The Left is in crisis. We no longer present a cohesive movement, and we no longer form coherent political parties. We are a fractured and ill-defined mess, our goals are diffuse and scattered, and we are hemorrhaging supporters from what should be our base—the working class, liberals, and racial and sexual minorities. It is not clear that left-wing parties and movements are currently listening to that base or have its best interests at heart.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent British election, which was disastrous for the left. Labour lost key seats, including in areas that have voted left for close to a century, and experienced its worst drubbing in four decades. An outright majority was won by surely the least credible Tory Prime Minister in living memory. It seems uncomfortably likely that this disaster is soon to be mirrored in the US by the re-election of Donald Trump for a second term, despite the fact that the American public has had four years—beginning with his 2015 campaign—to notice how manifestly unfit he is to be the leader of the western world. The pressing questions at the moment are, what’s going on? and what, if anything, can we do to stop it?
Let’s start with what isn’t going to work. It simply will not do to blame these electoral results on the idea that the majority of the population is ignorant, hateful, or unaware of their own best interests. This is the attitude—made popular throughout the educated left by a growing commitment to elitism and critical theories—that got us into this mess in the first place. This attitude is particularly worrying because it leads leftist activists to double down on exactly those things that are killing the left.
If left-leaning parties around the world hope to have any future electoral success, they need to ditch both elitism and identity-based theory and develop some self-awareness. They need to start listening to the people they are supposed to represent so that they can understand what people actually want from a left-wing party. Only in this way can the left heal its fractures and form a strong and principled movement, with political parties that the general public can trust and respect.
The policies of left-wing parties need to come from the people—not represent revolutionary ideologies most do not share or appreciate having imposed upon them for their own good. The public will not stand for this—nor should they. It is absolutely right to reject the social engineering projects of theorists, activists, and the privileged elite who, like self-appointed philosopher kings, want to order society according to their ideological vision of how things should be rather than how they are or realistically could be.
People who reject the ideologues’ vision are not all racist, sexist, and xenophobic bigots or radical capitalist absolutists. Liberals and working people, who form an overlapping majority, generally have strong opinions on what will make their lives better and society fairer, and they are increasingly deciding that right-wing parties are closer to providing this. Barely electable as those might be, that’s still miles better than being totally unelectable. This is a point our left-wing parties seem utterly unable to grasp—as our elections keep demonstrating. This calls for humility and introspection from the left, rather than doubling down and denigrating the masses for their wrongthink.
Left-wing parties and movements generally have a harder job maintaining consistency and cohesion than conservative ones because of their progressive nature. Progress requires change, moving with the times, and finding new directions. It requires fighting for certain advances and then, when these are achieved, fighting for new ones. Conservatives generally have an easier time with continuity because they seek to conserve aspects of society that they see as good, as well as upholding consistent principles, rooted in consistent moral intuitions of individual responsibility, respect for tradition and authority, cultural cohesion, and family. While differences do exist within conservatism—especially between libertarian fiscal conservatives and religious and/or social conservatives—there are natural limits as to how much principles can change and evolve when they are firmly rooted in the drive to conserve.
Progressives, on the other hand, are always trying to move forward and address new injustices and inequalities. The drive to progress necessarily manifests in many different directions at the same time and these can even contradict each other. One good example of this is the vitriolic conflict between the radical feminists, whose rejection of gender is rooted in an adaptation of Marxist class struggle, and the self-ID trans activists, whose conception of gender is rooted in postmodern queer theory. These groups are both decidedly left-wing and yet they do not agree. Another such conflict came to light when Goldsmith University’s Feminist Society endorsed the Islamic Society’s protests against communist feminist, Maryam Namazie, due to her criticism of Islamism. For progressives to make progress, their competing aims therefore need to be balanced within a consistent ethical framework—a liberal framework—that can prevent the left from repeatedly fracturing because of incompatible aims and conceptions of the world.
Helen has previously described the current deadlock between the three main elements of the left: the radical (or socialist), identitarian (“Social Justice”), and liberal left. She argues that the liberal left must strongly champion liberalism, as an overarching principle by which the valid concerns of the other strands of the left can be judged. Neither socialism nor identity politics can win back the voters who have gone over to the right because most people support regulated capitalism and universal principles of fairness and reciprocity, regardless of identity. This is perfectly compatible with profound concern about the disadvantages people face because of their class, race, sex, or sexuality.
