James Whyle

FT opinion piece on French protest as actually in keeping with the thought of Edmund Burke: “In France, the (peaceful) protesters demand better-funded schools and then a smoother link to universities, which in turn will determine their career prospects. You might regard this as an expensive request for an indebted state. But it is also an embrace of bourgeois values. What the students want is a proper functioning of the merit-based, study-and-work social order, not an alternative to it. A fairer rat race but a rat race. The contrast with the 1990s slacker ethic, let alone 1968, with its frontal attack on normie ways, is sharp. And lost on some of these purported rebels. Or consider the “cockroach” movement in India. It got going after an exam leak ruined the matriculation of lots of medical students. The campaign then widened to encompass other grievances, such as bad schools and nepotism in elite jobs. Notice the theme here: thwarted ambition to advance within the system, not a rejection of it from first principles. (There shouldn’t, a radical would argue, be elite jobs.) In the 1770s, Edmund Burke said the American colonists just wanted their existing rights as free sons of the empire, not a new social order, and so weren’t revolutionaries at all, but in a sense more conventional than those who would refuse them. There is something Burkean about the non-violent protests of 2026. Honour the old social contract, is the gist of their message to the state. Make bourgeois aspiration easier. There were times when de Gaulle and LBJ would have given an arm for protesters like these.” ft.com/content/70280c68-2ae0… The young are conformists in denial