeanbart_-_Nouvelle_­composition_­ politique_du_vote_LREM_-_4_juin_2019.pdf.

Bibliography John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016.

6 NORTH-WESTERN EUROPE Divergent scenarios in the economic heart of Europe

France is of course not alone in showing similar sociological changes as in the United States—although it is true that the presidential features of the French and the US political system have made the Great Class Shift more obvious to the observer. By contrast, and for historical reasons that vary (from the ­seventeenth century Glorious Revolution in the United Kingdom to the post–World War II settlement in Germany), countries in North-Western Europe have generally opted for strong parliamentary systems. This can sometimes complicate our reading of the evolution in Western political landscapes, as atomization is more the norm than the exception in continental parliamentary systems. But taken from a sociological perspective, the region has characteristics that are very similar between each other, and with France or the United States. Currently the economic heart of the continent, North Western Europe attracts numerous members of the Creative Class that cluster in creative hubs such as London, Vienna, Amsterdam, or Berlin. Historically the center of the Industrial Revolution, North-Western Europe is also home to many members of the white working class, the heart of the New Minority. By virtue of its economic importance, it is also the part of Europe where the Suburban Middle Class is the most numerous; it therefore continues to hold a dominant place among the electorate – the aging population, and the large number of retired people who are homeowners, playing a significant role in this. Finally, on account of its attractiveness to young and educated immigrants, including those from other parts of Europe, it also has a relatively large number of Millennials (at least by European standards), allowing them to form a critical mass that count in elections. An attempt to sub-divide the region would lead to the same parallels. From Manchester to Munich, North-Western Europe is better known as the “blue banana”, the industrial engine of the continent which has gradually turned into its Creative center. As in the United States, the economic transition to the knowledge

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economy has prompted the emergence of Creatives as a social and political powerhouse that has in turn sometimes scared the Suburban Middle Class, while the New Minority, left behind as everywhere else, has re-emerged as a political force to be reckoned with, including in Germany. However, despite all these similarities, none of the countries in the region offers a unique electoral scenario. The question is of course why and how countries with similar sociological features and sometimes even political cultures have produced so different outcomes. Great Britain represents an interesting example of how the fault lines resulting from the Great Class Shift have changed our political landscapes, defying the expectations of the political class during the campaign for Brexit, but also more generally reshaping the British political landscape. In the mid-2010s British pundits had started to envisage the decade as “the Cameron years” (after the Thatcher years of 1979–1990 and the Blair years of 1997–2007). The Conservative Party’s hold on power seemed to have consolidated, thanks to a coalition that united the Suburban Middle Class (the dominant partner in the coalition) with a portion of the Creative Class, which the British prime minister had managed to lure away from an ailing New Labour at the end of the 2000s. But things had already started to go wrong soon after the return of Conservatives in power, as the party’s Eurosceptic wing – in the backbenches back then – continued to push for a departure (or at least distancing) from the European Union. In doing so, they led the way, but also followed the views of many members of the Provincial Middle Class, who very often cherished the idea that Great Britain was a world apart from the rest of the continent, thanks notably to the legacy of Empire and more particularly the Anglosphere, which still creates a special cultural bond between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States with the United Kingdom.1 Greatly underestimating the capacity of these backbenchers to mobilize voters, and in order to pacify a Conservative Party historically split over Europe, David Cameron took the risk of calling a referendum to decide once and for all the question that had been poisoning life inside the party since the premiership of John Major. Of course, the then-prime minister felt at the time that once faced with the daunting prospect of leaving the EU, a majority of Britons would follow his leadership. This turned out to be a major mistake. As  John B. Judis emphasizes in his book on The  Populist Explosion, “popular opposition to the EU went back decades and was based on the perception that by joining the EU, the UK had abandoned its own sovereignty. It drew on English or British nationalism. But by 2009, opposition to the EU had begun to spread from Tory towns to the working-class areas in Northern and Eastern England that regularly voted for Labour. And UKIP began to find voters there. According to Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin’s extensive study of UKIP and its supporters, the bulk of its support shifted to the older, less-educated and primarily male white working class”.2 Nigel Farage had always loathed the European Union, of course – his leaving the Conservative Party in the 1990s had indeed been the result of John Major’s moderate stance on Europe,3 but his party was initially libertarian on the economic front.

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With their historic opposition to the European Union, UKIP had certainly gained sympathies within the United Kingdom. It  could put pressure on the Conservative Party as the latter’s majority in many key constituencies depended on UKIP supporters vote, but David Cameron had managed to limit Nigel Farage’s appeal during parliamentary elections by his strategy to unite the Creative elites with the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class. With electoral expansion compromised in the middle class, Farage radically altered his party’s economic program (shifting it to the left), while maintaining the party’s anti-EU chore platform. The results were rather encouraging for UKIP: while its score in the 2015 general elections might not seem impressive at first, this was primarily due to the first-past-the-post electoral system for parliamentary election, which works against the smaller parties. Indeed, while UKIP was only able to send one MP to Westminster, it nonetheless secured a total of 12.6% of the popular vote, making it the third most supported party in the United Kingdom.4 Despite having the smallest number of MPs, Nigel Farage’s party was ahead of the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists in terms of votes, and this surge was confirmed in the European elections of 2014, where UKIP won the plurality of the vote and defeated both the Conservatives and Labour, with a total of 26.6%.5 When the time came to decide on the timing (or opportunity) of a referendum, these figures should have alarmed the most pro-European Conservative MPs. For Farage, the objective was not to win a general election: his political raison d’être, above all, remained Brexit, the dream of a lifetime, which David Cameron was now offering him on a silver plate. Once the idea of the referendum had been agreed in principle and the date had been set, the whimsical leader of UKIP centered his campaign on public services and immigration – a theme that could mobilize the working class voters, while middle class voters were originally more susceptible to the arguments put forward by Eurosceptic Conservatives such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, or Iain Duncan-Smith. To quote once again John Judis in his remarkable account on the rise of populism in 2015–2016: “Farage fused the incendiary issue of immigration with that of EU-membership. UKIP adopted the position that the way to limit immigration was to get out of the EU. Farage also adapted UKIP’s general political outlook to its new workingclass voters, many of whom had once voted for Labour. He abandoned UKIP’s commitment to laissez-faire economics. Farage proposed taking the funds that the UK contributed to the EU and using them to improve Britain’s National Health Service”,6 the most statist healthcare system in Europe. This  strategic change paid off: the final result, a relatively short, but no less clear Brexit victory with 51,89% of the votes, can of course be explained (among other factors) by the capacity of the Conservative Party’s Eurosceptic wing (chief among them Boris Johnson) to mobilize a higher voter turnout against the EU among their middle-class constituents, but also by the devastating effects of Farage’s strategy on the working-class vote  – so much so that most Conservative Party leaders borrowed this rhetoric, notably on the NHS. Analyses of the Brexit vote all

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point out a clear social homogeneity, as Judis recalls: “voters for Leave were concentrated among older and less educated voters and within towns where the median income was less than $45,000”.7 After having been condemned by Tony Blair’s New Labour to political insignificance in the 1990s, the New Minority had its revenge as it forced the Creative Class to contemplate the consequences of its support for globalization, a movement that may have worked for the elites but that had only marginalized them in British society. As in the United States, the victory of Brexit also occurred because the “Remain” coalition did not deliver on voting day. While it is certainly true that the Creatives came out in large numbers to stay in the EU (thereby following an internationalist, pro-diversity mindset that it has been defending since it first emerged in the late 1990s), the Millennials did not follow suit. When the Brexit results were published, it was often stated in Brussels that almost 75% of young people had voted to stay in the EU,8 and that is certainly true. But it is equally true that only 36% of 18–24-year-olds and 58% of 25–35-year-olds had voted (as compared with a turnout of 83% among the over-65s9), despite the high stakes involved and the uncertainties surrounding the results. The low turnout among Millennials was just as big a factor in Brexit as the working-class vote, and this apathy can be attributed in part to the very low-key support of their new champion, Jeremy Corbyn for the “Remain” campaign. One year earlier, Corbyn had been elected leader of Labour thanks to the support of Millennials who had joined the party, in part to reject outright the (very Creative Class-focused) legacy of Tony Blair. The  generation that had grown up with New Labour and the Iraq war was now longing for a more “authentic” Left, closer to the new lumpen proletariat of the cities (and accessorily their own interests). And what could be more authentic than a historic member of the left’s old guard who had stayed true to his values, surviving the electoral triumphs of New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s and even the conversion of former comrade-in-arm Ken Livingstone to social liberalism? Corbyn’s authenticity was not understood as an argument by the Labour Blairite establishment, and therefore the accusations against Corbyn’s radical past and his support for organizations that were hardly commendable back then (and even less so today) only served to strengthen his popularity among the under-35s. Corbyn took the Labour Party thanks to a new, young activist grassroots base,10 and his political future thus depends largely on their mobilization; this was clearly seen in 2016, when they backed him massively in a leadership challenge, defeating the party’s Blairite parliamentary wing. Given the Labour leader’s hesitancy and, therefore, that of Labour’s Remains campaign, he no doubt carries his share of the blame for the establishment’s defeat. Without a massive mobilization of the Millennials’ vote by Labour, and with an alliance between England’s Suburban Middle Class and New Minority, the Creatives were too isolated to be able to harbor hopes of a Remain victory. The shock of Brexit naturally had immediate effects on British politics. With the departure of David Cameron, the alliance that the Conservative Party had

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built between the Creatives and the country’s Suburban Middle Class was now in jeopardy. Indeed, while the election of Theresa May as leader may initially have provided solace to diplomats in Brussels with regard to the British government’s intentions, her first speech as leader to the Conservative Party conference in October 2016 left no doubt about the Tories’ new philosophical (and electoral) approach: a mixture of nationalism and state interventionism, it clearly expressed the desire of the new leadership to move to a new alliance between the Suburban Middle Class and the New Minority, with the delivery of Brexit as the common denominator.11 In other words, it appeared that the Conservatives had chosen to surf the wave of Brexit to guarantee that they would stay in power. There was some logic to this stance: having lost its raison d’être on account of Brexit, UKIP was bound to suffer a major setback in the next election. The New Minority vote was there for the taking: Tim Shipman, in his remarkable account of the time, recalls how the Conservatives’ “research [department] identified an opportunity to reach out to ‘Working Class Strugglers’, predominantly Leave voters outside Labour’s inner-city strongholds  – many in the Northern towns  – who were prepared to consider a vote for May but wanted reassurances she would not backtrack on Brexit and that she was a different kind of Conservative”.12 The Prime Minister certainly followed suit, and the resulting strategy initially worked: in the local elections in May 2017, amid a low turnout, the Conservatives won an impressive victory against a self-focused Labour Party that could only count on its Millennial electorate, with more and more Creatives relinquishing their support. But the initial hints that members of the old working class may switch their support for the Conservatives was always conditional. As Shipman points out, “focus groups had revealed that a large number of working-class Brexiteers were considering voting Conservative for the first time in their lives because of May, but they were concerned …. If we give her this mandate, what is she going to do with it? Will she hit me? Is she going to be like any other Tory and hit me, or is she going to be on my side”?13 Theresa May’s first mistake was to gamble on a snap election one month after her triumph in the local elections, before she had really been able to open the party up to the working-class electorate (which could easily have been done in that year’s Party Conference). But the truth is (and it was probably intended that way by Conservative HQ) that this election could also have been a perfect occasion to crystallize the New Minority vote for the Conservatives. The campaign quickly went off track, courtesy of a clumsy and un-inspirational campaign, but also because of one important detail: the Tories’ manifesto support for restoring fox hunting. Again, to quote Tim Shipman, “The  biggest topic of conversation by far amongst these Labour-background  […] voters was foxhunting, often preceded with the comment: ‘we never thought she would be in favor of fox-hunting’. Potential urban switchers began to think the PM was the same as any other Tory, and began doubting her”.14 Of course, the fox-hunting issue was only one among many other reasons that convinced voters to shun away from the Conservatives, but it certainly played a role, as canvassers and

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consultants recounted in their electoral post-mortems. In any case, the result was that Conservatives did not secure the New Minority vote, and in particular the white working class vote in the North of England, which was still suspicious of the Tories’ Thatcherite heritage. In  the end, many Conservatives’ target constituencies continued to provide a majority for Labour (on account of a far lower turnout among this demographic than during the Brexit vote), and the general election left a bitter taste in the mouths of all parties concerned: left with the unconditional support of only one class, neither Labour nor the Conservatives were really in a position of force (despite their taking collectively a much higher share of the vote than in previous elections, a paradox in itself ), and their bitter differences (both between each other and inside themselves) have rendered the Brexit process much more painful than it could have been. As for the Liberal Democrats, they have had difficulties to assume the leadership of the Creative Class, although their very encouraging results at the 2019 European elections might open a window of opportunity for them to position themselves as the Creatives’ champions  – this might prove difficult, however, in the context of national elections after the issue of Brexit is resolved. As UK parties have tried to break the deadlock in the context of intense Brexit debate, the battle for each party’s soul (and its link with the electorate) has continued, and the next electoral campaigns will probably show changes in their philosophy in order to gain the support of one of the two antagonistic classes that find themselves outside the two major parties: the New Minority and the Creative Class. Crossing the North Sea to examine the situation in continental Europe, the Dutch case represents another remarkable example on how the political landscape has followed the global Great Class Shift. Dutch political culture is very different from that in the United Kingdom, with a much more atomized political system: the relative social homogeneity of the country (with a still very large middle class) is nuanced by a culture of Verzuiling, a system of social “compartmentalization” (or pillarization) whereby the country’s various communities have historically been very much hermetically sealed from one another. Each group (liberals, socialists, but also different Christian denominations) has historically developed its own way of life, with each individual being taken care of by the community to which he or she belongs from cradle to grave, from the media s/he followed, to the sports club s/he belonged to. Though this system has gradually faded since the middle of the 1960s, this concept of apart-hood and parallel lives (originally promoted to allow for the peaceful coexistence of the different communities in the Dutch realm) is still very much alive, and it promotes a cultural fragmentation that transpires in politics, as each party needs to mobilize a relatively stable but changing electoral base, counts its chicken on election day and then enters in talks with the representatives of the other communities to form a government. As a result of this specific culture, and also because of the continued social dominance of the Suburban Middle Class, the general architecture of the political system

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has somehow been more resilient than in many other countries, with few new players entering the political landscape. That does not  mean however that historic parties have not been challenged, as their popularity has changed depending on their ability to stick to the aspirations of the four classes that are the subject of this book. This has produced some winners, but also some losers emerging in the most recent general election of March 2017. The Dutch Labour Party (PvdA), which, like the French Parti socialiste, paid the price for its failure to pick a side when it came to represent one of the four classes, was the main loser of this contest. The electoral disaster suffered by the PvdA in 2017 (moving from second position, with 24.8% to seventh, with 5.7%, i.e. a fall of almost 20 points) benefited D66, a social-liberal party very popular among the creative professions (it has the best-educated electorate in the country15), and GroenLinks (Green Left), a much more progressive environmentalist party that has greatly increased its constituency thanks to the support of the Millennials – it achieved its best results in the big cities and university towns in the 18–35 age bracket and is also in first place in Amsterdam.16 These spectacular developments on the left should not take attention away from the real center of attention back then: Geert Wilders. It is worth noting here that before the French presidential race came to the dramatic conclusion we now know, an earlier cliff hanger had already raised nervousness among European elites in the spring of 2017: the March 15 general election in the Netherlands. At the beginning of the year, Geert Wilders’ farright Party for Freedom (PVV) looked set to secure first place and therefore make any coalition talks that would not include him almost impossible. An ally of Marine Le Pen in the European Parliament, the leader of the PVV has a lot in common with his French counterpart, not least his very direct style, in stark contrast with the historically far more polished language of the Dutch politics. But the commonalities between Wilders and Le Pen were just as much substance as style. Indeed, founded in 2006 on foundations that combined conservatism and nationalism (one should remember that Wilders was a member of parliament for the liberal-conservative VVD until then), the PVV took the same philosophical trajectory as the Rassemblement national, recalibrating its economic platform to the left in order to attract the white working class and the peripheral populations living a long way away from major urban centers like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or The Hague; and despite a disappointing second place with 13.1% of the vote, the 2017 election results pleaded in favor of this repositioning, as it crystallized a New Minority vote that is now overwhelmingly turning towards the far-right in North Western Europe and beyond. In fact, a detailed study of the results shows how much the Wilders vote has become a sociological vote: according to an IPSOS poll published by NOS17 on election day, the PVV electorate is over-represented among socio-professional categories with lower levels of education, whereas the map of results, broken down town by town, shows a much higher support for PVV in the most peripheral regions of the Netherlands,

