The ongoing collapse of the center-left

The center-left, the dominant political ideology since the end of WWII, is threatening to be snuffed out of existence all over the western world.

EuropeCenterLeft_decades-decline.png

The far-right Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time in 2010, winning 6% of the vote. On Sunday, they finished in third place with 18% of the vote. And while the center-left Social Democrats finished ahead of the Sweden Democrats, they registered their worst electoral performance in more than 100 years.

Sweden’s Social Democratic Party is not an anomaly. In legislative elections held over the past two years, the French Socialist Party, German Social Democratic Party and Dutch Labor Party – three other major left-of-center parties – recorded their worst-ever results in the postwar era. Once-strong center-left parties in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Spain are also near historic lows in terms of their most recent legislative election results.

It isn't just Europe.
In Japan, the center-left Democratic Party is moribund.
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 that this isn't happening in isolation.

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.

If you are wondering why this is happening, consider what passes for center-left these days.
With Emmanuel Macron’s election in France and the rejection of the far-right Marine Le Pen, the neoliberal establishment breathed a sigh of relief. The populist backlash was "over". It was time to crank out more privatization, austerity, and increased military spending.
Macron, now called the “president of the rich”, has been known to say things like “people who are successful and those who are nothing”; or when he said “we spend a crazy amount of dough” on welfare; or when he told protesters to “stop making a mess and look for a job”.
This is the kinds of people being celebrated by traditional center-left parties.

One of the few exceptions to this trend 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.

The center-left has been totally captured by the neoliberals, and they are on a suicide mission.
The thing is, its impossible to destroy the left without having a huge impact on the right as well. You can't have a right without a left, a conservative without a liberal, to compare it to.
So the largely successful, 40-year long corporate assault on everything to the left is distorting the right-wing as well. The more they crush everything working class, the more twisted and ugly the right-wing will become.

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Cassiodorus's picture

It's pointless to call these parties "center-left" anymore. They're representatives of capital, and in that regard they're conformists, because capital has a long-term lease on most governments. Their point in existing as parties is to snuff out whatever alternative utopian dream might exist among those who are not owners of capital -- if necessary by handing over power to other conformist parties. They're not "collapsing" -- they don't need to be the actual representatives of political power as long as those with real political power support them.

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"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

@Cassiodorus
but it doesn't work like that in reality.

First of all, when you simply leave 40-60% of the population completely unrepresented by the system, it makes the political system illegitimate and unstable.

Secondly, like I said above, the right-wing tends to get extreme and crazy when there is no counter-weight on the left side. There is nothing TPTB can do to change this fact, as long as they continue to crush the left.

We are just one financial crash away from things getting completely out of hand.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@gjohnsit

First of all, when you simply leave 40-60% of the population completely unrepresented by the system, it makes the political system illegitimate and unstable.

Yes but nothing happens. Capital makes no concessions and the protesters all go home after the big demos with everything still the same. Sanders/ Corbyn might change this, but so far they haven't.

Secondly, like I said above, the right-wing tends to get extreme and crazy when there is no counter-weight on the left side.

That doesn't worry capital. Of course, Hitler didn't worry capital, and so far I have heard of no right wing anywhere that is 1% as extreme or as crazy as Hitler was.

We are just one financial crash away from things getting completely out of hand.

I'm still left wondering why a financial crash isn't solved by printing money. Obama had how much printed already so that Trump could claim that everything was fine?

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"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Cassiodorus I think Hitler did worry capital, but not for reasons we're discussing here.

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"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

mimi's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
I read your comment wrongly, you meant that the capital was worried about Hitler, and I read it as Hitler having been worried about capital.

My apologies.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@mimi No problem!

I wouldn't want to guess what Hitler worried about.

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"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

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
Hitler was backed by capitalists and profited from Hitler a great deal (remember that most German Jews became slave labor).
However, capitalists regretted it once things got out of hand, and eventually some of them died at the hands of Hitler's henchmen.
Once you destroy the liberal establishment, things never just stop there.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@gjohnsit True enough; but I was thinking more of the way Hitler invented a German currency run by his government, rather than borrowing money from private banks.

Capital doesn't like that.

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"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

mimi's picture

@Cassiodorus @Cassiodorus

I'm still left wondering why a financial crash isn't solved by printing money. Obama had how much printed already so that Trump could claim that everything was fine?
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they didn't experience how a clothes basket full of million Deutsche Mark bills could still not buy a bred? (1923 in Germany...)
img580.jpg
I had an aunt, who remembered those times. I had a bill like that kept as a reminder and gave it Joe, when we had a meet-up. He was a little confused and didn't get the value of my well intentioned 'gift' to him. Smile
I promise if we ever should meet in another meet-up I will bring a little gold nugget... those at least can't be printed. /s

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@mimi This one period of history in Germany is always used to shoot down the argument that a government could simply print money if it needed more. Interestingly enough, neither 1929 nor 2008 in the United States is ever used to shoot down the idea that a society should rely on private banks to control currency.

