From June 2013 to the Revolts In France: A Look At Cultural Factors and Identities

The election of Donald Trump in the US, the rise of the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France, the Brexit and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil seem to be completely different events without any visible connection between them, but under the surface one can notice that, in reality, they are very similar phenomena with a starting point in the cultural wars that have swept the West in recent years.

Let’s start with Brazil. In June 2013, Brazil was taken by an unprecedented wave of protests that may have been the last in the Western hemisphere to adopt a non-identitarian character, being still rooted in class issues and on eminently political agendas (in the sense of demanding effective changes based not on individual identities, but on notions of class and of social rights).

In fact, the 2013 protests were attended by individuals from a wide range of backgrounds — in every respect, social, racial, cultural, class, but especially ideological, perhaps its most controversial and least understood element — becoming something far greater than those who took to the streets could have imagined then.

The protests began with the demand for a reduction in public transportation fares and also with the demand for studies for the implementation of a free public transportation system. Soon, after violent repression in several cities of Brazil, other agendas were added, generally focused on improving public services and against police violence.

Many have tried to link these protests to that of the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests), which shook France between late 2018 and early 2019 (with some sporadic resurgence up until now), and no doubt there are many common points, such as the absence of a recognizable leadership (in Brazil, the Free Pass Movement or MPL called for demonstrations, but the movement organized itself horizontally), huge popular revolt with violent acts — and violent response — and with a central agenda, plus a wide range of popular demands, etc.

However, something that also seems to be pivotal to the protests in France was missing from the June 2013 protests in Brazil: the identitarian character erupting from the latent cultural conflict that has taken hold not only of France, but which seems to be a globally widespread trend.

In France, the protests had a more homogeneous character, with a large presence of an impoverished rural middle class in the provinces and city workers in precarious conditions of the most diverse political spectrums — and also gaining support from both the far right and the far left as the protests grew and spread.

In an article for the Uninômade Network, Alexandre Pinheiro, professor of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, set the tone:

“It is not every day that families from small towns in the countryside, without any previous ‘militant’ history, decide to put on a yellow vest and spend days camped on a rond-point by the road, generating a national mobilisation. It is not every day that a pensioner leaves the banlieue to protest for hours in streets crossed by fires and barricades”.

In Brazil, the political process was more complicated. The demonstrations caused mistrust among the political classes of the most diverse strata, with the forging of a broad union of parties behind the violent suppression of the movement. As protests grew, sectors of the left who have originally called for the demonstrations were not able to dictate the course of events, while the far right began to occupy the space that was gradually abandoned by the other side.

From vacuum to identity politics

There is no vacuum in politics, and as such the retreat of the left on the one hand and the police violence on the other, ended up helping the (far)right to gather support and gain momentum. The then ruling Worker’s Party (centre-left) was among the biggest enthusiasts of the police violence during June 2013; this helps to explain, in part, why the party came to be hated afterwords and led the way for the victory of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.

Returning to France, one notes the virtual absence of revolts in neighbourhoods with greater ethnic diversity, or massive presence of immigrants. The Yellow Vests revolt was eminently “French”, mostly white, with a direct connection with a crisis in the countryside, a dispute between urban France and deep, rural France, of small and medium cities that also depended of increasingly dwindling industries.

In other words, however many elements of the struggles that had taken hold in various parts of the world since the end of the last decade, the protests in France were already showing signs of the beginning of a paradigm shift. It was politics, economy, and class walking side by side with identity politics.

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, anthropologist and professor of International Development at the University of Bath, writing for The Intercept Brasil, stated that France would be re-editing the June 2013 protests, yet both phenomena differ when we include the element of identity and despite the seemingly diversity of agendas, in the case of France there is a certain uniformity in the actors involved.

It is not just a rebellion of the precariat or the result of the neoliberal flexibilization of labour relations, as Pinheiro-Machado wrote, and “consequently, of the ways of doing union politics, acting as a machine for grinding collectivities, de-democratizing, disaggregating and individualizing, the protests of the precariat tend to be disorganized, since the sphere of politicization ceases to be the labour, but occurs in a decentralized way on social networks,” but of something even more profound, a revolt that does not occur only in the field of the economy or democracy, but operates in the field of the most primitive identities and within a logic of cultural conflicts.

The configuration of the protests in France resembles much more the phenomenon that served as Trump’s backbone (and what led him to victory) than with June 2013. It no doubt aggregates fundamental elements of both mo(vi)ments, but the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) showed a detachment from what June 2013 meant and how it was configured. The Brazilian protests were more similar and to some extent a continuation to the protests in Spain that led to the emergence of the Podemos party or the Arab Spring in which the main drivers were exclusion, economic and political issues, democracy and class issues but with a diversity of identities sharing space and building agendas in the streets.

In the US, identity politics arise as unions vanish

In the US, an important part of Trump’s electorate came from impoverished industrial regions, areas in crisis, with neighbourhoods and cities emptying, where unions functioned as social aggregators.

Trump’s discourse that he would make America great again, restoring those jobs and the dignity of workers — many of them from historically Democrat regions — quickly filled the vacuum. The appeal also went deep into a population that was left behind by the Democrat discourse of minority empowerment, often speaking from and to large centres far removed from the reality of those who increasingly felt no one cared about them and did not see themselves as target of such discourses.

There is much in common between the Gilet jaunes and Trump’s victory when we analyse the power reduction of unions. In the US, trade unions were not able to respond to the immediate demands of workers while the Democrats and liberals as a whole began to adopt divisive identity discourses over class discourse of workers’ needs.

Worldwide, workers era facing a divide between the countryside and the city, between new technologies and jobs “from the past”, elite versus the proletariat, and also whites versus minorities, most of whom are excluded or feeling excluded from official lefty discourses and, in the US, finding in Trump an answer to their grievances.

And we cannot overlook, it is important to make it clear, that the Democrat discourse has moved from creating and maintaining jobs to tailor-made discourses for minorities and vulnerable groups — LGBT, women, POC — an electorate that is largely already captive or with a greater tendency to vote for the party anyway.

A discourse often focused on issues that are far from some of the problems faced by the white middle class in swing states  — those in the throes of impoverishment and in the midst of a rising unemployment crisis — in much need of feeding their families and who don’t know (or care) by which pronoun someone who defines himself/herself as gender-fluid should be treated, the focal point of Mark Lilla’s criticism in his 2017 book “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.”

It is not, of course, a question of supporting the idea that issues related to minorities and vulnerable populations are not important, but rather of adopting a perspective on what are the immediate concerns of the majority of the population and how, within this great debate, such specific agendas can (and should) be included. The Democrats have failed; and to a large extent the Brazilian left, which behaves like a US mirror on these very same issues, has also failed.

Identity politics spread and the far-right rises

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is the most visible result of the cultural wars. Pablo Ortellado, professor of the University of São Paulo, wrote for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo that “Bolsonaro is a soldier of the cultural wars, putting at the centre of his discourse moral issues such as the sexualization of childhood, schools without [left-wing] ideology, the possession of weapons, the punishment of criminals and anti-feminism.”

Bolsonaro, like Trump, represents “a broader trend in international politics, towards what has been labelled populist nationalism,” explains Francis Fukuyama in his book Identity. He goes on to explain how “demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in word politics today” and helps us understand the phenomenon of the growth of the extreme right worldwide and of the revolts of a precariat that has less to do with class (although it carries with it many of its fundamental elements) and more with a struggle for recognition of one’s identity that, Fukuyama explains, “cannot be simply satisfied by economic means”.

While in recent years the left has increasingly deviated from the defence of class interests to concentrate on the defence of micro-identities (against microaggressions) and specific groups against others, exchanging the notion of “class” for the one of “identity” and blaming oppression no longer on a powerful class of bourgeois, but on those who identify themselves (or are identified as) as men, whites, straight and cisgenders, the right “is re-defining itself as patriots,” says Fukuyama, a category that also ends up showing strongly identitarian traits and that is linked to race, ethnicity and religion, creating a dynamic he calls “politics of resentment,” creating revolts (as in France) or helping to elect individuals from the far right connected to this radical vision of patriotism and tradition (Trump, Bolsonaro, etc).

Despite all the weight of the identitarian discourse of (and within) the left, eminently identity-based movements such as the Gilet Jaunes or the movements (rather gatherings) that led to the election of Trump and Bolsonaro simply escape the understanding of that very left.

As philosopher Bruno Cava wrote, “Being [Emmanuel] Macron the [French] president, parties on the left and right fell into the uprising, wearing the vests. It is a duel of populism between Jean Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen in which, it seems to me, the left is less prepared, given the excess of codes and the identitarian component.”

Brexit is also part of this logic, of more cosmopolitan and urban regions voting for permanence as impoverished regions, more agrarian or with working force in decline, voting for a way out expecting for better times and believing that foreigners threaten not only their jobs, but their way of life, their very identity. Despite the economic discourse, the main idea that drove the vote for Brexit was that of identity, of “us being invaded” and of a so-called sovereignty of the UK.

Viktor Orbán’s discourse in Hungary follows remarkably similar lines, as does the discourse of much of the far-right worldwide.

Finally, we are faced with mostly (or significantly) white, rural middle class or impoverished working class movements, from the peripheries of the great centres or provinces, that challenge or even subvert the prevailing logic of identitarian struggles by expressing what journalist Ishaan Tharoor has called “cultural anxiety.” However, they are strongly focused on issues related to class, exclusion, unemployment, and impoverishment – added of the identitarian component.

The protests in France had (and to some extent still have) striking characteristics such as disbelief in the future, distrust of urban elites, and a real atmosphere of uncertainty that serves as fuel for increasingly radicalised protests and that increasingly appeal to the more primitive identities of participants who come to see outsiders as natural enemies.

As for Bolsonaro and Trump, they are sad realities with which the left and those who place themselves in the progressive and democratic camp will have to deal. And, first of all, they will have to understand the ethos of those who sustain such governments, under penalty of continuing to reproduce the same policies and discourses that helped elect the far right.