By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, October 20, 2025
Metric units have physical referents, revised a few years
ago: A meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/ 299,792,458th
of a second. The kilogram is derived from the Planck constant.
(Formerly, a gram was the mass of one cubic centimeter of water at 4
degrees Celsius; now, it’s just 1,000th of a kilogram.) The Kelvin
scale is based on the Boltzmann constant. Etc.
Under the recent changes in the metric system, a second
is defined as one-half of the average life expectancy of a French government in
2025.
Votes of no confidence. A new prime minister every few
weeks if not every two seconds, literally. A
surprise credit downgrade. Nationwide protests and strikes. An ascendant
far-right party.
France really, really doesn’t want to do entitlement
reform.
France has had either five or six governments and prime
ministers since 2024, depending on how you count: Sébastien Lecornu resigned
earlier in the month but was immediately reappointed. I’ll count him as two.
President Emmanuel Macron’s term extends into 2027, but
his approval rating is retreating faster than Napoleon on a sled. He is being
pressured to resign, with some of that pressure coming from inside his own
camp. A self-described pragmatist and centrist, Macron is seen by many in
France as too aloof, too interested in international affairs—in his legacy—and
too insulated from the baguette et beurre issues at home. Forced to
appeal to the left in order to beat back the rising force of Marine Le Pen’s
right-wing National Rally, Macron has suspended a law gradually raising
France’s pension eligibility age from 62 to 64.
The problem is that France cannot afford to put off
pension reform.
France is a persistent violator of European Union
debt-control rules, taking the great place of dishonor once held by former
fiscal basket-cases such as Greece. The Europeans take a narrower view of
sovereign debt than Americans do, and the markets are more skeptical of the
ability of European countries to carry large debt loads: As a share of GDP,
France’s government debt is less than that of the United States (about 116
percent for the French vs. 123 percent for les Américains), and so, in
that respect, France is being punished not for its absolute debt load but for
the political chaos and irresolution that demonstrates and confirms the
fundamental French disinclination to deal with the problem.
France’s deficit in 2024 was 5.8 percent of GDP, the
largest since World War II and nearly twice the 3 percent limit imposed by the
European Union. In comparison, EU countries ranging from Greece to Denmark ran
modest surpluses in 2024, with the Danes enjoying a surplus amounting to 4.5
percent of GDP. (By comparison, the United States would have to run a surplus
of about $1.4 trillion to match that performance; instead, the U.S. government
ran a deficit of about $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025.) France’s persistent
deficit is not great in straightforward economic terms, but, more important, it
is a signal that France’s political leadership is unable or unwilling to meet
its obligation to impose reasonable fiscal discipline. For the skittish debt
markets, it does not matter whether Paris could sort itself out—it matters that
Paris apparently won’t. Lenders care about whether a borrower can repay a debt,
but they also worry about whether a borrower is inclined to do so. Willingness
to make good on obligations matters as much as ability to do so.
Six
out of seven French voters disapprove of Macron’s job performance. One
analyst describes the public attitude toward the president as “hatred.” And, as
such, he does not have the clout to impose his will on the legislature, where
power is divided among the left, the right, and the center, but it gets pretty
complicated pretty quickly: Lecornu survived his most recent (as of this
writing!) no-confidence vote thanks in part to support from elements of both
the Socialist Party and the much-diminished center-right Republicans. (If you
think our Republican Party is useless as teats on a boar, check out
France’s Groupe Droite Républicaine.) The current system of French
government, a legacy of Charles de Gaulle, is designed to avoid this kind of
paralysis, but it apparently is not fit for purpose.
There is a structural lesson in that for Americans. As
our presidency continues on its way from Gaullist to Napoleonic, American
governance is becoming less stable, less predictable, less coherent, less
effective—more autocratic, more chaotic, more sclerotic, more dangerous—than
it was under our original constitutional settlement, when Congress was the
supreme branch and the executive charged with executing Congress’ laws rather
than making its own up on the fly. Goodness knows I am not the biggest fan of
capital-D Democracy in its cultic form—the populist-majoritarian notion that if
50 percent plus one of the voters decide to nuke the moon that makes it a good
idea—but in that great eternal contest between king and parliament, parliament
generally does a better job.