Nor does anyone, apart from the two Galbraiths and Ellen Brown, ever ask how the private banks' production and regulation of currency differs from "simply printing money."

Short answer: it doesn't.
You just get different sorts of problems depending on which kind of people you allow to have the power of determining how much currency is available.

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"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

mimi's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
study all the answers and comments to it, takes days. I appreciate all the homework you handed down to me. I always had a love-grrrrr relationship to our best tough teachers at school. Smile

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Cassiodorus's picture

@mimi that in 1923 the banks didn't hoard Deutschmarks to stop German inflation because in 1923 Germany was a pariah nation for 1) having lost the war and 2) for breaking the embargo on the Soviet Union. Today the US prints tons of money and the banks shovel it away in vaults because if said money were to enter circulation you'd see global, and not just country-specific, inflation, and this would put the value of a whole lot of dollar-denominated assets owned by a lot of powerful people in the region of zero.

Germany in 1923 just didn't have the power that the US has now. This power, generally called "dollar hegemony," explains for instance why the US is not experiencing Germany-in-1923-style inflation right now even though the national debt is $21 trillion.

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"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate

ggersh's picture

@Cassiodorus the corporations and the ultra wealthy

That's what they use to buy up the world and though
it's true the money isn't in circulation to the sheep
the shepards got it all to do with it what they want

CB's bought all the crap banks created both good and
bad, they didnt need to create $27tril just for the
hell of it.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-stock-exchanges-by-size/

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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

ggersh's picture

@Cassiodorus in which the Kochs take over govt
oh damn they have, now we wait to see what
happens once SS and Medicare are stripped
down cost of all med's rising and become
inaccessible along w/food and water, Hitlers
Reich will be a walk in the park

That doesn't worry capital. Of course, Hitler didn't worry capital, and so far I have heard of no right wing anywhere that is 1% as extreme or as crazy as Hitler was.

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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

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Cassiodorus Correct.

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"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

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

...What did our man in London do differently than Bernie, Keith, and their counterparts everywhere else?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

travelerxxx's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat

...What did our man in London do differently than Bernie, Keith, and their counterparts everywhere else?

I wonder whether it is more what Corbyn's audience "...did differently" than what Corbyn did. Perhaps the Brits are a bit more open to the possibility of class struggle, and even see it better, than all the potential millionaires here in the wonderful USA.?

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Roy Blakeley's picture

@gjohnsit @travelerxxx is that in the UK there is an elected leader of the Labour party, and the rank and file were able to vote the Blairites out. In this country there is no real elected leader, the DNC chair being an underling. This makes it easier for the petrified dog turds that make up the leadership of the Democratic Party to perpetuate itself.

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lotlizard's picture

@Roy Blakeley  
poll of the membership. One member, one vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Corbyn_Labour_Party_leadership_camp...

Corbyn could also consolidate his position by bringing in many new members through the “Momentum” organization created by his followers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_%28organisation%29

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Bollox Ref's picture

@Roy Blakeley

The Democrats aren't a Party in the traditional sense. Sure, you might give money, and get some phony DNC 'membership' number, but you will have no say.... ever.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

@Roy Blakeley
"Vote the Blairites out" -- at least not yet.

See my comment below

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat Reside within a parliamentary system with a different kind of elections.

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"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

GreatLakeSailor's picture

...counted by hand in public.

@The Liberal Moonbat

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Compensated Spokes Model for Big Poor.

@The Liberal Moonbat
they can smell bullsh*t

Labour has opened up a four-point lead on the Conservatives despite the summer row over antisemitism, according to a new poll.

The survey puts Jeremy Corbyn's party at 41 per cent - up from 40 per cent in July - and the Tories down one per cent to 37.

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mimi's picture

@gjohnsit
bullshit. oh lord, help ...

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Hetrose's picture

This Political sift smells a little like that which preceded World War II. Or is my sniffer acting up?

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

The "center left" in 1946 is by no means the same thing as the "center left" in 1996, and certainly bears no resemblance to the "center left" in 2016. In 2016, the "center left" embraces torture, austerity economics, mass warrantless surveillance, the petroleum economy, and endless war. Also, most startlingly, nuclear war.

The "center left" of 2016 is well to the right of both Nixon and Reagan. Actually, in 1986, this "center left" would thrive most among the proponents of Pat Buchanan.

