The global collapse of the center-left
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
- W.B. Yeats
French president Francois Hollande will not seek re-election in 2017, mostly due to his historic unpopularity.
His political failure strongly resembles the demise of the Democrats.
Hollande needed to appeal to both the Socialists’ former working class base and to more prosperous urban liberals. He could not.
In France, the much-maligned mondialisation (globalization) is embodied by institutions like the European Union, the concept of open borders, and trade deals that have coincided with the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. The parallels between French voter backlash and America’s Trumpland are clear.
Americans are famously unable to see beyond our borders. Thus, Trump's victory is the one tree in a global center-left collapse forest.
Stepping back and seeing the entire landscape would allow Democrats to see the political landscape has changed, and the need for fundamental reforms.
So why is the centre-left by and large not benefiting from the failures of their political opponents? The deep reason lies in its absorption of the policies of the centre-right, going back almost three decades: the acceptance of free trade agreements, the deregulation of everything, and (in the eurozone) of binding fiscal rules and the most extreme version of central bank independence on earth. They are all but indistinguishable from their opponents.
The story is much the same in the United States, where the lion's share of deregulation has been done under Democrats. The same goes for Australia, where the Labour Party is also in decline.
Even when it comes to warmongering, Democrats are virtually indistinguishable from Republicans.
Why did the center-left embrace this neoliberal agenda? For the money.
The greatest assault on traditional social democracy in the last generation has come from “Third Way” leaders of center-left parties like Tony Blair, and their continental European counterparts. Like the Clinton Democrats, these “modernizing” social democrats embraced free markets with a convert’s zeal, celebrating globalization and deregulating finance, while seeking to privatize or dismantle parts of the older welfare state. The politicians of the Third Way were far more libertarian than the voters in their own parties and their actions helped to make possible the global economic crisis.
Having given up traditional social democratic economics for a watered-down version of libertarian conservatism, the Third Way social democrats in Europe, like the Clinton and Obama Democrats in the U.S., sought to replace the traditional bread-and-butter concerns of working-class voters with idealistic campaigns about multiculturalism, climate change and obesity that appealed to more affluent, college-educated voters.
Multiculturalism, climate change and obesity are worthy causes, but they don't endanger the power or profits of the ruling elites.
That is the problem.
The size of the problem is staggering.
Overall, the total vote share for the continent's traditional center-left parties is now at its lowest level since at least World War II. Like the Democrats, these parties have been marginalized, with little influence over policy as the right prepares to place its stamp on the Western world in a way that could endure for decades.
"If the left and the center-left don't get their act together, then we're looking at a period of very unstable right-wing hegemony," said Alex Callinicos, a European studies professor at King's College London.
If the problem was just greed or incompetence, then fixing this would be no more difficult than replacing people. Unfortunately, the problem goes much, much deeper, to the very ideology of the party members.
Throughout the century, it is remarkable how little emerged by way of a cross-border intellectual culture of the centre-left. If you wanted to choose a globally influential thinker for the centre-left after the second world war, you would have to go for the Hungarian-American historian Karl Polanyi. Polanyi argued that capitalism consists of a “double movement” – the push for free markets and the pushback against them, to regulate them in the interests of society.
The beauty of Polanyi’s big idea was that it allowed the centre-left in the 1980s to find a justification for its work that could survive the demise of the working class. Instead of “protecting the working class”, the aim of social democracy became understood as “regulating capitalism for its own good”.
The root cause of all social democracy’s problems since 2008 is that it is no longer clear how this can be done. There was a rightwing version of neoliberalism, red in tooth and claw; and a progressive version – with its financial inclusion agenda, gay marriage, and meritocratic ethos in education, healthcare and social policy.
At it's heart, center-left neoliberalism has no realistic plan to address the failures of globalism and the decline of the working class. It wouldn't even know where to start, if it was incline to even try.
But even worse, it has no vision of a better world. There is no 'progress' in its 'progressive' outside of changing the race and gender of the ruling elite.
The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old quip, if you have no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the Zapatistas; the urban "precariat"; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT "community"; the grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season's worthless Democrat; Occupy; a "Trotskyist" software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability; its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its reflex is to "send messages" to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or for the oppressed...
If there is fringe radicalism that has an impact on the prosecution of mainstream politics, it is increasingly the province of the aggressive right, the balancing effect being to drag the gravity of our politics to a rightish centre.
