This sort of calculated hypocrisy among the French political elite, which likes to "talk left, act right," has now completely undermined support for market capitalism.

This description of the hypocrisy of the political class is the kernel of truth in the whole WaPo piece. The thing is, there was never a lot of support for market capitalism, who are they kidding? If you're not a merchant or a capitalist you don't start out supporting it: you have to be convinced. And talking left and acting right is a way to do that, by getting people to associate rightist policy with leftist ideas, so that when they think left they can only imagine solutions on the right.

But it is not working, is it? And the WaPo just gave away the game. It's been going on for decades, as 'talking left' was a way to counterbalance the influence of the existance of the Soviet bloc as an alternative economic model. [I'm not going to get into how sound the model was or how accurate the view of it from the west was: it's the conventional wisdom that we owe a century of social democracy to the revolutionary threat of communism]

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman