The shift

Taking a page out of the Tom Frank playbook, Serge Halimi relates the rise of Sarkozy in France to Reagan in America.

In both cases, he argues, the Right was able to ascend the political ladder by effectively driving wedges into center-left coalitions via a redefinition of the "social question": to make the primary rift in society "no longer about the division between rich and poor or capital and labor, but an internecine feud between two sections of the proletariat, those who won't work and those who will." Or, alternatively, to shift the locus of attention away from "economic interests" and towards "values" or "culture."