The global collapse of the center-left

The destruction of the centrist Democrats in the U.S., Blue Dog Democrats in particular, is well known. What isn't talked about as much is how the center-left is being routed all over the western world.

The spectre that haunts Europe’s centre left has a name: Pasokification. In 2009, Greece’s once-great social democratic party won 43.9% of the national vote. Barely six years later, it could manage just 6.3%.
Atomised in France, all but wiped out in the Netherlands, humiliated in Germany, Europe’s mainstream centre left is in full retreat. Even in its one-time stronghold of Scandinavia, social democracy is now struggling.
There are many reasons. The embrace-the-market “Third Way” policies of leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder worked fine in the turn-of-the-century boom years but seem to offer little to today’s vulnerable centre-left voters.

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Germany's Gerhard Schröder is a good example. His cluelessness can only be matched by Hillary's cluelessness.

There are few better illustrations of this crisis than Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz's futile anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel in the aftermath of Sunday's election. Schulz called her "the biggest loser" of the race; he chastised her for "a systematic evasion of politics" that created a vacuum for nationalists to step in and declared her feel-good campaign "scandalous." He made it sound as though it was Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Union governed with his SPD for the last four years, who caused his party to show its worst ever election result -- just 20.5 percent of the vote. Considering that he'd campaigned against her, and that she's won the election, Schulz's charges sounded surreal. Clearly, he has no clue what happened to his party's support, just as French Socialists had no idea why their backing collapsed in the run-up to this year's presidential election, and just as the Dutch Labour Party struggled to comprehend its electoral implosion in March.

The center-left (i.e. "socialist" parties in Europe) had been getting killed since 2009, but 2017 was a particularly bad year.
It appears that 2018 will be more of the same.

Ask anyone in Italy about who might be sitting at the head of government in Palazzo Chigi following national elections on 4 March and the answer is a collective shrug of the shoulder.
...There is only one likelihood that most pundits do agree upon: that the Italian centre-left, led by former prime minister Matteo Renzi, seems poised to be heading for a humiliating defeat, not unlike its ideological counterparts in Germany and Spain.
...“The centre-left is not seen as an alternative to the disgruntled voters out there. It embraced globalisation and bailed out banks when needed, and has not been able to differentiate itself from centre-right,” says Wolfango Piccoli, the co-president of Teneo Intelligence, a research firm in London.

This is not to say that we have a Crisis Of The Left.
When center-left parties turn to the left the public responds.

A good example is the UK Labour Party under socialist Jeremy Corbyn. Labour received more than 40 per cent of the popular vote in 2017 – more than any Labour leader since Tony Blair in 2001.
What was truly amazing is that he did this while he had to fight his own party every step of the way.

Corbyn won with 59.5 percent of the vote. Burnham, the runner-up, received 19 percent. According to the Guardian, “shell-shocked members of the shadow cabinet, some on the verge of tears, gathered together in small groups in the foyer” in reaction to the victory, while others “continued plotting, in the manner of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of the second world war.”

The neoliberal Blairites failed at preventing Corbyn from becoming the leader of the Labour Party, but that doesn't mean they just gave up.

Instead, within mere hours of Corbyn’s victory, Yvette Cooper — one of his former leadership rivals — and six other shadow cabinet members declared they wouldn’t serve under him.
...His own MPs yelled “Resign” at him in the middle of a parliamentary debate. They passed a no-confidence motion against him by 172 to forty, and nearly sixty former Labour parliamentary candidates called for his resignation.
...Labour MPs’ efforts to defeat Corbyn failed a second time, however, with Corbyn beating his sole challenger, Owen Smith, by an even larger margin than in his first victory.

The neoliberals stopped at nothing to bring down their party leader. When the Tories called a snap election, thinking they were going to destroy Corbyn once and for all, the Blairites jumped on board.
Their criticism of Corbyn became absolutely bizarre and hysterical.

