In March, after encountering opposition to a pension-reform proposal to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 that the government says is necessary to stave off insolvency, French president Emmanuel Macron opted to ram through the legislation without a vote of lawmakers in the National Assembly, pursuant to his authority under Article 49.3 of the French constitution. This move prompted a subsequent no-confidence vote that the government narrowly survived and infuriated opponents of the bill. Since then, France has been wracked by civil unrest.

While Macron’s steamrolling of the lower house of the French parliament undermined the democratic legitimacy of the legislation, it was wholly consistent with the French constitution, and the underlying policy is sound. France needs pension reform, and hostility to the law seems absurd given that its citizens will still retire earlier than their peers in Germany, the U.K., Spain, and most other European nations.

Nevertheless, antagonism to this modest change has persisted. Yesterday, it came to a head when an estimated 782,000 people poured out onto the streets in a nationwide May Day protest of pension reform. May Day is International Workers’ Day, a leftist holiday commemorating the Haymarket affair, an 1886 Chicago labor riot during which a bomb was thrown at police, resulting in chaos and mass violence.

French president Emmanuel Macron loves to gripe about America’s outsized influence on his country. Whether it’s his neo-Gaullist refusal to be America’s lackey or his hypocritical complaints about our exportation of wokeness, few things seem to provoke him more than hostility to the Stars and Stripes. The great irony here is that the United States is the guarantor of France’s national security, and the social-justice fundamentalism that now predominates American discourse is a cultural aberration and wouldn’t have emerged had it not been for the works of French philosophers like Michel Foucault.

But yesterday, Macron may have been right for the first and only time. May Day is a terrible holiday with American origins, and it is observed by history’s most quixotic ideologues and used to justify their unworkable and often depraved political program. The celebration is, by far and away, our worst cultural export.