They simplify and summarise, stripping out the detail – but that’s what makes them so valuable. They provide us with a common frame of reference, a way of gauging where we stand in relation to one another. 

Democracy, too, needs directions. For all the details of policy making, all the nuances of ideology, we, as voters, need a straightforward way of lining up the options and making our choices. By reducing the complexities to a single dimension, that’s exactly what the Left-Right spectrum does for us.

It may be crude, it may be simplistic – but in the democratic era, it has untangled the mess, sorting politicians into parties, and parties into coalitions. 

It also puts the focus on the issues that matter most. The central proposition of modern politics is the state. How big should it be? How much should it spend, tax, redistribute, regulate? The details are complex, but the fundamental choice is not: do you want a bigger state or a smaller one? Go left for the former; right for the latter. 

But what if that’s not how it works anymore? What if politics has become about something else? 

Further reading

How the populists have united Italy

By Beatrice Faleri

From Brexit to Trump to the populist triumph in Italy, the established order is under attack. There is talk of political realignment. But realignment along what axis? If it’s no longer Left-versus-Right, then what are the defining directions of the new spectrum?

This deep dive is an attempt to find answers. It comes in three parts:

• First, where did Left and Right come from? How did they end up defining our politics? And why are they now losing their grip?
• Second, what are the alternatives to Left-versus-Right? Why has ‘open-versus-closed’ emerged as the front runner? And who’s pushing the idea?
• Third, what is the true meaning of Open and Closed? What is it doing to democracy? And are the advocates of ‘Open’ really as open as they think they are?

For more on these new directions, read on. 

The origin of left and right

Let’s begin at the beginning. Or what is supposed to be the beginning.

In the English language, the first reference to Left and Right as political categories is in Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 history of the French Revolution. It comes from his description of the National Constituent Assembly – the first ‘parliament’ of revolutionary France, where supporters of the king and supporters of the revolution sat on opposite sides of the chamber:[1. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 1837, Book VI, Chapter 2]

“…if we glance into that Assembly Hall of theirs, it will be found, as is natural, ‘most irregular.’ As many as ‘a hundred members are on their feet at once;’ no rule in making motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators’ Gallery allowed to applaud, and even to hiss… Nevertheless, as in all human Assemblages, like does begin arranging itself to like… Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.”

The Assembly, formed in 1789, was soon for the chop (as indeed were many of its members). However, the symbolism of its seating arrangement would persist in the various bodies that succeeded it – those most attached to the established order on the right, those keenest on radical change on the left, and those between the extremes in the centre. 

Further reading

Ever since medieval times, angry men have been inciting mobs

By Michael Burleigh

Over the next two hundred years, these labels would attach themselves to the politics of other nations – whether or not their legislative bodies followed the same physical layout.

So, is that all there is to it – just an accident of history? The legacy of a seating arrangement that might just as easily have gone the other way? Absolutely not. The symbolic meaning of left and right is much older the French Revolution. In fact, it pre-dates history itself.

Most human beings are right-handed. Our right hands are typically stronger and more dextrous than the left. It is a physical bias strong enough to shape language. For instance, the English word ‘dexterity’ is derived from the Latin for right-handed; whereas the word ‘left‘ has Germanic origins meaning weak or foolish.

The word ‘right‘ goes all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root word *reg from which we also get words like ‘regular’, ‘straight’, ‘correct’, ‘adroit’, ‘royal’ and ‘rule’.

Both literally and symbolically, ‘right’ embodies normality, ability and thus the natural order of things. The left embodies the opposite.

In fact, from a leftie perspective it gets worse. Because most people use their right hand to eat with, many cultures have made a point of using the left hand to perform tasks that include contact with dirt and excrement.[2. For instance, the Chinese character for right-handed is composed of the symbols for hand and mouth, while the character for left-handed is features symbols for hand and work] Across the Middle East, and many other parts of the world, touching food with the left hand is a cultural taboo.

The unsavoury associations of the left hand are perhaps compounded by an element of fear. In contests of physical prowess, whether on the battlefield or the sporting arena, the left-hander presents the right-hander with an unfamiliar opponent – one capable of delivering blows from an unaccustomed direction.

This left-handedness isn’t just unusual, it’s also subversive – if not downright sinister.

We see the symbolism of left and right in religion too. In the New Testament, Christ, as the Good Shepherd, separates the sheep (i.e. the righteous) from the goats (i.e. the fallen), placing the former on his right side and the latter on his left.[3. Matthew 25: 31-46] Comparable metaphors can be found in non-Abrahamic faiths too. For intance, Hindu traditions distinguish between the concepts of daksinachara (the ‘right-hand path’ of orthodox, virtuous spiritual practice) and vamacara (the ‘left-hand path’ of heterodox, transgressive spiritual practice).

Left and right in politics

The political association of the right with the established order and the left with challenges to that order is therefore no accident. It is deeply encoded within culture, language and religion – and thus applying the same symbols to politics came naturally. But why did it take so long for politics to acquire its ‘wings’?

It wasn’t until the Enlightenment period that internal division along ideological lines came to be seen as anything other than a mortal threat to the integrity of the realm. Before that the only alternative to a unified, if hierarchical, society was assumed to be bloody chaos – which is why the established order (and the shared religious assumptions that underpinned it) was ferociously defended.

The Reformation would, of course, shatter the religious unity of western Christendom, but within each state it was generally expected that the people would follow the same religion as their rulers: the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion).

Further reading

Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

By Peter Franklin

In the Enlightenment period, the old certainties and structures would be loosened. In some states, such as England, the process was evolutionary; in others, like France, it was revolutionary. The English approach allowed for the gradual accommodation of a widening range of religious and economic interests within a continuing, though not immutable, constitutional framework. However, in France, where the ancien régime was unaccommodating, change could only come about through the repudiation of established sources of authority. What was once regarded as right was right no longer.

In one form or another, the struggle to break with the pre-modern past would go on to define the politics of the West in the 19th century. However, the bourgeois revolt against the aristocratic order was just the beginning.

As a different kind of revolution – the Industrial Revolution – gathered pace, it created the conditions for the rise (and, in many places, the revolt) of an urban working class. Moreover, the Industrial Age was also a ‘Bureaucratic Age‘, with transport and communication technologies enabling the centralisation of political and economic power. For the first time, state ownership of the means of production, the wholesale redistribution of wealth and the creation of a modern welfare state – i.e. socialism – became a viable proposition with a powerful political constituency.

As a result, the bourgeois revolutionaries found themselves outflanked on the left by socialist revolutionaries. Indeed, left and right were redefined. Instead of corresponding to the enemies and the defenders of the aristocratic order, the labels became attached to the enemies and defenders of the capitalist order. [4. In Russia, where a bourgeois revolution (or evolution) hadn’t happened, revolution, when it did occur, brought down the aristocracy and capitalism at the same time]

Further reading

Why we should listen to the Luddites

By Nigel Cameron

Parties that had been thought of as being on the left, but opposed socialism, found themselves moving to the right. One of the best examples of this realignment comes from Denmark, where the main party of the centre-right is called Venstre. This confuses outsiders because venstre is the Danish word for ‘left’. There is, however, a logical explanation: In the 19th century, Venstre really was a party of the left – as the term was then understood; but when socialism emerged as an electoral force, the political spectrum was redefined and Venstre along with it.

We can therefore think in terms of a ’19th-century Left’ and a ’20th-century Left’. To this day, support for, or opposition to, the ideas of the latter defines the Left-Right political spectrum.

That said, it’s worth noting that while the ’19th-century Left’ triumphed over the aristocratic order; there was, in the West, no clear victory for the ’20th-century Left’ over its enemy – the capitalist order. At best, it forced a compromise: the so-called ‘mixed economy’ of publicly and privately-owned industries. By the final decades of the 20th century not even that could be maintained. The mixed economy gave way to the weaker compromise of ‘neoliberalism‘ – i.e. in which the welfare state continued, but nationalised industry was privatised. Furthermore, the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the transmutation of communism in China cleared the way for the globalisation of the capitalist order.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08, followed by the Great Recession, could have marked another turning point – this time in favour of the Left. But while the flaws of neoliberalism were painfully exposed, and are yet to be adequately reformed, the contemporary Left has failed to provide a coherent economic alternative. And that’s not even the Left’s biggest problem.

Though the dominance of neoliberalism can be seen as a success for the Right, the Left still had a powerful role to play as the most enthusiastic redistributor of the proceeds of growth. [5. The era of ‘high neoliberalism’ – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Lehman Brothers – was defined by centre-left leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder.] But in the decade of austerity since the crash, neoliberalism has not provided much in the way of proceeds for the Left to redistribute from; and, as mentioned, the Left has not provided a replacement for neoliberalism. This leaves the Left without a purpose and, increasingly, without power.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

Across Europe, social democrats are in crisis. Once dominant parties of government are haemorrhaging votes and in many cases (e.g. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Greece) dwindling away to minor party status. In part, this is due to the electoral rise of the radical and alternative Left. However, parties of protest are a poor substitute for parties of government. To date, the only one of the left-wing populist parties to gain power is SYRIZA in Greece – and its fate has been to implement a savage programme of cuts on behalf of the Eurozone authorities.

An end to Left and Right?

The decline of the mainstream Left isn’t just an issue for one side of the political divide. A Left incapable of making a difference to economic policy calls into question the relevance of the entire Left-Right spectrum.

A clear sign that old distinctions are collapsing is the growing ease with which parties of the mainstream Left and Right now find themselves in government together. For instance, three of the last four German governments have been ‘grand coalitions’ between the centre-right Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats. Since 2010, Left-Right coalitions have been formed in a number of other European countries including Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. One could argue that Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement is also a Left-Right coalition – albeit in the form of a new party designed for the purpose.

The old model of centre-left and centre-right alternating in government and opposition can no longer be taken for granted. Parties and politicians that were once rivals for power are increasingly likely to find themselves as partners.

