AUGUST was once a time for dreaming, wandering the empty streets of this city, reading silly-season newspaper stories after a leisurely lunch washed down with Sancerre, gazing at squares where fountains plashed and the pregnant or the old chatted on benches at dusk. Then something happened. The world speeded up. Stress levels soared. Idle moments evaporated. Egos expanded. Devices became hand-held. Money outpaced politics. August aborted this year. It morphed into the serious season. The beach lost out to the barricades. A time of outrage is upon us.
A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility. History has never seen a global power shift as radical as the current one that managed to be peaceful.
Growth, jobs, expansion, excitement — and, yes, possibility — lie in the great non-Western arc from China through India to South Africa and Brazil. The world has been turned upside-down. What we are witnessing is how shaken Western societies are by such inversion.
As new powers emerge, globalization has altered the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers. This, too, is fueling a time of outrage that has left Western politicians chasing shadows.