The socialists—who prioritise the material realities of economic and class issues—and the identitarians—with their myopic and obsessive focus on race, gender, and sexuality as social constructs perpetuated in language—cannot easily cooperate with each other, without a broader framework that is neither socialist nor identitarian. The left needs to focus on both economic and identity issues. As Andrew Sullivan observes, right now most people want a combination of center-left economics and center-right stability. We can achieve this by restoring liberalism to the heart of left-wing politics and rejecting the lure of illiberal alternatives.
Liberalism, in its essence, seeks incremental reform to address social injustices, and it does so on the level of the individual and the universal. That is, liberalism seeks to produce a society in which every individual has access, in principle, to everything society has to offer, regardless of economic background, race, gender or sexuality. Liberalism is not (as its socialist and Social Justice critics claim) a belief that society has already achieved that aim and a corresponding denial of any continuing disadvantages caused by economic inequalities or prejudice.
On the contrary, by insisting on the rights of the individual and universal principles of non-discrimination we can oppose the barriers impeding any social group. This is the approach taken by the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and gay pride—with great success. (We have written about this.) Critics of liberalism are right to warn us that focusing only on the individual and the universal can lead us to overlook issues disadvantaging specific groups. But we can address these criticisms most effectively by appealing to a broader liberal framework, not by attempting to overthrow it.
We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners’ rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalizing homosexuality: we have won those wars. In fact, much of the right supports these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering a cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis.
The intractability of the problem facing the left was made abundantly clear by the recent UK election. Constituencies such as Grimsby and Blyth voted Conservative after decades of being staunchly Labour. As Aditya Chakrabortty points out, this is largely due to changes in working class political identity:
While the party bigwigs threw their weight about, the mines and the manufacturers, the steel and the shipbuilding were snuffed out. With them went the culture of Labourism: the bolshy union stewards, the self-organised societies, most of the local newspapers. Practically any institution that might incubate a working-class provincial political identity was bulldozed.
Workers have other concerns now, and it seems they did not feel that Labour was addressing them. In areas that were long-term Labour strongholds—and which have now turned Tory—a majority of working people also voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. This points to a deep and fundamental rift that cannot easily be ignored—and some of the responses to this division highlight many of the same issues that triggered working-class support for Leave in the first place.
Corbyn’s Labour Party was torn between honoring the wishes of the many working people who wanted to leave the European Union and those of its liberal and cosmopolitan supporters, who strongly supported Remain. After dithering on the issue for a couple of years, Labour finally compromised by calling for a second referendum, a solution that, by calling Mulligan on the results of the first Brexit referendum, seems not to have mollified its working class base in the least. Since then, a YouGov survey found that Labour voters were more likely to think the next Labour leader needed to be more centrist and that the general population overwhelmingly did not care for identity politics, at least in the realm of gender.
The Economist has described Labour as out of touch with the working class, particularly in the north. In Grimsby, for example, they claim, “Locals have no time for Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader. Three complaints are loudest: he is not a patriot; he is more interested in minorities than ‘people like us’; and he represents the hijacking of the Labour Party by London.” The paper notes that even former Labour MP Austin Mitchell, who once claimed that Grimsby would vote Labour even if the candidate were a “raving alcoholic sex paedophile,” urged people to vote against Corbyn and his “mob of cosmopolitan meritocrats who love the EU more than those at the bottom of society’s top-heavy heap.” Such comments suggest that London elitism and identity politics are not exactly popular with the salt of the earth.
While the issue of Brexit is far more complicated than a simple left-right divide, it highlights a profound disconnect between the old, class-conscious left and the new identity-conscious (read: identity-obsessed) left. By attempting to satisfy both of them at the same time, Labour is tearing itself apart. We can also see this in the anti-Semitism that now plagues the party, which is a consequence of attempting to come to terms with postcolonial guilt by acknowledging Britain’s role in the current tensions across the Muslim world. As a result, Labour often supports conservative Muslims over liberal ones, and condones—or actively endorses—the sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism that comes along with that position, leaving British Jews in a very vulnerable position. These deep inconsistencies have led many centrist and liberal voters in the UK to believe that the Tories better represent their interests than can Labour.
These political challenges are not confined to the UK. In the US, the Democratic Party is flailing, as it attempts to satisfy both its economic and identitarian wings, in the run-up to the 2020 elections. While the majority of the left and center—and a significant part of the right—hope that a reasonable, electable presidential candidate will emerge from within the Democratic Party, they’re forced to stare wild-eyed as the vast majority of the current and past hopefuls catalogue their pronouns in their Twitter bios and declare that “the future is female” and “the future is intersectional.”
Meanwhile, the activist base—the only ones interested in these displays—write articles fixated on the identity politics surrounding these candidates. Joe Biden is just one more old, white man who needs to step aside (even though he has tremendous support among black Americans, as does that other old white man, Bernie Sanders, who is polling in second place). If you don’t support Elizabeth Warren, even as she panders endlessly to the far-left fringe, it’s because you’ve bought into systemic misogyny (or condone Trump’s allegedly racist mockery of her as “Pocahontas”). Pete Buttigieg, who would be America’s first openly gay president if he were elected, isn’t gay enough. He may be married to a man but, we’re told, he isn’t really gay because he’s straight-passing and not a queer activist.
Amid this parade of leftist insanity, former President Barack Obama has pointed out, with his usual calm, that this is not the right way to proceed. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly,” he said. Obama deplored the idea that being as judgmental as possible is the way to make progress: “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.” His point is that left-side activists and politicos are trying to impose what they see as progressive values and policies onto average people, who may share many—but not all—their views and will not support the forced implementation of things they disagree with. The response was an avalanche of hot-taking articles and fast-tweeted condemnations of Obama as a conservative and a boomer.
This leaves left-wing parties in a quandary. They need to move with the times but are currently unsure where those times are going. They also need to appeal to both those left-leaning people who utterly reject identity politics and snobbish elitism—and the very loud and aggressive cohort who adamantly and intolerantly demand them. The results are so messy that some utterly horrifying right-wing parties now look more consistent, reasonable, and electable by comparison. As David Leonhardt asks,
How can the left win again in places like Grimsby or, say, Ohio? It doesn’t yet have an answer. Full-throated leftism doesn’t seem to work, based on the Labour party’s current standing in the polls and on recent American political history. Nor does it work to call your opponents racist. And while it may help to offer a lot of worker-friendly policies, it’s not enough …
Throughout much of the world, the left is still searching for an effective way to convey to the voters who often decide elections: We’re on your side. It’s a hard problem to solve, I recognize. But the payoff for doing so would be very large.
Labour MP Jess Phillips makes a similar point in this Guardian piece, which concludes:
The truth is, there are corners of our party that have become too intolerant of challenge and debate. The truth is, there is a clique who don’t care if our appeal has narrowed, as long as they have control of the institutions and ideas of the party.
We’ve all got to discover the courage to ask the difficult questions about the future of our party and the future of the working-class communities who need a Labour government. Because the alternative is that the working-class voters who, in despair, lent the Tories their votes on Thursday, never take them back.
It is time for the left to acknowledge this wake-up call. If the election of Donald Trump in the US and the catastrophic collapse of Labour in the UK haven’t made it obvious that we have a problem, it is unclear what will. The left cannot continue to try to impose a set of ideological values held by only a tiny minority of the left-leaning public and then blame that public for not electing a left-wing government. While trying to find its footing in today’s society and address the injustices and concerns of most of its natural base, the left has fallen into the trap of listening to noisy ideologues rather than average liberal and leftist working people. How much more evidence do we need that this does not work? When will we start listening to what people overwhelmingly want—a society that meets their material needs and feels fair and ethical? When will the left commit to being liberal again?
The “social justice” or “intersectionality” side is the conservative side. They are the same group of antisemites that 20 years ago propounded the myth of Cultural Marxism, now making it a reality.
Regulated capitalism IS what most people are talking about when they say “socialism”. It’s just a word being used poorly and then propagandized to try to call everyone on the left some type of Marxist. Literally every progressive I know is wondering where all these Marxists are that these status quo pseudo-intellectuals never shut up about. These 2 individuals are clearly just a couple of wannabe intellectuals who couldn’t actually make it in academia, so they decided to make a living as pandering pseudo-intellectuals. None of these “cultural commentators” ever have actual scientific credibility (Note Lindsay has ZERO publications in mathematics, and Pluckenrose similarly has no evidence of any actual research career I can find). These professional apologists simply make a living by taking advantage of the biases of the masses in order to pander to their views in seemingly intellectual ways. It’s one of the oldest tricks of failed… Read more »
[…] Red Pill and a retreat to chauvinistic sectarianism on the right, and on the other hand, a complete abstraction of identity on the left, not just politically but literally where the conceptual, digital, and physical identity are at […]
I discuss specific issues on the left through its failure to deal with the grooming gang scandal in the UK here:
https://medium.com/@TheWakeful/the-uk-street-grooming-scandals-how-the-left-has-failed-in-its-responsibilities-15e507e227f7
As someone who, after finding Areo, reconnected with the notion of being a “classical liberal” (although this alignment is, to my mind, in line with being conservative,) I appreciate this article. I try to read widely when I can, but so often feel either alienated or coerced that it is very hard work.
I’d like to add a small point to this list for consideration: progressivism would be helped in its search for unity by recognizing the value of its natural tension with conservatism. To me, the outsized influence of Marx and other (post-)Hegelians makes the conflict between the established and the hopeful a a fight to the death rather than a gymnastic contest. I think this explains some of the purity tests the authors mention here; if the winner is to take all, there’s much more anxiety over the ideological particulars.
We certainly should oppose identity politics and wokesterism. But to denounce socialism in the same breath, is just plain ridiculous and foolish. it’s dancing on the strings of the Man. You’re doing your masters’ bidding. As Ishay Landa has argued, socialism is the aughebung of political liberalism, which the capitalist class finds dispensable, when the workers get too restless, in the name of economic liberalism–the protection of private property–through fascism. These identity politicians are just a fifth column within the Left for these elites, who are closing down discourse in the name of political correctness, and dividing the working class, to PREVENT socialist revolution. By lumping IP in with socialism as something equally objectionable, you are playing THE SAME GAME. Think about it before you engage in yet more anti-communist folly. Yuri Felshtinsky has convinced me that Lenin sabotaged the Russian Revolution because he had a strong layer of patriarchal… Read more »
The left’s problem is that is has run out of ideas on matters of economics. That’s the reason for the obsession about identity and social justice.
There’s a lot in this piece, but I want to single out this remark because I think it contains an important misunderstanding radical politics: For progressives to make progress, their competing aims therefore need to be balanced within a consistent ethical framework—a liberal framework—that can prevent the left from repeatedly fracturing because of incompatible aims and conceptions of the world. You’re looking for a new synthesis, but you’re repeating the fatal mistake of your liberal forebears in supposing that liberalism is compatible with radical or progressive movements. Liberalism has an ethics because it accepts the political regime in which it operates. Radicals reject the regime they live in and its ethics. Liberals believe justice and equality are things we take collection action to achieve, in other words, while radicals believe justice and equality are things we achieve when we overthrow the system by whatever means necessary. Liberalism and radical progressive… Read more »
A few days ago, my wife and I visited the place where my wife is a regular guest. By the nature of my character, I immediately distinguish people with deviant behavior (I remember, I took a glance at the picture by an artist unknown to me and said that he most likely suffered from schizophrenia – so it was). That’s why I drew attention to a strange young person and quietly asked my wife: What kind of creature is this? I’ll tell you later – my wife whispered. As it turned out, it was a young girl, “positioning herself as a man”. She looked like a frightened puppy, bristling in constant expectation of danger. Small scared puppy. Enough! We all remember what difficulties we encountered at the age of 12-15 years. We remember what confusion reigned in our thoughts, how our bodies and our thoughts frightened us. We remember how… Read more »
The Left IS ‘identity politics’, and will not remodel itself, so thoroughly does the Left literally despise ordinary people for not buying Left bull. This is terminal for the Left. THE ORIGIN OF ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’ & ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’: Not Consideration for Minorities but Hatred Towards the Mass of Ordinary People; Specifically ‘the Workers’ — Tracing the Roots of Why and How it Arose and Developed Reveals the Greatest Political Fraud in History. ‘Identity politics’ (often or even usually dubbed ‘political correctness’) is the result of a political-Left major backlash against the mass of ordinary people (in Europe and ‘the West’), beginning in the 1920s/30s, in the wake of the persistent failure of Marxist theory to be realised in European ‘revolution’ or any real change through democracy. In shifting the blame away from Marxist theory and its adherents, and on to those the theory had prescribed and predicted would have been… Read more »
[…] we were in the grip of that wild hope, an article in Areo by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay titled The Left is Having an Identity Crisis drew […]
Democrats dominated the 2018 mid-terms, the Dem presidential candidate in 2016 won the vote by ~3 million votes, and progressive policies like Medicare for All, student debt forgiveness, minimum wage increase, etc enjoy popular support (in many cases, a majority, but at least a plurality). And yet the Democrats control only the House, while Republicans control the WH, Senate, and SCOTUS. Evidently, the problem is not so much one of votes or policies, but the structure of the political system itself: the Electoral College and the Senate drastically over-represent (highly conservative) rural areas, and the proliferation of extreme partisan gerrymander further entrenches the right’s structural advantages. The only “identity crisis” the left is suffering from, is the corporate arm of the Democratic party (which includes most of the party’s leadership) being afraid of their own shadow; fearing the popular leftward shift that, if they exercised a simple political calculus, ought… Read more »
[…] Source: The Left is Having an Identity Crisis – Areo […]
Reading this piece and its attendant comments, I feel there are a few things that need clarifying. 1. In saying that ‘the left’ need to be more liberal, I don’t think the author is telling social-democrats to convert to a classical liberal platform. Rather, they should re-affirm the values of liberal democracy. These are political norms which transcend ideology and relate to how we interact within a shared polity. Of course, liberals and even conservatives can and should do the same thing. Respectful, reasoned debate would benefit us all if only we would commit to it. 2. Identitarians of all political persuasions need to tone it down. And I say ‘all’ because this is something that also transcends politics. Indeed it is tempting to say that conservatives were the original enthusiasts for casting everything in terms of demographic differences. If so that only makes it more important for progressives to… Read more »
[…] crisis paradoxically because of its tight embrace of identity politics. That’s the case of another great article just out we talk about toward the end of this episode, and you’ll want to listen all the way to the […]
[…] crisis paradoxically because of its tight embrace of identity politics. That’s the case of another great article just out we talk about toward the end of this episode, and you’ll want to listen all the way to the end […]
Here you go:
“They need to start listening to the people they are supposed to represent so that they can understand what people actually want from a left-wing party.”
Fixed:
“They need to start listening to the people they are supposed to represent so that they can understand what people actually want because that’s how representative democracy works.”
Your analysis is a bit idealistic. Labour has the membership who voted with their feet to join. They took it over. This new membership are thoroughly woke. Wokery is not just a set of ideas: it works its way into identity, it filters meaning, it defines what the terrain of ‘political’ is. They can no more transcend their wokery than Catholics can replace the Pope with a Mullah.
James and Helen, thank you both for your continued work around these issues. I’m a US-based Lefty feeling torn between the socialist camp and the liberal left camp, but I certainly do not find the identitarian camp productive. I agree with the socialist camp on issues related to economics but see a demand for conformity I’m uncomfortable with. I agree with the liberal lefties on protecting individuals freedoms; but I worry sometimes that the liberal left capitulates too much to free market ideology. I think what really distinguishes the situation in United States from the UK is the bipartisan commitment to the military industrial complex. Endless war upon endless war since the conclusion of World War II – Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Korea, Syria, countless CIA-backed coups resulting in horrific loss of life in the countries we intervene in, countless deaths of service members, and a massive financial… Read more »
If there was every a perfectly crafted essay this is it, and not just because I mostly agree. It might be time for a formal schism of the left — the woke/rainbow/globalist/urban SJ types and the conservative left who are basically the sort of people who used to vote Labour but who voted Tory just now. However:
“and fostering a cohesive multiculturalism”
Why? Leave multicult to the SJ left, the conservative left hates it. Why should folks want to give up their own culture in their own country? The authors understand clearly the dangers of Identity and Grievance and that whole show, but under multicult those things are inevitable since multicult officially creates a cultural vacuum in which each Identity will naturally try to advance their position. Multicult = SJ, it is unavoidable. “cohesive multiculturalism” is an oxymoron.
“that other old white man, Bernie Sanders”
Sanders is not white, he is Jewish. It’s one of the main arguments made against him by the Afro-American community as well as many on the Left – America doesn’t need a Jewish president.
Trump and Boris Johnson were both elected because they were the only pro-people candidates on either side. Trump is on Team USA and Johnson is on Team Britain. The people recognized this and voted accordingly. All the other candidates were anti-their own people, often scathingly so. Anti-working class hatred overflowed like a broken sewer last week, just look at any comment thread about the British election. They are punching down and speaking truth to the powerless.
“Progressives, on the other hand, are always trying to move forward and address new injustices and inequalities.”
So there is no clear separation of supply and demand. Leftist ideology both demands a constant stream of the new injustices and inequalities, to justify itself and keep it occupied, and supplies the means for addressing these – according to its own reckoning. This is not a healthy situation.
This seems like an attempt to recover the reputation of ‘left’ from those who are destroying the definition.
Good luck, but you face the same problem as the rest of us: Screamy, faux-outrage phantasmagoria promoted by the media for clicks.
I think the ideas are expressed well and worth discussing. If I understand, the authors wish liberals could make some peace around general principles in the interest of ousting the extreme right-wingers who are stealing the show. That seems practical to me, even though it requires some level of compromise, which will be fought bitterly by the ultra-woke factions of the left, who seem to think that a small victory (aka a shift to the left, but not FAR left) will never be sufficient. Better to lose the battle and continue the war until we attain some Utopian world of perfect opportunity for every expression of human race, ethnicity, gender (don’t forget the pronouns please) etc etc wokeness raised to the nth power. As an American suffering through Trump’s disastrous regime, I would be happy to see ANY move away from neoliberalism and toward a more just society, however much… Read more »
The only comfort is that we have been here before. The 2019 election was almost an action reply of the 1983 election, with an unpopular Tory leader winning against an unelectable Labour leader. The Labour 1983 election manifesto was famously described as “the longest suicide note in history”. So, on past experience, just another 14 years to wait.
I heard arguments that anything that wasn’t a vote against Johnson was a wasted vote, but my view was that any vote that wasn’t a vote against Corbyn was a wasted vote, so I voted strategically rather than tactically. Now the sensible people in Labour just need to make sure they get a competent leader next time.
I never thought I’d say this but …….. we need a new Neil Kinnock.
The left has spent so much time fighting “monsters” that it has unknowingly become a “monster,” meaning it doesn’t even need a really challenging opposition to beat it, just one that can hear “ordinary people.” The left has locked itself in a bell jar and it arrogantly thinks that it knows what the people think or knows the best way that everyone should go. The people want to be heard, not treated as incapable and stupid. Now, I don’t know if I can expose it clearly, but to me it seems “simple.” The left has long been superior to the right, and as we see in the media, in universities, in culture as a whole it still is. For a long time the right was classified by them as prejudiced, intolerant, irrational (because of religious dogmatism) and unconcerned with the poor and needy citizen. Of course, this is not a… Read more »
«Helen has previously described the current deadlock between the three main elements of the left: the radical (or socialist), identitarian (“Social Justice”), and liberal left. She argues that the liberal left must strongly champion liberalism, as an overarching principle by which the valid concerns of the other strands of the left can be judged»
If I understood correctly, only the leftists can be judged by the principles of liberalism. Deplorables do not deserve to be judged by any principles. They can’t even be considered people.
And after that, you are surprised that people do not like you. OK, I got it.
This article strives to conflate two very different political disasters as if they are hardly distinguishable, without looking in detail at what went wrong in Labour in the UK, and how this differs from the Hilary Clinton defeat. 1. Corbyn campaigned on a platform of the kind of “Social Democracy” and regulated economy which took root and reached considerable accomplishments in many nearby countries in the North of Europe. That’s not to say that Corbyn’s personal views and sympathies are not with more radical views, but he in now way sought to turn Labour into a communist party, only to regulate the wild market. Sanders’ views do not veer that far from social democracy either. Corbyn’s view that a first world country like England does not need to have homeless people is not communism, rather it is what the social democrats of neighbouring Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands believed… Read more »
Over here across the pond we haven’t always had the parties that exist now. At one time we had a Whig party but because it wasn’t fulfilling a need amongst the electorate it died. I wouldn’t shed any tears to see either of our 2 parties replaced by an anti corruption pro labor party. Sounds like your Labour could also use a re branding. Also bear in mind that when so much of the population has grown poorer, things that are labeled xenophobic or racist such as keeping immigration much lower, are a reaction to losing jobs. Likewise the Brahmin left likes employing immigrants as it ausages guilt for being so well off and not really working.
The left was never as homogenous as the right. That was what was great about it. The left was the wing that would critique, criticize and mock not just the right wing, but itself. And because of that self-scrutiny it developed better ideas than the right. It had a mechanism for weeding out the worst ideas. And that is what it has lost, and why it’s ideas are increasingly more terrible.
Helen, much that I value your writing and respect your opinion, I think you encapsulated the problem with the left in your first paragraph: “An outright majority was won by surely the least credible Tory Prime Minister in living memory. It seems uncomfortably likely that this disaster is soon to be mirrored in the US by the re-election of Donald Trump for a second term, despite the fact that the American public has had four years—beginning with his 2015 campaign—to notice how manifestly unfit he is to be the leader of the western world. ” Who are you to make these judgments? I don’t think either point is clear. While Trump is clearly an obnoxious loudmouth; isn’t the economy doing rather better? Unemployment is down, especially among African Americans, Secondly, Boris Johnson, I think was well regarded generally as Major of London. Well, I could be wrong but these are… Read more »