Jerry B. Marchant examines how the appearance of popular consent, staged, polled, or projected, is used to make a predetermined outcome feel like a free choice, and asks who actually benefits when a nation’s sovereignty is defined for it by others.
We are constantly told a choice is ours to make. Sometimes it is loud and unmistakable, like those proclaimed at rallies, trending across social media, repeated until it feels less like an opinion and more like a fact of nature. The effect is always the same: the outcome starts to look inevitable, and because it looks popular, it starts to feel like something the nation arrived at itself. Increasingly, though, the “nation” doing the arriving is not the one actually deciding.
Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, called this the “engineering of consent” or the deliberate shaping of what people believe they’ve decided for themselves.1 Solomon Asch’s classic 1950s experiments showed how easily individuals abandon their own judgment once they believe a group consensus already exists, even a staged one.2 The persuasion isn’t in the argument but in the appearance of the crowd having already decided, and in who gets to determine what the crowd is allowed to decide about in the first place.
The Sovereignty Question at Home
France’s own president has been remarkably candid about where he believes that decision-making authority should sit. In a 2017 address, Emmanuel Macron characterized the very idea of national sovereignty as an illusion, a notion he argued France needed to move beyond in favor of a shared “European sovereignty.” He has repeated the theme since, telling the European Parliament in Strasbourg that a retreat toward national sovereignty was a false comfort in a world of migration and rival powers, insisting instead that Europe needed a sovereignty stronger than its own.
Critics, not just on the nationalist right but across the political spectrum, have argued that this vision has hollowed out the mechanisms through which ordinary French citizens might actually be consulted. Analysts writing for the LSE’s EUROPP blog describe Macron’s project as a promise that “a technocratic, post-ideological centre could transcend France’s traditional left-right divide.” A promise now widely seen as having failed, leaving behind a governing style built on a narrow circle of advisors rather than parties, unions, or local authorities. The commentary site The UnPopulist noted that this technocratic approach gave Macron’s reforms the character of impositions rather than the product of debate, a dynamic tied to the fact that barely a quarter of French citizens now believe their political process functions at all.
His government’s own 2019 “Grand Débat National,” launched to defuse the Yellow Vest revolt, was widely read as confirmation of the same pattern: a consultation staged to look like listening. Manon Aubry of La France Insoumise accused Macron of steering the debate to avoid “the questions that made people uncomfortable,” including reinstating the wealth tax he had scrapped. Polling from IFOP found that only 38 percent of French voters believed their input would shape any actual policy. A columnist for The Connexion later judged that the two-month exercise produced essentially no measurable change. A consultation whose findings were quietly shelved once the immediate unrest had passed.
This is the nationalist critique in its simplest form: a governing class that increasingly answers to Brussels and to an abstract “European” electorate rather than to the French one, dressing that arrangement up in the language of consultation and consensus so that the transfer of decision-making authority feels like something the public chose.
The Hypocrisy Question Abroad
The same government that stages domestic consensus while quietly overriding it has, on the world stage, positioned itself as a defender of democratic legitimacy against everyone else. Macron has repeatedly framed the European Union as a bulwark of liberal democracy against “illiberal” and “authoritarian” rivals, explicitly naming Russia and China as the powers Europe must guard its sovereignty against.
Scholars studying the emerging multipolar order have pointed out the discomfort in that posture.
Research from the Atlantic Council notes that rising powers led by Russia and China increasingly dispute the West’s own claim to define what counts as legitimate governance, arguing that Western democracy promotion has too often been paired with regime change abroad, comparing the pattern, in the words of the report, to “the colonialism of the nineteenth century.” The Carnegie Endowment’s research on the “post-Western order” goes further, documenting that Western democracy promoters have themselves quietly propped up authoritarian partners when convenient. The Carnegie researchers pointed specifically to Washington’s continued embrace of Egypt’s government even after publicly citing its own antidemocratic record. Meanwhile, a growing academic literature on “non-Western democracy” argues that the very claim to a universal, Western-defined model of legitimate consent is itself a hegemonic strategy, a way for one civilizational bloc to keep judging every other nation’s political choices by its own standard.
Put plainly: a French government that cannot produce genuine domestic consensus, and openly regards its own national sovereignty as something to be pooled away, has little standing to lecture the rest of a multipolar world about the authenticity of its elections.
Two Symptoms of the Same Disease
None of this proves coordination between Macron’s technocratic centrism, Mélenchon’s staged populism, or the broader Western establishment they both, in different ways, belong to. What it does suggest is that “manufactured consensus” is not a foreign trick imported from abroad, but it is the operating procedure of a political class that has learned to make the erosion of a nation’s own decision-making power feel like the nation’s own idea.
The danger isn’t that people are being lied to outright. It’s subtler than that: the sense of having chosen freely, whether the choice is a president, a policy, or a place inside someone else’s alliance system, is itself the product being sold.
Recognizing the staging—the hologram, the curated consultation, the sovereignty quietly redefined as an illusion—is the first step toward telling the difference between a nation’s decision and a performance of one.
Bernays, Edward L. “The Engineering of Consent.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 250, 1947, pp. 113–120.
Asch, Solomon E. “Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments.” In Groups, Leadership and Men, edited by Harold Guetzkow, Carnegie Press, 1951, pp. 177–190.
The french regime has no priority whatsoever, other than The War On Russia, and is not going to let a trifle such as democracy get in the way.