The Great Revolt Against Greenism

When the history of our times comes to be written, it’s possible the date of 17 November 2018 will feature prominently. For two extraordinary events rocked Europe that Saturday. Two of our most populous cities – London and Paris – were shaken by vast gatherings of citizens making noisy demands of their ruling classes. And the demands could not have been more different. One side wanted nothing less than to drag society back into the benighted hell of pre-modern, pre-industrial existence. The other demanded the right to drive and work and live well, free from the onerous eco-rules of the elites. This cross-Channel clash of moral visions may well have been the first battle in the war of the vibe shift.

Gathered in London was Extinction Rebellion, the death cult of poshos convinced Earth’s fiery end is imminent. Gathered in Paris were the gilets jaunes, that mass uprising of working men and women enraged by Emmanuel Macron’s hike in fuel taxes in the name of ‘fighting climate change’. Six thousand of XR’s doom-fearing activists swarmed London and blocked five of the bridges across the Thames, as they sang and danced and wailed, medieval-style, about the ‘billions’ of souls who will perish in the coming ‘collapse of civilisation’. It was the movement’s first-ever ‘day of rebellion’. In Paris – and more than a thousand other locations around France – a quarter of a million citizens hit the streets to slam the punitive eco-policies of their rulers. It was the gilets jaunes’ first day of rebellion, too.

That these two movements launched on the same day is a most fortunate quirk of history, for it allowed us to see with crystal clarity one of the most cavernous dividing lines in the 21st-century West. On one side, the lurid dread of the upper classes who hate industry and hold it responsible for the future apocalypse that stalks their fever dreams. On the other, the hesitant optimism of the working classes, whose clarion cry was not for the unwinding of industry but for their right to a greater share of its fruits. XR’s rallying manifesto was essentially a religious document, of the millenarian variety, foretelling the ‘annihilation’ of nature, the ‘destruction of all we hold dear’, and the ‘mass extinction’ of life on Earth as seas that are ‘poisoned, acidic and rising’ devour us in their unforgiving floods. The gilets jaunes’ manifesto was a sober, secular tract, making the case for fewer green taxes, a fairer redistribution of wealth and the ‘protection of French industry’.