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on the border with Germany (Pekkela, Bellingwede, Vlagtwedde, Emmen), or in the Maastricht region, a very symbolic area, but above all one that sits very much in an outermost position compared to the rest of the country. While Wilders’ very direct, anti-immigration discourse was very effective among the New Minority, his strategy was nonetheless thwarted by the party that he had left ten years earlier, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD. Fighting hard to regain advantage among the middle class, Rutte managed to take back votes from Wilders, by echoing some of the tough talks of the populist leader, crawling back to first place with 21.6% of the votes. But the VVD’s appeal did not rest so much in taking some of Wilders’ electorate as to deny him support from the Suburban Middle Class. Indeed, having the third largest proportion of degree-educated voters in the country, the VVD could hardly campaign effectively with the white working class while keeping its electoral base satisfied. Instead, Mark Rutte built his victory on a change of semantics aimed at bringing back the votes of a portion of the middle class that was about to join Geert Wilders. This explain the tougher talk on immigration, and above all the very aggressive defense against the intrusion of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo˘g an in Dutch politics during the 2017 campaign. In this sense, it is fair to say that the Dutch center-right managed to stage the first effective counter-strategy of the 2010s to contain (rather than counter) populists: while the middle class is very dominant in the Netherlands, it is split in two: the Christian middle class is generally more rural, and supports the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), while its more secular (sub)urban wing forms the heart of the VVD’s electorate. During the period of sharp decline that followed the end of Jan Peter Balkenende’s leadership, the CDA had lost part of its electorate to Wilders, and it very much looked like after seven years of Rutte government, the same voter fatigue was taking hold in the Suburban part of the middle class, offering the Dutch far-right a historic opportunity to become the first party in the Netherlands. In the end, both VVD and CDA managed to recapture their traditional electorate (in particular by taking back its leadership on the rhetoric around assimilation and being against the migrant flows, which Wilders had monopolized until that point), and in doing so they prevented the PVV from building a deadly coalition between the New Minority and a significant part of the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class, which would have led him to a potential majority, albeit relative. The challenge faced by the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) in the same year was remarkably similar to that of the Dutch center-right – however, its answer to the threat of the far-right eating up its traditional electorate was even more daring, as the party’s establishment decided to give carte blanche to Sebastian Kurz, who would become the youngest head of government in Europe at 31 years old. The situation inside the ÖVP did not leave much choice to the establishment of the party: having been in power or associated to it in a coalition for the entire lifetime of its new leader, mostly inside a Grand coalition with the Social Democrats of the SPÖ (the other historic Austrian party), the ÖVP  had  been

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slowly but almost continuously declining since the dominant years of Wolfgang Schüssel’s chancellorship in the early 2000s. During that time, the Austrian ­center-right had lost its dominant position to the benefit of the Social Democrats, and was increasingly challenged for second-place by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which like the Dutch or French far-right had retained its nationalist trademark but had also transformed itself into a left-wing party on economic matters – the FPÖ’s campaign slogan in 2017, die Soziale Heimatpartei (the social patriotic party) spoke volumes about the change undergone by the party since the days of Jörg Haider, whose economic program in the late 1990s had a far more laissez-faire approach. The FPÖ’s trajectory had followed the exact opposite of the traditional parties, gaining support almost continuously from the late 2000s onwards, as more and more voters grew tired of a business as usual discourse that certainly corresponded to the remarkable stability and economic development of Austria, but masked growing social tensions, front and center among which was the marginalization of the country’s New Minority. This is particularly the case in the regions that border Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia: after the EU enlargement to the East in 2004, the Burgenland region, already somewhat on the margins of the Austrian economy, had seen large numbers of job losses to the much cheaper Central European neighboring states, while the geographical proximity of Vienna prevented the region from becoming its own economic hub, as Salzburg or Innsbruck had done. This  marginalization was to contribute to turning the most easterly region in the country into a new stronghold for the FPÖ, along with Carinthia, a state with a much longer history of support for the far-right.18 The legislative election of September 2013 had already shown the alarming weakness of Austria’s two historic parties: while the SPÖ and the ÖVP were securing the top two positions and shared power once again in a Grand coalition that the Austrians were increasingly getting tired of, the FPÖ was already threatening the Austrian center-right’s second place. As chancellor Werner Faymann reconducted the SPÖ-ÖVP coalition, the contrast grew between a rapidly changing Austrian society and a political establishment whose defense of the status quo was becoming increasingly unpopular. This  mistake (coupled of course with the migrant crisis, which saw Austria serve as the main entry point to Western Europe) is at the origin of the political earthquake of 2016, with the elimination in the first round of the presidential election of the two representatives of the historic parties, a first in Austria’s post-war history. Staying true to their traditions, the SPÖ and the ÖVP had chosen “classic” candidates to represent them – Rudolf Hundstorfer and Andreas Kohl, respectively, were politicians in the latter stages of their careers and with an undisputedly tidy reputation, with a career built on seeking compromise. These would probably have been perfect candidates in any other presidential elections, but not in this one: Hundstorfer and Kohl were to finish in fourth and fifth place, with 11.3% and 11.1% of the vote, respectively, and therefore did not qualify

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to the second round. The decisive round was to be held two times, in May and December 2016, because of a very close score and some errors in the counting of votes in some cities. For the first time in postwar Austrian history, it pitched two outsiders to the historic parties: Alexander Van Der Bellen, an independent candidate who originated from the Green party, and Norbert Hofer, the candidate from the FPÖ who had won the first round by a sizeable margin with, 35.1% of the vote (as opposed to just 21.3% for Van Der Bellen). Hofer’s profile was unusual: a world away from the much more controversial party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, the candidate of the FPÖ had a far more polished profile, and his physical disability (he had been the victim of a paragliding accident in 2003) made him much more sympathetic than any of the other leaders of the party. This relative smoothness made Hofer’s profile incredibly hard to challenge for the mainstream: with his clear Eurosceptic and antiimmigration line, Hofer could count on the FPÖ to mobilize the New Minority, while his polished style certainly appealed to Austria’s suburban and rural middle classes, even more so as this electorate was increasingly moving away from ÖVP and its tradition of compromising with SPÖ. During the campaigns for the second round, each of the candidates therefore tried to gather support beyond their original base: Hofer continued to build bridges between the new, marginalized working class and the Provincial Middle Class, while Van Der Bellen mobilized his Creative and Millennial electorate, a large proportion of whom had already voted for him in the first round. The result of the second round would conform to expectations from a sociological perspective, with Hofer securing almost 90% of the working class vote and huge majorities in the rural areas and small towns, while the environmentalist candidate remained untouchable among white-collar voters, the educated young and voters in the big cities.19 Paradoxically, Van Der Bellen would eventually triumph by taking away part of the Suburban Middle Class vote (particularly in Western Länder such as Tyrol, where environmental considerations remain very high on the agenda, usually making the local ÖVP much “greener” than its Eastern counterparts), making an extra effort to connect with them – in typical Austrian fashion, it included the wearing of the traditional lederhosen during visits to the Austrian regions, a quite unusual step for a candidate from this political family.20 Van Der Bellen may have secured victory in a hard-fought battle, but the problem of traditional parties decay remained intact, as Austria remains a parliamentary republic where the President plays a mainly symbolic role, and the Chancellor clearly sets the political pace. Following their spectacular setbacks, both ÖVP and the SPÖ had to reform: the Social Democrats’ response was mostly cosmetic, as they selected a new chancellor, Christian Kern, who renewed the party’s image without changing the party’s fundamental message. On the other hand, the ÖVP’s renovation task was much more urgent, as its ratings continued to drop and announced its relegation into third place. After much hesitation, the party establishment realized that it had no other options than to gamble on Sebastian Kurz. The young leader was by no means an unknown quantity to

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Austrians – quite the contrary: in 2011, at the age of just 24, he had joined the government as minister for integration, a strategic post to which he had added the very prestigious foreign affairs ministry in 2013 – following general elections in which his name had probably already helped the ÖVP to escape relegation to third place.21 Kurz had already built a reputation as a disruptor in Austrian politics, and his conservative line on certain sensitive subjects (not least the continuing presence of crosses in all Austrian classrooms, a tradition passed down from the arch-Catholic Austrian empire) certainly secured the support of the party’s traditional electorate. At the same time, his integrationist policies with regard to minorities, and willingness to limit immigration hit when the 2015 refugee crisis (Kurz mobilized Austria’s extensive diplomatic network in South-Eastern Europe to close the Balkans migration route) made him attractive to those parts of the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class that had been progressively switching to the far-right part between 2005 and 2015. Kurz understood that a mere cosmetic makeover would not  be enough to make the party attractive. This is why he undertook a major re-branding exercise, leading the ÖVP to drop its historic name to become Die neue Vokspartei (“the New People’s Party”).22 The  rebranding operation centered the party around Kurz’s persona, whose youth and sometimes unusual positions allowed him to enlarge his base of support, with celebrities flocking in support – from motor racing champion Nikki Lauda and former Paralympic athlete Kira Grünberg to Greens defector Efganni Dönmez (an Austrian with Turkish heritage), in a move that was reminiscent of the Nicolas Sarkozy’ chase for celebrity support on his way to the Elysée in 2004–2006. In the end, Kurz’s transgressive behavior enabled him to win a large share of the votes among Millennials (particularly women under-30, a category in which the ÖVP rivaled the SPÖ in 2017 with 29% support23), aggregating them to a revivified Suburban and Provincial Middle Class base. The  resulting victory of die neue Volkspartei in the general election of October 15, 2017, had all the hallmarks of an electoral miracle for the Austrian center-right: just six months before the election, and under a different leadership, the old ÖVP was struggling to reach 20% in the polls, and lagged far behind both the SPÖ and the FPÖ. But once Kurz took over the party in March 2017, the situation was completely reversed. Immediately denouncing the coalition agreement with the Social Democrats that was keeping his party subordinate to interests the Suburban Middle Class wished to break away with  –  at least for a while, Kurz took it on himself to reclaim the leadership of his base class, increasingly courted by the FPÖ.24 This would probably have been enough for him to level his party’s support with the Social Democrats, but his additional appeal to the Millennials gave him the large majority he needed to secure the Chancellorship. It should be noted, however, that the key to Kurz’s success remains his leadership on the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class, who still form a large majority in Austria. The FPÖ’s results, meanwhile, show that their electoral base

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among the country’s New Minority has consolidated in 2017, with more than 59% support in the working-class populations according to exit polls.25 Contrary to what many political observers commented after the formation of a post-electoral Volkspartei-FPÖ coalition, Kurz’s electoral success does not rest on support from the far-right, but on the contrary from containing its progress among Austria’s middle class. The  question is now  of course to know whether the Austrian Chancellor will be able to keep the FPÖ at bay and weaken a New Minority electoral base that has never seemed as strong as it is now. In case anyone doubted, Kurz’s appeals to the center before and during the European elections of 2019 show very clearly that his base of support is certainly not among the working-class population of Austria. Another question mark hangs over the future of the SPÖ, who need to reinvent themselves and get used to a new opposition status (they had been continuously in power since 2002). Like their counterparts on the French and Dutch center-left, the Austrian Social-Democrats have been unable to anticipate sociological changes that have driven massive electoral upheaval since the beginning of the economic crisis. In fact, Christian Kern managed to save the party from a much more damaging defeat thanks to a massive last-minute shift in support from the Greens to the SPÖ in the final days of the campaign, a strategic vote that proved very costly for the latter, since they just fell short of reaching the 5% threshold required to enter Parliament. The Greens’ frustration is all the more understandable as they had hovered around the 10% mark for much of the ­campaign, and secured substantial support from the Millennials, giving them a possible future advantage in this demographics over the Social Democrats, who also have to compete for the support of the Creative Class, which is more and more attracted to a party that has been specifically created for them, the liberals of NEOS. The German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) faces similar challenges today, as it is living a disastrous electoral cycle, with federal elections that recorded its worst ever results in 2017, while the last regional and European elections of 2018 and 2019 have seen the party being challenged by the Greens for the leadership of the left. However, this is not merely a German phenomenon. Greens across North Western continental Europe have provided a fresh alternative to social democrats, which is proving extremely tempting for the Millennial electorate across the region, as recent results in the Netherlands, Belgium (2018 local elections), or Germany in 2018 have shown. This has had disastrous consequences for the SPD, as the party’s recent setbacks push its leaders to search for a new identity. Like the PS in France and the PvdA in the Netherlands, the SPD chose not to choose which of the four classes it should represent, but instead carried on bringing its old electoral coalition together, with as a result an almost continuous reduction in its share of the vote over the past 15 years. The SPD has thus lost relevance in the public debate, and voters have fled: the German working class abandoned its support for the party as a result of the Schröder reform, fleeing to

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Die Linke or towards apathy, before backing the new Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or Af D); the Millennials have progressively been coopted into the Greens, and the Creatives have never been fully bought into the SPD: few German bobos profess themselves to be Social Democrats today, and the SPD was unable to deploy a progressive narrative in its identity during its time in coalition, as Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union vampirized a large part of the party’s progressive agenda, in particular during the refugee crisis of 2015. For a while, Germany had been the exception in Europe: whereas all party systems around the continent were experiencing atomization and the old catchall parties going through a sharp decline, the Germans continued to largely put their trust in the two main parties, the CDU (and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Union or CSU) and the SPD. But this exception is coming to an end, as the last regional and European elections, along with the increased difficulties to form a government in 2017–2018 have shown. In  fact, the SPD is not  the only party that has faced sharp decline in support: despite their first place in the 2017 legislative elections, the CDU and CSU recorded their worst electoral result since 1949,26 and the 2018 regional elections confirmed this downward trend, as the Bavarian election saw the almighty CSU score its worst result since 1950.27 The results are all the more striking that, until 2015, it looked as though Chancellor Merkel, in power since 2005, was unbeatable. The  disappointing results in 2017–2018, which have forced the Chancellor to relinquish the head of the party to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, prove that this is no longer the case, and even if the CDU is individually in a far more comfortable position than the SPD, it will also have to adapt its messaging (and probably its electoral expectations) to the Great Class Shift. Why is the situation more complicated in the SPD than in CDU? The leadership of Angela Merkel has been a major factor, but it is not  the only one: historically, the CDU and the CSU have been the parties best suited to represent the middle class, which still makes up a sizeable part of the population. But while the SPD chose to abandon the non-urban lower middle class during the Schröder years (they would re-emerge a decade later and support Af D), the CDU managed to keep the trust of the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class, which along with the reassuring personality of Angela Merkel has allowed the party to thrive. That is, until 2015 and the migrant crisis, which not only brought about major tensions within German society, but also shook the heart of the CDU’s electorate. To understand what changed in the once almighty CDU, it is worth going back to the early days of July  2015, when the leadership of Angela Merkel remained uncontested and support for the CDU was still above the 40% mark. On Wednesday, July 15, while the number of asylum applications in Germany was starting to become a political issue (but had not yet reached crisis point – the real migrant crisis would only start in August), Angela Merkel traveled to

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Rostock for a town hall meeting with a group of teenagers. Confronted with the tears of a Palestinian girl whose family faced expulsion after spending four years in Germany, the Chancellor showed compassion, but remained inflexible: “If we say now that you can all come – you can come over from Africa, you can all come over, we won’t be able to cope”.28 The SPD (then as now partners in the Grand Coalition) protested, but to no avail: the combination of firmness and compassion was popular among Germans, in particular those from the middle class that were the base of the CDU vote. But the massive influx of migrants in August 2015 completely changed the situation: overtaken by events (like most of her European colleagues), the Chancellor radically changed her position in just a few days, and shifted from a restrictive migration policy to a generous policy of welcoming all asylum seekers, may they be Syrian refugees – or economic migrants. The change of hearts was reflected in a spectacular semantic change, from the “das können wir nicht schaffen” (we cannot cope) in her exchange with the Palestinian teenager to the famous “wir können das schaffen, und wir schaffen das”(we can do this, and we will do this), which became a symbol of her opendoor policy after September 2015. What could have led to this Damascene conversion? Apart from following an ethical path that is certainly plausible considering her religious background, Angela Merkel also took into account two factors: the first was economic, and resided in the growing demands of German business who were anticipating workforce shortages due to the aging population. The second was more political and consisted in depriving the SPD of the support of the Creative Class – a population that, from their bobo city centers of Berlin and Hamburg, considers immigration in a positive way as an agent of greater diversity. On these two grounds, the Chancellor’s plan had obviously succeeded: the major German industry’s challenge of a shrinking workforce in the long-term had been partially solved, and the wir schaffen das discourse had also made her the face of German welcoming policy towards migrants, thereby depriving the SPD of a campaign argument. But this strategy also created a profound division in German society, and especially among the CDU’s electorate. The representatives of the Suburban Middle Class had watched anxiously the images of refugees arriving at Munich railway station, and many were split between a real empathy for the migrants and a fear of the destabilizing effect that this sudden demographic change could have on their daily lives – this in a context in which Islam’s demographic growth continues to frighten almost all countries and regions on the periphery of the historic Muslim world.29 When, a few months later, the series of terrorist actions carried on by ISIS and the scandal of sexual harassment carried out by (predominantly) asylum-seekers in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve hit the headlines, the balance tipped towards fear: the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class had been led by the Creatives to allow for a promotion of diversity that was supposed to make Germany a better place, but instead the result was discord and chaos, a very un-Germanic notion in the post-war period – and therefore a source of

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considerable stress in the country. In the absence of an acceptable alternative (Angela Merkel had made hers the German term “alternativlos”, suggesting that her policies were not only common sense but also inevitable), the Provincial Middle Class did not  desert the CDU altogether, but many abstained from voting (or voted for the liberal of FDP), while some were tempted to vote for Alternative für Deutschland (Af D). Af D duly made a historic breakthrough in Germany in 2017. Created in 2013, first and foremost as a libertarian and Eurosceptic party, it had already achieved notoriety-level before the migrant crisis, winning seven seats in the European Parliament in 2014. But the 2014 party was very different from the one that gained fame subsequently. The departure of co-founder Bernd Lucke (a libertarian economist) in 2015 enabled a new generation of leaders to align the movement’s economic and social platform to the agenda of the New Minority, thereby following the examples set by Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders. Out, then, went the intellectual reasoning of the early days, and the libertarian economic platform; Af D would build its success around nostalgia for the “good old days” and the protection that they provided (particularly in East Germany), and above all the rejection of immigration, which was a subject that could appeal to the White Working Class vote, but also create affinities for parts of the stressed Suburban Middle Class. Being the only party present in this anti-immigration niche, Af D went through a phase of exponential growth, and took many outside commentators by surprise in the parliamentary elections in September 2017, before stabilizing its polling scores around 15%. The entry in the Bundestag of the first party to the right of the CSU since 1961,30 and its third place overall represented a shock for the political establishment. Further, it soured subsequent coalition talks, leading to a breakdown of the first coalition attempt between the CDU, the Greens and the liberals of FDP, before a new Grand Coalition was reconducted, albeit reluctantly. This  lame duck solution satisfied nobody and ended in the disappointing regional election results of the fall 2018 that in turn accelerated the departure of Angela Merkel as head of the CDU. Considering the historic nature of Af D’s breakthrough and its sudden rise to political significance, it would be easy to attribute this success solely to the migrant crisis. However, this would be missing the point: even the most perfunctory analysis of the Af D vote reveals that the party enjoys the support of a sociological base corresponding to a New Minority that is more workingclass in its East-German strongholds, and more peripheral lower middle class in Western Germany. Indeed, a glance at map results provides ample evidence of this: the former East-German Länder have indeed voted in larger numbers for Af D, and the areas most affected are the peripheral white working-class districts of the former GDR. Many of these Ossis still feel that they have had to pay much of the price for German reunification in the 1990s, and have felt betrayed by the SPD during the Schröder reforms, which flexibilized employment (and benefits) all over the country, creating much growth

