Can France Happen Here?

Can France Happen Here?

Massive civil unrest here? Where is it going to come from? Seniors, over cuts to Social Security? I just can’t imagine a bunch of seniors – even the Gray Panthers – torching their nursing homes from their wheelchairs. Students? Can you imagine our high school kids rioting for more classrooms and better-paid teachers? Illegals? Not unless they want to be deported. What about the radical socialists? As much as the DSA would love it, there are too few hardcore socialists to take to the streets. Yes, we had riots after MLK’s assassination. Yes, we had them after George Floyd’s death, but they soon “burned” themselves out. So what would provoke demonstrations like those in France here? Beats me. But I just don’t see it. Yes, there is discontent, but there is always discontent. But protests on the French scale? Not likely. Seriously, can you envision riots in South Carolina?

Sure, some local agitators used encrypted Signal chats to coordinate transportation, supplies and demonstrations before clashes with federal agents, mainly over ICE. Sort of like where teens coordinated group shoplifting sojourns on Snapchat – called flash mobs – at local malls. But the masses of people aren’t going to protest ICE, because most of us want illegal criminals to be either jailed or deported – not given citizenship or voting rights. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said, “France is descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS just like the socialist Democrats in America. What we are witnessing is a chilling warning for all Americans of what happens if the radical Marxist insurgent left gets their way.”

Sure, but the open-borders policy of the Biden administration is over, and I doubt voters would sanction it again, given the impact on local communities across the country. ICE rioting is an isolated, rather than a national, phenomenon in the United States and is likely to remain so. Even the densest DSA politician knows that publicly embracing open borders risks backlash from the majority of Americans – even those who are immigrants themselves.

But what if radical socialists come to national power? Would open borders return? Maybe, but I think even they know that such a policy would get them voted out of office. Sure, politicians like Bernie Sanders, AOC and Michigan democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed have made abolishing ICE a campaign position, arguing that the agency cannot be reformed. But an election of El-Sayed would not change national policy, and I bet that post-Trump he would find himself a one-term senator.

Also, it is somewhat ironic that in France a convergence of frustrations over school funding, rising costs, France’s stagnant economy and longstanding tensions surrounding immigration and assimilation led to the rioting. In Marseille, gangs of North African-heritage youths rode through the city center on motorbikes, waving the Palestinian flag. That the rioters are mainly of Algerian and Moroccan heritage will likely lead to the election of the right-wing Le Pen next year. So the immigrant rioters are actually scripting their own demise. The French left has seized on the opportunity to try to overthrow the government – albeit through elections rather than armed conflict, where they would be outgunned. La France Insoumise – France’s DSA, the party of the extreme left – has joined the rioters, the Islamists and the anarchists, seeing an opportunity to seize power eventually through the ballot box.

But they, too, will fail. The majority of the French are appalled, and there will be a backlash. But the events in France are just another example of “useful idiots” using disgruntled, foreign-descended kids as a kind of grunt army against Western values. The far left hates the Western way of life. But they won’t find much traction among the masses of citizens, even in France, which is no stranger to political tumult where strikes and protests are part of the national culture.

President Trump said that the riots are the inevitable result of “out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!” Trump has his own agenda. Does he really think that the rioting would have occurred if France were not faced with a failing economy brought about by its own socialist policies? In a more rational world, Trump would be arguing against socialism (which he has himself embraced with his own policies of government purchases of stakes in private companies) rather than the immigrant bogeyman.

Does anyone really think that Hispanics are going to take to the streets here? Hardly. Most want to be assimilated into the country, speak the language, work hard, go to church, get their children educated and pursue the American Dream. I know that many will point to the Muslim community as a possible source of civil unrest. But again, given their small numbers, any protests will be localized and not national. Then too, if there is a French Dream that runs thought the ethos of that country, please enlighten me.

What about socialists like New York’s Zohran Mamdani and anti-Israel activists? They don’t have widespread support either. The DSA gets its support from disaffected (mostly) white college graduates and not from the population writ large. In the primaries, black voters have largely voted against DSA candidates, and the DSA will not find a large body of support there. Yes, there are some black socialists, like Florida’s Angie Nixon. But she is an anomaly. Black Americans know that this country and capitalism have made them better off than any socialist regime anywhere in the world, and they don’t want to kill the golden goose.

France is a mess, not just because of its immigration policies but also because of the failure of its socialist-based governmental policies. We would have to go a long way down the socialist road before even the slim possibility of large-scale national rioting made its way into this country.

But what are France’s immigration policies. Just to be clear, as Peter Zeihan has rightly pointed out, France’s problem is not one of illegal migration, it is one of legal migration. Enshrined in the French constitution is the provision that anyone in territories that once were French-controlled can easily migrate into the country. So the North Africans migrants from Algeria and Morocco are actually legal migrants into the country not illegals as Trump and others have implied. Now what do you think are the odds that France will change their constitution to shut off the flow of legal immigrants form the former French colonies?

Regardless, this is probably why Macron has fiercely defended his country against politicians like Trump who are using the French crisis for their own political purposes. Macron has said: “We’ve had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.” Foreign leaders — including those “on the other side of the Atlantic” — are seeking to exploit France’s tense social climate for political gain. “When I see leaders who are in the middle of election campaigns, whether in the region or on the other side of the Atlantic — who sometimes naively repeat AI-generated content or spread narratives that certain circles are clearly trying to promote about what happened in France — they’re using our country for their own political campaigns.”