In many countries, the 39-year-old French president remains a symbol of youthful dynamism, a darling of social democrats shocked by Brexit and the ascent of Donald Trump. But in France, the man whose landslide victory in May marked the end of Europe’s populist surge is falling out of favor — and fast.
.. just 36 percent of the French now approve of their president, roughly the same as the percentage of Americans who approve of President Trump. On May 7, 66 percent of French voters supported Macron.
.. Among the frequently cited factors his team noticed, he said, were reactions to the president’s perceived lack of respect for the French military and the relative inexperience and lack of discipline shown by his party’s parliamentary deputies.
.. the president enjoys far broader powers than many of his Western peers — including the power to dissolve Parliament. As a result, he receives all the credit or all the blame whenever either is due.
.. reluctant to grant interviews, preferring to deliver lengthy orations in the halls of Versailles, France’s historic seat of absolute monarchy, and such regal optics have not played well with the media or the public.
.. A vague proposal to make his wife, Brigitte, an “official” first lady — a title that would have come with a separate taxpayer-funded budget — was abandoned after an online petition garnered more than 300,000 signatures.
.. After his inauguration, the new president quickly set his sights on military expenditures, a not-unexpected move given his promises to slash government spending as a way to keep France in line with European Union budgetary guidelines. Although he pledged to increase military spending by next year, he plans to go ahead with previously announced cuts of almost $1 billion to the 2017 defense budget.
.. That amount represents a small fraction of the French military’s total annual budget of $37 billion. But against the backdrop of France’s efforts to combat terrorism at home and abroad, Macron’s decision was seen by military officials as a betrayal. In mid-July, the country’s top-ranking general, Pierre de Villiers, resigned in protest.
.. The young president — who has never served in the military — dismissed the protests of his troops, telling them in a widely discussed public speech last month, “I am your boss” and insisting that he needed “no pressure and no commentary.”
The speech was poorly received by military families, Desportes said, adding, “He knows nothing.”
..“He’s adopted a very clear strategy of not talking to the press,” he said, noting that Macron has so far preferred to appear in the spotlight only alongside other world leaders or pop stars.
.. if you keep doing that for too long, people will start to think you’re only interested in the glamorous things and not in the everyday problems people have.”
Is ‘Game of Thrones’ a Dystopia?
And so I snarked on Twitter that “the porn-y side of Game of Thrones helps keeps liberals deluded about why they like the show,” letting them tell themselves, “Oh, I like it because it’s deconstructing this patriarchal pre-modern world and showing how it’s sex and power all the way down.” But not so, liberals: “You like it because it lets you escape the flat dreariness of liberalism for a little while. Because deep down you want a king or queen.”
.. I think that dystopian exaggeration is in fact key to the show’s appeal to liberals in many ways. It lets you fantasize about the negation of your principles while simultaneously confirming their rightness. GoT presents a vision of a world in which illiberal instincts can be freely indulged, in which the id is constrained only by physical power. All the violent, nasty stuff liberal society (thankfully) won’t let us do, but that’s still seething in our lizard brains, gets acted out. And not just acted out — violence and brutality are the organizing principles on which the world is based.
.. the show chides you for harboring the very fantasies it helps you gratify. It wallows in their destructive consequences — makes that wallowing, in fact, simultaneous with the fulfillment of the fantasies. Will to power leads to suffering and chaos, which lead to more opportunities for the will to power to be acted upon, etc. This is a vastly more complex and interesting emotional appeal than “people secretly want kings.”
.. These shows invite liberal viewers into various illiberal or pre-liberal or just, I suppose, red-state worlds, which are more violent and sexist and id-driven than polite prestige-TV-viewing liberal society, and which offer viewers the kind of escapism that Phillips describes … in which there is a temporary attraction to being a mobster or hanging out with glamorous chainsmoking ’50s admen or leaving your put-upon suburban life behind and becoming Heisenberg the drug lord.
.. But then ultimately because these worlds are clearly wicked, dystopic or just reactionary white-male-bastions you can return in relief to the end of history, making Phillips’ “reconciliation with the existing order” after sojourning for a while in a more inegalitarian or will-to-power world.
.. But what the shows properly understood are doing isn’t a celebration of illiberalism; it’s an exploration of its attractions that ultimately confirms the liberal world and all its norms.
.. fundamentally “The Sopranos” was a story without any heroes, a tragedy in which the only moral compass (uncertain as Dr. Melfi’s arrow sometimes was) was supplied by an outsider
.. fantasy from Tolkien to the present (in both its fictional forms and role-playing varietals) partakes by its nature of romantic and reactionary themes, often scratching the same anti-modern itch as certain forms of far-right and New Age lefty politics — and perhaps the same monarchical itch as certain forms of Macron-esque centrism as well.
.. it’s a world in which the fabric of a feudal society gets rent and you root for a very particular set of noble families to regain their rightful place and help weave it back together
.. whatever their politics in this world, both the show’s bad fans and its good fans are rooting a queen or for a king.
Trump Stomps Planet Earth
Trump once pointed out a dozen six-foot-high speakers by the pool at Mar-a-Lago blasting classic rock and said: “You know, when I moved here to Palm Beach, nobody wanted me around. And I love cranking this music as loud as I can because it bugs the heck out of all of these so-and-sos and I love it.”
It is a familiar pattern. “He wanted to get out of Queens to come to Manhattan,” O’Brien said. “He wanted to be accepted by the real estate class in Manhattan, but then he thumbed his nose at them.” He wanted to run for president as a Republican and get the G.O.P. establishment’s approval, but then he thumbed his nose at it.
.. As Mark Landler and Michael Shear reported in The Times, Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, had told reporters in Sicily that Mr. Trump might be coming around. “His views are evolving” on climate change, Cohn said. “He came here to learn. He came here to get smarter.”
That smarted and made Trump want to blast classic rock.
.. Then the president read an interview with Emmanuel Macron in a French newspaper, bragging about how he had prepared to give Trump an Iron Man grip because it was “a moment of truth” showing that he “won’t make small concessions, even symbolic ones.”
.. “Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said. A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.’”
Trump Handshake Showdown: France’s Macron Just Won’t Let Go
U.S. President Donald Trump met his match in a handshake showdown with France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron.
.. Trump has described himself as “a germ freak” and called handshakes “barbaric.” In his 1997 book “The Art of the Comeback,” Trump wrote he’d “often thought of taking out a series of newspaper ads encouraging the abolishment of the handshake.”