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but also making life much harder in the least competitive (and very often, former East German) parts of the country. A  visit in these regions is usually enough to understand the situation: behind the beautiful make-overs of the city-centers in Dresden, Leipzig, or Berlin, where clean, ultra-modern buildings are offered to the eyes of all, life in the former East German industrial centers has seldom changed since the 1990s, and things have even gone backwards in the areas furthest from the city-centers as depopulation has led the state to close down social services one after the other, like in many other Western countries. 31 As one might logically expect, the working class in East Germany (or at least what was left of it) had initially flirted with the ex-communists of Die Linke, before taking refuge in abstention. Like many other modern left-wing parties, Die Linke has been torn from the very beginning between a traditional wing bent on working class support little attracted by diversity, and a post-1968 deconstructivist left that has made diversity (in particular ethnic diversity) and identity politics an act of faith. As Die Linke gradually saw its post-Communist ideology fade away, many former East German workers withdrew their support opting first of apathy before finding in Af D a party that corresponded to their aspirations on economic and social matters. As in many other European countries, the Af D has built its electoral success first and foremost on its ability to position itself as the champion of the old white working class, completing the white minority by adding to its ranks the more marginalized (and less educated) strata of society in the center of Germany and to the north of Bavaria, a phenomenon similar to that of the French Lepénisation of the valleys of the Rhône river in the late 1990s and of the Garonne river in the 2010s. For a long time, it appeared that Germany’s twentieth century history was to make the country a special case in Europe: after the horrors of World War II and the ensuing division of the country, the German political class had made it a point of honor to behave in exemplary fashion and always choose negotiation over polarization, a state of things that originally survived the 2008 crisis, but not the migrant crisis of 2015. Despite a much more stable social situation than its neighbors, the wealthiest country in Europe has therefore not been immune from the social upheavals that have radically altered Western political landscapes. In  this sense, the collapse of the consensual ­bipolar system dominated by two big-tent parties, while often lived as a catastrophe by the German political class, should be rather seen as a normalization of German politics, as the country’s party system comes to resemble more that of its neighbors. But some features of the past do remain, however, and notably the legacy of the GDR – which de facto connect at least Eastern Germany to a region with a different sociology: indeed, while the politics of North-West Europe revolve around a demographic advantage for the Suburban Middle Class, the same cannot be said of Central and Eastern Europe, where the dominant class is definitely the New Minority, and particularly what remains of the working class.

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Notes 1 The  concept of the Anglosphere, very much underestimated on the Continent, is indeed a powerful notion of identity that has created much stronger ties than the Commonwealth, notably because it is based on a shared culture and language. See for example Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics, Medford: Polity, 2018. 2 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 135. 3 The reason for Farage’s departure was the signing of the Maastricht Treaty by John Major’s Conservative government  – the treaty, establishing an “ever-closer union between the peoples of Europe”, acted in a way as the UKIP’s act of foundation – see the brief biography of Nigel Farage on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.com/ news/uk-politics-36701855. 4 See the report by the British electoral commission for these elections: http://www. electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/190959/UKPGE-reportMay-2015-1.pdf. 5 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections2014-results/en/country-results-uk-2014. html 6 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, p. 137. 7 Ibid., p. 139. 8 On the basis of several polls conducted on the day of the vote – see the fact-checking website Fullfact.org: https://fullfact.org/ europe/young-voters-and-eu-referendum. 9 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/eu-referendum-brexit-young-people-upsetby-the-outcome-of-the-eu-referendum-why-didnt-you-vote-a7105396.html 10 During the party’s leadership campaign in 2015, the Labour Party had received a huge number of membership applications (but not  requests to rejoin the party). Since then, the demographics of Labour’s membership (and its vote) have tipped very clearly towards young people, lured by Jeremy Corbyn’s agenda and personality – to the point that the  Economist proclaimed that age was now  the main point of contention between the Conservatives and Labour. See: https://www.economist.com/ blogs/speakerscorner/2017/06/youth-booth. 11 The  conservative Daily Telegraph nailed it in its headline: “Remember the good that ­government can do, says Theresa May as she vows to ­intervene to help workers”, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/theresa-may-patriotic-speech-­ conservative​-party-conference-live/. 12 Tim Shipman, Fallout: A  Year of Political Mayhem, London: HarperCollins, 2017, p. 184. 13 Ibid., p. 276. 14 Ibid., p. 368. 15 See IPSOS polls, aggregated and published on the NOS website: https://lfverkiezingen.appspot.com/nos/widget/main.html. 16 Ibid. 17 https://lfverkiezingen.appspot.com/nos/widget/main.html 18 Carinthia was the Austrian province (or Land) in which the Haider phenomenon had originated, with Haider having been the region’s governor from 1989 to 1991 and from 1999 until his death in 2008. Before that, and as a result of its strong anticlericalism, the region had been at the heart of the advances by the far-right that had occurred in the 1890s and at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before becoming an important haven for Fascist and Nazi groups in Austria between the two world wars. This historical flirtation by the region with the far-right is the subject of numerous jokes and anecdotes in the Austrian parties on both Right and Left – see for example Hellwig Valentin, Der Sonderfall: Kärntner Zeitgeschichte 1918–2014, Klagenfurt: Hermagoras, 2009.

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19 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 134. 20 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-austria-tracht/austrians-embrace-traditionaldress-despite-political-connotations-idUSKBN13O25H 21 The Austrian electoral system being based on a preferential lists system where individuals on the list can move up or down into (or out of ) electoral positions, Kurz had come first of all the “preferred candidate” votes. This means he had gathered more votes around his person than Chancelor Werner Faymann, but also the leader of his own party, Michael Spindelegger, which no doubt contributed to weakening the latter’s position as leader of the party. See https://balkanist.net/the-telegenic-mr-kurzaustrias-elections-and-a-likely-landmark-victory-for-the-populist-right/. 22 Kurz was merely following the footsteps of the rebranding he had led upon taking over the party’s political academy: the PolAk, with obvious mixed connotations for outsiders, had then changed its name to “Politische Akademie”. His action on the party though was much more thorough though – today, little remains of the “old popular party”, including in the hallmark colors, as the old trademark black is much less visible in the party’s graphic identity. See the website of the party: https://www.dieneuevolkspartei.at/. 23 SORA/ISA poll conducted for the APA and the ÖRF on 26 and 29 September 2017. An analysis of the poll is available on the website of the Wiener Zeitung: http:// www.wienerzeitung.at/nachrichten/oesterreich/politik/577204_SPOe-und-OeVPpunkten-bei-Frauen-FPOe-bei-Maennern.html. 24 SORA’s analysis of voter flows between 2013 and 2017, the ÖVP benefited from a swing from the FPÖ (around 17% of the electorate from 2013), but also from the Greens (14%), the liberals of NEOS (25%), and from people who voted for “none of the above” or refrained from voting altogether. See the survey here: http://www. sora.at/themen/wahlverhalten/wahlanalysen/waehlerstromanalysen/nrw17.html. 25 Source: SORA, quoted by Europe Elects: https://twitter.com/europeelects/status/ 919629835122569216?lang=fr. 26 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41376577 27 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/14/bavaria-poll-humiliation-forangela​-merkel-conservative-allies 28 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/angela-merkel-comforts-teenagepalestinian​-asylum-seeker-germany 29 This is not only true for Europe, a continent with multiple contact areas with Islam (and substantial, sometimes very ancient Muslim minorities or majorities on its soil). All areas that are situated in the immediate periphery of the Muslim world (and ­sometimes harbor Muslim minorities) are concerned, with different degrees of v­ iolence or fear of Islam having developed over the past decade: the Central African Republic and South Sudan/Sudan conflict are African examples of conflict, while Burma (with the Rohingya minority question) or China (with its treatment of Muslim in the province of Xinjiang) being other examples of conflict with Muslims in Asia – not forgetting the tensions in the Philippines or Southern Thailand; only South America does not, for the time being, seem to be affected by this rise in Islamophobia (to be interpreted here in accordance with the true meaning of the words: fear of Islam). 30 To the extent that the, the German party (Deutsche Partei), a national-conservative party representing many veterans of World War II, and the All-German Bloc  – League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights (Gesamtdeutscher Block/Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten, or GB-BHE) were deemed to be further to the right than the CDU. The two parties were present in the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany until the parliamentary elections of 1961, which consolidated Germany’s dominant two-party system – until recently. 31 See for example the account by the journalist Ellen Hinsey, and in particular her description of the towns of Halle, Hoyerswerda, and Weisswasser, all three of which are close to the Polish border. Ellen Hinsey, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, Candor: Telos Press, 2017, p. 168.

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Bibliography Ellen Hinsey, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, Candor: Telos Press, 2017. John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016. Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The  Anglosphere in British Politics, Medford: Polity, 2018. Tim Shipman, Fallout: A Year of Political Mayhem, London: HarperCollins, 2017. Hellwig Valentin, Der Sonderfall: Kärntner Zeitgeschichte 1918–2014, Klagenfurt: Hermagoras, 2009.

7 CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Power to the (white) working class

What we colloquially term as Central and Eastern Europe (the definition of “Central” and “Eastern” being subject to geographic differentiation between countries that consider themselves “Western”) has not  escaped the dramatic realignment of our social and political landscapes. In  many ways, the political consequences of the social upheavals of the late 2000s and early 2010s have been even more spectacular in the region, as the electoral victories of right-wing ˇ leaders such as Viktor Orbán, but also liberal ones such as Zuzana Caputová have shown over the past few years. These sometimes quite violent political swings are the results of the same social transition as in Western Europe, completed by the experience of the 1990s democratic transition. Indeed, the post-communist party systems, patiently built up by the new (and not-so-new) national elites in the 1990s had remained very fragile. They were therefore impacted more quickly by the 2008 crisis, as shown by the collapse of the Hungarian Left in 2010 (that gave Orbán’s Fidesz a constitutional majority) or that of the Christian-Democratic center-right in Slovakia in the general election of 2012. In  each case, the two historic political families never fully recovered, and this contributed to the establishment of spectacular imbalances in the two countries’ political systems. These imbalances should be of course attributed to the serious mistakes made by political leaders at the time – Ferenc Gyurcsány’s withholding of the financial situation in Hungary in 2006 and his infamous Balatono˝szöd speech,1 or the Gorila scandal that rocked the campaign of the 2012 legislative elections in Slovakia.2 However, the long-term trend of political re-composition is so large across the region that it cannot solely be attributed to specific, or indeed short-term factors. In fact, after two decades of dominance by political parties accepting liberal democracy as face-value, the whole region has shifted to a more uncertain political landscape, whose imbalance is now linked – at least partly – to the dominance of the white working class.

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Central and Eastern European history and culture have been marked by the Communist experiment of 1945–1991 (sometimes 1917–1991), and Soviet dominance left traces everywhere, whether in the economic fabric (particularly in the most easterly countries or regions) or in people’s mentalities. It is worth noting here that Communist ideology theoretically aimed at “liberating” the working class, seizing power via the establishment of a dictatorship of the ­proletariat – a precondition for the construction of an egalitarian Socialist society, uncluttered by the concept of private property. Therefore, the popular imagery of communist regimes gave workers and peasants an essential role in society, and a ­culturally dominant position, with heroic workers featuring along workersoldier or worker-partisan in the pantheon of Socialist Realism and symbolistic soviet monuments, some of which are still visible today. In the post–World War II Eastern bloc, being part of the proletariat was a badge of honor. But it was also the promise of a better world, dominated by the working class. Its values were indeed at the core (at least theoretically, and in areas of life where the party didn’t have control, also in reality) of the communist experiment: whereas the West wanted to integrate the working class into the middle class, Moscow wanted the middle class to integrate into the working class – although in the end the reality of the Brezhnev-era’s actual “Existing Socialism” created something in between, a sort of poor middle-class co-opted into working-class imagery. The implosion of the socialist economic system in the 1980s greatly modified the situation: after the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet Empire, the majority of the factories and mines, unsuited to the market economy, were shut down, while professions that had hitherto been respectable and respected (such as doctors or teachers) became socially and monetarily devalued, as state institutions dismantled, drastically decreasing public-sector salaries and pensions. In a matter of months, sometimes days, vast swathes of the population went from having a decent social (if not economic) status, with a job for life, to having no status at all. It is still difficult, particularly in the West, to imagine the social cataclysm that the collapse of the socialist economic systems represented – and its consequences on people’s psyche. Immediate effects, though, were immediately apparent. Apart from the former communist elites who were mostly able to quickly readjust (and increase their profits exponentially) during the privatization period, Central and Eastern European societies split into two categories: those who were able to get or stay out of the old industrial centers and adapted to the market economy – they were to form the heart of a new Suburban Middle Class – and those who stayed in post-communist “rust belts” that became social ghettos, to form the heart of a new, over-sized working-class minority in the post-communist space. In the context of the planned economy, where heavy industry was often reserved for the Soviet Union, the dominance of this white working class very often followed a geographical crescendo pattern: the further West one went, the more middle class the social landscape became. On the other hand, the further East one went, the more industrial (or post-industrial) the landscape became, and once arrived in Russia, the social dominance of the white working class was beyond questioning,

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except in Moscow and St. Petersburg, two urban islands where a Provincial (in fact suburban) Middle Class rubs shoulders with a Creative Class living in the very affluent (but also very small) city centers and university hubs. The numerical weakness of the Creatives can be explained by the rough transition towards a market economy in the 1990s, but also by the legacy of communism: apart from the 1968 Prague Spring, there is no consequential Eastern bloc equivalent to the Western student revolts of the late 1960s, which marked the starting point for the liberalization of society and the rise of diversity as a positive value. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the liberal movement is not entirely absent, but it stayed underground, promoted by a rare breed of young intellectuals such as Václav Havel, whose career path in the 1970s could not have been more different from the still extraordinary but far more linear destiny of Western May-68ers like Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Here again, a geographical gradation from West to East is clearly visible in terms of the size (or rather lack thereof ) of the “Eastern beatnik” movement: at the time, and even after the persecution that followed the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia witnessed a modest, but noticeable rise of a young rebel movement – dubbed Mániˇcky, with psychedelic rock bands like Plastic People of the Universe obtaining cult status, these young artists, intellectuals and their followers braved persecution from the authorities, and were to form the basis of Vaclav Havel’s Charter 77 movement. Very present in Czech lands, the Mániˇcky movement was much less active in the Slovak half of the country, and in the more Eastern parts of the bloc, to the extent that the Soviet Union remained sealed off from the lifestyle (and sexual) revolution of the 1970s: in 1986, during a televised show featuring a direct dialogue between American and Soviet citizens, a citizen from Leningrad named Lyudmila Ivanova declared, without the slightest trace of irony: “There is no sex in the USSR”. She was talking about pornography or the public culture of sex, and she was right: the subject was still completely taboo among the Soviet public at that time, even though Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost was already well under way. This  historic divergence between West and East has of course had consequences for the Creative Class’ presence in the region: while its emergence as a social and political force dates back to the late 1990s, it finds its genesis in the 1968 social revolution and the gradual rise of individualism since then. But East of the Iron Curtain, this change did not occur. As a result, the rise of the Creative Class has been greatly slowed down by the challenge of transitioning to democracy and the market economy in the 1990s. In some instances, the rise of the Creatives would be associated with the chaos of the economic transition of the 1990s: at the time, many early Creatives were often linked with the old Socialist nomenklatura: familiar with capitalist economic mechanisms and thanks to an extensive network, they were able to take advantage of this uncertain period to get rich quickly and secure the jobs of the future, while the rest of the population struggled to earn a decent lifestyle, defined by the canons of the Western-style middle class. In Russia, an extreme example, Vladimir Putin’s base popularity was built on a social rejection of the Moscow and St. Petersburg

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embryonic Creative Class, open to Western influences (always a suspicious feature in the minds of many Slavophile/Eurasianist Russians). In the eyes of many, these Creatives were associated with the oligarchs who looted the country during the Yeltsin years. The Creatives are not the only weaker class in Central and Eastern Europe. Millennials are also much less numerous than in North Western Europe for a number of reasons: first, against the backdrop of the implosion of the socialist economies in the 1980s and the uncertainty of the economic transition in the 1990s, many young couples got reluctant to have children, while the increased rate of divorce (very often caused by social hardships) did limit the size of many families. Secondly, starting in the 1990s and going well into the 2010s, the region has lived a constant emigration of young and talented graduates to North-West Europe and North America, where they could continue their studies and find creative jobs. The trend has somewhat slowed down recently in some countries as some cities in the region are starting to emerge as creative hubs (often thanks to the presence of quality universities and relatively inexpensive cost of living), with Tallinn becoming the world center of e-government culture, Warsaw and Bratislava becoming magnet-cities for the region’s hipsters, just like Bucharest and the Transylvanian university towns of Romania. But that does not mean that the trend is reversed, and while many are still dreaming to leave their country for the more affluent parts of Europe, very few Creatives who have made it “in the West” actually come back. As a result, Millennials constitute a small minority in the post-communist societies, and they very often have to join forces with the Creatives in order to get a critical mass – this is what led to the creation of Momentum in Hungary, or Progressive Slovakia. But because of the numerical inferiority (and isolation) of both classes, very often this alliance is not sufficient to even contemplate reaching a popular majority. In the meantime, Millennials’ and Creatives’ quest for transparency and diversity directly clash with a much stronger culture of uniformity inherited from the socialist period, still very present in the post-communist subconscious. The writer Ellen Hinsey conveys this subconscious appeal for uniformity in her book Mastering the Past, in which she relates an interview with a former citizen of the GDR – asked about his views on the transition to the market economy, he laments the times of communism, where “there was one kind of milk, bread, meat – there were no choices. After, we went home and talked about literature. There was a feeling of solidarity. In some ways, we were living in a fairytale”3 – a fairytale very removed from the standards of the Creative and Millennial diversity paradise. In this sociological context, it is easier to understand why in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which have been marked in many countries in Central Europe by hard austerity policies, many citizens in the region have rejected the Creatives’ liberalism. It started very early in Russia, where Vladimir Putin became the forerunner of the promotion of “illiberal democracy”: as Creatives and Millennials are concentrated in the two suburban islands of Moscow and St. Petersburg (and also because these cities are still surrounded by sprawling Soviet suburbs in

