February 27, 2019 / Understanding Emannuel Macron

MR. MACRON is neither right-wing nor left-wing, because what he represents is not an ideology but . . .

. . . a caste. His base is France's meritocratic elite, the people who have benefited from the same global trends that have left most of the country behind. When Giles Le Gendre, a senior politician from Mr. Macron's party, was recently asked that the government should have been done differently, his baffling response seemed to encapsulate Macronism: "We were probably too intelligent, too subtle."

(This could be President Barack Hussein Obama, who applauded nothing more regularly than he applauded himself. "Yes, the president is capable of giving intelligent and mature answers to questions. But the intent is so obvious—and the effort shows such strain—that the answers feel more condescending than enlightening. Remnick's piece, in fact, doesn't show Obama's complexity; it shows Obama applauding his own complexity." (Isaac Chotiner, 'Barack Obama Talks to Us Like We're Children,' The New Republic, January 20, 2014, referring to a recent profile of Mr. Obama by David Remnick in New Yorker. )

Mr. Macron -- who has mused about the subconscious desire of the French for a king and has dismissed those who dislike him as "defiant Gauls" -- represent a type: the brilliant technocrat, turned investment-banker multimillionaire, turned political appointee. It is a type that a great many French people detest and hold responsible for the country's decline. As an adviser, speaking on background to French media, admitted in a striking moment of lucidity, "People viscerally reject who is is; the class-contempt stuff is not good."

(Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, "The Failure of the French Elite," The Wall Street Journal, February 23-24, 2019)