There is a parallel here with the political realignment that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. A clear sign that the liberal parties of the ’19th-century Left’ had ceased to be the actual left was when they joined forces with their old enemies on the Right – against the rising influence of socialism.

But how exact is the parallel between what happened to ’19th-century Left’ and what might be happening now to the ‘20th-century Left’?  

Is there, for instance, an emerging ‘21st-century Left’, capable of (a) redefining Left and Right as completely as the socialists did a hundred years ago; and (b) displacing the previous incarnation of the Left at the ballot box ?

Further reading

How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

There is, but only up to a point.

Ideologically, left-wing populist movements are good at saying what they are against (neoliberalism, etc), but not so good at articulating what they are for. There is no new ‘big idea’ whose impact is even remotely comparable to that of socialism in the 20th century. 

The closest it gets are the ‘post-work’ ideas[6. See, for instance, Andy Beckett, ‘Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs’, Guardian, 19 January 2018] of the accelerationists and others. However, ‘post-workism’ is a response to economic conditions that don’t exist yet i.e. a super-productive economy in which human workers are largely replaced by robots. The socialism of the late 19th was able to flourish in the 20th because it was a response to economic conditions that most people experienced in their daily lives. Furthermore, the socialist parties of the era – whether communist, democratic socialist or social democrat – offered not just a protest against those conditions, but also a means of changing them.

Further reading

Accelerationism, Blue Labour and the future of work

By Peter Franklin

Protest can still make an impact at the ballot box, of course. In countries across Europe, there’s no doubt that the populist Left has taken votes away from the mainstream left.

And yet the radical Left is not the only, or even the biggest, threat to the mainstream Left. In many countries, the most shattering blow to the latter’s voter base has come from populists who don’t belong to any kind of Left: a far from exhaustive list includes UKIP in the UK, the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, the Five Star Movement and the League in Italy, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party in Austria and, of course, the ‘alt-right’ and the wider Trump phenomenon in America.

With the exception of Five Star, these movements are usually classified as ‘right-wing populists’. 

They are certainly populist in the sense of being anti-establishment, but in what what sense are they right-wing? In terms of the economic issues that are most definitive of the conventional left-right political spectrum, parties of the ‘populist Right’ are generally to the Left of the mainstream Right and often to the left of the mainstream Left too.

Most of these movements don’t define themselves by conventional categories of Left and Right anyway. The degree of state involvement in the economy is, for them, a secondary issue. Indeed, their mission is to polarise politics along an entirely different axis. As their support increases, they are succeeding – sometimes pushing the mainstream left and right into unholy alliance, sometimes pushing one or both out of power altogether.

The Left-Right spectrum is falling to bits; what might replace it is the subject of part two of this series.

***

When nationalist movements clash it can – for the left – resemble two fleas arguing over who owns the dog they live on. Flags, cultural miscellanea and the mythical ‘national soul’ are typically viewed with suspicion. They are a frivolous distraction from the real struggle, which for the left takes place between economic classes in what Marx called the “abode of production”. Political life is thus dominated by an economic rather than a territorial logic. Beneath the jingoism that characterises nationalist movements, it is a case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss – albeit with his own flag and football team. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I arrived in Barcelona from Madrid in early September – just in time, as it happened, for the national day of Catalonia, which on the eleventh of every year commemorates the fall of the city during the War of Spanish Succession. This year, however, the day was marked by a demonstration of national will toward a specific end: the semi-autonomous region in north eastern Spain was gearing up for its unauthorised independence referendum on 1 October. If the region voted Yes, Catalonia’s President Carles Puigdemont was threatening to make a unilateral declaration of independence in the face of threats bellowed from Madrid.

For Podemos, the idea of Catalonian independence throws up its own challenge. The party has a significant body of support in both Catalonia and the Basque regions, including among secessionists. Any separation on the part of Catalonia would effectively see swathes of Podemos’ voter base marooned in a foreign territory.

But principle is also at stake. Full independence is anathema to many leftists within Podemos, who gravitate instinctively toward fraternal internationalism over petty nationalism. That said, the party does support the right of Catalans to hold a legal referendum – leading the bigger parties to portray Podemos as intent on ‘breaking up’ Spain.

It hadn’t been nationalist flags that I’d first noticed on arriving in Barcelona, but graffiti. About 100 metres down the street from my hotel in the Dreta de l’Eixample neighbourhood, the words ‘kill the tourist’ had been emblazoned on a doorway in blood-red paint. Barcelona is at the epicentre of a wave of anti-tourist sentiment that has recently hit other cities including San Sebastian and Valencia. A recent survey carried out by Barcelona city council found that the locals consider tourism to be the city’s second most serious problem after unemployment.

Wrestling your way through the hordes of inebriated stag parties on Las Ramblas of an evening, you do sometimes feel the urge to pull out your own can of paint and dab something colourfully offensive on the sidewalk. There is something almost profane about sated English revellers vomiting on cobbles a few blocks away from the modest Placa de George Orwell. But then I have been there and done that too, so to speak; and it was after all the anti-temperance Orwell who wrote approvingly in 1941 that the English have a tendency to “drink as much beer as their wages will permit”. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Nowadays Catalonia plays host to some 18 million tourists every year, and at least some of the local anger derives from the material inequalities generated by this influx of extranjeros. Buy-to-Let landlords are purchasing entire blocks of flats to lease via apps like Airbnb, and there is a sense it is driving up rents in the most desirable areas of the city. El Periodico reported in 2016 that apartment rents in the central part of town had increased by more than 10% between 2014 and 2016.

Yet there is a degree of nationalist sentiment at work in the animosity directed at the tourists: a recent attack on a tourist bus near the Camp Nou football stadium was claimed by Arran Jovent, a group linked to Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), a left-wing pro-Catalan independence party. An Arran spokesperson told the BBC that it wanted to “destroy the system – and the tourist industry is part of that system”.

When I arrived in Barcelona a similar – if more subtle – attitude prevailed in even the quieter quarters of the city. Draped from the apartment blocks in the old town a patchwork of Catalan flags and banners loudly proclaimed ‘Si!’ and ‘Democracia!’. As in Britain, the economic grievances emanating from austerity have, in regions like Catalonia, been directed toward the central government – despite the fact that Puigdemont’s autonomous government in Catalonia has introduced its own programme of spending cuts. The referendum is at least partly a ‘Fote’t!’ (f*ck you) to Madrid, as one flag-waving young Catalan put it to me.

But a more miserly logic is also at play. Wealthy Catalonia contains around seven-and-a-half million people and accounts for about a fifth of Spain’s overall GDP. In a manner resembling those in Britain who complain semi-seriously of wishing to turn London into a mercantilist ‘city state’, some in Catalonia view yocal, rural Spain as a parasitical drain on prosperous Barcelona.

On Catalan day itself I picked up a taxi to the edge of town where Pablo Iglesias, the 38-year-old leader of Podemos, was billed to speak at a Catalunya in Comú rally. After several hours hanging around in the oppressive midday sun – the newspapers sold by the communist sects at these events make excellent protective hats once you master the art of folding them – Iglesias finally appeared on the stage.

A diminutive man with a ponytail and a beard who looks the archetypal university professor, Iglesias is nonetheless an impressive rhetorician. His voice was deeper than I was expecting and he spoke in a straightforward, authoritative style that had a hint of Hugo Chavez in its euphonic jabs. It hammered away at the listener like a fist striking a table, rising in intonation as Iglesias reached a point he wished to emphasise. From the small stage, the Podemos leader denounced the PP as a “corrupt political party”, and accused them of deploying the methods of “Francismo” in the days leading up to the referendum. But the message was of solidarity rather than separateness.

“We have to join forces to kick them out of government. We have to build an alternative majority, so finally Catalans can vote,” Iglesias thundered between spontaneous chants of ‘Si, se Podemos’ (Yes we can) from the assembled crowd of around 400 people. Iglesias also attacked the right-leaning government in Catalonia for its social policies.

Back in Madrid I had spent an hour at the Spanish Parliament talking to Ione Belarra, the Podemos MP for the Pamplona region in northern Spain. Elected to the Spanish parliament at the national elections of 2016, Belarra was scathing about Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) and its response to the nationalist provocations of the government in Catalonia.

“The principle problem here is the Popular Party. They have been playing deaf with the independence movement for the past six years, and now they pretend to be surprised by events,” she told me.

While the PP accepts a degree of self-determination for the regions, it has been able to win successive national elections with little support in places like Catalonia and the Basque region. There is thus little incentive for Madrid to make further concessions such as granting Catalans the right to hold a legal referendum.

There are 17 ‘autonomous communities’ in Spain, each with control over policies areas including education, the police and social security. While the arrangement seems to suit most people, nationalists on both sides have been attempting to tear up the existing order. A 2006 statute granted Catalonia further powers of autonomy; yet the move was reversed in 2010 after it was challenged in the courts by the PP. Rajoy argues that the current referendum is illegal under Spain’s 1978 constitution, which reaffirmed ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation’. Yet the PP has rejected all attempts to reform the post-Franco constitution – a prerequisite to Catalonia holding a serious referendum.

A former journalist, the President of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont governs with a slim majority and a minority of the popular vote based on regional elections which took place in 2015. A fervent secessionist, Puigdemont was the first Catalan President to refuse to swear an oath of loyalty to the Spanish constitution and the King. He governs in coalition with several small left-wing nationalist parties.

“What we are defending on this issue is that a referendum has to be held, but it has to be held with guarantees for everyone,” Belarra tells me. “It has to be agreed upon by all parties, and it has to be recognised internationally. Otherwise there is no way of moving forward…Never mind which way they’re going to vote; we have to guarantee that they can do it.”

