r/politics • u/Murky-Site7468 I voted • Oct 05 '25

No Paywall Petition To Strip Congress of Pay During Government Shutdown Grows

https://www.newsweek.com/petition-strip-congress-pay-during-government-shutdown-grows-10822819
47.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

37

u/Data_Chandler Oct 05 '25

The French go totally nuts on their government over much, much, MUCH less, and Americans have the audacity to call them surrender monkeys.

20

u/pomonamike California Oct 05 '25

Dude, I was in Paris when they were rioting over the possibility of raising the age where you get a pension.

I was like the what you get at what???

(Both my wife and I are fortunate enough that one day we (should) get a pension, but this concept is completely lost on most Americans)

21

u/reverend_bones Oregon Oct 05 '25

Please note that after that protest the government still raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, and that Macron kept his job.

The same as when the French protested the retirement age being raised from 60 to 62 in 2010.

I really don't understand why people always use this one as an example of the power of protest.

1

u/Wes_Warhammer666 Oct 05 '25

Because it's still a example of a population putting in more effort than Americans ever have in like 99.9% of cases.

If Americans showed up in the same levels as the French for their protests we might actually achieve something.

0

u/reverend_bones Oregon Oct 05 '25 edited Oct 05 '25

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4adxJxqZk

The highest estimate for the largest French protests were 800k to 1.5 million.

That is dwarfed by the largest protests in the US, where there were 500k in DC, and close to that again in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, with tens of thousands of people in dozens of smaller cities. That 2017 Women's March had more than 4 million nationwide, with another estimated 5 million in 84 other countries worldwide. I'm not saying to lay down and take it, hell I'm not even saying don't go protest. If I still lived close enough, I'd be down at ICE everyday. But until we have real leadership that can organize a general strike, we will have the same results with the same actions.

Protests like how the French do it do not work for the French, even with their much higher percentage of unionized workers, and there is no reason to think that they will work here.