The Blairites are so consumed by hatred, and so incensed that anybody should offer a political alternative to neo-liberalism, that they simply cannot stop....The BBC Newsnight “policy editor” has just been tipped off, by two of the usual anonymous Blairite MPs, that Corbyn has stooped so low as actually to ask people to vote Labour, as part of his vile plot to seize power. I am not making this up.

Finally came the election and Corbyn's Labour, now with a socialist agenda, surpassed all expectations. So did the neoliberal Blairites finally admit they were wrong and give up?
Of course not. They immediately started plotting on forming a centrist party to steal moderate voters from Labour, to the benefit of the Tories.
On a local level the Blairites are working hard to undermine Labour's gains from the election.

During the last two years, however, Labour’s right wing has gone a bit further than that, trying to destablise Corbyn, and then criticising him for not being stable. Their aim is to return the party to the free market agenda of the 1990s and 2000s.
It’s understandable, then, that the left of the party hopes these local ballots will construct a bulwark of sympathetic MPs against the right. But data on the LabourList website shows that, of the 32 target seats where members have already chosen their candidate, only eight have selected an individual backed by the grassroots pro-Corbyn group Momentum.

Corbyn's experience is instructive for why the center-left is in collapse, and who are the real enemies of socialists (hint: they aren't the opposition party).
In America you saw the Democratic primaries openly rigged from the DNC down, and now with progressives fighting back, the neoliberal establishment is working hard to undermine the party's grassroots.
Corbyn showed us that the people can win against the neoliberals. But it also shows us that the neoliberals will never, ever stop. They are tools of the establishment, and that's why they are so hated.
The neoliberals, like Clintonites, will gladly implode the Democratic Party if the only alternative is a progressive victory.

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Steven D's picture

Much like the God Janus, we see two faces but it doesn't matter what each face says since the result for all but the donor class is the same - to be shit upon and told we're lucky to get that.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

@Steven D
more war please

In a speech at Stanford this month, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared that America intends to keep military troops in Syria indefinitely, in pursuit of the US’s “key end states for Syria,” including “post-Assad leadership,” the marginalization of Iran and the elimination of “weapons of mass destruction” that the US claims Syria has.
...
Newsweek (1/19/18) ran an article from the Atlantic Council’s Frederic Hof that called Tillerson’s speech “a major improvement in the American approach to the crisis in Syria.” The piece concluded that “what Mr. Tillerson has articulated is more than good enough as a starting point for a policy reflecting American values and upholding American interests.”

The Washington Post editorial board (1/22/18) also endorsed American violation of international law
...
The Atlantic (1/18/18) published a piece by Kori Schake, a self-identified supporter of “regime change [and] long-term military commitments.”
..For Schake, the problem isn’t that the goal of America’s Syria policy is to illegally occupy a country and overthrow its government, while ratcheting up already dangerously high levels of hostility towards Iran and Russia. It’s that that the Trump administration isn’t doing enough to achieve this.

Meanwhile, accounts of Tillerson’s speech on CNN (1/18/18) and Buzzfeed (1/18/18) opt not to make any reference to the absence of a legal basis for what he describes. One of the few allusions of any kind to international law was a throwaway line in an AP report (1/24/18): “The Islamic State’s retreat also has forced the US to stretch thinner its legal rationale for operating in Syria.” What that rationale might consist of was not explained.

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Look at this from 2016

Our report found that 75% of press coverage misrepresents Jeremy Corbyn – we can't ignore media bias anymore

And then it got worse.

The hostility Jeremy Corbyn faces from national newspapers has been laid bare by an analysis underlining the negative reaction from the print media to the Labour Party’s election offer.

An audit of the last week’s newspaper and broadcast election coverage by Loughborough University found that national newspapers with the largest circulations have been the most critical of the leader of the Opposition, his polices, and the party.