The Franco regime was opposed to any manifestation of autonomy on the part Spain’s nationalities. According to the Spain scholar Paul Preston, during the final days of the Civil War Franco’s rebel army waged a “deliberately ponderous war of annihilation through the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, Aragon and Catalonia”- all the better to strike fear into potentially troublesome populations early on. The Franco regime subsequently banned the Catalan language and rescinded all regional powers granted by the fledgling republic. Celebrating Catalan day at all under Franco would invariably draw the unwelcome attention of the authorities.

On the eve of the celebrations I met up with Adriá Porta Caballé, an academic who previously worked for Podemos’ deputy leader and Political Secretary, Íñigo Errejón. Porta Caballé has since moved again to Barcelona to help start a Podemos-linked Catalan-based coalition called Catalunya en Comú (Catalonia in Common). Podemos has had a role in several electoral coalitions such as this, including En Marea in Galicia, En Comú Podem (a Barcelona-based project led by the Mayor Ada Colau), and Compromís in Valencia.

Founded in December 2016, Catalunya en Comú is led by 43-year-old university professor Xavier Domenech and supported by the mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau. The new party backs the Catalans’ right to hold an officially recognised referendum but, faithful to the left, the movement is broadly against independence – only around 20% of its members are secessionists.

“This is not going to be the referendum that the Catalan people need,” the bearded and bespectacled Porta Caballé tells me between drags on a cigarette.

Yet he calls the referendum a “legitimate mobilisation” – a reminder to the Spanish government of the existence of the “80 per cent of the Catalan people that want to have a referendum”.

While a majority of Catalans appear to support the notion of an official referendum, most polls over recent decades have found a majority of Catalans against a parting of ways with Spain. According to a June 2017 poll, 41% of Catalans were in favour of an independent state, compared to 49% who were against. Support for independence peaked at 57% in 2012. Interestingly, an analysis of polling data by the Atlantic found a strong correlation between support for independence and unemployment in Catalonia.

“In Podemos, we refer to the ’78 regime, which is the regime born of the constitution of 1978…which to us is a series of contracts made with the fear that maybe the dictatorship can come again,” Porta Caballé says.

The constitution describes regions like Catalonia as ‘nationalities’; yet it recognises only one nation.

“For us [this] is crucial…so you have something in between true recognition of nations and the centralist state organisation that we had before…It is evident I think to everybody [apart from the PP] that we cannot go back to the 1978 state.”

The extent to which a centralised state is fundamental to Spanish conservatism is apparent from any comparison with Britain. Porta Caballé tells me that he was “amazed” at the equable response of British Conservatives to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence.

“I mean, I know [David] Cameron was economically liberal, but at least I think you in Great Britain have a democratic right-[wing], so you have a right that is able to have [something] like the Scottish referendum without [Cameron] losing all the conservatives. This has never happened here because the right didn’t change I would say as much after dictatorship.”

Podemos has been accused by its opponents of having an ambiguous stance on Catalan independence due to its support for an official referendum. In the weeks leading up to 1 October, both the PP and Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) backed the police measures deployed by Madrid – enacted to prevent the rogue referendum from taking place. The crackdown has included raids on local newspapers, the seizing of millions of ballot papers, and, as the date of the referendum approached, a rescinding of Catalonia’s financial autonomy. 14 of Catalonia’s government officials have been detained by the Spanish authorities, while on the day of the vote itself, footage emerged of the Civil Guard using police batons and rubber bullets to bloody Catalans attempting to vote. Catalan officials reported that 800 people were injured during clashes with police. Under article 155 of the Spanish constitution, Madrid is able to intervene like this in the running of what is supposed to be an autonomous region.

Yet despite the threat of violence, 2.3 million Catalans managed to cast their votes, with a turnout of around 43%. Around 90% of those who marked their ballot papers backed independence.

In the immediate aftermath of 1st October both sides mobilised their supporters. On the day of the vote itself, crowds draped in the Catalan flag thronged the city’s squares and boulevards. A week later, on 8 October, thousands gathered in Barcelona waving the flag of Spain – a raucous reminder that a majority here are not ardent secessionists.

While Porta Caballé is adamant that this is “not going to legally be the referendum that the Catalan people need”, he says the job of Catalunya in Comú – and by extension Podemos – is to “represent the 80% of the Catalan people that want to have a referendum”:

“What you have from the Partido Popular since the start is a legalist approach to what’s happening. So they always say the constitution doesn’t approve of a referendum…They’re not doing the crucial job which is to say that maybe the best way to carry on and be united as a state is to be more permissive and to be more democratic in the recognition of different nationalities. That maybe such a belligerent reaction to any kind of national and autonomous expression is [a] worse [way]…to keep the country united.”

The left finds itself in an unusual position over Catalan independence, much as the British left did when Scotland held its referendum in 2014. For some, nationalist movements resurrect the penumbra of romantic grandeur that has slipped away from the wider socialist movement. During the lead up to the Scottish vote, leftist grandee Tariq Ali enthusiastically contrasted “dreary old England” with “intellectually liberating” Scotland, where nationalism was not really nationalism at all, but rather a social democratic movement whose “gaze is fixed on the Norwegian model”.

Ali, a former Maoist, embodies better than most the temperament of those who latch like wasps to a clod of jam anything which emits even the faintest whiff of ‘revolution’.

Yet Ali was something of an anachronism; a majority of the international left still look with suspicion on any strain of nationalism. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (the Barcelona-based anarcho-syndicalist trade union) perhaps captured the prevailing mood when it put out a statement in October declaring that, “while we firmly oppose repression from an increasingly authoritarian state and their fascist allies, we are in no way supportive of the nationalist agenda”. Both the Spanish and Catalan Socialist parties are similarly opposed to independence, as are most of those involved in Podemos.

It is perhaps paradoxical, then, that Podemos has been accused of siding with Catalan’s nationalists. The former PP Prime Minister José María Aznar has accused Podemos of attempting to “destroy the transition as an agreement and as a narrative of reconciliation among Spaniards”. Similarly, one of the conditions on which the Socialist Party has up to now rejected an electoral alliance with Podemos is on the basis that the smaller party wishes to “break-up Spain”.

Yet anyone looking for proof that Podemos’ careful positioning on regional independence is genuine – and that the new party does not wish to see Spain torn apart – need only look at results from recent elections. Podemos is one of the leading electoral forces in both Catalonia and the Basque Country; the secession of either region would deliver a significant blow to the party’s electoral prospects. No doubt Podemos’ support for a referendum on Catalan independence is itself responsible for some of the support the party has picked up in the region. But the notion that Podemos is actively seeking the break-up of Spain is conspiratorial nonsense. The party’s approach to self-determination is hardly novel, even on the left, and might be distilled into Lenin’s remark that “the unconditional recognition of the struggle for…self-determination in no way obliges us to support every demand for national self-determination”.

Put another way, one can in principle support the idea of a referendum without coming down definitely on one side.

Podemos’ position on Catalonian independence does in fact reflect that of Catalonia itself. Some 80% of the population are thought to favour a referendum; yet a slim majority appear to want to remain a part of Spain.

As things stand, both Spain and Catalonia wait. In a much-anticipated post-referendum statement on 10 October, Carles Puigdemont effectively kicked the can down the road. He did not, as some expected, make a declaration of independence; but he did say that Catalonia has a “mandate” to become a republic. In response, Mariano Rajoy announced that the central government had taken steps toward suspending home rule in Catalonia.

To outside observers the solution to the crisis seems straightforward enough: a more autonomous Catalonia situated within a properly federal and democratic Spain – provided, of course, that Catalonia votes to remain within Spain in a proper referendum. But few in the government can bring themselves to argue for it. Those who make such arguments – especially from a distance – fail to grasp the degree to which the unity of the Spanish state is a central ideological pillar of Mariano Rajoy’s conservatives. The ‘indivisibility’ of the country was central to Francoism and is far from peripheral to a contemporary Popular Party that has never fully disavowed its Francoist antecedents. Puigdemont’s apparent climbdown is probably based on the shrewd assumption that Madrid will continue to respond bull-headedly to even the more modest proposals emanating from Catalonia – further bolstering support for independence.

‘Our leaders never make mistakes’, bellowed Franco’s thugs in the 1930s, borrowing from the Italian fascist slogan ‘Il Duce sempre ha raggione’. If it wishes to avoid further acrimony and civil strife, Spain’s ruling Popular Party would do well to heed the words of another Italian, and embrace the more reflective conservatism of Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are,” Rajoy might reflect, “things will have to change”.

***

The party’s rise has been precipitous. Within months of its founding on the 17th of January 2014, Podemos secured 1.25 million votes in that year’s European Parliament elections. By mid-2015 it had taken control of major cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Cádiz and Zaragoza in the municipal elections, and shortly thereafter Podemos ranked first in some national polls. The party’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, had the highest approval rating of any Spanish politician at the time.

Podemos ultimately went on to finish an impressive third at the 2015 National Election with 20 per cent of the vote. ‘Podemos is here to stay’, declared the El Español newspaper.

A slightly disappointing 2016 election followed – Unidos Podemos (United We Can), a coalition of Podemos and the communist-dominated United Left, shed more than a million votes. Yet a party founded less than two years previously had nonetheless managed to scoop over 20 per cent of the national vote share in two successive elections. Polling carried out earlier this year shows Podemos retaining roughly that level of support. Both its rapid rise and persistent strength shows Podemos is a force to be reckoned with.

Podemos first emerged from the 15-M Movement, a series of 20,000 street protests that rocked Spain’s largest towns and cities in 2011. The ‘indignados’, as they were called, first gathered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square on May 15, 2011. Inspired by the Tahrir Square demonstrations that had ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak three months earlier, the indignados refused to decamp from the square for several weeks, despite the lingering presence of the sinister Guardia Civil, Spain’s quasi military-police force. The protests were an expression of anger at the bail-out of the banks and the government’s (in this case the Socialist Party’s) imposition of austerity policies. One of the movement’s slogans was ‘No es una crisis, es una estafa’ – It’s not a crisis, it’s a con.

