Outside of Latin America, it has been a miserable three decades for left-wing political parties. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall were seen, in the West, as a decisive repudiation of socialism and communism as ideas.
The collapse of the USSR robbed left movements in the Third World of their ideological and often financial foundation. In India, where Communists were once the principal opposition to the Congress, the traditional left appears in terminal decline everywhere bar Tripura. Even the notionally Communist regimes of China and Vietnam have abandoned Marxist-Leninist economics in favour of state-driven capitalism. In Europe, leftists have been accused of allowing unrestrained immigration and of fiscal profligacy.
Nowhere was the decline of the left more pronounced, though, than in the Anglosphere – in Australia and Canada, but especially in the United Kingdom and United States. After a series of key domestic policy victories in the postwar period – the expansion of the welfare state, of government regulation of business, and of civil rights, on both sides of the Atlantic – left-wing governments lost favour with voters at the end of the 1970s. They had become associated with high unemployment and high inflation – “stagflation” – industrial decline and, in the US, with an insufficiently firm approach to crime and national security.
The ideological and political victory of the right can be measured not just in electoral success but, more importantly, in the transformation that success forced on the left parties. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair convinced their parties that winning elections meant adopting the positions of the right on crime and national security – as a large majority of the electorate favour these positions – and government intervention in the economy to improve relations with donors and the corporate-owned media. Margaret Thatcher is said to have regarded New Labour as her greatest achievement in politics.
Disdain for politics of electability
Twenty years later, the Clinton-Blair centrist synthesis, sometimes called the “third way”, is under attack. In the boom years of the 1990s and early 2000s, these reformed left parties successfully tried to be all things to all people. New Labour combined Conservative policies on privatisation and regulation with increased spending on public services. But the Great Recession put paid to the fantasy that there are no trade-offs in politics. Both Labour and the Democrats are in the process of electing new leaders. And to the consternation, even horror, of party establishments, all the momentum is with left-wing candidates – Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership.
As candidates, Sanders and Corbyn are remarkably alike. Both are self-described socialists – an identification that has been unfashionable in the US for almost a century, and one that Tony Blair thought he had managed to distance the Labour Party from. Both entered the race with no ambition of winning, with the intention of drawing greater attention to the issues of income inequality, corporate malpractice, climate change, and the protection of public services.
Both have been marginal figures within their party – Sanders caucuses with the Democrats without having ever joined the party, and Corbyn has been a consistent backbench critic, from the left, of the past five Labour leaders. Both were born in the 1940s, and look it, but draw their support and enthusiasm primarily from young voters. Corbyn’s surge in popularity has been attributed in part to an influx of 18- and 19-year olds into the Labour Party since the last general election.
But their most relevant similarity is in their disdain for the politics of electability. Unlike Blair and both Clintons, their policy positions are not visibly influenced or determined by opinion polls or other political considerations. The centrist response to allegations of inauthenticity or excessive compromise has always been that you don’t achieve anything in opposition. Fair enough, and neither Sanders nor Corbyn is likely to win – Sanders may win a few primaries, but has little or no chance of defeating Hillary Clinton, while Labour’s preference voting system may see Corbyn pick up the most first-preference votes but lose to a less polarising candidate. Even so, as “conviction politicians”, they stand out, and the credibility their consistency has earned is at the heart of their popularity. In the US and UK, and in Europe, voters have never been more cynical about politicians. Much of this is the fault of Tony Blair, widely believed to have misled the public about the reasons for going to war in Iraq.
Ideology in politics
Sanders and Corbyn support aggressively cracking down on corporate tax avoidance, and spending the proceeds on public infrastructure spending. Both believe that public university education ought to be free. Both opposed the invasion of Iraq. As the centre of political gravity is further to the left in Britain than in America, Corbyn is more a traditional socialist than Sanders, advocating renationalisaion of the railways and Royal Mail, and much higher income taxes.
But while their rivals, and mainstream media outlets, might dub them unelectable protest candidates – the centrist Financial Times compared Corbyn to Donald Trump – Sanders and Corbyn are serious men and serious candidates, which is why criticism of them tends to be rhetorical rather than substantive. Corbyn’s reasonableness and essential decency are evident in this Channel 4 interview (note how the anchor, in a manner familiar to Indian viewers, responds to any attempt to answer his question with a hectoring tone of escalating indignation):
Even though Sanders and Corbyn won’t win, their surge is proof that genuinely left-wing ideas are regaining ground in parties that had banished them in the 1990s. The fact that both draw their support from their parties’ youngest members could be evidence of the old chestnut about any 20-year-old with a heart being a socialist or, as with attitudes to gay rights, they could be proof that younger voters with no memories of stagflation or the Cold War are willing to give left-wing ideas a chance. And with growing income inequality within Western societies, and growing awareness and resentment of this inequality, the left have the political impetus for a comeback.
In time, perhaps, Sanders and Corbyn, and others like them, will teach left parties something that the right has understood – that conviction politicians can win elections. In the right circumstances, parties with genuinely radical agendas, whether on the left or right, can win large electoral majorities – think Attlee in 1945, Thatcher in 1979 or, closer home, AAP in 2015. There is no better proof of this than Narendra Modi, derided for years by liberal and left-wing commentators as too polarising to be elected BJP leader, let alone Prime Minister. Modi, who had been seen as unacceptable to the BJP’s allies, managed, through an unabashedly right-wing campaign, to do what his accommodating predecessors could not dream of – render those allies superfluous.
One of the laziest myths in political analysis holds that elections are always won “from the centre ground”. This might have been true in the 1990s, but that was a historically contingent fact, not an immutable law. Credibility and trust can be more important to voters than the details of policy. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton thought they had succeeded in taking the ideology out of politics – Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have shown how provisional that victory was.
