President Emmanuel Macron

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Arriving in Paris in the middle of the most severe political crisis in France since the mass uprising of spoiled brats in 1968, I looked around for signs of it in the street. There were none, of course: People were going about their business as usual. The simple restaurant to which we always go when we arrive in Paris was just as good, the service just as pleasant, as before. If it weren’t for newspapers, the internet, etc., we wouldn’t have noticed that there was a crisis on.

This caused me to veer toward one of the two poles between which the pendulum of my mind constantly swings: that politics is of supreme unimportance, mere froth on the surface of life, whose real concerns lie much deeper. The other pole to which the pendulum of my mind swings is that politics is of supreme importance, and that one ignores it at one’s peril. You might not be interested in politics, but politics, or at least the political class, is interested in you, and will make your life miserable if it can.

No doubt the truth, if such a thing exists in so shifting and movable a question, lies (most of the time) somewhere between the two, but it is difficult for a mind to remain for very long at a happy medium. The temptation is always to go to extremes, for the golden mean is seldom interesting.

In North Korea, politics is everything; in Switzerland, practically nothing. South Africa is another country in which politics is omnipresent and seemingly all-important, and this is no new phenomenon. In 1928, the South African poet and satirist Roy Campbell wrote:

South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside…

When people start talking politics, a fire lights in their mind and they become passionate, even when normally they are calm and collected. In France, I have noticed an extraordinary personal hatred for the current president Emmanuel Macron, which to an outsider seems disproportional to his undoubted failures and failings. He is hated more in France than is Starmer in England, perhaps because Starmer has personality enough only to draw contempt rather than hatred. It is difficult to hate an automaton.

Getting rid of hated or despised politicians is rarely the complete answer to a nation’s woes, and often not even a partial answer since the replacements are no better and sometimes even worse. Politicians inherit situations not of their own making, whose solutions, while they may be obvious on an intellectual level, are all but impossible on a political one.

A government runs up too much debt and lives beyond its means? Simple: Reduce expenditure. Aggregate demand may fall, however, even if only temporarily and even if such reduction will conduce in the long term to greater prosperity. In democratic politics, there is no long term, there is only standard of living until the next election, which is why supposedly reformist governments have only a short time to attempt reform.

Cutting expenditure, however necessary it might be, will cause discomfort and even hardship to someone, which will be well publicized and cause outrage against those who attempt it. Those harmed may deserve their seven lean years after their seven fat ones, but harm is still harm and suffering is still suffering. A sentimental electorate, with its insatiable appetite for hard-luck stories, will think the government hard-hearted rather than hardheaded. That is why it is far easier to create dependence than to end it.

According to an excellent article in Le Figaro by a professor at the Sciences Po, the Institute of Political Studies, in Paris, the situation in France is not the fault of individual politicians alone, or even that of the entire political, bad as they might be, but that of the population, which has come to expect both more services from the government and lower taxes—lower taxes for themselves, that is. The taxation of others rarely outrages us as much as tax demands on ourselves.

Anyone who has observed government agencies close-up will know that they are wasteful and inefficient; in some cases, their very existence depends upon their inefficiency. Unnecessary rules and regulations, and wastage of effort, are permanent features of bureaucracy. The mission statement of Dickens’ fictional Circumlocution Office, which he invented in the 1850s, when governmental bureaucracy was in its infancy, was How not to do it. Just as the wonder of the Soviet Union was not why it produced so little but how it produced anything at all, so in modern bureaucracies the wonder is not that everything takes so long but that anything ever gets done. Expecting more efficiency from a bureaucracy as an answer to economic problems is like hoping for milk from lions. As the Nigerians say, you can’t stop a goat from eating yams.

But we are not guiltless. We are sheep who complain of their shepherd: We don’t like his guidance or his bullying, we abominate his sheepdog, but we want him to take better care of us. The shepherd says that he will do so, provided only that we accept that he decides everything for us. We want him not only to protect us from the wolves, but to provide the grass as well.

The population was not always like this. At one time, not millennia ago but within the living memory of some, people took pride in their independence and experienced public support as a defeat and a humiliation. It was once a matter of personal pride and dignity that if a person was not rich, at least he was not in debt. But debt for the sake of current expenditure is no longer dishonorable, even if one has no prospect of repaying it. Nor is debt feared: Individuals can go bankrupt and start again; countries that borrow in their own currencies can inflate the money away. And lenders seem in any case to have no memory. How many times has Argentina defaulted since 2000?

Eat, drink, and be merry, then: For tomorrow we shall be solvent.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).