I recently visited Spain for UnHerd to try and understand the ideas and people that animate this new power. Prior to leaving London for Madrid I had met up at a pub near Victoria Station with the academic and member of Podemos’ London ‘Circle’ Sirio Canós Donnay. Circles are territorial or sectoral groups of people with an interest in Podemos – both inside as well as outside of Spain. They are the equivalent of a left-wing party branch meeting, though with fewer strictures handed down from on high beyond some basic democratic and organisational rules.

Sirio tells me that the initial purpose of the indignados movement – often referred to simply as M-15 – was to shift public consciousness away from the idea that the economic crisis engulfing Spain was a product of invisible market forces or personal irresponsibility:

“Collective problems had been [up to then] perceived as individual ones…At first [the indignados] were saying they [the political establishment] don’t represent us, the goods [are] in the hands of politicians and bankers.”

Similar protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London and the Geração à Rasca in Portugal were springing up at about the same time. These manifestations of anger and frustration would ultimately fizzle out.

A rejection of social democracy as well as the free market Right

Wider public blame for the financial crisis was often laid at the door of ruling social democratic parties and what was perceived as their excessive spending. In Britain, Gordon Brown’s New Labour government left power after 13 years on the back of a pledge by Conservative Party leader David Cameron to implement an unyielding programme of cuts and to create a “low-tax, low-debt economy”. Amid high unemployment and a growing number of home repossessions, Spain’s ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) suffered the same fate as New Labour. In November 2011 it crashed to its worst election result since the 1977 transition to democracy. As we drink very English glasses of London pale ale, Sirio reflects on those results:

“Something that was quite tough for all of us involved in the movement was that the same year the indignados took the squares and the country by storm, there were general elections and the conservatives won by an overwhelming national majority. And that was quite difficult to understand. Many people said ‘let’s leave things as they are, Spain will never change’”.

Yet the anger provoked by the economic crisis and recession was still there; it simply required a movement to channel it effectively. Unemployment in Spain remains at 22% even today, the second highest in the Eurozone after Greece. Youth unemployment sits at 41%.

Podemos stands out from some of the other movements which occupied European plazas and boulevards in 2011 in that there was always a sense among organizers that the residual and simmering anger had to be transmitted into something solid. Sirio again:

“Traditional parties thought it was safe because they kept winning elections, but there was some much broader cultural movement that had radically changed Spanish society. But it needed somebody to translate that, and that first occurred with Podemos and with the local coalitions that fought for the local elections.”

The 2011 Europe-wide anti-austerity protests were largely mocked by established political parties and establishment journals – often, paradoxically, by the same people and organs that would complacently pour scorn on the prospect of Brexit and a Donald Trump Presidency five years later. “This is not a revolution in the making,” declared the London Economist as it cast a scornful eye on student activists who took to a wintry Parliament Square in late 2010, perhaps living up to Lenin’s famous description of the paper as “a journal which speaks for British millionaires”.

Five years later the Economist and similar publications were caught completely flat-footed by the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn to the summit of the Labour Party.

In Spain, M-15 activists anticipated the accusation that their movement consisted of pampered students and the usual far-left troublemakers engaged in revolution as play. Podemos’ founding manifesto, published in January 2014, was titled Mover ficha: convertir la indignación en cambio político (’Making a move: turning indignation into political change’).

One of the things which disorientated the wider Spanish left was Podemos’ almost gleeful jettisoning of the terms left and right. And a degree of suspicion was perhaps wise given recent history: beyond left and right was often the snake oil used to sell the third way (along with other vacuous doggerel: forward, not back).

NOT joining the gravy train

Now that the party is a real player on the Spanish political scene – it has 71 MPs and 5 MEPs – Podemos is seeking to prevent a cleavage opening up between itself and those it represents. It is doing this by, inter alia, adopting an old idea brought to fleeting prominence in Britain in the 1980s by Coventry MP Dave Nellist. Between 1983 to 1992, Nellist, a Labour MP subsequently expelled from the party for being a member of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, drew the equivalent of what was then called a ‘workers’ wage’. This was calculated at about 40 per cent of an MP’s salary.

Podemos have adopted something similar in Spain, with its 71 MPs taking home a wage that is no more than three minimum wages (707.60 EUR) per month. The rest of the money goes to the party as well as to local social projects. Any income received by anyone working in any capacity for Podemos is also published on the party’s website.

“There’s certain tendencies in the system,” Sirio tells me: “Some people, when they become MPs, their metabolism changes and they just become completely different people.”

The trend in Leninist parties toward what Leon Trotsky in 1904 prophetically termed ‘substitutionism’ – the inclination on the part of party insiders to substitute themselves for the class they supposedly represent – is an (albeit reversible) feature of representative democracy too. An MP may enter parliament with the support of his or her working class constituents; yet on attaining power their material interests often clash with those they claim to represent. MPs of all parties can subsequently behave as a class for themselves, with an increasing chasm opening up between parliament and ordinary people.

The importance of remaining materially in touch the electorate is important for Podemos’ moral message, too

“It was Gramsci who said that every crisis is also a moral crisis,” says Adriá Porta Caballé, an academic who previously worked for the party’s deputy leader, Íñigo Errejón. He continues:

“And one of the things that surprised the left [was that], apart from the social populist dichotomies like oligarchies versus people and citizens versus privileged elites, we also used moral ones, like decent people versus corruption and so on.”

Following the disappointing 2016 election result, the unity of the early days has given way in recent times to something of an ideological rupture at the top of Podemos.

“In 2016 there was an ideological and political change in Podemos,” the party’s 34-year-old Deputy Leader and Political Secretary Íñigo Errejón told the Eldiario.es newspaper in February 2017. He added that the party was “more worried about showing how far away it is from the other parties than about setting the agenda in our country”.

The split centred around an alliance with the old Spanish Communist Party (PCE) under the umbrella of Podemos’ electoral alliance with United Left (IU). Spain has a strong anarchist tradition and many activists (both pragmatic and further left) were unhappy with Iglesias’ decision to bring the formerly Soviet-orientated communists into the Podemos tent. Errejón himself was thought to favour a more conciliatory approach to the PSOE (though the PSOE itself sought to forge an alliance instead with Ciudadanos, another new party that holds seats in the Cortes).

In one sense the gravitation toward the communists made sense for both parties. United Left won more than 900,000 votes in the December 2015 election, yet was rewarded with just two seats in congress due to Spain’s electoral system. Combined, the votes of Podemos and United Left would have seen the two parties come within a whisker of the Socialist Party in terms of seats in the Congress at the same election.

On forming the alliance for the 2016 election, called because of the inability of any party to form a government after the inconclusive result of 2015, Podemos and IU retained their own party logos and each party’s candidates stood on their respective rosters. There were of course areas of disagreement – NATO membership and the Spanish Royal family to cite two examples that were emitted from the United Podemos manifesto – but the party was as one on the essentials: a programme of higher taxes for the rich and a renegotiation of the fiscal target with Brussels.

Yet lining up alongside the hammer and sickle-waving communists – in a country where the Civil War remains a pertinent part of the cultural backdrop – came pregnant with risk. There was always a chance it would drive away centrist voters attracted by Podemos’ promise to break free from the clichés of the past. Podemos first captured the imagination in Spain with its wedding of material criticisms of Spanish society – unemployment, poverty and corruption – to moral categories that people can easily digest, something the populist right has been doing for years.

“Every revolution is first of all a revolution against the existing left,” says Porta Caballé. “And I think that’s one of the things we did.”

Going into the 2016 election, the assumption on the part of many inside both Podemos and IU was that the votes of both parties would simply collect in United Podemos. As such, predictions abounded of the party overtaking the Socialist Party and becoming the second largest political force in Spain.

As it transpired, United Left went on to win a million fewer votes than its constituent parties had done at the 2015 election; Iglesias emerged from the election a diminished figure.

Inside Podemos, however, Iglesias is still firmly in control. The inter-party struggle between Iglesias and Errejón was settled with a resounding victory for the incumbent leader at the party’s February 2017 congress in Madrid. After several months of public infighting, Iglesias’ political agenda secured the support of 56% of Podemos activists against 33% who voted for Errejón’s programme. Iglesias also won re-election as Secretary General with 89% of the vote against Andalusian MP Juan Moreno Yagüe.

Yet Iglesias sounded a conciliatory note in the wake of the result, telling the Guardian that he wanted to “have the best people close to me even if they don’t think like me.”

Whether Iglesias intends to further entrench Podemos’ rapprochement with the communist left is hard to say, though it would appear to contradict the ideas set out in his book Politics in a Time of Crisis, written shortly after the founding of Podemos in 2014. In the text, Iglesias approvingly sums up Podemos’ provocative political style as contained in the phrase ‘If you want to get it right, don’t do what the left would do’.

These don’t appear to be the words of a thuggish Stalinist dialectician. But then the foreword to the book is written by one Alexis Tsipras, the fleeting golden boy of the new European left who kept Greece in the Eurozone by implementing the very austerity measures his party set everything on opposing. That isn’t Iglesias’ fault of course. But it does rather lend weight to George Orwell’s point about saints (even socialist saints) being ‘judged guilty until they are proved innocent’.

As for getting closer to real power, the PSOE’s refusal to countenance a deal with Podemos does not mean the new party cannot bring its influence to bear on the PSOE. With the election and re-election of the left-leaning Pedro Sanchez, the PSOE has already embarked on baby steps in the direction of the radical younger party. This suits Podemos, as the insurgent party can retain its radicalism and build a new hegemony without sacrificing its edge to the blunting tendencies of power. Should the PSOE change its mind about an alliance at some later date, Podemos can perhaps view its own role in any governing coalition as one of keeping the bigger party honest.