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which a very openly nationalist Suburban Middle Class reigns supreme), Putin has built his popularity on this workers/middle-class public, which constitutes a large majority of the Russian population. To do so his general policy model rests on the rebuilding of a social uniformity that is seen to be linked to the “golden days” (in many Russians’ minds) of the Soviet Union. This model contrasts with that of the West, where diversity has been championed for the last 30 years. This allows the Russian President to flatter the nationalist and Eurasianist sentiments of the country’s working and middle classes. Vladimir Putin’s virile style has also been very much tailor-suited to appeal to these same categories of the Russian population, that together constitute a strong basis of support that he can mobilize thanks to a propaganda machine that makes any election exercise in the country more of a Potemkin show than a real electoral contest. As British journalist Edward Luce explains: “Whether it is taking his shirt off to go hunting, or zooming on to the stage on a Harley and in Ray-Bans at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Putin’s shape-shifting appearances are calibrated for the Russian left-behinds”,4 who remains the heart of his support base in a closed space that still needs to give some form of popular perceived legitimacy to the regime. Other leaders in central Europe have noticed the effectiveness of Putin’s strategy, and have tried to emulate him in legitimizing their power via an appeal to the working class and the Suburban Middle Class. Chief among them of course is Viktor Orbán. While the point of this book is not to discuss the state of democracy in either Russia or Hungary, it is interesting to see how the two most famous advocates of different brands of illiberalism in the region have relied on a relatively similar coalition to get to and keep power. But the Russian and Hungarian leaders come from different points: while the first one consolidated his position in the working class before consolidating his power by appealing to the Suburban Middle Class, Viktor Orbán went the other way, as his Fidesz movement (originally a liberal party) was in the 2000s a predominantly Suburban Middle Class party with support outside of Budapest and in the countryside. However, since 2010 and his comeback to power, the Hungarian Prime Minister has understood that extending his appeal to the old Hungarian working class was the best way to ensure a very high level of support that he regularly translates into large popular majorities. This difference in coalition-building, along with major cultural differences, certainly explains why Orbán has not choreographed appearances fishing in army fatigues, or taking to the skies in an ultra-light aircraft to observe Siberian wild geese. Despite this major difference, the Hungarian leader’s positioning is sometimes strikingly similar to Vladimir Putin’s, and this shows clearly in their common rhetoric: defending traditions from “cosmopolitan” Western liberalism (an anti-Creatives mantra that brings together their two target electorates), a propensity to portray these Creatives and Millennials as the enemy from within, and the promotion of uniformity – an easy task for Putin as his main point of reference remains the 1945 victory of the Soviet Union over the fascists and its return to a status of Great Power, while Orbán plays more discreetly but no less effectively on the memories of the lost pre-1918 Greater Hungary, which was assimilationist and centralized in its essence. In this context,

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both leaders’ relative strength in public opinion often contrast with the relative weakness of the Russian and Hungarian opposition that find it difficult to get out of their urban ghettos of Budapest, Moscow, and St. Petersburg – something that is of course made harder by a more difficult access to television, which remains the main instrument of outreach to major non-urban areas in both countries. It is worth noting that these two cases of achieving an arch-dominant position through the exclusive support (by democratic or, in the case of Russia at least, other means) from the Suburban Middle Class and the New Minority remains an exception. At  present, and despite increasingly glaring institutional weaknesses, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have not gone down this route, not least due to the fragmented nature of their political landscape, which makes it very difficult for a single actor to emerge and take the lead of one of the two classes, let  alone build a coalition between the two. This  atomization makes it very difficult for any single actor to secure a constitutional majority similar to that achieved by Fidesz in Hungary in 2010. Despite their political dominance, both Slovakia’s SMER and Czechia’s ANO have always had to work together with other parties representing the Provincial Middle Classes and the old Czechoslovak working classes, and this significantly limits their ability to dominate their political landscape. This is one of the reasons why Slovakia’s SMER was unable to win the country’s last two presidential elections (in 2014 and 2019), despite having consolidated over the past ten years a position of relative dominance over the Slovak party landscape. In the early 2010s, it seemed that Ukraine was going to take a similar path as Russia, when Viktor Yanukovych’s regime used its electoral victory in 2010–2013 to close the system to rivals, but the Revolution of Dignity in the winter of 2013–2014 put an end to the concentration of powers. The revolution itself was led by a very resolute Creative Class that had come to define Kyiv’s intellectual scene, and was represented (among others) by civic leaders such as Mustafa Nayyem or journalists such as Serhiy Leshchenko, who felt that their country by all means belonged to the West, and reacted to then-president Yanukovych’s attempt to renounce the Association Agreement with the EU. The latter’s forceful response to protests that were originally peaceful led to a much larger alliance that brought together Millennials, Creatives, and members of the Ukrainian Provincial Middle Class that were ready to defend their country and their ideals. But despite the final victory of the Euromaidan and major reforms being passed in its immediate aftermath, the revolution did not usher into a new dominance of the Creative Class. That is because Ukraine’s political scene has remained the playground of competing oligarchs, who compete for influence either directly or by supporting different political projects. In their fierce competition for the vote and loyalty of (mostly) the Suburban Middle Class and workers, they had left many of the Creatives and Millennials isolated, and it remains to be seen whether the election of Volodymyr Zelensky will change the terms of the debate in the long term. In fact, it is very much hoped that the emergence of a stable Creative political force could help the country to really break away from the post-Soviet

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politics of the past three decades. The jury is still out on whether this could be the case, but one thing is certain: the Creatives’ demographic presence in all of Ukraine’s major cities5 does make them a much more formidable electoral force that would ever be the case in Russia. The  rise of Creative Class has led to the formation of new parties across the region, not  least of which in Romania, where the capital, Bucharest, the urban centers of Transylvania (Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu), and the university towns of Timis,oara and Ias,i have been hotspots for the creation of new parties and movements. Together with many of their compatriots based in foreign countries, these new urbanites came out in major numbers (and mobilized their families) to elect Klaus Iohannis as president in November 2013. Iohannis did not  run for office under the banner of diversity (although his German origins and past career as the mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu pleaded for it), but rather on the fight against corruption, an endemic problem that is mobilizing creatives in the region’s big urban centers. This mobilization made it possible to elect as President a reformer backed by both Creatives and the country’s middle class, although his action has largely been balanced by a parliament dominated by the Social Democrats of PSD. On this note, it is worth emphasizing that unlike in Western Europe, Romania’s Social Democrats (along with the Bulgarian Socialist Party) have remained very close to the old working class, and have positioned themselves as the champion of the New Minority, with the heart of their support still coming from the country’s old industrial zones. The main reason is that the PSD never really had to choose between promoting diversity or immigration and supporting the working class: since modern Romania has so far been a land of emigration, it has so far not been affected by an influx of migrants. As for the many minorities in the country, while they very often end up in a position of kingmakers in parliament, their electoral relevance to the Great Class Shift of the past ten years is limited, due to electoral specifics: the Hungarian minority has a party of its own whose effectiveness in voters’ mobilization allows them to compete with the other Romanian parties in general elections (with a stable voter pool almost exclusively made of the Magyar-speaking minority), while other ethnic minorities (Roma notably) have reserved seats in parliament, which guarantees them representation – but also ensures that they will not join the Creatives or Millennials in a coalition, as it is often the case in Western Europe. Given that the Creative Class has also been slow to emerge in Romania, the PSD has had no dilemma to solve between an old and a new electorate. It has therefore found it more expedient (and electorally bankable) to continue to speak for the working class, which remains a very powerful electoral force, not  least thanks to local patronage. This  is what the Creatives are rising up against: After successfully supporting President Ioannis in 2013, they realized their political power, and are now organizing in new urban parties like the Save Romania Union (USR) or more recently former Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos,’s Romania Plus, with transparency acting as a rallying cry.

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Nevertheless, the Creative class is still very much a minority in Romanian society, and its power is limited by the fact that it is concentrated in the country’s big urban centers; this explains both the spectacular success of the mobilization of Romania’s big cities against corruption in January 2017, but also the score of 8.92% obtained by USR in the last parliamentary election, a result that was encouraging for a brand new party, but was a long way from enabling the creative class to claim to conduct the country’s affairs as a majority leader. In order to gain access to power, Romania’s creative class will probably need to form a coalition with the party that represents the Provincial and Suburban Middle Class, the National Liberal Party (PNL). The oldest party still in existence in continental Europe, the PNL has indeed managed to face its own prospects of electoral decay by making itself the advocate of those Romanians who live in the richer areas around the main city centers (in the parliamentary election of 2016, it achieved one of its best scores in the region of Ilfov, which surrounds Bucharest),6 and Transylvania, which remains culturally middle class, if only through the heritage left by its Habsburg legacy.7 The PNL’s electoral potential, however, is still incomplete, as the institutional weight of a historic party, along with the strength of regional barons, make the party’s transformation into an electoral mobilization machine much more difficult. While this limits its capacity to achieve a plural majority against the Social Democrats in legislative contests, the PNL’s electoral base is sufficient to ensure it a wide representation, particularly in the North West of the country and in the suburban areas around Bucharest. This in turn makes the party’s mobilization crucial for President Iohannis’ prospects for re-election: the president has built around himself a coalition of Creatives and middle class, where the PNL’s positions are aligned with those of the creatives in support for liberally inspired economic reforms and foreign policy orientation towards the West (whereas that of Romania’s social-democrats is moving increasingly towards the idea of Romania withdrawing into an alliance of central European countries). Of  course, this PNL-USR alliance has its own contradictions, in particular on social issues, but these seem at present less important than the willingness of the two parties to break the dominance of the Social Democrats, who retain a well-oiled mobilization machinery in their strongholds thanks to their historical networks (along with a strong power of patronage). This advantage was clearly seen in the general election of December  2016, where the PSD built itself a strong majority while the Creatives’ and middle class parties were not able to mobilize their voters – however, this advantage for the left will be much leveled by the vote of Romanians abroad in the presidential election in 2019, where the second round will probably see a working-class PSD candidate challenge incumbent president Iohannis. The latter’s capacity to consolidate his alliance between urban creatives and the Provincial Middle Class will be decisive for his re-election. Finally, the case of Poland is interesting, as Polish classes balancing each other much more than any other country in the region. This is not to say that

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the country is not polarized – by Poles’ own admission it is very much so, and this represents a major political problem in their eyes.8 But this polarization is also the result of a heads-on value clash between the Creative Class (currently represented by the opposition) and the working class, whose champions, the Law and Justice party (PiS), are currently in government. Another interesting aspect of the Polish case is that its realignment started before all the others: indeed, the social-democratic left had all but disappeared after its obliteration in the general election of 2005, which pitted the conservatives of PiS and the liberals of Civic Platform (PO) against one another. In  the next election in 2007, the new two-party system was consolidated, with an increasingly marked East-West split coupled with a geographical sliding scale that corresponded to the lesser presence of the working class (due to a more thorough development of the regions) as one went closer to the German border. There is also evidence of a growing divide between towns and the countryside, confirmed during the 2018 local elections: looking at electoral maps from 2007 onwards, one can see that the most creative urban centers systematically voted for the liberal parties and against the conservatives of the PiS – this is clearly the case in Warsaw, Łódz´, and Krakow, three cities in the eastern half of the country currently standing like liberal islands surrounded by a sea of PiS support in the countryside. As the Creatives of PO have collided head-on with PiS and its workingclass supporters, the Polish middle class, which is much stronger than in any other country of the region, is the key-class that decides the fate of elections. Two electoral maps help understand this pivotal role: the map of the 2011 general elections show a continued division between the East and the West of the country, but in 2011 the cities of Warsaw and Łódz´, which voted heavily for Civic Platform, were surrounded by an orange (the color of PO) belt of support in their large suburban areas. In 2015, this belt had disappeared completely, as these Powiats switched their support to PiS. Of course, the departure of leader Donald Tusk for Brussels and voter fatigue played their role, but the main reason for this switch in support were the chain of scandals that affected the party in 2014–20159 and switched the country’s Suburban Middle Class to the conservatives: moral rectitude is a central element in its system of values – it was based on this argument that François Fillon won the French center-right primary in 2016, and lost the presidential race in 2017. Civic Platform’s reputation did not  survive these scandals. And just like in the United States, Suburbia switched its support from the liberals to the conservatives, as Jarosław Kaczynski and his campaign team did not shy away from campaigning on the incorruptibility of his party. PiS’s victory in the election in 2015 rested first on its ability to unite its base, mainly composed of members of the New Minority (the countryside, the working class and people living in peripheral parts of Poland, generally in the East), but also to its new appeal to large sections of the Provincial Middle Class that had supported Donald Tusk in the previous election. These swing

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voters first switched sides to elect the moderate conservative Andrzej  Duda over Platform’s candidate Bronislaw Komorowski in the presidential elections, before confirming PiS’ victory by giving them a parliamentary majority a few months later. As Poland prepares for a new electoral cycle, the PiS’s support base is intact, if we are to believe the numerous polls published nowadays in Poland: in spite of the governments’ illiberal temptations and measures that largely departed from the European mainstream (many of which were stopped through organized action by Polish civil society, mainly in the major cities), Kaczyn´ski’s party still holds an advantage in the polls, although its isolation may in the short- or long-term cost it dearly. PiS’ popularity is not  surprising: Poland’s conservatives have stuck to the agenda they were voted for (a particularly popular measure was the “500+” program, which provided a grant of 500 Złoty, i.e. around 115 Euros per month per child for every family with two children or more), thereby consolidating their support in the working class. In the meantime, while the opposition has scored important victories in the local elections of October 2018, its triumph in the bigger cities like Warsaw (where PO candidate Rafał Trzaskowski was elected in the first round) was tempered by much closer election for the Voivodeship councils  – as they included suburban and peripheral areas of Poland. In short, the opposition has so far found it difficult to recapture the middle classes lost in 2014 and 2015, and its base of support remains trapped in the centers of large cities. The  Polish liberals are not  alone: even though central Europe’s electorate is still dominated by the new minority, the countries that have joined the European Union after 2004 have been able to build a Suburban Middle Class that has become the key to electoral success: very often, one sees the champion of the white working class, or (less often) of the Creative Class build support a majority among middle-class voters, and thereby ensure a dominant position in the national political landscape. One also notes here that ideology is less important than sociology: Poland’s Law and Justice party (very much on the right) and Romania’s PSD (on the left of the traditional political spectrum) have built their success on a support base in the New Minority. However, their success could not  be fulfilled if they did not  benefit from either the apathy (in the case of Romania) or support (in the case of Poland or Hungary) of the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class. As this category of the population is very often more nationalist and traditionalist than their Western counterparts, a real dilemma has emerged for these countries’ Creative leaders  – at least in countries where elections are still open and meaningful: gaining this key population’s support very often means making major concessions, and so many liberal parties have had to choose between ideological purity (combined with opposition status) or a shot at power with a watered-down platform. Over the recent years, liberals have often opted for the former, leaving options wide open for partisans of illiberal politics to build much stronger coalitions, and therefore consolidate their power.

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Notes 1 During the Balatono˝szöd party congress of the Hungarian Socialist Party in 2006, then party leader and Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsányi delivered a speech that was supposed to remain private, but was quickly leaked to the press. In this speech Gyurcsányi, used particularly crude language to explain how the government had “lied in the morning, at noon and at night” about the situation in the country during the election. The leaking of the speech provoked a crisis that delegitimized the government and the party and further encouraged the radicalization of Fidesz, paving the way for the latter’s electoral triumph in 2010, followed by controversial constitutional and justice reforms. See the translation of the speech at http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/europe/5359546.stm. 2 The  Gorila scandal takes its name from a Slovak secret service wiretap file from the mid 2000s, which recorded exchanges between politicians, officials and business executives (some of whom were linked with organized crime) suggesting collusion or corruption in their discussions. The files were never officially authentified, but they led to nationwide scandal, and protests that brought the end of the dominance of the ­centre-right landscape by the moderate Christian-Democratic SDKU-DS. See https:// www.ft.com/content/6fc1858c-48cd-11e1-954a-00144feabdc0#axzz1vnHfrPLW. 3 Ellen Hinsey, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, Candor: Telos Press, 2017, p. 166. 4 Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, London: Little Brown, 2017, p. 131. 5 A plethora of articles have been written about the “hipsterization” of the Ukrainian capital. See in particular this article from Politico: https://www.politico.eu/article/ kievs-hipster-revolution-russia-ukraine-culture. 6 For a detailed analysis of the electoral geography of the general election of 2016 in Romania, see https://www.electoralgeography.com/new/en/countries/r/romania/ romania-legislative-election-2016.html. 7 In Central and Eastern Europe, old imperial borders still have a significance, as they very often shaped the unconscious of inhabitants, and therefore their self-identity. See https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/11/21/imperial-borders-stillshape-politics-in-poland-and-romania, or for a more Romanian-centered view: https://emerging-europe.com/intelligence/romania-the-unready/. 8 According to a Gf K poll conducted for the International Republican Institute in 2017, 50% of Poles questioned felt that their country’s political parties were currently incapable of working together, including in the most difficult circumstances. Only 17% thought that the current dynamic is moving towards greater consensus, and 77% saw this polarization as a negative thing. See http://www.iri.org/resource/ new-survey-poles-politically-divided-reject-putin-style-autocracy. 9 An example is “waiter-gate” in June 2015, which revealed instances of cronyism, and the embarrassing conversations between senior civic platform figures in restaurants in Warsaw: the scandal led to the resignations of several ministers, but beyond the opprobrium this caused, it was above all the fact that some of them kept their jobs, despite the charges made against them, that prompted many column inches to be written about the row. See: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33089659.