I don’t want to go fishing in Jonah Goldberg’s pond here,
but there are real operational problems with the high-progressive model of
governance, which combines democratizing tendencies on one hand (e.g., wrecking
the political parties with the primary system, expanding referenda and ballot
initiatives, etc.) with anti-democratic tendencies on the other (shifting real
power from legislative committees to legislative leadership, in the Pelosian
mode, and from the legislature to the executive, in the Wilsonian mode, while
empowering supposedly disinterested experts to impose empiricist rationality on
both market outcomes and democratic outcomes, etc.). Some of you may remember
that in the late 20th and early 21st century there was a
robust movement afoot, mainly among Democrats and center-left types, to expand
the power of the presidency and make the office even more powerful by extending
the length of terms and increasing executive discretion—indeed, the notion that
a less-accountable president would be a better president, because he would be
liberated from thinking about reelection, is very much with us, as this
2024 column from a political science professor exemplifies. The underlying
assumption here is that presidents know what needs to be done and need to get
things done but are prevented from doing so by niggling political concerns.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was answering
similar arguments way back in 1986:
The basic argument for the
one-term, six-year Presidency is that the quest for re-election is at the heart
of our problems with self-government. The desire for re-election, it is
claimed, drives Presidents to do things they would not otherwise do. It leads
them to make easy promises and to postpone hard decisions. A single six-year
term would liberate Presidents from the pressures and temptations of politics.
Instead of worrying about re-election, they would be free to do only what was
best for the country.
The argument is superficially
attractive. But when you think about it, it is profoundly anti-democratic in
its implications. It assumes Presidents know better than anyone else what is
best for the country and that the people are so wrongheaded and ignorant that
Presidents should be encouraged to disregard their wishes. It assumes that the
less responsive a President is to popular desires and needs, the better
President he will be. It assumes that the democratic process is the obstacle to
wise decisions.
Both Schlesinger and the argument to which he was
responding are at least partially wrong. We the People, bless those thick
American skulls, are about as likely to be wrong about any given issue as right
about it, but their wrongness is not randomly distributed and, in that way,
partly self-correcting. Popular wrongness tends mainly to point in the
same direction or directions: in favor of more spending and more benefits;
against taxes to pay for that; reflexively against liberalism across the board,
from free speech to free trade; in favor of using the power of the state to
disadvantage or humiliate the very long list of people they hate; in favor of
violence and aggression until these become wearisome or expensive. As the
economist Bryan Caplan argues, the American system slightly advantages the
policy preferences of high-income people, who lean more in the direction of his
own libertarian views than does the median voter—and this, he argues, is “what makes
democracy tolerable.” Caplan may be intentionally provocative at times, but
his analysis is largely correct. (Speaking of which, Caplan has a new book
forthcoming, to be titled Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free
Markets. Here is his
lecture on the theme.) The notion that elections are a check on the
president assumes that what is intelligent or good is also what
is popular—which is, of course, the basic problem with that capital-D
Democracy I mentioned earlier. Voters are about as likely to reward presidents
for bad policies as for good ones.
There are other problems with majoritarian safeguards:
Donald Trump, to take an obvious example, has twice been elected without a
majority. Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson, two of the most powerful men in
government, represent no national majority.
But removing or reducing democratic checks, or loosening
other effective constraints on the executive, does not do the job, either.
Presidents thus liberated do not suddenly become selfless philosopher-kings
with no interests of their own, because reelection is not the only appetite at
work in the political belly. You will have noticed that lame-duck presidents in
the United States—or in France—do not suddenly become more courageous, more
intelligent, more reasonable, more sensible, or more responsible. Many of them
become quite the opposite. Donald Trump isn’t using the U.S. military to murder
seafaring South Americans because he thinks this is going to help him or
anybody he actually cares about (helpfully for him, that is a very, very short
list) win an election. He is using the U.S. military to murder South Americans
because he wants to murder South Americans and does not have the skill or the
sack to do it himself.
