John R. MacArthur

For New York liberals of a certain age, the term “states’ rights” has long been synonymous with segregation in the South. It’s personified by Alabama governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in June 1963, to prevent desegregation of the state university. Wallace blocked two black students from entering the university auditorium, and the ensuing confrontation between the governor and the Kennedy administration signaled the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow system that followed the Civil War. The governor was partly acting on the not entirely fallacious contention that under the federal system, state prerogative should sometimes supersede federal government edicts, and even rulings by the US Supreme Court.

The much-overused word “woke” — basically meaning to be at all moments of the day and night conscious of racial and sexual discrimination — has been remarkably resistant to criticism, reason and even ridicule. Ever since the initial exposure and denunciation of Harvey Weinstein in 2017 — a long-drawn-out prosecution and sentencing only recently concluded — the “wokes” have paraded their righteousness in every corner of society with very little pushback. Occasionally, a super baddie such as Bill Cosby gets released from prison on constitutional grounds, but super-wokes in the United States never let such minor reversals slow them down, since the public momentum and the arguments are overwhelmingly in their favor.

Vitry-le-François Can a modern revolution emanate from the political centre or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris – while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and across France – to the post-industrial town of Vitry-le-François to meet Charles de Courson, the French parliamentarian descended from Norman nobility who nearly succeeded in bringing down the government of President Emmanuel Macron with a no-confidence vote on 20 March.

It was eerily warm in New York the day before the midterm elections, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten — one of America’s most powerful union leaders and arguably the Democratic Party’s most influential non-elected power broker — was bracing for a confrontation that threatened to push the atmosphere past boiling point. We were standing in front of Public School 169, in Bay Terrace, a majority-white, upper-middle-class neighborhood in Queens, where Weingarten was attending a rally for three Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. “You probably heard that the anti-vaxxers are going to show up,” she told me with a hint of exaggerated amusement.