The Riot Coalition

By Abe Greenwald

Commentators are lining up to explain “the real cause” of the riots in France. They all strike me as accurate, informative, and obviously insufficient. There is no single way into this mess. 

It’s kind of like trying to determine the official cause of death in someone who suffered from multiple fatal conditions at the end of his life. That someone is Europe, and the conditions are progressive, in more than one sense of the word. 

There are the real crises: welfare-state failure, education collapse, the disappearance of community, an unsustainable old-age dependency ratio, and unassimilated immigration. Then there are the isms, the activist theologies ensuring that solutions remain out of reach: socialism, anarchism, Islamism, Palestinianism, and anti-Semitism.

The crises and the isms present a chicken-and-egg problem. If you’re angry about public schools without air conditioning—as apparently the French are—I can guarantee you that more socialism isn’t going to make the classroom any cooler.

This indecipherable convergence of radical pursuits is now everywhere in the West, and it’s been with us for a while. The first thing I thought of when I saw the scope of the French disaster was a spate of riots I wrote about in August 2011. Leftists tore through Britain for five days and nights of violence, vandalism, and arson. In the end, the riots left five people dead. What was the “real cause” then? The riots were sparked by the fatal police shooting of a young mixed-race man. But you wouldn’t know it from what soon developed. I wrote, at the time:

England has become a bonfire for every left-wing gripe and excuse you can name. There’s the claim of racial injustice, of course, but there’s also the call to class warfare. Young British looters explained to the BBC that they’ve been “showing the rich we do what we want.” There is the demand for the continuation of the unbridled welfare state. In the Guardian, Nina Power describes the riots as a response to “brutal cuts” in government spending. And anarchists have joined the fray. One self-proclaimed British anarchist told the Associated Press, “This is the uprising of the working class. We’re redistributing the wealth.”

The term “omnicause” entered the lexicon only in 2023. But the blueprint for omnicause rioting was already operative 15 years ago. In fact, it was already supplanting realistic plans for left-leaning governance. As I wrote: “Without a viable leftist blueprint for actual political progress, you riot incoherently, collaboratively, and opportunistically. The abandoned orphans of the left are taking Britain by storm.”

It’s been a long storm, growing and intensifying all these years. Each new eruption contributes something to it, whether an additional grievance or a destructive tactic. And the new elements live on. In the years since 2011, the storm has been fueled by Black Lives Matter, Antifa, gender radicalism, anti-Israel mania, and jihad fandom. After the George Floyd summer, all rioters would forever wear masks. With the campus tentifada, they added keffiyehs, terrorist flags, and genocidal rhetoric. The riots in France will add something new, too. Perhaps American high schoolers will soon take to the streets pretending to demand better education, though I somehow doubt it.

Whether this will stop, or at least ebb, depends foremost on the education of Western leaders. Will they learn the “real cause” of all this violence and instability? They’ve had a decade and a half to figure it out. And the answer is this: Leftist governance has failed their countries while radical ideas have transformed their peoples into mobs. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.