Where to now for the Left?
It’s been a rough year for the Left around the Western World. Bill Shorten lost what appeared to be an unloseable election in Australia after running a campaign based on shifting the tax system. Bernie Sanders trails the centrist Joe Biden in most national polls for the Democratic primaries and is behind Pete Buttigieg, a McKinsey nerd with no real policy beliefs, in some Iowa polls.
And as I write, the UK Tories could be on their way to their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher was leader, with a man who won’t confirm how many children he has looking set to be prime minister for another halfdecade at least.
But it hasn’t just been a bad year; it’s been a bad few decades. Union membership around the world has plummeted, and with it the share of income that goes to people who work for their money, rather than having their money work for them. The ‘‘left-wing’’ parties who have won have generally done so by explicitly unmooring themselves from actual left-wing ideas and embracing technocratic centrism: see Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and Jacinda Ardern.
It would be easy to simply tell the Left-ish parties around the world to embrace this centrism in order to win again. But politics is not quite that linear and people on the Left generally want to do more than just win and fiddle around in power for a while.
They tried that with Obama and got very little lasting policy wins for it, before losing all national power in 2016 anyway. The leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats lost her own seat in the UK. Most of Bill Clinton’s big policy wins, such as welfare reform and signing Nafta, were wins for the Right more than the Left.
You could make a strong argument that the standardbearers for the Left in recent years have all been fatally flawed as messengers for often-popular ideas. Shorten was intensely disliked. Sanders is old and has had a heart attack recently. Corbyn was unable to make clear to people inside his party that support for Palestine should never even get close to antisemitism, and even worse at making that clear to the general public.
No two elections or leaders are the same, of course, and many mitigating factors interfere with all of this. Both Corbyn and Shorten have to contend with a hostile Murdoch-owned press, as well as their own deficiencies of personality. The UK general election has been shaped by Brexit, an issue that splits Labour’s London-voters from its workingclass strongholds like little else, particularly after the strategic disaster of embracing a second referendum. And Sanders could well still win the primary.
Another argument concerns the nature of winning. Cultural conservatives in the working class, including many who have traditionally backed Left-wing parties, have slowly been solidifying their links to parties of the Right.
They are partially doing this because the Left has won several of the big social-issue battles of our time: gay marriage is legal across the Western World, cannabis is being decriminalised or legalised, and outside of America abortion rights are on the rise.
These wins have gone too far too fast for some.
On economic matters, ultraausterity has generally been rejected by the wider public, and many but not all right-wing parties. The National Party here does not wish to dramatically shrink the state. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives ran on a platform of increasing public spending. While he hasn’t quite governed this way, Donald Trump ran to the Left of the Republican Party economically. And many of the policies of Corbyn and Sanders enjoy majority polling support.
None of these wins come close to the dreams of the current Left.
But they show that the hard Right has a similar problem with dragging government away from the centre.
There is a wider realignment going on, which is troubling for the Left. The ideal voter in the mind of a Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders staffer is either a 20-something urbanite or a unionised factory worker without a college degree. Left parties can generally win over the former, but are having more and more trouble with the latter.
Part of this is that social issues problem, but another issue is just the changing nature of work in general.
Huge unionised workforces are getting more and more scarce, while work becomes increasingly white-collar or precarious.
This change has been very destabilising to the communities who used to work these jobs, but it is the Right that has harnessed the power of this destabilisation, not the ‘‘parties of workers’’ on the Left.
So where to from here?
In the UK, Corbynism is far from finished, even if Jeremy Corbyn is. The Labour Party he has built over the past four years will not replace him with a Blairite.
But whoever the new leader is may have to hold their nose and make some sort of alliance with the centre.
This would involve a lot more on-the-ground organising with people you disagree with, and a bit less ironic Stalinist trolling and infighting.
It could well involve allying with another party, which is problematic in the UK because of First Past the Post, but doable in countries like New Zealand with proportional systems.
Indeed, New Zealand’s Left has worked this out already, and MMP allows it to wield partial power in alliance with the centre.
The Green Party sucks up much of the urban hard Left vote, which allows Labour to swerve itself a lot closer to the centre and stop itself from alienating people who don’t really mind capitalism, or from the thousands of people who are a lot more worried about putting food on the table than they are about climate change.
Whether this alliance can hold is far from certain, particularly as climate change becomes more of an important issue into the next decade.
The National Party under Simon Bridges is running a campaign aimed squarely at the Kiwi battler, sick of the ‘‘wokeness’’ from Jacinda Ardern, but no massive fan of slick bigbusiness types like Bill English or John Key either. We’ll find out in about a year whether he can pull it off.
Cultural conservatives in the working class ... have slowly been solidifying their links to parties of the Right.