The real story of France and Europe laid bare by Macron’s whisker of a win is that simply no consensus exists among today’s adult generations about how to refashion a future for Europe. Right now, there is really no question that the globalist center’s ideal “future” has been tabled indefinitely by events. There’s not even any falling back on an “end of history.” History is skipping like a bad record, glitching over the same travails. An open-ended financial and economic predicament with no rational solution and no mores deep enough to cauterize the wound and start fresh. A continuous low-grade panic attack of police action and surveillance, struggling undermanned and under cultural constraints to prevent just enough terror attacks and abuses, whatever that magic number may be. A complete forfeit of any plan to push EU regulatory unification toward the singularity point that the European project had always envisioned, however abstractly, as its justifying goal.

Neither Macron nor anyone on his ideological team has the first inkling of how to surmount or steer clear of these impasses.

Sometimes life does reduce down to muddling through or bust. But, again, all the trouble and pain is meant to be endured in the name of little more than the same: the secular ethic of terminal niceness, the spirit of the world’s last museum curator or librarian, the small passing pleasures of enlightened materialism, the social bureaucrat who nibbes away at the edges of emotional injustice the way pensioners work at a jigsaw puzzle.

Does anyone really believe these values are enough to make indefinite suffering worth it?