What it retains of its "left" identity from the golden age of capitalism is the belief that bigotry is wrong, and everybody should get a chance to have the best of whatever is possible for non-rich people to have. Among those who can get a job, and among those who can get a job paying a living wage, there should be diversity (there doesn't need to be diversity among billionaires, although it makes for an inspiring story when there is). And nobody should say anything bigoted to anybody else. The definition of what "anything bigoted" is is a bit more fluid than it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or even the first decade of this century; nobody back then would have told me I was showing white privilege by opposing mass warrantless surveillance or that I was racist because I supported Social Security. However, this is basically what remains of the "left" part of "center left." Everything else that constitutes the "center left" is not only right-wing, but downright insane.

Probably that's why so many people are abandoning it.

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"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

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

The definition of what "anything bigoted" is is a bit more fluid than it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or even the first decade of this century; nobody back then would have told me I was showing white privilege by opposing mass warrantless surveillance or that I was racist because I supported Social Security. However, this is basically what remains of the "left" part of "center left." Everything else that constitutes the "center left" is not only right-wing, but downright insane.

Probably that's why so many people are abandoning it.

FDR would never embrace neoliberalism. The Dems abandoned the left, but it wasn't just the Dems. It's all the "mainstream left" parties all over the world.
Which is important, because you could be incline to wrongly think of this problem as isolated to just one party in one nation.

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mimi's picture

So what was it that 'humiliated' the German center-left? Did they do it to themselves or who and what was the cause that people don't see them as representing - what used to be called - the working class.

I just don't get why it happened. I listen to them and I have different opinions on many members who position themselves as center-left. I don't trust their words anymore. And I don't know exactly why that is. It all seems phony. I want to understand what it is that makes today's world different from the past. People as a whole don't change in their emotional and spontaneous reactions, but the technological tools to manipulate people's feeling have changed.
And it looks that it is a dangerous development we haven't managed to get under our own emotional control.

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lotlizard's picture

war narratives is pretty much worthless, in my opinion.

In any case, it has little in common with what was considered Left or Green in the 1980s (when there was mass organized protest against NATO deployment of new intermediate-range nuclear missiles).

The Schröder-Fischer (Social Democrat / Green Party) coalition government, like the Clinton administration in the U.S., cut back on the social safety net. It also sent German troops beyond Germany’s borders for the first time since World War II, participating in NATO war operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan.

Neocon wars abroad, neoliberal economics at home — after that, “center-left,” including the Green party “realist wing,” just seemed hollow.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard

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Euroskeptic

French leaders on the far right and far left weighed in on the result of Sweden’s parliamentary election, applauding the disruption of mainstream parties — albeit for different reasons.
...
“Victory against the extreme right in #Sweden. And our Swedish ally in the European coalition #NowThePeople made gains and reached 10%,” wrote Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed movement. (His coalition partner actually received 7.9 percent of the votes and 8 percent of parliamentary seats.)

no globalist

While both Mélenchon and Jeremy Corbyn are seen as having shaken up the establishment by tapping into mass discontent with the neoliberal status quo and putting forward redistributive programmes, our attitude to Mélenchon should not be adulatory. For all its appeal amongst socialists and social democrats, Mélenchon’s political project is essentially populist nationalism with a left-wing sheen. While I welcome the British left’s opportunity to engage with the political current Mélenchon represents, it must come from a critical perspective.

Mélenchon speaks of re-founding France into a ‘Sixth Republic’, but does so by appealing to patriotic sentiments rather than by calling for solidarity between workers and oppressed groups. He frequently denounces the European Union and Germany, as well as the destructive effects of capitalist competition at the international level, yet largely ignores the exploitative role of France’s own capitalist class. Indeed, when addressing attacks on workers’ rights, Mélenchon tends to demand various protectionist measures against foreign outsourcing instead of invoking the French left’s long-established slogan ‘Outlaw redundancies!’, which workers of all nationalities in France could raise against bosses of all nationalities.

Mélenchon’s rhetoric thus revives old Gaullist themes of strengthening French national sovereignty and turning France into a counterbalancing geopolitical force against the US.

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read some other stuff there, followed on from that, and then became fascinated by the fight going on in the Labour Party over the mechanism for "reselection" -- our equivalent being "primarying an incumbent".

(EDITED to add a few useful -- i hope -- links:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/17/three-quarters-of-labou...
http://theconversation.com/labour-deselection-and-reselection-rules-expl...
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2018/04/what-rule-change...
)

Apparently, it's damned near impossible under the current rules, and even though 75% of the current party membership wants something better -- possibly "mandatory reselection", meaning every incumbent would be subject to the equivalent of a primary in every election -- some of the same rules that make it almost impossible to even challenge an incumbent, could make it almost impossible to change the rules!

Without such a change, what you've got is Corbyn sitting at the head of a party in which the vast majority of sitting MPs represent the views of maybe 20% of the dues-paying members, rather than the army of activated Corbyn supporters. Under those circumstances, Labour could win a Parliamentary majority but to no avail, because Corbyn's own MPs wouldn't support him for the PMship.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.