Who benefits from talking about Brigitte Macron's sex life?
The attempt to defame Brigitte Macron by accusing her of belonging to the opposite sex from the one she professes contains an important political lesson. The case is so striking and bizarre that it has been used as an example of gratuitous malice and a lack of scruples when it comes to lying. This is a relevant interpretation, but I believe that if we want to learn anything from this episode, we need to look at a political program. underlying issues that go beyond the anecdote.
We live in a populist era. As I have tried to argue before, I don't necessarily find this to be a bad thing. I define populism as the construction of a us faced with a theyA way of doing politics based on exacerbating a particular conflict instead of pacifying it. Needless to say, politics should resolve social tensions through transformations that are as consensual as possible. But when the contradiction is real and conventional politics tells you that everything is fine, that if you complain it's because you're an idiot and that there's nothing to be done, then the logic of consensus becomes impossible. they and the us They exist; the question is whether those you choose to put at the center of your actions emerge from an analysis of real problems, and whether your goal is to solve those problems or entrench them in a perpetual war. Resentment is dangerous and, at the same time, it's an essential emotion for detecting and fighting injustices that we would otherwise swallow.
Broadly speaking, today there are two messages competing to channel the industrial quantities of resentment floating in the air: one says that those at the top are robbing you, and the other They say they think they're better than you. In recent years, we've often seen how political movements that have won the favor of the middle and working classes told them they would help them oust the corrupt elites, but when push comes to shove, their leaders and ranks are full of the same old elites, and when they come to power, they end up implementing policies that are very much in line with those they denounce. Rather than empowering the people and dethroning elites, the result of these politicians is... Those who have promised a revolution in recent years, whether leftist or conservative, have instead continued the game of musical chairs among superfluous elites. Naturally, the only way to maintain this contradiction without it being noticed is to shift the focus from economic grievances to cultural grievances.
The Brigitte Macron sex scandal is a textbook example of this phenomenon, which we must learn to recognize and denounce. Few issues highlight the cultural divide as much as opinions and discourses surrounding gender. By accusing the First Lady of being a trans woman, her detractors are focusing on the moral values of the President and his inner circle instead of on the dismantling of the welfare state and the lack of ideas for steering the country in the right direction. With the debate framed in these terms, Marine Le Pen's rise to power could create the illusion of political change, despite her implementing the exact same policies as Macron.
The gender war will continue, and it is perfectly legitimate for there to be a dialectic between more progressive and more conservative positions, which has nothing to do with the lies and abject transphobia behind the persecution of the French First Lady. Now, there's a huge difference if your diagnosis of the most significant ills and problems of the present moment is that they originate in cultural or economic issues. Because the result of abandoning material politics has been to leave the field open to a purely cultural populism that can win elections from time to time, but when it comes to power, it doesn't last long, and vice versa: an alternation between the center and the extremes that depends on cycles of excitement and exhaustion without any solid consensus ever quite taking shape.
The sense of disorientation and sterile pendulum that we see everywhere is a good sign that perhaps the cause of the ills doesn't originate in the disagreements on gender issues that may exist between certain progressive elites and the majority of the population, but rather in the fact that the progressive elites and the progressive elites and the progressive elites. In other words: when inequality is a real problem, cultural populism can only be combated with a healthy dose of economic populism.
