Last Saturday proved to be less of a crescendo and more of a curtain call for France's gilets jaunes, or Yellow Vests. “Acte XXX,” as organizers called the thirtieth iteration of their protest, made clear that the movement is coming to an end. Few were present in Paris this weekend, and the few who were didn't seem to know why.
More so than any movement in the twenty-first century, the gilets jaunes embody the problems of outrage politics. For the protesters, grains of truth and reason have been lost in a sea of fear and anger. For their politicians, charting these waters and sailing toward solutions has become impossible, and increasingly pointless: Over time, outrage politics—as seen in the dying moments of the gilets jaunes, the final pitch of Brexit, the hazy memory of Occupy Wall Street—tends to be far more about the outrage than about the politics, until, inevitably, it is about nothing at all.
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