Ro Khanna is wrong about the chaos in Europe — and about JD Vance
I keep coming back to the image of storefronts going up in flames. Whatever grievances drove people into the streets, the looting and arson are hard to square with any claim to moral legitimacy, and it's understandable why so many on the right see this as pure destruction rather than protest. The damage is real, and it's ordinary small business owners who are left to sort through the ashes.
At the same time, Khanna's instinct to ask what's underneath the anger isn't crazy. France has been through this cycle before, with the gilets jaunes and the pension strikes, and each time the underlying complaint sounds similar: the cost of living, the feeling that the system is rigged. You don't have to excuse the violence to wonder whether dismissing it as mere chaos misses something.
Where I land is somewhere in the middle, which is probably unsatisfying to both sides. Khanna may be too quick to find a socioeconomic explanation for what looks a lot like nihilism, but Vance's hardline posture risks treating every grievance as illegitimate. The truth is probably that both things are true at once, and the politics of this will get messier before it gets clearer. I'd want to hear more from the French business owners themselves, and less from American politicians using their streets as a proxy war.