The graph below, produced by the university’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, and seen first by HuffPost UK, shows that of ten national newspapers studied, only two - the Guardian and the Mirror - featured more positive coverage than negative of the Labour Party.

The problem was that it got so bad, people noticed.

Among all Labour members, affiliated members and supporters who said they were “undecided” during last summer’s leadership election, 87% agreed that the media was biased, as did 51% of the public as a whole.

When people realize they are being lied to, you can't influence them.

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The Aspie Corner's picture

Seriously. If any of the Porky Dems were actually 'center-left', they'd be closer to Bernie Sanders, at least in terms of economic policy. If these assholes were 'center-left', they wouldn't consider a right-wing private insurance bill a victory for 'the left'.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

@The Aspie Corner
On economic issues, or any issue that might upset the status quo, they are firmly on the right.

Basically they are on the left if the issue can be framed in a way of blaming poor people.

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The Aspie Corner's picture

@gjohnsit Billary was as far to the right as any Repig could get on any social issue you could list. Abortion? She wanted late term bans and even went along with Repig scapegoating of Planned Parenthood during the fake video fiasco. Gay Marriage? She was Repig on that shit until 2013, and even then she was fuckin' fake. Immigration? "Oh yeah, let's build the wall!"

Even if she and other piece of shit Porky Dems were left-wing on social issues, what difference does that make when their economic conservatism will drag the country ever rightward anyway?

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

Meteor Man's picture

Thanks for explaining The Big Picture gjohnsit. I have read a lot of snippets you cover in your essay and you managed to pull them all together into a coherent explanation of what's really going on.

I read a few articles about Corbyn's problems with the Blairites in his own party and the media. In a comment I made in The Evening Blues a while back joeshikspack pointed out that The Guardian had lost it's usual objective voice. The funny part is how European Hillarybots are suffering from the same confusion and delusions as the American Neoliberals.

I have read similar articles about the political upheavals in other European countries. Until now I did not see that the European Centrists were attacking the progressive wing of their own party. The exact same battle Bernie progressives are fighting against the Dinos!

It is reassuring to know that the working poor are waking up to the Neoliberal betrayal all across the globe. Peace Out and keep on trucking gjohnsit.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man
The People vs. the Democratic Establishment: The Coming Attack on Progressive Candidates

With the public increasingly rejecting the neoliberal consensus that has dominated the Democratic Party for decades, establishment Democrats have a mission to complete in the coming years. They need to convince voters that a neoliberal candidate who is funded by the donor class, is in fact a populist, social Democrat like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
They must then fool the left into voting for a representative of the neoliberal wing of the party. This is where we stand at the start of 2018: The grassroots base is too strong to be totally ignored, but powerful forces hope it is weak enough to be successfully manipulated.

Go left, Democrats! Ditch the Blue Dogs in the midterms

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@gjohnsit

Thanks, yet again, for another invariably informed and informative post.

Although the private face of the corporate Dems always seems indistinguishable from the sometime-more-public private face of the Republicans...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlQNcjZu2RU

Sec. of State Says U.S. Should Celebrate Starving People
Redacted Tonight

Published on 31 Jan 2018

Because sometimes human rights get in the way of the US PTB's interests... sooooo Clintonesque.

Somehow, the Progs have to replace the CorpoDems, NOW!

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

earthling1's picture

Great post.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

orlbucfan's picture

shite rising to the top isn't confined to here. It's world-wide. Sad

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Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.

snoopydawg's picture

He thought they would flock to vote for Hillary instead of Trump, or something. Yeah, he told us that he doesn't care if the whiner democrats vote for the DP because they want what the party isn't offering. What's the goal for next time?

The Democrats are focusing on winning back white Trump voters, more so than energizing its base or people of color.

More of the same. Bye bye, I quit voting after Barry was elected. The two parties are the same and they do the bidding of their donors. Nothing is going to change until Pelosi, Schumer and others like them leave, if even then. Kampala and Booker are waiting in the wings.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon