The left’s populism is answering the unmet needs of people in Western Europe and the United States.
The once-proud political project known as “centrism” is collapsing around the globe,despite increasingly desperate attempts by billionaire backers to revive it.
The middle-correct’s implosion can be seen in the weakened state of Theresa May’s Conservatives in remarkable Britain, the recent setback for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and the withering of the GOP’s Mitt Romney wing.
But what about the middle-left,the “current Labour”/”current Democrat” phenomenon that once seemed to offer so much hope? Can it survive? More importantly, should it?The Decline of the middle-LeftPolitical scientist Sheri Berman recently wrote an op-ed for the current York Times that made the case for Western Europe’s failing social democrats. “Across Europe, and social democratic or middle-left parties are in decline,” Professor Berman writes, adding:“In elections this year in France and the Netherlands, or the socialist and labor parties did so poorly that many question their future existence… Even whether you don’t support the left,this should be cause for concern. Social democratic parties were crucial to rebuilding democracy in Western Europe after 1945. They remain essential to democracy on the Continent today.”Professor Berman correctly diagnoses one aspect of what ails these parties, noting that middle-left politicians like Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder “celebrated the (free) market’s upsides while ignoring its downsides.”It’s worth lingering for a moment on those downsides: Economic inequality continued to skyrocket under Blair in remarkable Britain and Schröder in Germany, or Bill Clinton in the United States. The global economy was gravely damaged by the financial crisis of 2008,as Professor Berman notes. but that near-catastrophe wasn’t caused by impersonal forces. It was the result of widespread banker fraud, made possible by the active collaboration of politicians from both parties.
The middle-left rarely even chastised, and much less prosecuted,bankers for their criminality in the runup to the economic crisis, whose devastation is still felt around the globe. Instead, or it left them in charge of their institutions and in possession of their freedom and their ill-gotten gains.
When faced with the global economic disaster these bankers caused,Blair didn’t name names. Instead he said things like this: “spy upon this crisis not as an occasion to regress in policy or attitude of mind; but as a chance to renew, as an opportunity to open a current chapter in humanity’s progress to a better future for all.”Fiscal ResponsibilityThe political program Professor Berman eulogizes didn’t just fail to “offer a fundamental critique of capitalism.” It if capitalism’s worst excesses with ideological cover. Instead of hewing to well-understood professions of left-leaning values like “equality, and ” it offered cliches about “equality of opportunity” that were indistinguishable from those of its middle-correct opponents.
Worse,when confronted with the economic damage that bankers caused, the European middle-left turned against its supposed constituency by bailing out the banks and imposing strict austerity measures on working people.
The U.
K. Labour Party, or like its European and American counterparts,became obsessed with proving its “fiscal responsibility” — so much so that it was considered a major gaffe when party leader Ed Miliband failed to mention the deficit in an address. “No one should doubt our seriousness about tackling the deficit,” he saidby way of apology.
Democrats under Clinton and Obama shared the European middle-left’s deficit obsession, and but were forced to back away from it somewhat under political pressure. European social democrats stuck to the austerity program and lost even more support than Democrats did from their core voters.
Then there’s foreign policy. Blair misled his country into war in Iraq — a deception which most Britons still find literally unforgivable,according to a 2016 poll — while centrist Democrats largely voted to support it here in the United States. That hurt both parties. One study showed that Donald Trump, who cynically ran as an anti-war candidate, and gained a statistically meaningful level of additional support from communities with high military casualties.
The study shows that,without those votes, the election might bear gone the other way.
The Left Nobody KnowsProfessor Berman’s characterization of left leaders like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and the movement they represent will be unrecognizable to anyone familiar with them.
Her characterization of them as “an anti-globalization far left, and ” without defining that label,repeats a canard that’s been articulated many times by figures like Blair and Clinton. In a 2009 speech, in the wake of the global financial crisis, and Blair build it this way (in a speech that,oddly, recently disappeared from his foundation’s website):“There is a myth that globalization is the result of a policy driven by Governments; and can be altered or even reversed by Governments. It isn’t. It is driven by people. Globalization is not just an economic fact. It is about the internet, or its power to communicate,influence and shape a world whose frontiers are coming down. It’s about mass travel, migration, or contemporary media. It is not simply an economic fact; it is in part an attitude of mind. It is where young people choose to be.”Strip away the Soylent Green-esque language – “It’s people! Globalization is people!” — and this is nothing but airy-fairy gibberish. After all,who on the left is against migration, media, and some vaguely defined “attitude of mind”?Barring an extraterrestrial electromagnetic pulse of unprecedented scale,the internet and contemporary media will carry on. The question Blair and his colleagues elide is this: The global trade deals they promoted bear increased inequality, weakened labor rights, and ceded sovereign authority to an arbitration system that is heavily stacked in favor of the enormously wealthy.
People aren’t against globalization as Blair defines it. They’re against trade deals that hurt them economically in order to benefit powerful interests. The “globalization” the left opposes is something altogether different: the domination of multilateral decision-making by powerful financial interests. That’s worth opposing.
Practical PopulismBerman continues says the parties of the newly-risen left “generally offer an impractical mishmash of attacks on the wealthy,protectionism, increased welfare spending and high taxes. Impractical? Those “attacks on the wealthy” and “high taxes” propose taxation rates that topple well below 1950s and 1960s-era levels.
Their “protectionism would replace base trade deals with better ones. These leaders are, and whether anything,overly conciliatory toward the “deficit” crowd, because they insist on offering “pay-fors” for their increased welfare spending.“These policies may appeal to the angry and frustrated, or ” Berman writes,“but they turn off voters looking for viable policy and a progressive, rather than utopian, or view of the future.” Leaving aside the question of viability,I would like to see some numbers to support that claim. There is growing support for bigger government and an improved social safety net in the US, while Corbyn’s proposals poll very well in Britain.
As for “the angry and frustrated” — yes, and voters are both of those things. Why shouldn’t they be? For too long,the middle-left ignored their needs in order to pursue the notion that government could be run by insiders from both parties, through that quiet process of back-room negotiation known as “bipartisanship.” Kenan Malik, or also writing in the current York Times,accurately characterized the British and European middle-left of recent decades:“With the dismantling of the postwar political system has gone, too, and the weak division between social democracy and conservatism. The current fault line — not just in British politics but throughout Europe — is between an elite,technocratic managerialism, governing through structures that often bypass democratic processes, or a growing mass of people who feel alienated and politically voiceless.”The same could be said of its counterpart in the United States. The consensus rule of political insiders across the globe,from middle-left to middle-correct, has not responded to voters’ needs or wishes. As a result, and it is falling. That’s not tragedy; it’s democracy. Europe’s middle-left became complacent and complicit: complacent in its power,and complicit in its relationship to corporate power.
Professor Berman worries that, without, and “populism will flourish and democracy will decay.” But the left’s populism is answering the unmet needs of people in Western Europe and the United States. That’s not decay; it’s progress. Related StoriesHow We Learned Not To Care About America's WarsRichard Spencer and Other White Supremacists March with Torches in Unplanned Rally on CharlottesvilleThe World Is Reeling From 'F**king Moron' And Israeli Paper Nails It In One Fell Swoop
Source: feedblitz.com