Bibliography Ellen Hinsey, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, Candor: Telos Press, 2017. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, London: Little Brown, 2017.

8 SOUTHERN EUROPE The heart of the Millennial Challenge

If the legacy of the communist experiment largely explains the state of things in Central and Eastern Europe, the Southern part of the continent has other points of reference. Indeed, far from being a time of duress and privation, the 1980s and 1990s were on the contrary a “golden age” of sustained growth and increased prosperity for Mediterranean Europe. With political stability achieved, solid economic indicators and a consolidated democracy, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain ended the twentieth century in a state of euphoria, after more than two hundred years of economic and political turmoil. The Club Med’s large share in hosting some of the largest sporting events during this period is a testimony of this triumphant mood: Spain hosted the 1982 FIFA World Cup and the 1992 Olympic Games, Italy the 1990 FIFA World Cup, Greece the 2000 Olympiads, and Portugal the 2004 UEFA Football European Championship. From the early 2000s, however, the situation started to deteriorate, with trouble hitting first Italy, the third-largest economy in the Euro-zone. The  2008 crisis would be devastating for the region, as it engendered massive social crises and high levels of emigration that still affects Europe’s social fabric today. While the region immediately felt the effects of the financial disaster of 2008  – for example in Spain, where the financial crash burst the real estate bubble, the recession of 2008–2010 was not followed by a period of slow growth as in most of Europe, but by a deepening of the crisis. Indeed, the region’s banking sector was so toxic that individual states literally had to ruin themselves to keep their national private banks aflot (along with the savings of their citizens): we now know how much of a financial black hole the World’s oldest bank, Monte dei Paschi, has been to the Italian state treasury,1 but this extreme example is only one case among many: in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Cyprus, the entire banking system almost crashed between 2008 and 2010. And in each case, it was the states themselves that had to pay the bill: that was enough to keep at least the

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strategic banks running, but insufficient to maintain the financial sovereignty of these countries. Thus, the banking crisis became a sovereign debt crisis,2 where taxpayers had to pay for the transgressions of their banks and their governments. Against the backdrop of a collapsing economy, particularly in Greece where the recession ended only in 2014, the social consequences could only be spectacular. The experience of the crisis radically altered the social composition of Southern Europe, and with it, its political climate. Today, despite very low birth rates (even by European standards), the region’s politics is increasingly dominated by a “Millennials plus” demographic that sits on the margins of society. While the far-right is less present in the region (except in Italy, where the north of the country is still an industrial center that provides a New minority core for Matteo Salvini’s Northern League), left-wing populism is clearly a popular option: it is associated with a left-of-center coalition in Portugal, took power in Greece in 2015 and remains a pivotal power broker in Spain thanks to the electoral success of Podemos and the various far-left parties of Catalonia – chief among them the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the more anarchist-leaning Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP). This success in polls might seem paradoxical, given than these parties’ Millennial supporters do not in fact have a numerical advantage in the region, due to very weak birth rates since the late 1970s, and emigration of talented young individuals to North West Europe and the Americas after 2008. This  is certainly true, but the fact is that the Millennial Class is actually strongest in Southern Europe, as a “tribe” of educated young people left at the periphery of society. A  testimony of this marginalization is to be found in youth unemployment rates: 35.1% in Italy (more than three times the 11.1% average for the whole active population), 38.7% in Spain (as opposed to 16.7% in the entire workforce), and 43.3% in Greece (versus 20.6% for the whole active population3). While unemployment remains an endemic problem in Southern Europe, it has hit young people the hardest, to the extent that even university graduates have to deal with long-term unemployment. The countries of Southern Europe now have to face a situation where a whole section of their population is now completely excluded from the economic system and this social marginalization cannot go without political repercussions. Worse still, the social crisis is not  limited to the Millennials, as the 20.6% unemployment numbers for Greece suggest. Indeed, following the collapse of national economies in 2008–2012, a large cohort of Creatives and Middle-Class professionals have lost their jobs and gone through a similar process of social marginalization. This has certainly been the case in Spain, for instance, where countless members of Generation X had built their careers in the construction/ architecture business or as interior designers  very lucrative professions in the 2000s, during the boom years of residential construction. With the property crash that followed the stock market crisis of 2008, these professions became obsolete virtually overnight. Their disappearance resulted in the marginalization of individuals who had hitherto believed that Spain’s growth depended on them and went from having the status of globalization beneficiaries to that

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of middle-aged unemployed in need of retraining (often with a mortgage to pay and children to bring up). One can easily imagine the social rage felt by these people after their social downgrade, which led them to join the cohort of Millennials seeking for a radical revamping of the system. This social context explains the success of left-wing populisms in the region, with electoral scores that very often vary with how deep each country has been affected by the crisis. Greece undoubtedly paid the heaviest price, as average household income fell by more than a third between 2007 and 2013 – the biggest fall among all OECD countries, and a loss four times higher than the average for the Euro-zone.4 Of course, these are median figures, which hide the individual drama and the ruin of entire families that such a titanic figure  entails. This does not excuse or mitigate real abuse in the years preceding 2008, as newspapers across Europe have pointed out in their stories of individual and corporate tax frauds, cases of embezzlement and waste of public money (in the process, they very often passed on the suspicious behavior of their own government and banking system, who continued to provide the money in investments and loans that were known to be unsustainable). But whether or not one feels the Greeks deserved the treatment they were subjected to, the social consequences were spectacular – and undisputable: between 2008 and 2014, Greece went from an unemployment rate of 7.7%–27% (more than 50% for young people), while levels of extreme poverty rose from 11.5% to 21.5%.5 These spectacular figures explain the emergence of alternative political offers, especially on the left. Stemming originally from the euro-communist movement, the party Syriza was the focal point of this voters’ revolt, as the dynamic leadership of leader Alexis Tsipras allowed the party to gradually take the political lead on social movements against austerity (in which many Millennials took part) and transform them into an electoral force. Syriza enjoyed spectacular rise in the 2012 election, reaching a score of 26.89% in June 2012, in stark contrast with its 4.60% in 2009. It is worth noting that the party’s support was already based “among young voters, the unemployed, and the urban employed in both public and private sectors”, while it recorded its worst results “among housewives, senior citizens and rural voters”.6 This  sociological contrast is the basis of the new fault-line in Greek politics, as New Democracy, whose electorate is still firmly rooted in the Suburban Middle Class is now the prime challenger of Syriza, the party of the Millennials and the newly marginalized. The prize being (among other) the control of the state’s shrinking resources, which need to be redistributed among each party’s electorate (a problem that we see growing in many other countries, including France). In this context, there is little room for compromise and cross-class votes: in 2012, Syriza got 45.5% of votes among 18–24-year-olds, double its national score. On the other hand, it only won 13.8% of the vote among the over-65s,7 a figure that speaks volumes about the generational fault lines in Southern Europe. Socio-demographic pressure thus radically changed the Greek political landscape, and its first victim (as has so often been the case in Europe) has been the

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traditional center-left party, PASOK. The winner of the 2009 general elections (with 43.92% of the vote), PASOK could only net 6.3% of the vote six years later, in the September 2015 elections. The party lost its credibility almost immediately after the 2009 election, as Prime Minister Papandréou, arriving in power at the height of the financial crisis after campaigning on a generous redistributive platform, had no other option than to implement a policy at the exact opposite of what he had campaigned for just a few months before. This  drastic political reversal during a crisis of titanic proportions ensured that the PASOK lost all of its credibility among the electorate. It was therefore unable to turn itself into the defender of one of the four classes, a move that would have assured it of some form of existence, albeit a less prominent one than in the past. But as electoral vacuums never last, this electorate would not be lost for long: in 2014, Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza not only continued to secure a very large proportion of the Millennial vote, his accession to power meant that he could also take control of the PASOK’s old patronage networks (particularly in the public sector), thereby securing a stable electorate in the Greek middle class. When faced with the inevitability of implementing the austerity measures he had campaigned against in 2015, Alexis Tsipras showed he had learnt the lessons from the PASOK disaster: rather than abandoning his voters, he would stick to them, at least rhetorically, while implementing the drastic measures imposed by the Troika. One should remember that Syriza’s election in January 2015 literally left Brussels (and the Western capitals) thunderstruck, as this was the first victory ever for a populist party in “Western” Europe. Tsipras’ electoral success had obviously created high hopes for many in Greece and beyond, as the dreams of a socialist takeover to end austerity policies seemed to be materializing. Six months later, however, these voters had reasons to be disappointed: after a surreal period of conflict between the new government and the European Troika in the first half of 2014 and a referendum on austerity, in which Alexis Tsipras secured a support of no less than 61% against the rescue plan proposed by the country’s creditors, the Greek Prime Minister immediately betrayed his voters by accepting an even tougher austerity plan that the one he had called his fellow Greeks to reject. Unlike PASOK however, Tsipras stayed on message and continued to talk to his voters, using the referendum to tell his constituents that his hands were tied but that he would continue fighting for them despite the dire situation. The reversal surely cost the Greek leader a lot of his popularity, but his sticking to his electorate meant that he has been able to secure a stable second place in the polls (at around 25%). This in turn allows him to lead the opposition following his defeat in the July 2019 legislative elections. Even though his position has weakened since 2014, Tsipras has consolidated a key position in Greece by assuming the leadership of the Millennials and their allies. He owes his victory in 2014 above all to the mobilization of this electorate, to whom the crisis added a part of the Creatives and those parts of the middle class facing with social downgrading (particularly in the public sector).

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Despite its electoral defeat  in  the European and parliamentary elections of June–July 2019, Syriza is set to remain a force to be reckoned for the foreseeable future in Greece. The crisis hit the Iberian Peninsula hard as well. But while the Portuguese political landscape was not  fundamentally changed by the subsequent social upheavals, as politicians managed to adapt rapidly to the new class shift (in particular, the Left Bloc and the ruling Socialist Party managed to retain a large appeal to the Millennials), the Spanish political landscape went through a painful and decisive transformation. Like Germany, Spain had lived under a quasi-two party system during the past 40 years, and while regional parties could complicate the formation of the government, the fact that the two main parties of left and right regularly gathered 75% of the vote made one-party government the norm rather than the exception; in fact, in 2011, the Partido Popular (PP) and the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party (PSOE) still garnered 73.14% of the vote between them. But four years later, in the general election of 2015, they netted only 50.7% and even less in 2019 (45.4% in total). This spectacular reduction in the big-tent parties’ share of the vote has again mostly benefited movements that have adapted to the Great Class Shift. The first of these parties has gone through a very gradual (but nonetheless uninterrupted) progression and now represents Spain’s urban Creatives: Ciudadanos. Founded specifically in Catalonia in 2006 to fight against the secessionist movement, Albert Rivera’s party quickly brought together the pro-union forces in Catalan city centers, and therefore its decision to go national after 2011 put Ciudadanos in an ideal position to build upon a Creative Class core electorate. The profile of the party leadership speaks volumes about its identity, membership and electorate: from Albert Rivera (leader at the national level) to Begoña Villacis (Former candidate for the Madrid mayorship) or Ignacio Aguado (leader of the Ciudadanos group in the Madrid Assembly), they include a large number of top-lawyers, some of whom completed part of their studies in the United States and speak flawless English, a rare treat in the Spanish political scene. If one includes the profiles of other leading figures  like Luis Garicano (a famed economist who taught at the London School of Economics), Toni Roldán Mones (a younger economist well-known in the English-speaking world), Marta Rivera (a successful novelist before she entered politics), or the group’s spokesperson for the Madrid Region, Esther Ruiz Fernandez, a former Hollywood film producer, one can get a good image of what the Ciudadanos membership (and electorate) looks like: urban, well-educated, relatively young and generally integrated in globalization – in other words the Creative Class or, as Belén Barreiro calls them in her book on sociological changes in Spain since the crisis, digitalized citizens accommodated to the new global economy.8 Their scores around 15% in the past two electoral cycle of 2015–2016 and 2019 give a fair idea of this class’s current numbers in Spain. Ciudadanos’ success and consolidation in the Spanish political landscape is certainly impressive, but it should be noted that it was initially outshone by the originally more spectacular success of far-left party Podemos, led by Pablo

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Iglesias. Born in 1978, Iglesias could have been part of the Creative Class, but his ideological choices (and university career) decided otherwise. An uncompromising Marxist, he moved quickly into TV and the Web to sell his ideas to the wider public. And starting in 2009–2010, when the first effects of the crisis hit the Spanish population and especially its youth, they started to listen. Iglesias co-founded Podemos for the European elections of 2014, with immediate electoral success: the young party almost instantly won 8% of the vote in the European elections, before coming third with 20.7% in the general election of 2015. The rise of Podemos, as spectacular as it may be, was nonetheless unsurprising: Donatella della Porta and her colleagues have rightly pointed out that the party is the electoral extension of the Indignados protest movement that made the headlines in the early 2010s with massive demonstrations (gathering mostly young people) against the government’s austerity policies. Almost ten years later, the filiation of Podemos with the Indignados was not  only a component of the party’s identity, but also a major part of its success:9 with a populist discourse pitting “the people” against “la casta” (a cabal of journalists, industrialists and mainstream politicians), Pablo Iglesias presented himself as a credible defender (by virtue of his age and his style) of the Millennials, portrayed not without reason as the main victims of the crisis. Podemos has thus been able to bring together the core of the under-35 electorate, which had experienced unemployment rates of up to 55%, and was briefly able to extend its appeal to those in the Creative Class or the middle class that had been hit hard by the crisis, particularly in intellectual professions linked to the property bubble. The party’s electoral backsliding after 2015 is partly due to a better situation in the job market that allowed for other parties (particularly a re-vamped PSOE under the leadership of Pedro Sánchez) to get back some support in these two pillars of the pro-system votes, but also because of Podemos’ sectarian positioning: whereas in Greece Alexis Tsipras was very often happy just to speak to Millennials, and adopt their views to gain their long-term loyalty, Pablo Iglesias chose ideological purity over sociological representation. The problem is that most young people today, despite their propensity to rebel, are more politicized emotionally than ideologically: while they certainly refuse to accept social injustice, they are also against a statist, or purely Marxist solution to their problems. On account of having forgotten this and having politicized Podemos’ platform in an oversimplified manner, Iglesias is now facing a spectacular reversal of fortunes: whereas in 2015 he was closing in on the PSOE and polling above 20%, he came in fourth position in the 2019 elections, netting “only” 14.3% of the votes. The ideological strategy here had a disastrous effect on the party’s progression, while a sociological approach has allowed Tsipras to secure his party’s position in the long term. The  emergence of Podemos and Ciudadanos, of course, has meant that traditional parties have seen their share of the vote drastically reduced. On the center-right the Partido Popular (PP), in power until 2018, had kept its ground until the Catalonian crisis in the autumn of 2019, where communication mishandlings opened the door for more suburban elements of the party’s support to

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move to Ciudadanos, while the more conservative part of the electorate were tempted to opt for a more radical solution, incarnated by VOX, in the 2019 elections. Despite these difficulties, the party could still count on the support of the Provincial Middle Class to secure second place in parliament, thanks in particular to weakened (but nevertheless still solid) regional strongholds such as Galicia, where PP has reigned supreme since 1975 (not least thanks to a balancing act between two dominant ideologies in the areas, conservatism and regionalism). It remains to be seen how the party can cope with pressure from both the center (the Creatives of Ciudadanos) and the right, as the emergence of Santiago Abascal’s Vox in late 2018 and 2019 further complicates the right-of-center political landscape. In  fact, the party’s surge seems to be directly linked: the defeat of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, which generated a long-delayed debate inside the Spanish center-right, and the subsequent policies of the new government to open a dialogue with Catalonian separatists and open Spain’s doors to immigration, which created considerable stress among parts of the PP electorate (in particular males). But, the fact that the first breakthrough of Vox happened in Andalusia, the Southernmost part of the country and the most directly impacted by the (still moderate) new inflow of migrants should not come as a surprise, as the Andalusian 2018 regional election maps testifies: the Vox vote was concentrated in suburban areas more directly affected by immigration, as a contemporaneous analysis by mainstream newspaper El País has shown.10 National studies around the new Vox supporters nexus show a picture of an electorate only slightly to the right of PP (and coming predominantly from its ranks), but obsessed by two issues: immigration and the unity of Spain11 – it should come as no surprise that, when the time for general elections came in April 2018, a substantial portion of this solid middle-class electorate opted to support Vox, thereby dividing the right and compromising its chances to remain competitive against PSOE (the latter having learnt their lesson from the Podemos challenge a few years earlier, had adapted their style to get their electorate back). In other words, while the new Partido Popular tried to regain the suburban electorate it had lost to Ciudadanos in 2017, it lost the more provincial part of the middle class that feels engaged in a culture war with the left, which in Spain entails the issues of immigration and the Centralization vs. Regionalism debate. The spectacular defeat of PP in the April 2019 elections is an excellent example of the dilemmas of the realignment of center-right parties – in this case, the change of course of leader Pablo Casado (who first courted centrist voters before radically changing positions to avoid losing too much votes to the far-right) is telling of the future challenges of the right in Spain, but also in Europe. PP’s dire situation contrasts with the renewal of the PSOE under the leadership of Pedro Sánchez. In fact, while the party struggled during a very long time of the Rajoy area, it seems to have taken back the leadership of the left, while it was facing a situation similar to Spain’s center-right just a few years ago (a ­testimony of how political fortunes can change in these uncertain times). PSOE’s recovery has so far has been nothing short of a miracle, particularly considering that the