For it is difficult at present to see how Podemos’ strengthening of ties with the old left does anything other than put an artificial ceiling on the level of support the party might pick up. Pace Pedro Iglesias, the greatest danger for the party is not that it ‘sells out’ in the manner of Tsipras in Greece, but that it is pulled down into the subterranean obscurity of the far-left.

Notwithstanding any tribulations of this kind, the more fundamental question is whether or not Podemos can retain its compartmentalized separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ populism in perpetuity. For there is always a danger that, once you require a group of permanent outsiders to define your politics, the search for enemies never ends. The triumph over one adversary necessitates the creation of another. To paraphrase Nietzsche, he who fights demagogues risks becoming a demagogue himself.

Part three of this series – on Podemos and Catalonia will appear tomorrow.

***

You can learn a great deal in Spain, as elsewhere, by paying close attention to the names that adorn public buildings. Since 2014, travellers flying into Madrid have landed at the slightly shabby ‘Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport’. Suarez was Spain’s first post-Franco democratically elected Prime Minister; his name was added upon his death three years ago.

Adolfo Suárez’s political life embodied contradiction. A conservative Catholic and former Franco-era minister, during the democratic transition he nonetheless legalised the trade unions as well as the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). been impressed by the solemnity and discipline shown by the Communists at a 100,000-strong funeral for five people (including four of the party’s labour lawyers) who were shot dead by right-wing terrorists on Atocha Street in 1977, Suárez decided that it was time to legalise the PCE. They were, he concluded, self-contained enough to be a legitimate political force in the new Spain.

In the process Suárez took the unprecedented step of confronting the country’s powerful military establishment. Thus the Franco regime suffered a fate not dissimilar to that of several Eastern European post-war dictatorships: its final death warrant was signed by a middling bureaucrat spat out by its own nomenklatura.

Walking towards the Anton Martin district from south Madrid’s Atocha railway station, itself the scene of another massacre in 2004 as Islamist extremists planted bombs on packed commuter trains, any newly arrived visitor to Madrid soon encounters a haunting monument to those murdered during the ‘77 Atocha killings. In the cool and shady Anton Martin Square stand several inward-facing concrete human forms, perched atop a concrete plinth and locked in permanent embrace.

Basque terrorism and the central government’s forceful repression of the Catalonian independence referendum are more recent reminders that political disputes are not always peacefully resolved in Spain.

I followed the route past the square for a pre-arranged rendezvous with Jorge Moruno, one of the co-founders of Podemos in 2014 along with Pablo Iglesias and Miguel Urbán. He eventually arrived while I waited at the top of the steps to the Anton Martin metro station, a rare point of refuge from the sweltering midday sun.

Moruno is 34-years old, a sociology academic and the author of several books on the precarity of contemporary work. His explanation of Podemos’ appeal is both analytical and penetrating. Talking with him, one grasps that the secret of this “party of the left” is that it doesn’t always position itself on the left at all. Moruno explains, as I order a Café con leche in a nearby cafe:

“Nowadays we are supposed to be out of the crisis: Europe says, the Spanish government says, but seven of 10 families in Spain don’t see anything good…why? Because only the super-rich are seeing growth…inequality and poverty are still the same as two years ago.”

One of the words you hear a lot in Podemos is ‘hegemonía’ (hegemony), the concept of invisible power. This is an understanding of ideology as a material force in its own right, and lends itself to a political strategy based on forging a new window of acceptable wisdom through what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called a ‘war of position’.

The best recent example of a successful ‘war of position’ comes from the right. Asked what her greatest achievement was at a dinner for the Conservative MP Conor Burns, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds”[1.  Report on ConservativeHome from 2008.]. The goings on at provincial Tory party dinners are not usually the talk of Spain’s tapas bars and cantinas, but this remark was quoted back to me by leftists on several occasions during my time in Spain, and usually with a twinge of admiration. Mrs Thatcher’s conquest of her social democratic opponents – and their subsequent capitulation to the new common sense – was replicated to some extent in every western democracy in the 1980s, so that even her opponents came to accept the central tenets of her programme.

This is what Moruno calls the “discourse battleground”, and it is impossible to understand the rise of Podemos without first understanding both the degree to which social democracy suffered an internal collapse at the end of the twentieth century, but also the attempt by Podemos to forge a new hegemony in Spain.

“Margaret Thatcher…won one fundamental thing and this is why we talk about common sense…Because she was really a populist. If you listen to Margaret Thatcher, she didn’t talk to the rich people, she talked about the return of power to the people. A popular capitalism…I don’t like this way of thinking, but she won the battle of the 70s and 80s, the class struggle of the 70s and 80s.”

Following the restoration of democracy in Spain, the PSOE pursued an ideological trajectory similar to that of centre-left parties across Europe and the United States. As the left attempted to account for the crimes of Stalinism in the east and the challenges posed by the spread of Reagan-Thatcher economics in the west, mainstream social democratic parties began to gravitate rightwards – and in the eyes of many on the left away from the people they were elected to represent.

But then came the crash of ten years ago.

The 2008 crash posed big questions for Blairism, Clintonism and other social democrats

The ‘third-way’ hubris of the nineties and noughties was buried under $600 billion of Lehman Brothers debt, the territory that politicians such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had surrendered came back into play.

“This political space [has appeared], why?” Moruno asks me rhetorically…

“Because 30 years ago until now, they [social democrats] are making the same politics, the economic politics, as the conservative parties.”

When those politics produced the 2008 crash, these parties were seen as a cause of rather than the solution to the crisis.

The Podemos ‘hypothesis’ is built on three main tenets: the post-Gramscian idea of hegemony; the creation of a radical participatory democracy; and the ‘populist situation’ window of opportunity.

With respect to the latter of these, Podemos moved deftly, once the enthusiasm of the indignados had begun to wane, to channel the street protests into an effective electoral project. Adolpho Suarez had outfoxed the aging gargoyles of the Francoist establishment through sheer speed of action. Before they realised quite what he was up to, their power had been pulled from underneath them like the cloth whipped off a dining table. Podemos has gained ground in Spain through a similar seizing of the initiative.

Part of the reason this ‘window of opportunity’ has been seized by a party of the left rather than, as in most of Europe, by the nationalistic right lies in Spain’s failure to account for its past. Spain is the second country after Cambodia in terms of the documented cases of disappeared victims of political repression. In 1977, two years after the dictator’s death, an amnesty law was passed which granted most of Franco’s henchmen the right to die peacefully in their beds. Thirty years later the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero did pass the Historical Memory Law, which granted state aid to help locate and exhume some of the more than 100,000 missing persons from the post-war period. But the ruling Popular Party (PP) has since stated that it will grant “not one public euro for the exhumation of mass graves”. Financial support was withdrawn soon after Mariano Rajoy’s electoral victory in late 2011.

There has in other words been little of what has come to be known euphemistically as ‘de-Baathification’ in Spain. The Popular Party was founded by Manuel Fraga, one of Franco’s former ministers. In the early years it contained many former Francoists in its ranks. Nowadays the PP is in most respects a conventional European centre-right party. Yet its antecedents in Francoism – the sickly blend of authoritarianism, right-wing Catholicism and ‘family values’ which dominated the country for nearly half a century – has allowed it to retain an electoral hold over the contemporary far-right. There has been no comparable David Cameron figure in Spain who has felt secure enough to dismiss those on his right flank as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. And so it has been estimated that over 80% of people who describe themselves as far-right voted for Mariano Rajoy in the two most recent national elections.

Unapologetic admiration for the Generalissimo is, for the most part, a niche affair in Spain. A handful of extremists still gather every year at the Valle de los Caídos, a huge basilica just outside Madrid, to commemorate Franco’s death and sing the Cara al Sol with an arm flung skyward in a Roman salute (or to most of us, a Nazi salute). But most people just get on with the act of getting on – forgetting the 1936-39 civil war and subsequent dictatorship was officially enshrined in Spain’s transition to democracy forty years ago.

There have been a few frustrated attempts to revive a distinctive right-wing populism in recent times. The most high profile of these was Vox, a right-wing Catholic party founded in December 2013 by disgruntled elements within the Popular Party. Vox pledged to criminalise abortion, crackdown on migrants and create a more centralised state. Yet despite the relative success of similar parties across Europe’s more northerly regions, the party failed to win any seats at the 2014 European elections.

Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’) is arguably another ‘populist’ party that has emerged in Spain in recent years. It is intensely hostile to Catalonian independence and has in the past proposed that undocumented migrants be stripped on the right to healthcare in Spain. Founded in 2006 by former Popular Party member Albert Riveras, after nearly a decade in Catalan politics Ciudadanos announced that it would field candidates at the 2015 national election. The party rose up the polls rapidly at first, winning 40 seats; yet it was leapfrogged at the same election by Podemos, who finished third. The result was replicated in 2016, when Cuidanos lost eight of the seats it had won barely six months earlier.

The most electrifying insurgent response to the 2008 financial crisis has undoubtedly come from Podemos. The party’s ‘economic plan for the people’, released in 2014, called for a higher minimum wage, a 35-hour week and the restructuring of the country’s national debt.^[i] It also included plans to nationalise Spain’s utilities – though notably this was left out of Podemos’ 2015 election manifesto.

The hegemonía of the wider political order has already started to shift. The PSOE recently re-elected Pedro Sanchez, a politician of the left who, like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, enjoys the support of grassroots party members and provokes the reflexive hostility of party grandees.

“So we talk about these things, and now the socialist party is talking about them,” says Moruno. “So the real hegemony is when your words are the words that your adversaries use…So hegemony is to…[bring] the others to come to your side and talk about the topics you want to talk about.”

This evidently works best with opponents you are in close proximity to. The real work – of bringing about a transformation of wider society – begins when you have power, and when your opponents are scrambling around desperately trying to adapt to the new consensus.

