LIONEL SHRIVER: Can we be surprised that France has descended into nihilism?

The French themselves also bear responsibility for their growing impoverishment. Waves of protest have ensured the state remains bloated, burdening younger taxpayers with the extreme cost of pensions that still kick in at age 62 – youth’s reaction to which appears to be an eagerness to jump on the same gravy train at the earliest age possible.

Both groups out on the streets in force since mid-September – unassimilated immigrants and young, naively communist white French nationals – feel little vested interest in their country. According to an Ipsos survey this month, 79 percent of French young people have considered moving abroad.

Immigrants from North Africa and their descendants don’t feel French and aren’t really regarded by their white compatriots as French. They’re not only alienated from the world of the designer shops they’ve been demolishing, but fiercely hostile to it.Despite colonial ties, ghettoized, largely Muslim immigrants have little cultural affinity with perhaps the most supremely European of European nations. Excluded from the mainstream culture with few obvious routes to prosperity, immigrants must feel they’ve nothing to lose. If they feel they don’t belong in France, maybe they don’t.

Likewise, lefty, ethnically French young people must feel they’ve little investment in France. Tritely radicalized teachers have drilled into them that not only is their culture evil, but that they have no future. Climate change will scorch the earth to a cinder. Having last passed a balanced budget in 1973, their country is headed for fiscal oblivion (true). AI will eliminate all entry-level jobs, if not all jobs. They’ll never afford their own homes. Benefits being weighted towards the elderly, whose cohort only expands, the few younger folks who find work will have most of their earnings confiscated by the gerontocracy. Low fertility condemns Europe to decay, a conviction that further lowers fertility. Expecting nothing but collapse, conflagration and injustice fosters nihilism.

France already descended into nihilism in 1789 and 1968. And as John Daniel Davidson wrote earlier this month at the Federalist, “The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.”