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tribe on which former party leader José Luis Zapatero had decided to build his electoral success in the late 2000s, the Creative Class (which supported Zapatero’s move to pass a bill on same-sex marriage, for example) quickly deserted it after the crisis to support the more liberal Ciudadanos. Paradoxically, PSOE managed to stay alive thanks to the remaining support of the old Spanish working class: this is because immigration had not emerged as a major problem in Spain at least until 2019, meaning that the socialists were able to avoid suffering irreversible damage in their previous administration: unlike in France or Germany, the old working-class suburbs of Spain have very often stayed red, and their rejection of regional identities have often made them totally impervious to the Podemos’ rhetoric. They therefore stayed with the PSOE and are continuing to provide a strong electoral base, especially in areas like Catalonia or the Basque country, where they still form the heart of the old socialist party’s (unionist) electorate. The PSOE’s survival is also attributable to its old electoral clienteles, including in Andalusia, where until recently the party’s success relied on an alliance between workers and a middle class very often linked (directly or indirectly) with the regional or local public sector. Without the regions of Galicia and Andalusia, and without patronage practices that sometimes border on corruption, Socialistas and Populares would probably be in a much more difficult political situation nationally. Some may of course regret the fact that such practices still carry considerable weight in Spanish political life, but the breaking of patronage networks is a double-edged sword: without them, the far-left Podemos would probably have had more chances to take over larger chunks of the PSOE’s electorate and therefore become the number one party in terms of votes during the 2015–2016 electoral cycle. In the same way, one can see today how the weakening of Partido Popular and its local networks (very often accused of corruption in the latter years of Mariano Rajoy’s tenure) have encouraged the rise of Vox, a new party to the right of PP. Also of interest in Spanish politics is the adaptation of the political establishment to the Great Class Shift in two regions, the Basque country and Catalonia. In fact, both autonomías have a different political landscape than the rest of the country, at least because of its middle class: in both regions, the PP has become extremely weak, primarily because the nationalist parties have earned the trust of the Suburban and Provincial Middle Class: indeed, the Basque National Party (PNV) is a socially conservative party and has no difficulty recruiting its supporters from the affluent suburbs of Bilbao and in the Basque countryside – in areas that would otherwise overwhelmingly vote PP. As for Catalonia, the nationalist parties had originally turned the more mountainous (and relatively well-off ) areas in Barcelona’s hinterland into bastions of regionalism, often at the cost of spectacular cronyism, even by Spain’s standards.12 The Catalan elites gradually began to convert to the idea of secession after a series of corruption scandals tarnished the reputation of the regional government, even as the local economy went through a major downturn due to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The historic representatives of the Catalan Middle Class therefore opted

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to brush their own misdeeds under the carpet using the slogan “Madrid is stealing from us”,13 thereby causing a spectacular polarization in the Catalan political landscape. The  regional elites managed to reclaim their contested legitimacy thanks to this artifice, but at dear cost, as separatism had become mainstream: the Catalan Provincial Middle Classes now form the kernel of the independence movement in the region,14 and are joining forces with the Millennial supporter of the Catalan Republican Left15 to secede from Spain. This constitutes a novel alliance between Millennials and the Provincial Middle Class, with possible offshoots potentially emerging elsewhere in the region: in the Basque country in the longer-term, but also other parts of the Mediterranean space, in Corsica for example, where an alliance between middle-class regionalists and more youth-supported separatists won the majority of votes in the regional assembly elections of 2017. Italy closes this geographical tour of the Great Class Shift in Europe. In the Bel Paese, the situation is somewhat different than in the rest of Southern Europe, as Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement dominates the Millennials vote but has no Marxist overtones in its discourse (unlike Podemos and Syriza), and as Matteo Salvini’s Lega has managed to storm the political scene by appealing to both the Italian working class and the Northern Suburban and Provincial Middle Class. This  allows for another previously unheard-of coalition between a Millennial party and an originally New Minority party, but it is post-electoral, and the longterm winner of the socio-political shifts in the Italian electorate has thus far been Matteo Salvini, as the results of the May 2019 European election have shown. To understand why, a look at how and why Italy got where it is now seems necessary: while the peninsula has been hardly hit by the 2008 crisis, Italy’s decline had started well before 2008. Indeed, as many recent visitors may have noticed, many aspects of life seem to have come to a halt in the 1990s – including interior hotel decoration, at least South of the Po Plain. The  fact is that Italy has gone through an extremely long period of very slow growth, with only two years of GDP growth of 2% and above since 1991  – those were in 1995 and 2000. In 2005, the Economist gave Italy the unenviable title of “sick man of Europe”,16 and few would have doubted this status in subsequent years. Being the Euro-zone’s third-largest economy, the consequences of the financial crisis may not strike as spectacular (at least if compared with Spain or Greece), but the fact that it came on top of two decades of stagnation hurt the national social fabric particularly hard, thereby feeding a disgust for politics that in time translated into support for anti-system parties. As in the rest of southern Europe, the frustration of young people is a dominant feature of Italy’s sociological space. In fact, even more than their colleagues in Spain and Italy, they appear to be a sacrificed generation: with a rate of 35%, Italy’s youth unemployment is still at the same level as in Spain. But what these numbers don’t tell is that the global unemployment levels in Spain (16.7%) are much higher than in Italy (11.1%). The  Boot thereby represents an exception: usually, the differential between the youth and active population unemployment

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rate is in the range of two to one. In Italy however, this figure is one to three, and it shows how much young Italians are paying the price for the sustained lifestyle of their elders, many of which enjoy the security of their jobs – and the stability of their pensions. However, young Italians did not follow in the footsteps of their Greek or Spanish counterparts by opting for a Marxism-influenced option, despite a historically strong socialist and communist movement in the country. Instead great numbers of Millennials backed the political project of former comedian Beppe Grillo, the Five-Star Movement (M5S). Beppe Grillo does stand out from other leaders that Millennials have got attracted to: contrary to Pablo Iglesias, he does not seem to be very interested in ideology, and a glance at his blog reveals that his political platform is very heterogeneous: his long-held commitment to environmental issues places him among the traditional left; his opposition to vaccination shifts him back to the far-left; but his infamous tirades against foreigners or minorities17 would rather push him into the far-right. Yet, this very heterodoxy is the very thing that appeal to young Italians, who (re-) discovered Grillo as he dared to use their communication tools starting in the 2000s: this is when Grillo built his blog, not only as a website but also a forum for discussion, progressively winning the loyalty of many Millennials. Furthermore, his status as a pariah and rebel (he was banished from Italian television in 1986 for criticism of the government that the then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi deemed to be offensive) gave him the aura of authenticity that is particularly popular among Millennials. It should not come as a surprise that his movement registered a large chunk of its original support from Generation Y: ideological matters are of little interest to the younger generation, who generally distrust the state, which is on the contrary the prime instrument of the construction of socialism for Marxists. Grillo’s past, attitude, and rhetoric were therefore sufficient to allow him to take the leadership of Millennials excluded from the system by an older Middle Class keen on safeguarding its own interests. That makes him and M5S even purer sociological phenomenon than any other anti-austerity movement. The party’s ability, after 2014, to enlarge its electoral base to include parts of the lower middle class, particularly in Southern Italy, was a key to its subsequent successes, in the 2016 local elections first where M5S candidate (and newcomer) Virginia Raggi was elected mayor of Rome, and then the general elections of 2018, in which Beppe Grillo’s party garnered the majority of the votes for a single party, with a score of 30.68%. Much of the rise of the Five-Star Movement in the latter years has been to the detriment of the old Partito Democratico (PD), which as many other former left-ofcenter parties, has long since abandoned its socialist roots, and turned itself into a representative of the Creative Class. After the fall of the last Berlusconi government, the PD had taken the lead and the dynamic created by Matteo Renzi when he took office in the spring of 2014 had originally positioned the party ideally for representing this class. But the Creatives are not as numerous in Italy as in Northern Europe, and the Renzi fatigue that quickly followed his nomination has made the support of this class to PD less evident, particularly as the party

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has since decided to go more to the left to attract more Millennial voters, while trying to keep its historic middle-class electorate that benefits from its patronage, notably in central Italy (Tuscany, Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna in particular). In older times, the PD could also count on the support of these same voters in Southern, poorer parts of Italy – notably in Basilicata and some parts of Puglia and Campania, but the last legislative elections confirmed the erosion of the patronage vote in the Mezzogiorno, where the center-right of Silvio Berlusconi also lost large chunks of an electorate whose loyalty had previously been ensured by a paternalistic approach of local and regional governance. The result of the decline in these mainstream parties, should act as a warning for political actors supporting anti-corruption policies: while consensus is growing in southern Europe (or rather in its bigger cities) that more transparency should be brought in politics and administration, this transparency comes at a price: the extinction of old patronage networks. Some are of course criminal and will probably not be regretted by other than the criminals themselves, but others are indeed a factor of stabilization of local societies, including by ensuring a competitive advantage for institutional parties. While promoted by centrist parties, the disappearance of these networks does not  necessarily benefit them, as its former beneficiaries turn to new potential protectors to look after their interests, and those are rarely mainstream parties. In the 2018 elections, this lost electorate of Southern Italy very often turned to the populist parties – the Five-Star Movement, but also Matteo Salvini, whose Lega has come to dominate the Northern part of the country. The  rebirth  – and rise  – of Lega since Salvini took over in 2013 has been spectacular. Originally, the party was a “Padanian” movement wishing to separate the historic provinces of the Po Plain (Venice, Milan, and Savoy) from the rest of Italy, which had already turned during the times of Umberto Bossi into a more regionalist, right-wing variant of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Salvini was elected after a few years in the wilderness and following the end of Bossi’s political career, he changed the party’s profile, keeping its Provincial and Suburban Middle Class core, but putting a specific emphasis on the Italian New Minority – whether in the Northern working class or the Southern former lower middle class. Hence the transformation of the Northern League into Lega, which allowed for the give the party an all-Italian appeal. This way, Salvini had ensured a good presence on the political scene, being able to speak on behalf of the Italian New Minority (thanks to his style and rhetoric about immigration) and for a Provincial Middle Class that has continued to define Lega’s electoral platform (the main promise of the 2018 program, the instauration of a flat tax, is a good example of  this). However, it was Silvio Berlusconi himself who would deliver the largest part of Italy’s Suburban and Provincial Middle Class, by securing a right-of-center coalition with Salvini during the campaign for the 2018 elections. Forza Italia taking a weaker share of the vote in the end, Il Cavaliere became a junior partner in the coalition, and therefore delivered on a silver tray his electorate to Matteo Salvini, who has since then been able to use his position in the Italian government to

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grow in popularity and ensure Lega’s relative ­dominance in the Italian centerright, and subsequently in the national political landscape. Salvini’s capture of Forza Italia’s electorate should serve as a warning to other right-of-center parties across Europe: when in a position of inferiority or parity, it should generally refrain from allying with far-right ­parties – if not for moral reasons, then because the Berlusconi precedent shows that the historic Middle Class party has greater chances to be absorbed than to control its potential partner.

Notes 1 The scandal of the Monte dei Paschi di Sienna bank has reverberated more than any other in Italy’s banking history in the twenty-first century, though this history is not an avaricious one. For a brief introduction to the reasons for the scandal, see this article from La Stampa: http://www.lastampa.it/2013/01/27/economia/mps-storiadi-uno-scandalo-6Aov8UTp0qAoNnSDWf VfuJ/pagina.html. To save the bank and its small investors, the Italian state has had to spend no less than 20 billion Euros to date – and that’s just to keep the bank afloat. 2 See in particular John B. Judis, The  Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New  York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, pp. 110–14. 3 The  figures  date back to August 2017 for the unemployment rate among young people, and October 2017 for the average unemployment rate. See: https://www. statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/ and https://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/ for updated numbers. 4 See Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca, Movement Parties Against Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 36. 5 Ibid. 6 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016, p. 115. 7 Source: Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca, Movement Parties Against Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 45. 8 Barreiro also divides Spanish society in four classes, with two fault-lines: the Internet (division between Digitals and Analogics) and socio-economic situation (accommodated to the world economy vs. impoverished). See Belén Barreiro, La Sociedad que queremos: Digitales, analógicos, acomodados y empobercidos, Barcelona: Planeta, 2017. 9 Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca, Movement Parties Against Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2017. 10 https://elpais.com/politica/2018/12/03/actualidad/1543829876_200181.html. 11 See this analysis of the Vox electorate in early 2019: https://blogs.​elconfidencial. com/espana/una-cierta-mirada/2018-12-17/panelconfidencial-radiografia-votosvotantes-vox-datos_1709778/. 12 The reports on corruption held by the “Generalitat de Catalunya”, the Government of Catalonia, which has been controlled by the regionalists/nationalists for more than 35 years, are damning. See for example this recent article from El Mundo: http:// www.elmundo.es/espana/2017/01/12/5877764aca4741d8738b464b.html. 13 Much has been written about the very compelling slogan “Madrid nos roba”, which likens the Spanish government’s policy of regional redistribution (from more affluent Catalonia to the poorer regions like Andalusia) to theft. One of the responses to this can be found in this article published by El Pais: https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/03/09/ opinion/1489081336_061645.html.

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14 For more detailed analysis on the emergence of a class vote on independence, see this study by Kiko Llaneras for El País: https://politica.elpais.com/politica/2017/09/28/ ratio/1506601198_808440.html. 15 The Republican Left of Catalonia, a regional version of Podemos, is a secessionist party that enjoys major support among Millennials  – it has historically performed best in the bohemian (but not bourgeois) districts of Barcelona. 16 http://www.economist.com/node/3987219 17 In  2016, Grillo had made a dubious joke following the election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London, saying that he “would like to see it when he blows himself up at Westminster”, see: http://www.huffingtonpost.it/2016/05/15/beppe-grillo-sadiqkhan-westminster_n_9978954.html.

Bibliography Belén Barreiro, La Sociedad que queremos: Digitales, analógicos, acomodados y empobrecidos, Barcelona: Planeta, 2017. Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca, Movement Parties Against Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, 2017. John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016.

CONCLUSION

If anything, this brief tour of the Western political landscape has shown how much our electoral politics have radically changed since 2008. This is not necessarily a good thing, as the past model was characterized by a more-stable, less-atomized, and less-polarized political playing field. But while we can regret the old days, it is quite certain that we cannot, at least immediately, get back to the party systems of yesteryear, simply because the world has changed and is not getting back to where it was 15 years ago. As this book has amply shown, the evolution of our party systems corresponds to very profound sociological trends, and as our societies have changed, so must our politics. The Great Class Shift we have witnessed is here to stay, and although it came to clearly define the stakes in the American and French presidential elections of 2016–2017, it continues to have an impact of these countries’ political debate, and beyond. Indeed, the four classes that have been the subject of this book are also to be found in NorthWestern Europe, where the Suburban Middle Class still remains a formidable force and more often than not stabilizes politics in the region; they are at work in Central and Eastern Europe, where the white working class, a relic of socialist economies, has very often defined the temptation of leaders for illiberalism; and they are also at play in Southern Europe, where the socio-economic crisis gave the Millennials an importance they do not have elsewhere, prompting the emergence of new anti-austerity forces that may not all have taken power, but that have re-defined the way politics is done in these countries. The story of the Great Class Shift does not end here: because individual classes cannot form a majority on their own in any of the countries described in the second part of this book, their political leaders have had to build electoral or postelectoral coalitions to build majorities of government. This necessity of forming cross-class alliances is a universal requirement in the new four-class system, and although the dominant group varies according to regions and national traditions,

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a new type of coalition-building has become an imperious necessity to win elections. In  other words, a party or candidate needs to be positioned as the (preferably exclusive) spokesperson of one class to exist politically, but that is often not enough to guarantee victory at the ballot-box: Marine Le Pen made herself the New Minority’s sole representative in France in 2017, and thus gathered enough votes to qualify for the second round – however, these elections will not go in the history book for her record-high score on April 23, but for her resounding defeat on May 7. On account of having failed to form an alliance with another class, and specifically the Suburban Middle Class (which is exactly what Donald Trump had managed to achieve a few months earlier in the United States), the far-right candidate ensured the consolidation, at least for then, of her electoral glass ceiling, and her challenge for the next elections leading to the 2022 presidential contest will be to break her class isolation to form a majority. Conversely, the ability of Emmanuel Macron in France, Sebastian Kurz in Austria in 2017, or before them of Klaus Iohannis in Romania, and Alexis Tsipras in Greece in 2014 to mobilize people outside their traditional class electorate have enabled them to secure a large enough majority to win their elections and take power. The table below provides a clearer view of the four classes that have re-defined Western politics, and how each class can interact (or not) with one another to form a coalition of government. What is interesting is that there is no single recipe for success: almost all different combinations or alliances have been tried, with varying degrees of success – the alliance between Creatives and the New Minority remains hard to imagine today given how firmly each group’s worldviews are opposed to one another. The Millennials New minority alliance is also only at an experimental stage, and although the Italian Five-Star MovementLega alliance has shown that a coalition of anti-systemic forces is possible after elections, the jury is still out on whether it can become an effective and successful electoral alliance. Conflicting positions about diversity and immigration greatly complicate such a coalition-building, but a common willingness to bring down the system might well serve the purpose of leaders tempted to lead a full-out social revolt in the next few years. Among the leaders that seem ready to test such

Creative Class

Suburban Middle Class

Millennials

White Working Class

The four classes of the Great Class Shift and their possible alliances

130  Conclusion

an alliance, Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom (starting from a Millennial base) and Marine Le Pen in France (as her campaign team seems to have bet on a convergence of views between Millennials and the New Minority following the Yellow Vests crisis) seem to be in prime positions to test it. But before this latter alliance can show its worth, it seems that four combinations are most likely to succeed: •

•

•

•

The first brings together the Creatives and the Millennials; this is the alliance Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau built to get to power. Its potential is genuine (except in Central Europe where the numbers generally do not add up), but the increasingly noticeable revolt by the under-35s against the system is making it increasingly shaky – it also seems to work only after a very long run of the right in power. Another combination brings together the Creative Class with the Suburban Middle class; this was Emmanuel Macron’s winning formula in 2017 (starting from the Creative Class), which other emerging parties and leaders like Ciudadanos in Spain or Dacian Ciolo¸s are trying to emulate, with more or less success. In the other direction, Angela Merkel and David Cameron relied on such a coalition to consolidate their electorate, until the migration crisis and Brexit made them much weaker. This combination is potentially a very powerful one as it brings together the two winning classes of globalization, but its social-cultural fundamentals are weak – an election campaign centered on immigration can certainly break it, as the Brexit referendum clearly showed. A  third combination consists in bringing together the Suburban Middle Class and the New Minority; this is the alliance that elected Donald Trump, but also, in the opposite direction, Sebastian Kurz – the difference being that whereas Trump started from a working-class base, Kurz campaigned for the Middle Class and then turned to the working class representatives (the FPÖ) after the election. This is by far the strongest alliance in the context of a campaign in which immigration is a major issue. It is far weaker, however, when the economy takes precedence, as the two classes views on economic policy are clearly contradictory. Finally, a less common alliance can bring together Millennials and the Suburban Middle Class. This coalition might also seem counter-nature, as both classes have clearly opposed economic and social interests (as the conflict between them is both cultural and economic, and very often takes the form of a generational war between the Baby Boomers and Generation Y), but it is not  impossible when both classes are interested in autonomist or separatist political solutions. This is the coalition behind the secessionist alliance in Catalonia, but it is also to be found in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party has built parts of its platform on both social groups since 2007, or in Corsica, where the elections in December 2017 demonstrated its potential.

