Update: As expected, I’m being attacked as an idiot and told that I don’t understand anything about either U.S. or French politics. I’m also being told it’s unfair to compare French politics to U.S. politics, because, I don’t know. I guess it’s OK when “Very Serious” Neera writes a Washington Post Op-Ed making comparisons to our centrists, but not okay when I write, “Well, actually, Macron is more “Our Revolution” than he is “Center for American Progress.” Thanks to those who are substantively engaging my piece rather than dishing personal attacks. FWIW, I don’t care about Hillary or Bernie — I care about good public policy for the public good. This diary isn’t about Hillary and Bernie — it’s about public policy and ideology.
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I’ve noticed that the lesson “Very Serious DC and NYC Liberals” seem to be taking from the incredible success of Emmanuel Macron in France is that the path to victory for “The Party” in 2020 is centrism, centrism, centrism and personality, personality, personality. Basically, Hillary Clinton, but a tiny bit more likable than just likable enough.
From New York:
From Washington, D.C. (where Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden has not held back with her Macron adoration):
In addition to tweeting lots of Macron love, Neera even wrote an entire column in the Washington Post on the topic. The problem is that her love letter (and I’d submit the same critique of Max Boot’s work) to obscure institutional reforms in France ignored the most substantive part of Macron’s campaign: importing the wildly successful Nordic model to France, which in the case of France means making the country’s already very generous social model a tiny bit more generous, and making the country’s extremely rigid labor laws (i.e. it’s really, really, really hard to fire someone for incompetence in France) a bit more liberal (liberal in the European free market sense of the word).
Please read this carefully:
Macron’s policy is entirely in line with this model. He does not share the French Socialist Party’s (and now also its British sister party’s) strong anti-market ideology. But he is not a neo-liberal who wants to scrap France’s social policy system. On the contrary, he wants to invest in a labor market policy on typically Nordic lines, where one wants to give a second chance to those who lose their jobs due to globalization. He also wants to increase political efforts in areas such as health care, climate change and culture.
The Nordic model is also known as “flexicurity,” which is a more technical term for a social and labor contract defined by extensive universal welfare institutions, but also a liberal labor market. (Nevertheless, labor rights in Nordic countries are generally still stronger than those provided American workers.)
Furthermore, Macron’s support for free trade is surprisingly measured. He is in favor of some protectionism to defend French (and European) workers.
Macron’s proposals include a “buy European act” that would make it harder for non-EU companies to get public contracts in Europe. And when he visited German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May, Macron urged her to strengthen EU laws to stop “dumping,” wherein a non-EU company exports a product to Europe at prices lower than market value.
So, hmmm, help me think about this, my dear friends: who is the Democratic candidate from 2016 that supported both the Nordic social model and light protectionism? Was it Hillary Clinton?
Ummm, no, it was not.
Emmanuel Macron supports a social welfare infrastructure that Hillary — and the “Very Serious Wonks” at the Center for American Progress — would never even begin to consider as acceptable for the United States.
Ok, but what about the labor law reforms? Don’t those make Macron a “centrist” closer to Hillary than Bernie?
Ummm, no. When people like Neera and Max praise Macron and ponder why he could be so successful, and try and attribute all of that success to personality and institutional tinkering rather than a bold vision for human welfare, they display great ignorance of the national context that elected Macron. (I do think a lot “Very Serious DC and NYC Wonks” are well-meaning people, but when they try to draw lessons from European politics for American politics, they often display a breathtakingly poor understanding of European political economy, and, in particular, the nuance required to understand the differences between Nordic and French labor and social policy.)
Unlike the United States, France’s problem isn’t a deficit of public goods — France has great universal health care, outstanding public transportation, excellent public schools for both the rich and poor, good (albeit imperfect) social housing — but it does suffer from wage stagnation and a labor market that can be tough for young people and non-French European migrants and entrepreneurs to enter. So, Macron’s plan to reform the French labor market is not draconian cruelty — “French GOP”— but an earnest attempt to provide decent and respectful work for more French and European citizens.
So, in short, if you look at Macron on a thoughtful and substantive level — with appropriate French and European context — you see that Macron is, without a doubt, much, much, much closer to Bernie Sanders in terms of policy preferences than he is to a Hillary Clinton or Cory Booker.
It profoundly depresses me to say this, but when we talk about social and economic “centrists” in the U.S. context, we’re really talking about a very far-right approach to political economy and social policy in the rest of the rich world. (I suspect “progressives” like Neera would rather just ignore how cruel, extreme and severe the status quo of U.S. social and labor and policy is, because it does serve economic and political elites quite well, even if the bottom 80 percent of Americans suffer as a result.)
In a nutshell, if you’re a Democrat excited by the success of Macron in France, try to look at him on a deeper level than just “he’s energetic,”“young,” and “believes that climate change is real.” That’s all great, but substantively, if you really want to get on board the “Macron train (errr...TGV),” you must admit — unless you are choosing to be intellectually dishonest and ignore facts — that Macron and the En Marche movement, with its Nordic orientation, is dramatically closer to the Bernie Sanders/Keith Ellison wing of the Democratic Party than it is to the Hillary Clinton/Cory Booker wing.