Macron has spent the last few years jet-setting around
the world pretending that France is still a major global power capable of
sorting out big problems in the Middle East or Ukraine because that is how he
prefers to spend his time and because he thinks that this is the way one ends
up being remembered as a great statesman, and Macron apparently does not want
to be remembered as what he is: a reasonable, capable technocrat. I happen to
like and appreciate reasonable, capable technocrats and would happily march
Donald Trump and his whole stinking gang off to whatever desert island you like
in exchange for a few good technocrats—or a stack of old newspapers, for that
matter, or a kind word—but you get what I mean.
Which is to say: The French did not fix what is wrong
with their political system by making their presidents more powerful. The
French are not going to fix their political system by humbling Macron or by
driving him from office and thus humbling the presidency itself.
Our problems are different. But the United States is not
going to fix what is wrong with our system by making the presidency more
democratic or less democratic. Executives of whatever character—from democratic
to monarchical—tend to be predatory. Give a man power, he wants more power and
feels himself entitled to it; if he succeeds, that means he deserves more
power, and if he fails, that means he didn’t have enough power to get the job
done. A king demands more power in the name of God, and a democratically
elected executive demands more power in the name of the People. Anti-Trump
Americans rallied this weekend under the slogan “No Kings,” but why not “No
Presidents”? The Swiss get along perfectly fine without a single-man executive,
and so do many U.S. states such as Texas, where the governor, the lieutenant
governor, the attorney general, and other high executives are independently
elected and exercise independent powers. I am persuaded that the “unitary
executive” theory put forward largely (though not exclusively) by
conservative-leaning legal scholars is based on an overly broad reading of the
relevant constitutional provision, that the “executive power” in the vesting
clause is the power to execute Congress’ laws, not the power to act like a
freelance imperator-cum-god-king. There is a reason Congress can
override the president and not the other way around.
And therein we may discover the root issue: The
presidency is a problem, but it is not the main problem, which is
Congress. And Congress is just democratic enough, as it turns out. Congress’
problem is not structural but moral—it is paralyzed not by factors related to
democratic accountability but by the disinclination of members to do their
jobs. It is, to borrow from Jonah Goldberg again, a parliament of pundits. The
most important factor in American politics is not ideological but
dramaturgical: It is easier for We the People to pay attention to the doings
and sayings of one man than to follow 435 representatives, 100 senators, nine
Supreme Court justices, two dozen or so Cabinet members, endless committees and
subcommittees, etc. But while spreading politics out through “regular order” in
Congress through its committee system tends to dilute the poison of those
passions that John Adams warned us against, routing every national dispute
through the apparently (we are to believe) sacred person of the president
concentrates the venom.
The French presidency is in many ways grander than the
American one—the French executive has powers the American one does not and is subject
to fewer checks—and it seems smaller only because it is attached to the
government of a much less important country. (Please do not take this as an
insult to the French—I admire France and have seriously considered moving there
once or twice, but the facts are the facts.) But that grander presidency is of
no use to the French when their parliament cannot do what is needful because
the people, Nous le Peuple, will not permit their government to act
intelligently and patriotically.
Our government finances are, in context, slightly worse
than those of the French. And while Marine Le Pen may have come from a
positively neofascist background, Donald Trump is by far the more dangerous
demagogue, and he found his way to Le Pen’s neck of the political woods as
though he were to the Vichy manner born. But, more to the point, the American
people are no more serious about good, decent self-government today than the
French are, and everything else depends on that. If you want to see where the United
States is going, take a look at France just now—and I do not mean the view from
the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat. The French are not unique—they are just ahead of
the curve.