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Judging by these descriptions, it seems that the old Suburban Middle Class generally seems to be the key to most electoral success, as the Creative Class Millennials coalition has recently become more and more difficult to sustain, and as the Millennials New Minority coalition has not yet shown potential for electoral success. Apart from these notable exceptions, all other alliances do rely on the support or the addition of the Suburban Middle Class for success, making it of cardinal importance to electoral strategists today. Without their support, neither Donald Trump, nor Emmanuel Macron, nor Sebastian Kurz, nor indeed Matteo Salvini could have claimed electoral victory between 2016 and 2018. A key to the electoral system, this dominant position could appear as a surprise to the reader: in the opening pages of this book, I noted that following the election of Donald Trump, all the political communication rulebook (including the reliance on a middle-class center) had to be questioned. I also noted that the current upheavals were due to the shrinking of the middle class. Both assertions remain true  – and of course, many things have changed, including for the Suburban (and Provincial) Middle Class: in the 1990s, it accounted for more than 60% of the vote, making its center the battleground that the candidates and parties had to conquer in order to win a majority. This compelled parties to divide the middle class between them (for example, in France, the public sector middle class supported the left while the private sector middle class mostly rooted for the right), while candidates would try to conquer the center of this demographics to ensure political dominance. This entailed pushing the other party or candidate towards more marginalized sections of the middle class, making them appear “extreme” to the wider public. The situation of course has changed today: even in North-Western Europe, the Suburban Middle Class has lost its quasi-monopoly, and its interests do not correspond necessarily with those of society as a whole. A sort of primus inter pares in light of its demographic weight and the voting habits of its members, the Suburban Middle Class cannot claim the universal prominence it used to have, and must therefore be covered as one class among others. This poses one question: as our democratic system was based on a strong middle class, is there a future democracy in a post-bourgeoisie polity? Before getting back to this question, it is time to get back to the “new rulebook” for elections after the Great Class Shift. What is the recipe for a good campaign today? Political operatives should follow the following three golden rules as they form their electoral strategy: 1. To ensure existence in the political battlefield, the candidate (or party) should become the virtually exclusive champion or spokesperson of one of the four classes and be able to fully mobilize it on election day. 2. During the campaign, the candidate (or party) has to open up its electoral base to another class and build a coalition for a majority. 3. Finally, in order to discourage the forming of another coalition that would threaten to beat his/her own, the candidate (or party) must at the same time discourage or demobilize the classes of the opponent  – this can be done

132  Conclusion

by attacking the heart of the opponent’s electorate (showing that it is not a legitimate champion – this is by far the most arduous task), or by preventing two classes from coming together: this can be achieved for example by moving the central theme of the campaign to the economy in order to prevent a working class-Provincial Middle Class coalition, or on the contrary to move the battleground to themes such as immigration or gender to destabilize a coalition between the Provincial Middle Class and the Creative Class. On the face of it, this new rule-book seems to be anything but revolutionary: the classical rules of political mobilization  – building a base, opening it up, and demoralizing the opponent  – are familiar to all political consultants, and those basic rules have not changed. Yet the context they are applied has changed very much, and this changes the whole campaign architecture. In other words, while the mobilization techniques remain the same, the terrain (which remains fundamental to any battle, as Sun Tzu already noted already in the sixth c­ entury B.C.) has changed. Campaigns therefore have no choice but to adapt the use of the same tools and techniques to these changed conditions. If they do not do so, they will end in disaster: already in Europe, a great number of established parties (sometimes dating back more than a century) are facing political irrelevance. If they persist in ignoring the Great Class Shift, they will face extinction and join the fates of the French Socialist Party, Slovakia’s SDKU-DS or Greece’s PASOK. This  is all the more important as the new parties that have emerged from the atomization of our societies are usually not only much more mobile, but also closer to the identity of one of the four classes discussed in this book. Having galvanized voters that considered themselves ignored in the political debate, it is unlikely that these parties will come back into the fold in the near future. This in turn raises an important question about governance in our societies and the long-term viability of democracy, in an age where identity politics seem to be defining our political debate. Although this book has generally refrained from using the term, tackled with much more maestria by Francis Fukuyama,1 identity is at the heart of the Great Class Shift. While the emergence of social classes is a sociological phenomenon, their turning into a political movement has everything to do with identity – or, to follow the existentialist school of thought, their coming to terms with their being, which is the essence of existence. By  becoming conscious of their belonging to a class, its members have constructed its existence. And by claiming its right to exist, each class demands that its features, its culture be taken into account, that its dignity be respected. This is true for example for the Creative Class, who took conscience of their power as a class in the mid-2000s and have since then strived to push their agenda on the political scene. This is also true of the Suburban Middle Class, which has seen the Creative push as a threat to their existence (and their accusations of them being retrogrades as insulting their dignity). But this is also true for the two rebel classes, the New Minority and the Millennials, as both have taken conscience of

Conclusion  133

their collective power in the 2010s and have pushed for an agenda that not only corresponds to their point of view, but also sees recognition of their agenda as paramount. In  this sense, the Great Class Shift is yet an interesting example, not of ethnic or racial, but social identity politics. Our four classes thus raise questions about the stability of our systems. Indeed, what we have seen in the past five years is that the process of the Great Class Shift has coincided with a spectacular polarization of our political landscape. As the dominant middle class or bourgeoisie has shrunk, new conflicting demands have soared, and they are not  ready to compromise, principally because they do not  know (and purposefully ignore) each other. But is there something more to that? More than 40  years ago, Barrington Moore used a simple yet convincing recipe for the consolidation of any democratic system: “no bourgeoisie, no democracy”.2 This  dictum has since been challenged by many scholars, and sometimes empiric practice of democracy has shown (at least temporarily) that this form of government was possible in poorer society, but the thing remains  that democracies function much more smoothly with a large middle class that allows for some common feeling of identity and a corresponding sense of the, general interest. When the middle class is no longer a majority, and when classes are so disinclined to recognize their counterparts as respectable members of society (think of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”, for example), it seems legitimate to ask whether consensus is still possible, and what this means for the future of our democracies. To the extent that electoral campaigns now  have as much (if not  more) of a polarizing than a unifying effect, is the system viable? It might be tenable in the short and medium term, as a system with four antagonizing classes is actually more flexible than a ­bipolar system: indeed, it allows alliances to collapse and be reconstituted (in the United States, for example, the Creative Class-Millennials coalition held firm under Obama before breaking apart in 2016, and there is a fairly good chance that another coalition will take power after Donald Trump in 2020 or in 2024), but this does not preclude the consolidation of a bipolar class system in which the antagonisms become so entrenched that the result is a heavily contested election, deadlock and possibly later political violence. As long as a four-party system remains fluid, it will be more difficult to build coalitions in Europe – but it may also force different classes to talk to each other, as the bourgeoisie and the higher classes learned to talk with a rising working class in the early twentieth century – the process, however, was chaotic, and very often ushered in democratic breakdown, especially with the rise of communism and fascism in the first part of the twentieth century. We are not there yet, though. In fact, one of the remarkable characteristics of the realignment that we are currently undergoing is that, for the time being, the political battlefield remains submitted to the rules and boundaries of the democratic game: while emotions run high during electoral campaigns, while controversies can create hysteria among our political establishment, and while shutdowns or hung governments can paralyze our countries for a while, so far

134  Conclusion

the four classes that have made the Great Class Shift have respected the democratic game, have seldom questioned the results of the elections (ex-post at least), and most importantly have not  refrained from encouraging their supporters or members to pursue their agenda through violence. When Donald Trump became president of the United States with a majority in the electoral college but without securing a majority in the popular vote, and despite a vitriolic campaign, his opponent Hillary Clinton accepted her defeat quickly and without ­reservation – and chances are that despite the bravado of the campaign’s last days, Donald Trump would probably have done the same thing had he been on the losing side, either from his own accord or under pressure from the Republican establishment. For the time being, each class remains committed to the rules of the game and operates within a strictly legitimate and democratic framework. This is probably because each actor (and their supporters) in the West believes it has a real chance of taking power and push for a specific agenda, even if, in order to do so, it has to form coalitions (and therefore make compromise) to govern. But how long will this last? Is it possible to imagine that as result of being out of the decision-making process for a long period of time, the leaders of a specific class will one day deduce that the political system is deliberately excluding them and not working for them, and therefore that it is illegitimate? Such an eventuality is still remote, but it does not seem totally unrealistic – this is why the marginalization of the New Minority and of the Millennials (whether perceived or real) is so dangerous, and why getting them back on-board in the long term is so crucial for the future of our democracies. One could of course take a different view and take for granted that the rise of the Creative Class is now inevitable, which means that its agenda should be paramount to all the others in order to accelerate the process. The consequences of this historical determinism, however, have been painfully clear in 2016. It may rather be wiser to think of ways of bringing back or co-opting the classes that have been pushed to the margins of the system. This strategy actually has a relatively recent historical precedent: the integration of the working class into the middle class, which enabled Western societies to survive capitalism’s cyclical crises and beat the totalitarian challenges that arose in the twentieth century. In The New Urban Crisis, in which he comes back on the excesses of Creative-Class-focused urbanism (that he himself encouraged), Richard Florida discusses the necessity of re-building a middle-class that seems increasingly squeezed by rising housing market prices and the disappearance of mid-level jobs 3: “if we want to build a new middle class, we have no choice but to turn the tens of millions of low-paid service jobs we are stuck with into higher-paying jobs”.4 This probably means that “we’ll have to pay a bit more for services. But again, the New Deal era can serve as an example. After the Great Depression, we built a middle class by collectively paying a premium for our cars and appliances”.5

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Are we ready to show such solidarity today, and at what level? Beyond this question, Florida’s thesis also seems to be restricted to thinking the urban space, which is not  the national (or European) space in which our most consequential elections are fought (with all respect to mayors and local elected officials of course). Besides, the problem is not only economic, as the social identity politics contain a cultural element  – with a heavy focus on the question of diversity, itself linked to identity. This Kulturkampf cannot be appeased only with money, so conflict management between classes must take into account the different aspects of the confrontation. While the cultural and economic confrontations may not be solved (at least immediately), they can certainly be managed, if only to keep social cohesion in our communities, our nations, and the West in general, at a time when our way of life is increasingly being questioned by the rise of new global players (including, but not limited to, China). It should become a priority for our polities to come to manage the tensions that are the result of the Great Class Shift, but tackling their socio-cultural aspects will not  be easy in Europe, in the context of slow growth that has characterized the continent for the past decade. As Edward Luce points out, “We are taught to think our democracies are held together by values. Our faith in history fuels that myth. But liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth. When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolized by a fortunate few, things turn nasty. [...] The politics of interest group management turn into zero-sum battle over declining resources”.6 The political and economic reintegration of marginalized groups into our society will be no easy task: the search for a cultural compromise will be just as important as a new economic model capable of sustaining new social programs. This is the only way out of the dilemma posed by the Great Class Shift, and it is crucial that we resolve it so that the West can serenely face the challenges of the twenty-first century, in which its predominance will be called into question more than ever.

Notes 1 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, London: Profile Books, 2018. 2 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lords and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Beacon Press, 1993 (first edition in 1966), p. 418. 3 On this subject, see for example Alissa Quart, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, New York: Ecco, 2018. 4 Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 203. 5 Ibid., p. 206. 6 Edward Luce, The  Retreat of Western Liberalism, Little, Brown Book Group, 2017, p. 13.

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Bibliography Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis, New York: Basic Books, 2017, p. 203. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, London: Profile Books, 2018. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2017, p. 13. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lords and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993 (1966), p. 418. Alissa Quart, Squeezed:Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, New York: Ecco, 2018.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Page numbers followed by n refers to notes. Adomenas, Mantas xvi Af D see Alternative for Germany/ Alternative für Deutschland (Af D) Affordable Care Act 50, 77 Afghanistan 17 African American 27, 54, 75 Alliance for Liberals and Democrats xv Alternative for Germany/Alternative für Deutschland (Af D) 6, 9, 26, 43, 97, 99–100 Amazon 38, 58 American Dream 18, 30–1 Anglosphere 8–9, 17, 37, 46, 60–1, 64, 66n6, 86, 101n1 ANO 109 Apple 21, 38 Araud, Gérard 4 Arc de Triomphe 44 Athens, Ohio 70 Austria 101n18, 129; Catholicism 95; delegation of politicians to US 2016 presidential election 1; electoral system 102n21; Freedom Party (FPÖ) 43, 64, 93–6, 102n24, 130; SPÖ 92–6; 2016 presidential election xii, 94; working class 94–6 Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) 92–5, 102n24 Austrian Social-Democrats 96

Baby Boomers 31, 35, 57, 59, 62, 66n5, 67n20, 130 Balatonőszöd party 104, 114n1 Balkenende, Jan Peter 92 Barreiro, Belén 119, 126n8 Bataclan Theatre 40n13 Belgium xiii, 20, 69, 96 Berlin, Germany 85, 98, 100 Berlin Wall 105 Berlusconi, Silvio 124–6 Biedroń, Robert 10 Black Lives Matter 75–7 Blair, Tony 15, 47, 86, 88 Blairism 9, 88 Bolsonaro, Jair 6 Braun, Mike 81 Brexit xii–xiv, 4–5, 8–9, 43, 46, 70, 86–90, 130 Brezhnev, Leonid 105 Brokaw, Tom 67n20 Bush, George H. W. 7 Bush, George W. 3, 75, 81 Bush, Jeb 74 Bush family 9, 54 California 4, 21, 32, 55, 76 Cameron, David 86–8, 130 Canada 20, 86; Toronto 29 Čaputová, Zuzana 104

138  Index

Carson, Ben 74 Cassely, Jean-Laurent 55–6, 60 Catalan Republican Left (ERC) 116, 123 Catalonia Republican Left 127n15 Catholicism 34–5, 44–5, 79, 95 CDU see Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Central and Eastern Europe 35, 100, 104–13, 114n7, 115, 128 Chemla, Nicolas 36–7 Chikirou, Sophia 83n2 China 17–18, 102n29, 135 Chirac, Jacques 7–8 Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) 92 Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) 35 Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) 35 Christian-Democratic SDKU-DS 114n2 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 6, 9, 97–9, 102n30 Christianity 7–8, 34–6, 39n4, 42, 61, 90, 92, 104 Christie, Chris 74 Christof, Nicholas 61 Church and State 7, 14, 39n4; see also Catholicism; Christianity CIA World Factbook 83n7 Cioloş, Dacian 110, 130 Ciudadanos 10, 119–22, 130 class shifting 13–66; Creatives beginning 17–27; Millennials 54–66; New Minority 41–51; revolt of White Working Class 41–51; Suburban (and Provincial) Middle Class 29–39 Clinton, Bill 81 Clinton, Hillary 2, 5, 8, 27, 38, 54, 70, 74, 76–7, 134; “basket of deplorables” 133 Clinton-Bush election 2 Clinton-Trump election 1–5 coalitions 1, 66, 69–71, 113, 129–30, 134; Austria 93, 95–6; Creative Class Millennials 131, 133; Creatives 132; electoral 45, 128; France 47, 55; France and United States 73–83; Germany 96–7, 99; Grand Coalition 6, 92–3, 98–9; Great Britain 86, 88; Hungary 108; Italy 123, 125; Millennials New Minority 131; Netherlands 91–2; Portugal 116; progressive electoral 23; Provincial Middle Class 132; “Remain” 88; Romania 110–11; Russia 108–9; Spain 10; Trump 30, 38, 71, 77, 79, 133; voters xii

Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 106 Cold War 18 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 44 Conservatives 9, 33, 37, 86–90, 101n3, 101n10 Constant, Benjamin 73 Corbyn, Jeremy 61, 63, 88, 101n10, 130 Corbynism 9 Corsica 123, 130 Courtois, Stéphane 48 Craxi, Bettino 124 Creatives xii, 31–3, 35–9, 43, 45–7, 65, 70, 75, 131–2, 134; Austria 94, 96; beginning 17–27; Canada 29–30; Ciudadanos 121–2; Clinton 74; definition 19; Europe 24, 85–7, 107; father of 56; France 20, 56, 82; Generation Y 61; Germany 97–8; Greece 118; Hollande 56, 76; Iglesias 120; Italy 124; London 22; Macron 20, 64, 75, 78–81, 130; Millennials 57, 59, 62, 81, 88, 107, 130, 133; New Minority 71, 129; Obama 20, 23, 56, 64, 76, 130; Poland 112–13; prosystem xiii; Putin 107–8; Romania 110–11; Russia 106–8; Spain 116, 119; Trudeau 20, 64, 130; Trump 30; Ukraine 109–10; United Kingdom 88–90 Cruz, Ted 74 CSU 6, 9, 97, 99 Czechoslovakia 35, 106, 109 de Gaulle, Charles 34, 84n18 Delanoë, Bertrand 22 Delen, Bram xv Die neue Vokspartei (New People’s Party) 95; see also People’s Party, Austrian (ÖVP) Dragnea, Liviu, 51 Dreyfus Affair 14 Duda, Andrzej 113 Duncan-Smith, Iain 87 Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) 91, 96 Eagles of Death Metal 36–7, 40n13 Eastern Bloc 18 Ebert, Friedrich 14 European Constitution xiii, 15 Eyre, Igor Merheim xvi Facebook 38, 58–9, 65 Farage, Nigel 51, 86–7, 101n3

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far right 49, 51; Austria xii, 43, 64, 92–3, 95–6, 101n18; Europe 7, 50, 91, 116; France 8, 41–2, 45, 47, 64, 93; Germany 64; Italy 124, 126; Netherlands 92–3; Spain 121; United States 129 Fascism 101n18, 108, 133 Fico, Robert 51 Fidesz, 35, 104, 108–9, 114n1 FIFA World Cup 115 Fillon, François 7–8, 33–5, 38, 64, 75, 78–82, 84n18, 112 Five-Star Movement 123–5, 129 Florida, Richard 20, 25, 27n2, 56; “LGBT index” 22; The New Urban Crisis 134 FN see Front National (FN) Fondation Jean-Jaurès 42 Ford, Rob 29–30, 33, 37, 39n2 Ford, Robert 86 Forza Italia 125–6 FPÖ see Freedom Party (FPÖ) France: coalitions 47, 55; Communist Party 47–8; Creatives 20, 56, 82; ethnicity 83n7; far right 8, 41–2, 45, 47, 64, 93; National Assembly 7, 14; New Minority 41–7, 51; religion 83n7; Revolution 14; “Startup Nation” 75, 78; Suburban Middle Class 75, 78–82; 2002 election 6–7; United States 7–8, 71, 73–83; working class 42–8, 51 Freedom Party (FPÖ) 43, 64, 93–6, 102n24, 130 French Revolution 14 French Socialist Party (PS) 7, 10, 96, 132 Front National (FN) 8, 41–3, 79–80 Generation Me (GenMe) 56–7, 66n5 Generation X 30, 56, 62, 66n5, 116 Generation Y 56–9, 61–3, 66n5, 76, 124, 130 German Social Democratic Party (SPD) 6, 9, 14, 96–9 Germany 5–6, 14–15, 85, 92, 98, 102n30, 119, 122; see also Alternative for Germany/Alternative für Deutschland (Af D); Creatives 23; Eastern 9, 99–100; New Minority 43, 86; unemployment 60; Western 99; working class 96–7, 100 Gest, Justin xvi, 43, 46, 49, 52n7 Girondins 14 Goodhart, David 8, 28n14

Goodwin, Matthew 86 Google 21, 38 Gore, Al 3 Gorila Scandal 104, 114n2 Gove, Michael 87 Great Class Shift 9–10, 66, 74, 80, 85–6, 90, 97, 110, 119, 122–3, 128, 129, 131–5 Greatest Generation 60, 67n20 Great Recession 15, 25 Greece 10, 15, 55, 115–20, 123, 129, 132 Greens 6, 9, 76, 82, 94–7, 99, 102n24; Left 91 Grillo, Beppe 63, 123–4, 127n17; see also Five-Star Movement Guatemala 48 Guiluy, Christophe 46 Gyurcsány, Ferenc 104, 114n1 Haider, Jörg 93, 101n18 Hamburg, Germany 98 Hamburg, John 32 Hamon, Benoît 43, 74, 78 Hansen, Philipp xv Hidalgo, Anne 22 Hilton Miami Airport 1–3 Hispanics 27, 75–6, 83n6; Democrats 55 Hofer, Norbert xii, 94 Hollande, François xiv, 6, 43, 55–6, 75–6, 78 Huelin, Jean-Philippe 42 Hughes, Jesse 37, 40n13 Hundstorfer, Rudolf 93 Hungarian Left 104 Hungary 6, 35, 37, 93, 104, 107–9, 113 Huntington, Samuel 61 Iberian Peninsula 119 Iglesias, Pablo 63 Il Cavaliere 125 illiberal democracy 35, 107 individualism 32, 56–7, 106 International Republican Institute (IRI) xv–xvi, 4, 114n8 Iohannis, Klaus 110–11, 129 IPSOS 91, 101n15 Iranian Revolution 17 Jeanbart, Bruno 84n25 Johnson, Boris 37, 87 Johnson, Gary 77 Jospin, Lionel 7, 15, 42 Judis, John B. 50, 52n21; The Populist Explosion 48, 76, 86–8 Juppé, Alain 33, 84n18

140  Index

Kardashian, Kim 58 Kennedy, John F. 57 Kennedy-Nixon election 2 Kern, Christian 94, 96 Kiss 32 Kohl, Andreas 93 Kramp-Karrenbauer, Annegret 97 Kurz, Sebastian 58, 92, 94–6, 102n21, 102n22, 129–31 laissez-faire economics 54, 87, 93 La République En Marche 5, 7 Law and Justice party (PiS) 45, 112–13 Lazar, Marc 48 Lazara, Adrian Vazquez xvi Le Pen, Jean-Marie 7–8, 15, 42, 47, 51 Le Pen, Marine xi, 5, 7–8, 26, 38, 41–7, 51, 64, 75, 78–80, 82, 91, 99, 129–30; see also Rassemblement National Les Républicains 7, 82 LGBTQI 22–4 Liberal Democrats 9, 87, 90, 104, 135 Ligue du Sud 41 Livingstone, Ken 88 London, England 22, 24, 31, 37, 43, 46, 85, 127n17 London School of Economics 119 Luce, Edward 108, 135 Maastrich Treaty 17, 101n3 Macron, Emmanuel xi, xiii–xiv, 5–8, 20, 28n18, 43, 64, 71, 74, 80–3, 129–31; champion of Creative Class 75, 78–9; “modernization” 38; “reform” 38 Mahoning County, Ohio 50 Maine 3–4 Major, John 86, 101n3 Marshall Plan 30 Marxism 10–11, 14, 17, 26–7, 28n18, 45, 63, 65–6, 120, 123–4 May, Theresa 89, 101n11 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc 7–8, 28n18, 38, 43, 55, 61, 63, 65, 70, 74–5, 78–80, 82, 83n2 Merkel, Angela 6, 97–9, 130; see also Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Mexico 46–8 Michigan 3–4, 32 Microsoft 38; Office suite 67

Middle Class i, xii, 17–19, 25–6, 29–39, 39n3, 64, 133–4; see also Suburban Middle Class; Austria 94, 96; Europe 30, 87; France 44–7, 79; Germany 97–9; Greece 116, 118; Italy 124–6; Netherlands 90, 92; Poland 113; Provincial 32, 39n3, 44, 62, 64–5, 77, 81, 86–7, 92, 94–5, 97–9, 109, 111–13, 121–3, 125, 131–2; religious symbol neutralization 34–5; Romania 110–11; Russia 105–6; Spain 120–3; United States 38, 77, 81, 131 Millennials i, xii, 26, 54–66, 67n20, 129; see also Generation Y; Austria 94–6; Catalonia 127; Clinton 77; Creatives 57, 59, 62, 81, 88, 107, 130–1, 133; Europe 71, 85, 88, 91, 107; France 55, 75–6, 80, 82; Germany 97; Hungary 108; Mélenchon 55, 78–9; New Minority 51, 131–2, 134; Obama 55, 75, 130; Romania 110; Sanders 74; Southern Europe 115–26, 128; Suburban Middle Class 130–1; Trudeau 130; Trump 64; Ukraine 109; United Kingdom 88–9, 130; United States 70, 75–6 Minnesota 4 Mones, Toni Roldán 119 Montagnards 14 Monte dei Paschi di Sienna bank 115, 126n1 Moroza-Rasmussen, Jacob xv Muslims 36, 83n7, 98, 102n29 Muzergues, Alisa xvi Muzergues, Thibault xi–xii National Endowment for Democracy xv National Health Service (Britain) 87 National Liberal Party (PNL) 111 NATO 5 Nazism 73, 101n18 New Deal 30, 50, 134 New Hampshire 3–4 New Labour 47, 86, 88 New Minority 19, 26–7, 39, 41–51, 60, 62, 64–5, 71, 74–6, 78, 82, 85–6, 88–94, 96, 99–100, 109–10, 112–13, 116, 123, 125, 129; France 41–7, 51; Millennials 131–2, 134; Trump 70, 77, 80–1, 130 New People’s Party 95 Nice, Treaty of xiv Nice attacks 34

Index  141

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 17, 46 North-Western Europe 85–101, 128, 131 Nuit debout 55, 78 Obama, Barack 20, 26, 50, 55, 81; administration 23; campaign 74; Creatives 56, 64, 75–6, 130, 133; electorate 27, 76; Millennials 55, 75–6, 130, 133; New Minority and Suburban/Provincial Middle Class 77 Obamacare 50, 77 Occupy Wall Street 55, 76 OECD countries 117 Ohio 3–4, 46, 77; see also Athens, Ohio; Mahoning County, Ohio; Youngstown, Ohio OpinionWay 84n25 Orbán, Viktor 6, 35, 37, 104, 108 Oregon 4 ÖVP see Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) Papandréou, Andréas 15, 118 Paris, France 40n13, 44, 55, 65, 82 Paris Match 74 Park, David xvi Partido Popular, Spain (PP) 9–10, 119–22 Party for Freedom (PVV) 91–2 PASOK 118, 132 People’s Party, Austrian (ÖVP) 92–5, 102n24; see also Die neue Vokspartei (New People’s Party) People’s Party, Hungary Christian Democratic (KDNP) 35 Perot, Ross 15 Pew Report 48 Pew Research Center 50, 67n21, 77, 83n7 Philippot, Francois 42 Piketty, Thomas 18, 73 PiS see Law and Justice party (PiS) Plein, Philipp 36 Podemos 10, 55, 116, 119–23, 127n15 Poland 10, 15, 44, 111–13 Polish Social-Democrats 112 populism 66n1, 87; left-wing 116–17; right-wing 43 PP see Partido Popular, Spain (PP) Progressive Slovakia 10, 107 pro-system xii, 28n18, 120

Provincial Middle Class 32, 39n3, 44, 62, 64–5, 81, 86–7, 92, 94–5, 97–9, 109, 111–13, 121–3, 125, 131–2; Trump 38, 77 Prussia 38 PS see French Socialist Party (PS) PSD 110–11; Romania 113 PSOE see Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) Putin, Vladimir 106–8 PvdA see Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) PVV see Party for Freedom (PVV) Quart, Alissa 62 Rassemblement National 7–8, 26, 82, 91 Reagan, Ronald 4, 17 Real Clear Politics 84n19 Remainers 8–9, 88 Republican Left, Catalan (ERC) 116, 123 Republican Left, Catalonia 127n15 Republicans (France) 79 Republicans (U.S.) 3, 14, 134; candidates 61, 74, 76–7, 81, 83n6; Congress 2; electorate 50; Ohio 4; Party 1, 7, 33, 54; presidents 7, 9, 54, 61, 83n6; primaries 50, 54, 84n17 Rivera, Albert 119 Rivera, Marta 119 Romania 10, 51, 107, 110–11, 114n6, 114n7, 129; PSD 113 Romanian Social-Democrats 111 Romania Plus 110 Romney, Mitt 76–7, 83n6 Roy, Olivier 39n4 Rubio, Marco 1–2, 5, 74 Rust Belt 4, 46, 50, 105 Rutte, Mark 64, 92 Salvini, Matteo 6, 116, 123, 125–6, 131 same-sex marriage 8, 23–4, 33–5, 45, 61, 75–7, 122 Sanders, Bernie 8–9, 27, 54–5, 61, 63–4, 74, 76, 83n2, 83n10 Sarkozy, Nicolas xiv, 6–7, 33, 43, 65, 75, 84n18, 95 Save Romania Union 110 Scotland 130 Scott, Rick 81 Scottish National Party 87, 130 September 11, 2001 13, 15 Service Class 25–6, 30, 43, 45 Shipman, Tim 89

142  Index

The Simpsons 29 Slovakia 51, 93, 106, 109, 132; ChristianDemocratic center-right 104; Gorila scandal 114n2; Parliament 35 Slovenia 93 SMER 109 Social Democratic Party, German (SPD) 6, 9, 14, 96–9 Social-Democrats, Austrian 96 Social-Democrats, Polish 112 Social-Democrats, Romanian 111 socialism 14–15, 59, 63, 124; “Existing Socialism” 105 Socialist Realism 105 SORA 102n23, 102n24 South-East Asia 4, 18 Southern Europe 71, 115–26, 128; financial crisis 56 Soviet Union 4, 18, 105–6, 108 Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) 10, 119–22 SPD see Social Democratic Party, German SPÖ 92–6 “Startup Nation” 75, 78 Stefan, Laurentiu xvi Stein, Jill 77 Strache, Heinz-Christian 94 Suburban Bourgeoisie 31–3 Suburban Middle Class i, 26–7, 29–39, 39n3, 44, 46, 64–5, 74, 132; Austria 94–5; England 88–9; Europe 85–6, 100, 105, 128, 131; Fillon 78–9; France 75, 78–82; Germany 97–100; Greece 117; Hungary 108–9, 113; Italy 123, 125; Kurz 95; Lega 123, 125; Macron 80–3, 130–1; Merkel 97; Millennials 130–1; Netherlands 90–2; Obama 77; Orbán 108; Poland 112–13; Putin 108; Romania 111; Russia 108–9; Spain 122; Trump 38, 70, 77, 80, 83, 129–31; United Kingdom 87, 89 superdelegates 76, 83n10 Surotchak, Jan xv Syriza 10, 55, 117–19, 123 Tarascio, Alex xvi Taylor, Andrew xv terrorism xiii, 34–5, 98; Bataclan Theatre 40n13; September 11, 2001 13, 15 Thatcher, Margaret 86 Thatcherism 17, 42, 90

Tocqueville, Alexis de 73 Tories 89–90 Toronto, Canada 29–30, 39n1 Toronto Life 39n2 Treaty of Nice xiv Trotskyism 8, 14 Trudeau, Justin 5, 20, 26, 64, 130 Trump, Donald i, xii, 1–5, 8–9, 46, 54–5, 61, 74, 76, 83n6; “Access Hollywood” 77; anti-Trumpism 61, 67n24; coalitions 30, 38, 71, 77, 79, 133; majority electoral college 134; Make America Great Again 50; Millennials 64; New Minority 70, 77, 80–1, 130; Provincial Middle Class 38, 77; Suburban Middle Class 38, 70, 77, 80, 83, 129–31; “the Swamp” 54; taxation 80–1; working-class xi, 51, 130 Trzaskowski, Rafał 113 Tsipras, Alexis 61, 63, 117–18, 120, 129 Tusk, Donald 112 Twenge, Jean 56–7, 60, 66n5, 66n11 Tzu, Sun 132 UEFA Football European Championship 115 UKIP 9, 51, 86–7, 89, 101n3 Union for a Popular Movement 7 United Kingdom 4, 9, 13–15, 17, 23, 64, 70, 130; economics 86–7, 90; Glorious Revolution 85; working class 46, 49–50, 91 United States i, 5, 11n1, 13–15, 17, 20, 30, 86, 88, 112, 119, 133; coalitions 70; college graduates salaries 60; Creatives 25, 34, 38, 56, 85; employment 45; far right 29; France 7–8, 71, 73–83, 83n5, 85; Marxism 63; median household income 60; Middle Class 38, 77, 81, 131; Mid-West 48; Millennials 55, 70, 75–6; presidential election 4, 9, 27, 129, 134; same-sex marriage 23–4, 67n21; working class 30, 46, 48–51, 70, 77, 130 Van der Bellen, Alexander xii, 94 Verhofstadt, Guy xiv–xv “waiter-gate” 114n9 Walker, Scott 30, 33 Washington 4 Washington, DC 74 Washington Consensus 15

Index  143

White Working Class xi, 26, 39, 62, 71, 77, 85–6, 90; AfD 100; Central and Eastern Europe 104–13, 128; GDR 99; immigration 99; VVD 92; revolt 41–51 Why Him 32 Wilders, Geert 91–2, 99 Wiosna movement 10 Wisconsin 30, 70, 77 working class xii, 18–19, 132–4; see also White Working Class; Austria 94–6; Europe 86–9, 100; fall 25; France 42–8, 51; Germany 96–7, 100; income 25; indigenous 46; Italy 123; Paris 20, 22; Spain 122; Trump xi, 51,

130; United Kingdom 46, 49–50, 91; United States 30, 48–51, 70, 77, 130 World War I 14, 101n18 World War II 30–1, 67n20, 85, 100, 101n18, 102n30, 105 World Wide Web 17 Yannopoulos, Milo 37 Yellow Vests 44, 47, 82, 84n24, 130 Youngstown, Ohio 46, 49–50, 52n7, 77 Zapatero, José Luis 122 Zelensky, Volodymyr 109 Zuckerberg, Mark 58