There's downside in this new age of centrist consensus, most significantly in the way it encourages a political exchange that is all smoke, cynical self interest and little substance.
Real, substantial progress has been replaced by symbolic victories, which has now deteriorated to losing battles on symbolic issues.
That's one of the reasons why "progressives" fight over verbal outrages by obscure people that have no substantive impact, but have symbolic value, while using significantly less energy on Big Picture items that would actually arrest the decline of the working class.
The entire concept of creating a better future for the lower classes is now beyond the pale. Instead, "progressives" now exist to manage the decline of the working class, making sure that it doesn't happen too quickly to cause social unrest, and thus threaten the power of the ruling elite. The purpose of the center-left is to marginalize revolutionary forces on the left.
As Kathleen Geier writes, "the progressive label has become little more than a marketing tool, a signifier deployed to distract us from that the actual content of the signified."
Comments
As I said in the comments of my latest essay
I have decided to drop the use of "left" in mainstream politics, neo-liberal is the only one that works properly. That's only when I am feeling nice however.
Vote Whig! Er, I mean Democrat
I've been going with trueLeft and neo-liarisim
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
When you don't represent the people
and favor the donor class, you lose elections.
Neoliberalism has failed the planet.
Progressive to the bone.
I generally call myself a socialist
I generally call myself a socialist, as its less damaged then the progressive or liberal labels, and is generally held as something distinct from them.
Socialist or Leftist retain meaning in my view. I don't see how
any pro-capitalist stance merits the term left unless it's a mixed economy with the critical elements and basic industries publicly owned. There's no room for for-profit corporations in healthcare, water & sewer, power generation and distribution(except for homeowner power), etc.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
I struck a nerve at TOP
this is on the rec'd list
Congrats!
Watch those rotten Oranges explode!
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Most excellent! For them, the truth may not set them free but
at least the truth will give them indigestion for a while.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Lots of good points gjohnsit
The current leadership of the Democratic Party has no overriding goal except to enrich themselves as much as possible. Obama ran for President to be President, not because he had a real agenda. The same was true, in spades, for Hillary Clinton. Bernie, on the other hand, had a goal which was to improve the lives of the people of this country, particularly those that are not financially secure, at the expense of the corporate elite. If you have a goal of giving the people of the United States a decent, fulfilling life and a country and world that their children will be happy to live in, then you have a foundation on which to build electoral campaigns.
Good read and very true.
1. Notice Sabir is now missing? So much for "good guy".
2. Read somewhere that Obama said he took office with the goal of being the Democrats Ronald Reagan.
3. Harry Reid said the only problem the Democrats had was Comey.
4. Cenk said the Democrats have already said they will not fight Trump's cabinet. White flag is at full mast.
5. The thing to blame for Trump in the States are the Clintons and her bought and paid for court that tried to shove her down everyone's throat despite what they were being told by the numbers and the base.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
But they're full of shit about climate.
Climate change can't be mitigated or dealt with in any meaningful way under a neoliberal anti-regulatory profit-maximizing politics.
I wish people would stop lumping climate in with things like abortion, multiculturalism, LGBT rights as the "non-economic" issues--there is no issue more economic than climate change. And sometimes it looks like indigenous people are the only ones who get that.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Most radical economists realize the existential threat
of climate change. Like the non-capitalist indigenous people, they too have been marginalized, kept from positions of influence, and ignored.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Correctamundo!
Neoliberal economy with its magic "financialization" has got everyone thinking that "the economy" has nothing to do with the physical world, such as will be greatly transformed by climate change. "When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money..."
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
This is an illustration of the irrationality of human nature
There seems to be a common thread among various instances of collapse of power structures in societies. The modern Greeks saw it coming, but too late. They are beginning to realize that it doesn't matter who they vote for, they're screwed. Governments borrowed way too much, and now the people who did it have long since left office. For an interesting take on the collapse of the USSR read this article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/05/soviet-union-colla...
The root cause of many of our problems is overpopulation, but nobody wants to talk about that.
The root cause of our problems is amateur philosophizing.
We came to standing for nothing by being completely unable to identify root causes. "Population" is a measure of how the people, brilliant in their collective intelligence, came to be mere cheap labor under a system (i.e. capitalism) which produced lots of people so that lots of people could merely be exploited for their collective biopower. All of the statistics measuring industrial transformation of the Earth accelerate beginning in the 19th century, and then once again even further after World War II. Bonneuil and Fressoz' The Shock of the Anthropocene deal with the "Great Acceleration" phenomenon well.
There are of course social causes of the competitive industrialization which characterizes world history from the mid-18th century onward, causes related to Europe's competitive conquest of the world but also causes which have placed the whole world as an object for extraction and for profit for centuries now. But only a tiny crowd of analysts is willing to touch the environmental history which one must understand in order to make sense of this reality. (Here's an exception: Jason W. Moore.)
Today's "Left" is completely supine before global trends because its "leaders," both red and green, have made their peace with the utopia of money. Its repertoire of rationales is completely stuck in the mode of thinking which Karl Marx identified as "commodity fetishism." There are sectarians, who wear their ideological badges proudly but who are really mere vanguards without a proletariat, and there are the sellouts, whose protestations of being "Left" are made in defense of the right-wing wagon-circlings of the elite laagers. Against this we struggle to speculate constructively, using the best of the theories we know, as to how it might work out.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
And the strange case of war and imperialism
The neoliberal dominated parties both in Europe and the US have adopted pro-war and pro-imperialism positions. And it is the right wing parties in Europe that are anti-imperialism. More the point they are against their countries being sock puppets for US imperialism. Trump has been the most openly anti-imperialism major candidate at least in rhetoric. What he does remains to be seen. I suspect he many not be able to overcome the pro-war neocon establishment in State or DOD.
Sooo not in line with our cliches about left and right. The "liberal/left" European "social democrats" support massing troops on Russia's borders not seen since the Nazis (who were also a coalition and not just Germans). They play war games on Russia's borders as if the history of the previous century totally disappeared. (But the Russians are definitely remembering the wars .)
Climate change
will wreak havoc on us all before it destroys us. There will be a need to relocate people, build new break walls, rebuild roads and bridges etc. Of course the tax payers will be asked to foot the bill, if that is not economic then there is no such thing.
Things are about to get ugly
There was a Counterpunch article a few weeks back arguing that inequality is the oldest cause of social disintegration. There is a new book by a Stanford historian coming out in January that expands upon this idea. He demonstrates that the problem has almost never been reduced without chaos and violence going all the way back to the Neolithic.
This is the challenge for the left. Scarily, I doubt that any leader trying to solve the problem through redistribution will be allowed to live. This is not because of tin foil hat stuff like Vince Foster but through stochastic terrorism (the way abortion doctors are usually killed.) I suspect this is why Bernie caved: he's not stupid. No one threatened him - he is just a student of history.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Inequality combined with Corruption and a lack of belief in
the Rule of Law leads to a hopeless, despairing and angry population. When enough people get to the point of believing that they have little left to lose, then all kinds of unpleasantness ensues. The root cause to social disintegration in my opinion is the deleterious result of rampant and unfettered greed by the 1% to corner the world's wealth and resources. Do they have to have it ALL?
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
The loss of the rule of law
is the most stunning aspect of this, in my opinion. That rips the veneer of legitimacy right off of the rest of it, and leaves the perps with no plausible defense. The Reign of Terror and the guillotine were a direct response to exactly that situation, unaccountable elites have a rough history.
Smarter elites will curb the excesses before it gets that far, but I have no confidence that our elite class has any sense of history, proportion or shame.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
It doesn't help that France is just as class-ridden and
snob-ridden as the UK. If you haven't gone to one of the elite 'Ecoles', you're not suited for 'government'. (See Oxbridge.)
So much for "Liberté, égalité, fraternité".
Hollande never helped his cause, seeming to be a short, inconsequential twerp (with the face of Droopy Dawg), scootering to whatever girlfriend was next on the list.
(Edited)
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Stock Market bust coming soon?
Shiller's Index just reached 27.9 which is setting off alarms. This Market indicator hits extreme levels last seen before plunges in 1929, 2000 and 2008. Neoliberalism insures booms and busts and it looks as if another one is coming soon.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/08/market-indicator-hits-levels-last-seen-be...
That's The Way It Goes
American voters kept buying into the Democratic party BS, in part because Obama saved the Wall Street banks from the consequences of their actions. IF he could do it for them, he could do it for us, right?