(A Little More) Economics for English Majors
Regular readers here will notice that I have from time to
time referred to Father Robert Hugh Benson’s not-very-good 1907 novel, Lord
of the World, a fictional account of the last days and the rise of the
Antichrist. It is a novel set in the future—the future as imagined in 1907,
that is, and the suppositions about technological change are (as very retro
futurism tends to be) hilarious: Many Englishmen are living underground at that
point (crowding, you see) and everybody eats some kind of Soylent Green-style
synthetic foodstuffs, and people still hurry off to Blackfriars station to
catch the “eighteen o’clock,” but now it is a zeppelin instead of a bus or a
train.
You can learn a good deal about the past by looking at
what people thought the future was going to look like—The Jetsons, for
example, is entirely a product of its time—and one of the interesting little
tidbits in Lord of the World is the unquestioned assumption that the
final triumph of worldwide communism means ... free trade.
That sounds crazy, but it is not.
Karl Marx was not exactly what you would call a
free-trader, but he favored free trade as a kind of warming lamp in the
incubator of capitalism, something that would help capitalism reach its final
form before giving way, as his so-called science of history predicted, to
communism. But many socialists in the 19th and 20th centuries
favored free trade on economic grounds, understanding, as they did, that free
trade undermined the position of the landowning aristocracy and politically
connected industrial interests while providing the poor and the working classes
with less expensive food, clothing, and other necessities. I’ll write something
longer on this one of these days, but much of what was meant by the word
capitalism as used by 19th-century and early 20th-century
critics was nothing that Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek would recognize but
something more like what we call “crony capitalism.” The crony capitalists of
the 19th and 20th centuries were not free traders but
protectionists—the Anti-Corn
Law League, to take an obvious example, was most energetically opposed by
the sundry dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons who owned most of
the English farmland and who had the most to lose from competition from
imported grain.
In the United States, it was New England industrialists
who most strongly supported high tariffs and the principle of protectionism, to
the extent that these businessmen (who would go on to form the heart of the
Republican Party) would defend even a bad tariff, such as the infamous “Tariff
of Abominations,” on principle.
While their heirs and epigones have their own beefs with
free trade and globalization as practiced in our time, many of those old
socialists and anarchists took a view of industrial cartels and monopolies very
much akin to that of modern libertarians. Anti-trade protectionism, on the
other hand, was not conservative in the sense that the word describes a
tendency in American politics that ran from roughly the New Deal era until the
day before yesterday, but it was conservative in the sense that it was a
position associated with the conservative elements, the party of property and
large business interests, the party hostile to immigration and skeptical of
social change, and, overseas, the party of the established church, the
monarchy, hereditary class distinctions based on ancestry, etc.
While the conservatism of the 18th and 19th
century is a very different beast from the postwar Buckley-Reagan-Goldwater
conservatism whose economic libertarianism came to define much of the agenda of
the 20th century Republican Party, one can detect something
identifiable as a particularly American and republican form of conservatism
going back as far as both Presidents Adams, who were protectionists, supporting
tariffs in part for the same reason their contemporaries believed in things
such as
astrological portents and
miasma—brilliant men as they were, they were profoundly ignorant in many
regards, gentlemen philosophers who, if they read Aristotle in the evenings,
did so by candlelight.
A friend points out a recent book written by Marc-William
Palen, a history professor at the University of Exeter, and published by the
Princeton University Press:
Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. I will read
it and report.
Now that old-school republicanism has been rediscovered
by some of our left-wing friends, who only a few years ago were offering
obsequious loyalty pledges and singing literal hymns of praise
to Barack Obama (who was celebrated—let us not forget—as
a semidivine figure) perhaps they will rediscover some other worthy
elements of their intellectual patrimony, such as skepticism of centralized
authority, subsidiarity, the role of civil society (including the constructive
role played by religion), and—maybe!—free trade, too.
