{"id":8752,"date":"2018-12-12T11:35:04","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T10:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8752"},"modified":"2018-12-12T11:35:04","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T10:35:04","slug":"rule-by-technocrat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/8752\/","title":{"rendered":"Rule by technocrat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawliberty.org\/2018\/12\/10\/paris-is-burning-gilets-jaunes-macron\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a good article<\/a> on France, Macron, and the yellow vest movement, in particular:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Whether on the Right, center or Left, French politicians and senior government officials are an astonishingly homogenous bunch. Almost all of them have studied at the\u00a0<em>grandes \u00e9coles<\/em>\u00a0like the\u00a0<em>\u00c9cole Nationale d\u2019Administration<\/em>. These institutions serve to furnish a group of highly educated individuals. Commonly referred to as \u201c<em>les<\/em>\u00a0<em>\u00e9narques<\/em><em>,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0they rotate between elected office, the private sector, and the state bureaucracy, thereby ostensibly lending stability to France\u2019s notoriously cantankerous politics.<\/p>\n<p>These schools produce well-trained technocrats furnished with the mindset that their primary responsibility in life is to serve the state. This is a very different attitude to that which prevails among graduates of most top-level American universities. But the\u00a0<em>grandes \u00e9coles<\/em>\u00a0also facilitate a monolithic outlook, an absence of creative thought, and unhealthy patronage networks.<\/p>\n<p>In more recent times, these dispositions have been accompanied by a habit of embracing pretty much every politically correct nostrum. These range from gender ideology (something which infuriates large swathes of French public opinion, and not just on the Right) to environmentalism as a pseudo-religion. This has exacerbated the already huge gap between the viewpoint, life experiences, and priorities of people like Macron\u2014whose personal career path epitomizes the\u00a0<em>\u00e9narque<\/em>\u2014and most other French people, especially the France of the provinces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Anyone&#8217;s who worked in a company whose upper management are dominated by the graduates of the <em>grandes\u00a0\u00e9coles<\/em> will relate to that passage. See also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oilfieldexpat.com\/?p=502\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a good article on France, Macron, and the yellow vest movement, in particular: Whether on the Right, center or Left, French politicians and senior government officials are an astonishingly homogenous bunch. Almost all of them have studied at &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/8752\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57,67,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8752"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8753,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8752\/revisions\/8753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}