Except that he couldn't. He was too weak to take on the crooks who crashed the economy in the first place, in part because he'd made them promises of easing financial regulations and protection from criminal prosecution in trade for their permission to break the Oval Office color barrier.
Desperate for real change, the voters most harmed by Wall Street were determined to show that they weren't a captive voting bloc of the Democratic Party. Despite having real options in Johnson and Stein to show their displeasure to the Democrats, they voted instead to eliminate the Democrats as the middle men between Wall Street and the financial assets of Main Street. They voted for Trump. Yeah, THAT will hurt the Democrats! Put one of the worst pirates of all at the helm of the Ship of State. No more Wall Street money to the Democrats, because one of their own mans the conn.
So what if there won't be a nation under his command? We showed Them Dems!
I'll just dive overboard now and be rid of the scurvy lot!
Vowing To Oppose Everything Trump Attempts.
I feel as if the people of America
are center left or left leaning as a whole, I've never heard of anyone hating SS or Medicare, wanting wars, privatizing water, roads, parking, taking your shoes off at airports, having health insurance you cant afford.
And while the country is center left we are governed and controlled by a system that's right and righter.
The system of government we live under doesn't allow for us to control our own destiny, how democratic is it if many elected officials run unopposed and that was the DNC strategy. How many people want everything government privatized?
Howard Dean thinks he's gods gift to the Democrats cause he wants to run a 50 state strategy, oh my lord, why didn't anyone else ever think of that.
How do we still get Schumer and Pelosi after the drubbings the D's have taken for years, it's the system, your average bear wants change, 546 assholes in Dc want the status quo.
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
Great Essay,
As I recall, Lenin addressed this very issue, in Imperialism, and concluded that it would end with revolution, eventually.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Yeah, the "decline of the working classes"
The decline of the working classes is not inevitable. Dead labor is powerful, but not all-powerful.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
It is going to be very difficult for some on the left to give up
identity politics. But it needs to happen if we are to avoid violent protest.
The people in power won't give up their privilege easily. The system seems to be working just fine for them. They are perfectly willing to destroy the planet & their own economy while they gouge out every possible nickel.
The 99% need to ally and get some serious changes in tax, trade, and tariff policies.
chuck utzman
TULSI 2020
Hear,Hear! gjohnsit
this is dead on about the freaking centrist neo-liberal's who believe in 'disaster capitalism', the free market and call themselves 'progressive' or liberal.
I have friends and neighbors online and off who self identify as progressive's and are rabid supporters of the Clinton's and Obama. They are doing well in this nightmare of economic disparity. On one hand they believe in climate change, support the Standing Rock water protectors, stand up for women's right's, advocate eating organic healthy food (animals rights) and on the other hand loath and mock the ignorant unwashed masses, think Michelle and Hillary are great female role models for their daughters, want privatized education for their kids and drive honking huge gas guzzling earth destroying SUV's. How they can reconcile the classist, racist, sexist, anti-human and civil right's, earth destroying neo-liberal/neocon elitist policies and nasty ass global agenda of the want to rule the world neo-liberal/neocon Davo's crowd?
These PC super yuppified lefty's with their hip fake PC urban 'life style' seem incapable of grasping cause and effect. Symbolism does nothing for the masses of people stuck in poverty or barely able to keep a roof over their heads and feed their families. Symbolism does nothing for the villages of women, children and men that we bomb drone and destroy in our bloody endless wars fought for the interests of the transnational looters. It doesn't do a thing to stop the poverty, incarceration and killing of black people. How about the children who cannot get out of the school to prison for profit pipeline?
There are more then 4,000 homeless people in my city and that is most likely a gross under count. One of my Democratic neighbors thinks the Dem. mayor should roust them out of here as they spoil his bike commute on the wild undeveloped bike corridor. God forbid if you don't vote for a Democratic woman who rivals Margret Thatcher and thinks breaking corporate glass ceilings is the height of feminism your a sexist, woman hating, Dr. Commie Rat. This meritocracy is not democratic it is like La Feminista said an Ayn Randian viscous dog eat dog sick world view.
