The American Press' Love Affair with Emmanuel Macron

There seems to me no question that Emmanuel Macron has had an excellent press in the United States since he first appeared on the American news media's radar. Certainly that media is an elite-loving, Establishment-sucking up "respecter of persons" that is deeply deferential and even inclined to flatter heads of state and government, with leaders of the G-7 countries ranking particularly highly with them--so that simply holding the office that he does gets Macron positive treatment. To the extent that such a figure conforms to their expectations of the "international elite" they so exalt (it is a point in Macron's favor with them that he was an investment banker before entering politics), and their stupid fantasies about Euro-aristocrats in particular, they are still more inclined to flatter him--certainly to go by how they praise his looks and alleged "charm" and even his arrogance (all consistent with the image of an aristocrat in those cartoons in which they think, and in their minds especially fitting in a French one). It would seem yet another point in their favor that just as they think anything spoken in English using "Received Pronunciation" must express only the greatest intelligence and refinement (it is Rita Leeds over and over and over and over again with these people), people of their type imagine the same of anything said in French (especially to the extent that they have little or no command of the language, as is generally the case). It may also be that Macron's comparative youth is fascinating to journalists from a country where politics (just like in the old Soviet Union in its later days) has come to be dominated by ungainly gerontocrats who were never much "in their prime" and are now publicly displaying evidences of dementia--while some, even more stupidly, seem to approve of him the more in as they so heartily approve of the, ahem, unconventional, tabloid/Lifetime Channel movie-of-the-week details of his marriage.

However, all that would count for little were it not for the thing about Macron most important to winning their admiration, which is exactly the thing about him that the French public detests him for--not as some fools might have it, his being "too intelligent" or any other such nonsense, but Macron's being a rabid elitist, centrist, neoliberal-neoconservative openly contemptuous of the working people of his country, and of their thinking that they have a right to say in their own government. It is this, after all, that assuaged the hatred many in the American press felt for France and for "Old Europe" twenty years ago, such that they treat them far more favorably today, and which in the wake of his ill-conceived and ill-managed response to an "unexpected" far right victory in the European elections has publications like Politico running articles about Macron as a "tragic" figure of "magnificent mind" rather than discussing his "mind" the way that Emmanuel Todd did last year in his interview with Marianne.

For my part I find Todd's analysis in Marianne far, far more convincing, and suggest that the interested will get far more out of his remarks than any of the piffle that the mainstream of the English-speaking press has to offer.