Words About Words
An advertisement for the fashion brand Moncler contains
this retch-inducing marketing copy: “Starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro,
Warmer Together brings iconic designs to the fore. Hooded down jackets for men
and women spotlight enduring Moncler codes, telling a story rooted in brand
DNA.” To me, this reads like someone accidentally published the internal
marketing strategy memo as ad copy, “telling a story rooted in brand DNA,” etc.
But in the depraved times in which we live, marketers write to consumers as
though they were writing to other marketers, and this passes for
sophistication. It reminds me of the legendary episode involving George H.W.
Bush giving a speech and then apparently reading his stage directions:
“Message: I care.” Some companies are really, really good at “telling a story
rooted in brand DNA”: Ralph Lauren and his hermetically sealed little fantasy
world, BMW, Nike—and so are non-corporate brands such as Harvard and
feminism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But I do hate the way that corporate-speak has
infiltrated ordinary conversation. Every time I hear some college sophomore
talk about his “personal brand,” I want to slap him and say, “You’re 19 years
old, dummy!”
And Furthermore ...
While I’m indulging my inner ... I don’t want to write snob,
but, maybe ... this
column in the New York Times caught my attention: “These Boots Have
Lasted Me 12 Years. Unfortunately, They’re $600.” The boots in question, made
by R.M. Williams, are described as “the first shoes I reach for whether I’m
wearing black jeans and a T-shirt or a dark navy
suit. Over more than a decade, they have become such an integral part of my
wardrobe that last year, I ordered a new, identical pair to wear at my
wedding.”
Two things: One, R.M. Williams makes gardening shoes.
Really good gardening shoes, including some that they pretend are “dress”
boots, but these are not getting-married-in boots—these are mowing-the-lawn
boots, maybe drinking-beer boots. Ain’t nobody ever going to convince me
otherwise.
The second and more remarkable thing is the hilarious
pretense that $600 for a pair of boots is a heavy lift for the readership of
the New York Times, which has long enjoyed a relatively high-income
readership. I haven’t opened up the print Times in a while, but the
first few pages used to be a who’s who of luxury brands, and the Times itself
offers as a “case study” of its advertising capabilities its work with Cartier, which
is not a brand for people who worry much about spending $600 on a pair of
shoes. The Times has published nearly a dozen stories about Hermès, the
French luxury house, in 2025 alone, and the year is not out. A half-dozen of
those stories are about the famous Birkin bag, a purse that starts around
$9,000 and goes up—waaaaay up—from there, and which apparently is very
difficult to buy even if you have the money. Other prominent Times advertisers
include Patek Philippe, Mercedes-Benz, Land Rover, and others of that sort.
Tiffany & Co. famously ran an ad in the New York Times every day for
more than a century, finally giving up on print in 2021.
I am sure that there are New York Times readers
who sweat a $600 pair of boots. Things are tough on the Upper West Side, I
hear. Lord help them if they ever find out what the high-toned rednecks in
Oklahoma are spending at
Lucchese or what the cool kids are laying down at Adidas.
One of my least favorite of all American social quirks is
the apparent need that well-off Americans have to pretend that they are
hardscrabble hustlers just struggling to put together the funds for a pair of
gardening shoes to get married in. It is, among other things, insulting to the
people who actually are made to count every nickel.
(I do not mean to characterize the author of the Times
article that way, necessarily. I don’t know anything about him; I am writing
about the context here, not the author.)
In Closing
“No Kings!” say our friends on the left. I hope they mean
it this time. But I suspect that what we will see is progressive politicians
taking Trump’s excesses and abuses as a permission slip the next time they are
in power. I do not have any time for whataboutism, but it is a fact that Kamala
Harris, to take an example, did her best to use the powers invested in her as
attorney general of California to punish political enemies,
taking unconstitutional steps in the process. Barack Obama insisted “I’m
not king”—he used the actual words!—when describing the limits on his power to
change U.S. immigration practices, and then he turned right around and did the
thing he said he didn’t have the kingly power to do. My hopes are not high in
this regard. But maybe someone will disappoint my pessimism.
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