It's not just working class people who are relegated to the loser's pile but the middle class too. Unless you make enough money to win the game and afford the vig your part of the working poor. Your gentrified right out od a decent affordable place to live. What happened to the concept of the common good? The left my ass. Anyone who can't 'play the game and win is a loser' said the investment realtor down the street. 'It's a screw or get screwed world'. He's a New Democrat who thinks NPR is too liberal. Socially liberal does not mean going to a march for women because Hillary lost and Trump is a sexist pig and a crooked con man. Like Big Dog isn't.
Sorry for the long incoherent rant. I got carried away with my 'grievance culture' immoderate, extremist far left outrage at the sad state of what passes for progressive or the center left these days. The Third Way bills themselves on their websites as 'radical centrist's' now that's is an oxymoron almost that's almost as bad as the concept of healthcare for profit or education for testing.
Damn good rant.
Really does push the question at all of those who would obtusely cling to the "take back the Democratic Party" strategy -- how are they going to sell the Democratic Party to its victims?
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
If Ds had a principle at all
They would at least invest in everyone's souccess, and be far less enjoying of the perks of their bubble.
If we don't replace them outright. The worst must be asked, by a constituent, to step up, or step out.
Next indivdual to speak positively on NAFTA needs to be considered a subversive, or enemy of Humanity. TPP: Will make you a "WANTED" person, not to be apprehended, but found dead, in a trash heap; among the remorseless, forgotten.
Jeebus Put A Fork in'em!
Fighting for democratic principles,... well, since forever
Sometimes I wonder if both the right and the left
Are just marching along smack into the chaotic complexity of the modern world. Going righteously with their ideologies into the future neither really knowing how this is going work out. Macro events pushing everyone along like a tsunami wave into the unknown. Maybe as determined as either side is to impose their will on the other, maybe they don't really comprehend the music within the sound and fury. As strange as the recent turn of events has been I guess I will just watch and see what happens.
It's not going to end the way they say it's going to end.
That is the only thing I can count on. The experts are always wrong.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho
It's not Right. It's not Left. It's Up or Down.
I have been slow to accept the truism of that idea. But this is reality. Up = 1%. Down = everybody else.
Elites, whether arising from capitalist "market" philosophies", monocratic management, religious hierarchies, of hereditary "divine right" always concentrate more power/wealth to themselves, with progressively less concern for those not-elite. This has always been such. Exceptions might be found in small communes, kibbutzim, etc., but eventually, once a group reaches a certain size, "leadership" arises and must exist in order to perpetuate the concept upon which any initially small group hopes to continue growth, whether by "spreading the message" (propaganda, evangelism, unionization, etc.). Leaders by virtue of their leadership, whether for good or ill, then derive a certain prestige or power. Once power enters the picture, the nucleus for elitism has been formed.
Thus elitism is inherent in social systems, regardless of the origination of that system. No matter the originating ideology, power of elites is like a cancer, which, once formed, naturally seeks to accrete "more" to itself. Can there be a control for elitism?
Consider global warming. This is only a symptom of the underlying cause. The cause: the selfish insatiable greed by the current elites. Just like any malignant growth, the process eventually kills the host.
One attempted solution is to form a competing elite seeking to obtain some of that power. But if that competing elite is strong enough, it will displace the original elite. Think the feudalistic society's conversion over centuries to capitalism. Competing elites may often not inspire fear in the "original" elite, until the competition becomes too great to be ignored. From this situation are two possible resolutions. One is the outright destruction of the competition. The other measure is the co-optation of the competition, such as the modern Democratic and Republican parties into a stronger monocracy than previously existed.
I believe it was Jefferson who recommended a Revolution every 20 years. His understanding of society, although flawed (he was a slave owner), was insightful. Revolutions may be peaceful, although rare, such as England's "Glorious Revolution" or they may be bloody messes like the French and Russian Revolutions.
Another fine essay, gjohnsit.
It's interesting to note
that leadership in simple, low tech societies is fairly benign. I remember reading long ago about tribes in New Guinea, wherein the "chief" was a sort of expediter, someone who could encourage and organize others into performing group projects, like a hunt, a yam roast, or building something. These chiefs weren't any better off than anyone else, they just were skilled at motivating people to work together for the common good. Somehow this breaks down when the population group exceeds a couple of hundred or so, and an "elite" forms.
How to manage and mitigate that elite seems to be the core of politics.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
I believe that Democracy doesn't "scale" well