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The collapse of the USSR robbed left movements in the Third World of their ideological and often financial foundation. In India, where Communists were once the principal opposition to the Congress, the traditional left appears in terminal decline everywhere bar Tripura. Even the notionally Communist regimes of China and Vietnam have abandoned Marxist-Leninist economics in favour of state-driven capitalism. In Europe, leftists have been accused of allowing unrestrained immigration and of fiscal profligacy.
Nowhere was the decline of the left more pronounced, though, than in the Anglosphere – in Australia and Canada, but especially in the United Kingdom and United States. After a series of key domestic policy victories in the postwar period – the expansion of the welfare state, of government regulation of business, and of civil rights, on both sides of the Atlantic – left-wing governments lost favour with voters at the end of the 1970s. They had become associated with high unemployment and high inflation – “stagflation” – industrial decline and, in the US, with an insufficiently firm approach to crime and national security.
The ideological and political victory of the right can be measured not just in electoral success but, more importantly, in the transformation that success forced on the left parties. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair convinced their parties that winning elections meant adopting the positions of the right on crime and national security – as a large majority of the electorate favour these positions – and government intervention in the economy to improve relations with donors and the corporate-owned media. Margaret Thatcher is said to have regarded New Labour as her greatest achievement in politics.
Disdain for politics of electability
Twenty years later, the Clinton-Blair centrist synthesis, sometimes called the “third way”, is under attack. In the boom years of the 1990s and early 2000s, these reformed left parties successfully tried to be all things to all people. New Labour combined Conservative policies on privatisation and regulation with increased spending on public services. But the Great Recession put paid to the fantasy that there are no trade-offs in politics. Both Labour and the Democrats are in the process of electing new leaders. And to the consternation, even horror, of party establishments, all the momentum is with left-wing candidates – Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership.
As candidates, Sanders and Corbyn are remarkably alike. Both are self-described socialists – an identification that has been unfashionable in the US for almost a century, and one that Tony Blair thought he had managed to distance the Labour Party from. Both entered the race with no ambition of winning, with the intention of drawing greater attention to the issues of income inequality, corporate malpractice, climate change, and the protection of public services.
Both have been marginal figures within their party – Sanders caucuses with the Democrats without having ever joined the party, and Corbyn has been a consistent backbench critic, from the left, of the past five Labour leaders. Both were born in the 1940s, and look it, but draw their support and enthusiasm primarily from young voters. Corbyn’s surge in popularity has been attributed in part to an influx of 18- and 19-year olds into the Labour Party since the last general election.
But their most relevant similarity is in their disdain for the politics of electability. Unlike Blair and both Clintons, their policy positions are not visibly influenced or determined by opinion polls or other political considerations. The centrist response to allegations of inauthenticity or excessive compromise has always been that you don’t achieve anything in opposition. Fair enough, and neither Sanders nor Corbyn is likely to win – Sanders may win a few primaries, but has little or no chance of defeating Hillary Clinton, while Labour’s preference voting system may see Corbyn pick up the most first-preference votes but lose to a less polarising candidate. Even so, as “conviction politicians”, they stand out, and the credibility their consistency has earned is at the heart of their popularity. In the US and UK, and in Europe, voters have never been more cynical about politicians. Much of this is the fault of Tony Blair, widely believed to have misled the public about the reasons for going to war in Iraq.
Ideology in politics
Sanders and Corbyn support aggressively cracking down on corporate tax avoidance, and spending the proceeds on public infrastructure spending. Both believe that public university education ought to be free. Both opposed the invasion of Iraq. As the centre of political gravity is further to the left in Britain than in America, Corbyn is more a traditional socialist than Sanders, advocating renationalisaion of the railways and Royal Mail, and much higher income taxes.
But while their rivals, and mainstream media outlets, might dub them unelectable protest candidates – the centrist Financial Times compared Corbyn to Donald Trump – Sanders and Corbyn are serious men and serious candidates, which is why criticism of them tends to be rhetorical rather than substantive. Corbyn’s reasonableness and essential decency are evident in this Channel 4 interview (note how the anchor, in a manner familiar to Indian viewers, responds to any attempt to answer his question with a hectoring tone of escalating indignation):
Even though Sanders and Corbyn won’t win, their surge is proof that genuinely left-wing ideas are regaining ground in parties that had banished them in the 1990s. The fact that both draw their support from their parties’ youngest members could be evidence of the old chestnut about any 20-year-old with a heart being a socialist or, as with attitudes to gay rights, they could be proof that younger voters with no memories of stagflation or the Cold War are willing to give left-wing ideas a chance. And with growing income inequality within Western societies, and growing awareness and resentment of this inequality, the left have the political impetus for a comeback.
In time, perhaps, Sanders and Corbyn, and others like them, will teach left parties something that the right has understood – that conviction politicians can win elections. In the right circumstances, parties with genuinely radical agendas, whether on the left or right, can win large electoral majorities – think Attlee in 1945, Thatcher in 1979 or, closer home, AAP in 2015. There is no better proof of this than Narendra Modi, derided for years by liberal and left-wing commentators as too polarising to be elected BJP leader, let alone Prime Minister. Modi, who had been seen as unacceptable to the BJP’s allies, managed, through an unabashedly right-wing campaign, to do what his accommodating predecessors could not dream of – render those allies superfluous.
One of the laziest myths in political analysis holds that elections are always won “from the centre ground”. This might have been true in the 1990s, but that was a historically contingent fact, not an immutable law. Credibility and trust can be more important to voters than the details of policy. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton thought they had succeeded in taking the ideology out of politics – Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have shown how provisional that victory was.