Podemos is especially influenced by the post-Gramscian ideas of the late Argentinian professor Ernesto Laclau and the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe. Their theory of populism posits that political movements draw their strength from the groups that stand in opposition to them. “Every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which both denies that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same time,” as Professor Laclau[1.  Laclau: A Critical Reader, Simon Critchly, Oliver Marchart, 2012.] phrases it.

And so rather than abandon the territory of ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups to right-wing populism, Podemos has introduced dichotomies more to its own liking:

The people versus the oligarchy;

The ‘99%’ versus ‘the 1%’;

The top versus the bottom.

In other words, in order to slay the dragon you have to become a dragon yourself.

Witnessing first-hand the rise of obscurantism and xenophobia in 1930s Europe, Victor Serge, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, warned that it was:

“The failures of the others that makes for the strength of the Führers. When there’s no worthwhile banner, you start to march behind worthless ones”.

The rise of the likes of Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán on the back of widespread working class support is, on this analysis, an indictment of the left.

Adriá Porta Caballé, an academic who previously worked for the party’s deputy leader, Íñigo Errejón, made a similar point when I met him in Barcelona a few days after my chat with Moruno:

“Wherever populism is hegemonised by reactionary forces, it is a symptom that the left has been defeated there, because it’s not doing the battle at the same level.”

During the Brexit referendum campaign back in Britain, the prominent Leave campaigner Michael Gove was widely ridiculed for saying that Britons had “had enough of experts”. But Britain’s current environment secretary was onto something. There is dwindling faith in the idea of managerial politics, as it is pursued by professional technicians and often devoid of conflict. Porta Caballé told me over a glass of beer at the Baccardi Cafe on Barcelona’s Paseo de Sant Joan that he believes this way of doing politics is “dead”:

“This social democratic third way dream that we could have a democracy that would be purely rational and deliberistic without antagonism, I think it’s dead… If you want to fight fascism and racism, it is not enough to say ‘oh this is irrational, this is not right, if you look at the statistics this is not gonna happen’. Because fascism and racism are presenting…a very strong conflict, and if you want to displace that you have to present another one. Which can be much more positive… But you have to confront them on the basis of passions.”

When Podemos first appeared on the scene, the party’s apathetic approach toward traditional categories and shibboleths predictably angered some within the old guard of the Spanish left, as all breaks with established doctrine invariably do.

“Podemos was born talking about how the problem is not [whether] you call yourself left or more right…The problem is bottom up,” Moruno tells me back in Madrid.

“And this broke the political framework because if you proclaim ‘I am more left than the socialists’, you will always be the little child of the Socialist Party. And we said no, we have to kick the table [away], and we have to change the positions. The problem is not [whether] you are left or right, the problem is democracy against oligarchy.”

Moruno is fairly unrelenting in his criticism of established communist parties – both in Spain and elsewhere – despite the fact that Pablo Iglesias’ faction of the party appears to have effectively formed a loose alliance with the PCE. Moruno sees a breach with the old left as inevitable.

“The Stalinist party, if in the general elections they have less votes than the last time, they think that this is better, that they are making progress because this means that the bourgeoisie are working against them. So it’s more than that you can’t talk to the people; it’s a symbol you are doing well! So this is the worst legacy of the Soviet Union: the political culture of the communist parties…I think in the entire twentieth century, the communist parties used to take the conservative position at every important historical point.”

At the 2016 election Podemos promised to make the country ‘smile’ again. Yet the party surprised many of its supporters by leaving the introduction of a Basic Income – an all-the-rage economic idea whereby every citizen would receive a flat amount of money every month whether in work or not – out of its manifesto.

Moruno is adamant, however, that the future of left-wing politics – the “spirit of communism”, as he calls it – should be rooted in a shift away from the fetishisation of labour and toward a future in which, to paraphrase Karl Marx’s famous remark, the citizen would be free to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, criticise in the evening…without ever becoming hunter, fisherman or critic’. Moruno:

“We have the possibility for the first time to make another kind of society where the working contract, or the salary they pay you, [isn’t] the central point of our biographies. When we talk about class, [the] working class, what does it mean today? Because there are a lot of kinds of working…We can [also] value activities that don’t receive pay. Because in the capitalist society it’s considered that it’s only a [proper] activity if they pay you for it. And you can only receive an income if you have this kind of work. We have to explode this logic. We have to value social activities that don’t receive money, and we have to make another kind of income independent of work.”

Too often in recent times the left has retreated to a purely critical and theoretical bearing. It has lived “in the midst of ideas about people, instead of among the people themselves”, as Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his humanist critique of Polish Stalinism. The danger inherent in the alliance Podemos forged with the traditional left at the 2016 election is that, to paraphrase Marx, all the old crap might revive. The old divisions of the past could creep back in, inducing sclerosis in the young patient.

Yet the idea that Podemos could remain forever equidistant from the old divisions – that the party could be viewed in perpetuity as non-ideological or ‘beyond left or right’ – was perhaps far-fetched to begin with. If you believe that politics is fundamentally about a clash of interests, then it is possible that those interests roughly correlate to the divisions of the past, even today.

The question, then, is how to forge a new left on the bones of the old – and how to do so without being dragged under by the various historical re-enactment societies with their desire to repeat the twentieth century all over again.

Moruno is interested in winning the smaller political battles of the present; but he keeps coming back to the importance of thrashing out a captivating vision of the future.

“It’s not enough to talk about how bad things are, we need to project another kind of future [that is] different than the way we live nowadays,” Moruno says before we exchange fraternal goodbyes and I head back towards Atocha Station to catch my train to Barcelona.

Earlier on, as we had sat down in the coffee shop, Moruno noticed me brandishing – tourist-like – a book on the Civil War. Moruno believes that one of the problems with the contemporary left is its obsession with defensively re-fighting the battles of the past.

“If you don’t hold up a vision of the future, you become conservative…This is a big problem of all the European societies because we don’t have another utopia…A lot of years ago there was socialism or barbarism. Now we only have the barbarism. So the problem is we need also a new horizon, a new utopia…to [show] it is possible that we can live better.”

All successful populist movements draw their lifeforce from the absolute certainty that those in power no longer care about their people. Therefore to renew the country, the people (as defined by the populists) must cast off these parasites like a dog shaking off its fleas.

Podemos has retained this ‘in’ and ‘out’ dichotomy – while redefining it on its own terms. Meanwhile it has eschewed the usual lug-rotting leftist jargon that inspires such a state of resentful boredom in most remotely normal human beings.

For this alone Podemos should command a degree of respect; and it is why I suspect they will be a fixture on the Spanish scene for the foreseeable future.

Please call by tomorrow for part two of this three-part profile of Podemos.

Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.

Disraeli has a character respond thus: “You speak of — ” said Egremont, hesitantly.

You know how Gerard responds; he defines the two nations of England as being: “THE YOUNG AND THE OLD.”

Oops! Of course, Disraeli actually has Gerard say, “THE RICH AND THE POOR”. But the transposition of age for wealth makes the 19th Century Conservative the perfect guide to the political troubles of America and Britain and New Zealand, and likely Australia, in 2017.

Since the Brexit Referendum in the UK and to a certain extent the defeat of Clinton in the US, various theories have been floated to explain why the “wrong” side won. Most popular among them is that the young have been cheated by the old.

From grotesque internet memes (like this one, which laughingly imagines a Brexit voter Doris, who “died of old age 2 [sic] days after the vote”) to serious thinkers like David Willetts and his book The Pinch (How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back), the two nations within each anglosphere country are no longer the rich and the poor, but the old and the young.

Two nations: young people, most of whom have degrees, vs old people, most of whom do not. Young people, most of whom are forced to rent, vs old people, most of whom possess a mortgage. And so on.

The rise of the Left, whether Sanders in the US, or Britain’s resurgent yet morally disordered Labour Party, or New Zealand’s new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern; all are explained by this old/rich vs young/poor dichotomisation. Why would young people vote for capitalism, goes the cliché, when they don’t have any capital?

I don’t entirely disagree. For example, in the UK, to be born to a lower middle-class family in the southeast of England is to be a lottery winner assuming you eventually inherit your parents’ house. Not so, however, should you be born in a region without insane house prices. Thus: Inheritance sucks. It’s unfair. Let’s vote for someone who’d abolish it.

But if the young/old wealth differential is a necessary component of the rise of the Left that still doesn’t mean it’s a sufficient explanation.

The generational split originated with the cultural shift that began towards the end of the last century (and well before the age of austerity): the rise of identity politics, at the cost of the old-skool, values-driven stuff. Viewed through such a prism, the resurgent Left can be seen as a consequence of this deeper malaise, not simply the driver of one.

Of course, we always had identity politics: I’m a British unionist (I believe that Scotland and England are better in one United Kingdom), a position I didn’t adopt through a process of deductive reasoning but which I merely accepted, as one of life’s axioms. Being British meant, well, supporting the concept of Britain.

That — and the few other axioms which together defined what I think of as suburban, lower middle-class bourgeois morality (“It’s important to work”, “Families need fathers”, “Innocent until convicted, whatever Twitter says”) — have all been fractured, by the rise of postmodern identity politics, which puts self-definition, actualisation, realisation at the centre of a very empty universe. Who defines the common good, when no-one else’s opinion matters? “Common good”? Fake news, man (Trump is as much a consequence of this as Corbyn.)

In a science fiction story I enjoyed this week, the inhabitants of an alien world find themselves in the power of what they call a “monster god”, whom they are compelled to worship, even as it devours them. Identity politics is the monster god of planet Earth, and the name of that monster is solipsism.

To acknowledge this monster explains a lot. Is it any wonder, told to define their own truth, that the verbal communication of young people is dominated by the question mark? When they speak? Even when they’re not asking a question?

The monster god cares nothing for the confusion it generates in the minds of its adherents. Like all fake gods, it’s mostly interested in sacrifice, starting with all those bourgeois norms I took for granted. But its prize is greater than mere social decency. Monsters, of course, are creations of our id. And the ironic sacrifice demanded by identity politics is of self.

Because if identity can be anything, then identity is nothing. If you share your identity with no-one else, because you refuse to let anyone else’s views define you… then you’re limitless. But empty.

Which explains as well as any other theory the current fascination/confusion with gender. “It’s a social construct, and every other social construct you were given was bad,” whisper the taxpayer-funded lobby groups. “So abolish it. You are the gender or no-gender which you want to be.”

No matter that real transgender people may find such assertions unsettling: they are not you, and you are all that matters to the god of identity politics.

The monster god creates a vacuum into which race his eager demons, like John McDonnell, the real power in the British Labour Party. He sees an army of young people trained to reject bourgeois norms, educated to believe that their opinions are supreme, but doubtful as to the substance from which those opinions should be formed. Could there be a more perfect machine to deliver the violent extra-parliamentary “insurrection” (his word) for which Mr McDonnell so sweatily yearns?

Where is the opposition to this? In his description of the Conservative Party in Coningsby, Disraeli could have been describing the current British government:

A body of individuals totally unequal to the exigencies of the epoch, and indeed unconscious of its real character.

Didn’t you love that “hesitantly” with which Egremont asked the “two nations” question — one to which he already knew the answer? The solution for the centre-Right starts with dropping that hesitancy. Be conscious of the real character of identity politics: the monster god is, before everything, monstrous. Would it kill Conservatives to say so?

Then defend the basis for real liberty: faith in common axioms that define the good life. The strength of this suburban morality is its insistence that you are connected with others; so the opinion that others hold of you matters, and your behaviour should reflect this.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, accepting that we’re not each at the centre of large, empty, self-defined universes is the foundation upon which individuals can achieve true freedom. Only connect — yourself with others; everything else is void.

Iceland’s politics are, in fact, a microcosm of two of the movements that are shaking the globe: left-wing, anti-capitalist politics and anti-corruption populism. The 2008 collapse of Iceland’s banks, followed by a series of revelations implicating top leaders of centre-right parties in corrupt or self-dealing acts, have altered the island’s once-staid electoral landscape.

Iceland’s Political Tradition: Boring and Conservative

No one would have guessed this would happen ten years ago. The centre-right Independence Party had won every election since its formation in the late 1920s.[1.  The Independence party was formed in 1929 by the merger of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. It thus combines classical liberalism with cultural conservatism in the manner of conservative parties worldwide. Its MEPs sit with the ECR, the European Alliance of Conservatives and Reformers, rather than the Christian Democratic European People’s Party (EPP). See, e.g., Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (“The Independence Party”) Interviewed, Grapevine.] It was in government for 51 of the 62 years between Iceland’s full independence from Denmark in 1946 and the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. Every Independence Party leader has eventually become Prime Minister.

The Icelandic left, moreover, has been historically weak. No left-wing or centre-left party received more than 30 percent of the vote until 2003, and left or centre-left parties only served in government in coalition with the Independence Party or its centrist, agrarian competitor, the Progressive Party. Especially in comparison with its Nordic and Scandinavian cousins, Iceland has been a bastion of the right.

The 2008 Banking Collapse Initially Empowered the Left

That all changed after the 2008 collapse. The Independence Party had been in government for twenty-five consecutive years, and its two most recent leaders had been prime minister during the period of privatization and tax-cutting that had fueled the bubble that led to the crash. And what a crash it was! Unemployment went from next to nothing to over 8 % between 2007 and 2009.[2.  Failing banks, winning economy: the truth about Iceland’s recovery. World finance] The country’s GDP, which more than doubled between 2001 and 2007, dropped by 40 percent by 2009.[3.  World Bank: Iceland] Iceland’s banks, which had grown so large that their assets were 14 times the nation’s GDP,[4.  Iceland, symbol of financial crisis, finally lifts capitol controls. New York Times] went bust, causing interest rates to rise to 18% and inflation to exceed 12%. Tens of thousands of Icelandic households went bankrupt or lost their savings – a huge number in a country of only 330,000 people.

Icelandic voters reacted by doing what voters worldwide do when they go through economic collapse; they voted in the opposition. The two left-wing parties, the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement, captured over 50% of the vote for the first time in the country’s history.[5.  Statistics Iceland] The Social Democratic Alliance’s leader, Johanna Sigurdardottir, became the country’s first female leader and the first prime minister to govern solely from the left.

Despite their left-wing heritage, the new government was economically helpless. It instituted a severe program of austerity, raising taxes dramatically while also slashing spending.[6.  The government raised the VAT to 25.5%, hiked the top personal income tax to over 46 percent, and also hiked corporate, capital gains, and a host of other taxes too – all while also cutting expenditures. For a complete explanation, see Is Iceland Krugman’s Inadvertent Case For The Monetary Policy Offset Of Fiscal Policy? ] Economic growth slowly returned, but people remained poorer than they had been before they switched governments. So, at the 2013 elections, Icelanders again booted out their government and voted in the opposition, this time restoring the Independence Party to the top position it had held for seven decades before the crash.

Hardship and Corruption Create the Demand for Populism

But this time Icelanders did not simply switch horses. The Independence Party had never fallen below 32% of the vote in its history before 2009; it recovered to only 26.7% in 2013. More importantly, a host of new parties that stood outside the traditional left-right axis received a quarter of the vote. Disappointed by all traditional parties, Icelandic voters were beginning to embrace populism.[7.  Two new parties, Bright Future and the Pirate Party, broke the 5% threshold and entered the Althing. Statistics Iceland]

Despite regaining first place, Independence’s leader did not become prime minister. The Progressive Party gained nearly 10% of the vote, reaching its highest vote share since 1979. Its leader, Sigmunddur David Gunlaugsson, had risen to notoriety by resisting attempts by foreign creditors to make Iceland pay billions of pounds in compensation for assets foreign investors had lost in the bank collapse.[8.  Iceland is in Crisis Mode. It feels like 2009 all over again. The Guardian]The people’s hero for this, and untainted by prior involvement in either the crisis or in the policies that had led to it,[9.  Gunlaugsson only entered political life in the 2009 election as a Progressive Party parliamentarian.]Independence decided to back him for the top slot. Its leader took the Finance Ministry instead.

Iceland’s economy rocketed back to life under his leadership. But then the Panama Papers revealed that Gunlaugsson’s wife had secretly held shares in an offshore company with links to the failed banks, an interest he had failed to disclose.[10.  Iceland ousted one leader named in the Panama Papers’ but ended up with another on the list.] This was particularly galling as he had, according to one Icelandic political scientist, “claimed to speak on behalf of the deprived ordinary man against the wealthy elite” in his rise to power.[11. Iceland is in Crisis Mode. It feels like 2009 all over again. The Guardian] To have been clothed as a populist while benefitting from the crisis was viewed as a betrayal of the highest order. The government promptly collapsed and new elections were called.

But all was not rosy even prior to this revelation. For over a year, polls had shown the Pirate Party leading by a wide margin. At one point in early 2016 over 40% of potential voters said they would support a party with no governing experience and a platform that promised little more than internet freedom.[12.  See Icelandic parliamentary election, 2016 – Wikipedia] Something had clearly changed.

The fall election further documented the crumbling foundation of Iceland’s political foundations. Independence increased its vote share slightly to 29 percent, but the Progressives collapsed to an all-time low of 11.5%. The Social Democrats also were punished as leftist voters switched to the Left-Green Movement; the longtime voice of the Icelandic left barely made it into parliament with a mere 5.7%. For the first time in history, a majority of voters supported parties that had never before elected a prime minister.

This did not mean, however, that these parties could agree to form a government together. The Left-Green Movement, with 15.9 percent of the vote, and the Pirates, with 14.5%, agreed to work together.[13.  Statistics Iceland] But two other new parties, Bright Future and Reform, held the balance of power. Neither was particularly left-wing in their politics; Reform, for example, had been formed as a split from Independence by pro-EU, pro-free trade party members. Thus, despite a clear verdict against politics as usual, Independence formed the new government with a one vote majority provided by Bright Future and Reform.

More Corruption = More Populism

Karl Marx once said that “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”[14.  See “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Marxists.org] So it is fitting that his Icelandic heirs, the Left-Green Movement, may benefit from the country’s latest episode in corrupt politics. If the banking collapse and the Panama Papers’ revelation were tragic, the incident that brought down the current government could have been written by the American comedic family, the Marx Brothers.

Iceland has a system that permits people convicted of certain crimes to “restore their honor,” and hence regain some employment opportunities and civil rights, on the receipt of three letters testifying to the person’s character. In mid-September, Bright Future resigned from government after a disclosure that the prime minister’s father had signed such a letter on behalf of a man who had convicted of raping his stepdaughter almost daily for twelve years.[15.  Row over sexual abuse letter brings down Icelands’ government;  PM’s father endorsed “restored honour for convicted paedophile. Grapevine] The Justice Minister, a member of the Independence Party, had told the prime minister in the summer about this, but neither disclosed it until forced to by a parliamentary committee.

After nearly a decade of economic collapse and persistent insider self-dealing, Icelanders may be ready for a radical break with the past. While Independence finished first again, it lost five seats and received only 25% of the vote. The two main left-wing parties, the Left-Green Movement and the Social Alliance, increased their share of the vote to a combined 29% and added five seats. Reform and the Pirates both lost seats and Bright Future was kicked out of parliament entirely. The Progressives kept their 8 seats, but neither a centre-right nor a centre-left government can command a majority. The balance of power will be held by two new parties, both of which are openly populist and eschew traditional left-right classification. For the second election in a row, a majority of voters supported a party that has never before provided a Prime Minister. Iceland’s politics is now much like its weather, mostly cloudy.

Iceland’s Left-Populist Future?

Four of the eight parties in parliament are clearly on the left or centre-left. Left-Green focuses on reducing income equality, significantly expanding housing and parental leave benefits, is suspicious of free trade agreements, and proposes a carbonless Iceland by 2040.[16.  Results of Landsfundar 2017 . This page is in Icelandic. Translation was obtained via Google Translate.] It also opposes Iceland’s membership in NATO and increasing the number of refugees that the ethnically homogenous country accepts.[17.  93 percent of Iceland residents had been born in Iceland as of 2014. Less than 1 percent had been born outside of the European Union. See Demographics of Iceland – Wikipedia.]The Pirates want the government to spend more on building houses, increase the disability benefit, and increase the amount exempted from income taxation each month.[18.  The Icelandic Pirate Party . The page is in Icelandic, translated by Google Translate.]The new People’s Party won 4 seats: it wants to make health care free for all, regulate interest rates for housing, and dramatically increase the monthly income exemption to ISK 300,000, or about half of the average monthly wage.[19.  Statistics Iceland . As of 20 October, the exchange rates for the Icelandic kronor were 105–1 for the U.S. dollar, 124-1 for the Euro, and 139-1 for the UK pound. The People’s Party agenda can be found here (in Icelandic).] The Social Democratic Alliance echoes many of the policies, also calling for significant increases in government benefits, and a fourfold increase in the monthly exemption.[20.   Icelandic Soical democratic party The page is in Icelandic, translated by Google Translate.] Together, though, these parties command only 28 seats in Iceland’s 63 seat parliament the Althing.

The three centre-right parties – Independence, the Progressives, and Reform – also command only 28 seats. Thus, the new government must either include ideological opposites – a grand coalition involving Independence, the Left-Greens, and one other party has been mentioned – or it must include the largest of the new parties, the Centre Party. And that party is led by none other than former Prime Minister Gunnlaugsson, the man whose resignation triggered the 2016 election to begin with. Icelandic politics is simply a mess.

Conclusion: No Country Is Immune from Populism

Analysts worldwide should look carefully at these developments, as similar trends can be observed elsewhere. Anger and disgust at repeated self-dealing by politicians has helped spawn Czechia’s ANO party, which won that country’s recent election, and Italy’s Five Star Movement, which currently leads in most of the polls. Left-wing populism that preaches Euroscepticism, distrust of private markets, and increased public spending is also on the rise, especially in nations that, like Iceland, have suffered severe financial distress.[21.  Greece’s SYRIZA and Spain’s Podemos are the best known leftist populist parties, and Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and the USA’s Bernie Sanders are examples of leftist populist influence on traditional centre-left groups. The latest example is Belgium’s Workers’ Party, a traditionally Communist party that has focused its attention on less ideological issues in recent years. It has more than tripled its standing in economically depressed Wallonia since the May 2014 elections. See Opinion polling for the next Belgian federal election – Wikipedia] It is tempting to think “it can’t happen here,” but that’s just not so. If populism can rock staid, conservative Iceland, it can gain credence anywhere.

Some of us, myself included, had come to know each other prior to 1989, in the long battle to affirm the shared civilisation of Europe against the obliterating tyranny of communism. Others, much younger, had been drawn to our circle in search of another philosophy than the empty cosmopolitanism of the new European elite. Over the years we have tried in our various ways to define what Europe really stands for, and to reaffirm our links with the European diaspora and with Western civilisation as a whole.

The statement is a response to a deep crisis in the culture and self-image of European society. No thinking person can doubt the existence of this crisis, or its connection to the dominant liberal orthodoxies of the EU institutions. Europe is defined by its inheritance. This inheritance includes the Christian religion, secular jurisdiction, and the idea of citizenship. Thanks to those inheritances Europe has enjoyed a distinctive political culture: one of mutual responsibility among people who define their identity in national terms and who make their laws by a process of democratic consultation. To defend that inheritance, however, is to invite the charge of populism, nationalism, racism and xenophobia: terms of abuse that are thrown thoughtlessly at all who believe that national identity and customary loyalties are the sine qua non of peaceful settlement.

Our statement is in part an attempt to define the areas where the true idea of Europe is in conflict with the false idea that is being imposed upon us. According to the false idea Europe is a ‘multicultural’ society, with no special allegiance to the religious inheritance or national identities of the European people. It is a society without borders, in which national sovereignty is to be eroded or discarded in favour of government by a bureaucratic elite. The false Europe extends a welcome to globalism in all its forms. It is to open its borders to immigrants without concern for their culture, their values or their capacity for the kind of territorial loyalty that has defined the history of our nation states. And it is to install an abstract conception of ‘human rights’ at every place where custom and loyalty have shaped our way of life. This false Europe is conceived as a background to the rootless and self-indulgent lifestyle of the sixties. And in order to advance that lifestyle, for which no positive argument has ever been given, its advocates hurl insults at the ordinary law-abiding citizens for whom marriage and the family, neighbourhood, custom and an inherited sense of belonging are the foundations of their way of life.

For many years I have been struck by the way in which those on whom the future of society most depends – the ‘marrying classes’ as Lytton Strachey contemptuously described them, or les salauds as Sartre put it, yet more contemptuously – are also first to be singled out as targets by the apostles of liberation. But freedom of the kind that we all enjoy is made possible by social trust, and social trust depends on a shared sense of belonging, and a shared national culture. To dismiss those things as ‘racism and xenophobia’, as is the norm among opinionated Europeans today, is to undermine the social stability on which the elites depend for their freedoms. Equally destructive has been the habit – in France especially – of dividing political postures into the ‘progressive’ and the ‘reactionary’, and thereby preparing a welcome for every innovation, however destructive, and a contemptuous dismissal for all attempts, however nuanced and reasonable, to defend what we have.

One of the most important assets that we have is the protection of free speech. In European countries differences of opinion have been not only permitted but encouraged. We are heirs to a tradition of public debate in which rational argument prevails over crowd emotions. Our opponents who defend the false Europe are entitled to do so and we expect them to work by peaceful means for their goals, opposed by our arguments but free from our abuse. But in drafting the Paris statement we were acutely aware that this tradition of public debate is no longer respected on the left. Those who defend the European inheritance are regularly sneered at or silenced, and while legitimate criticisms of Islam and its adherents are vilified as ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘hate speech’, no equivalent punishment is meted out to the critics of Christianity. The disappearance of free speech from our universities has gone hand in hand with draconian legislation enforcing invented ‘human rights’ in areas where Europeans are by no means of one mind – areas such as abortion, gay marriage, adoption, and the maintenance of religious symbols and festivals. In all these matters the culture of repudiation has seized the advantage, imposing multicultural orthodoxies in advance of the discussion and reflection of which our continent stands so greatly in need.

It is my firm belief that young people can be made aware not only that our spiritual and cultural inheritance is worth preserving but that it is the source of all the freedoms that they enjoy – including the freedom publicly to repudiate it, a freedom that Islamic civilisation has never extended to its adherents. It is my hope too that young people will begin to think clearly about the likely outcome of the repudiation to which they are being encouraged, and will come to see that the result will not be a tolerant and open society, but, in all likelihood, a condition of social fragmentation and ethnic strife. But our statement is not addressed only to the young; it is addressed also to politicians, writers, intellectuals and cultural figures who have the opportunity to give voice to the ideals that have shaped our continent, and to begin the defence of what is most precious to us all.

Until now that is. Monbiot believes that he has the outline of just such a story. Here, from the Guardian, is his elevator pitch:

“Through restoring community, renewing civic life and claiming our place in the world, we build a society in which our extraordinary nature – our altruism, empathy and deep connection – is released. A kinder world stimulates and normalises our kinder values. I propose a name for this story: the Politics of Belonging.”

To get the full gist, you’ll need to read the whole thing, but what might immediately strike the casual reader is the story’s utopianism. Its author, however, makes an appeal to scientific plausibility:

“Over the past few years, there has been a convergence of findings in different sciences: psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Research in all these fields points to the same conclusion: that human beings are, in the words of an article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, ‘spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals’. This refers to our astonishing degree of altruism. We possess an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare, and a peerless ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

“We are also, among mammals, the supreme cooperators…”

Actually, that would be the Naked Mole Rat, which (along with the Damaraland Mole Rat) is the only eusocial mammal. Zoological pedantry aside, one has to observe that, while uniquely compassionate, humans are also uniquely cruel. And though uniquely altruistic, we’re also uniquely avaricious. Indeed, in terms of morality and immorality, we’re peerless in every way. That’s because, in all but the least important sense, we’re not animals. If I were constructing a narrative of hope, that’s what I would begin with – we are not animals.

To be fair, Monbiot believes that we can and should put aside our competitive instincts and make the most of  our cooperative potential. Furthermore, he has every confidence that we can do this in a politically transformative way – because it’s already happening:

“…[it] might sound like an improbable hope – until you begin to explore some of the remarkable things that have been happening in the United States.

“The Big Organising model developed by the campaign to elect Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee is potentially transformative. Rather than relying on big spending, big data and a big staff, it uses proliferating networks of volunteers, who train and supervise more volunteers, to carry out the tasks usually reserved for staff. While Hillary Clinton’s campaign was organising money, the Sanders campaign was organising people.”

Back in May of this year, Monbiot argued that “this method could be used to transform the prospects of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party”. He was “widely mocked” for doing so, but he was proved right by subsequent events.

However, in noting – and, in some cases, celebrating – the rise of grassroots political movements, he has, I believe, misunderstood their essence. What’s really going on isn’t some kind of shared spiritual awakening, but a potentially darker phenomenon.

The other week I wrote about the anthropological philosophy of René Girard – who knew a thing or two about human storytelling – and who concluded that “imitation is at the root of all human behaviour.” We are, he said, driven by “mimetic desire”.

Thus when people come together in pursuit of a common goal we should suspect that copying, not community, is the motivating force. Indeed, what the new political movements have in common – from the populist left through to the alt-right – is their profoundly mimetic nature. Their most powerful form of communication is the internet ‘meme’ (a word meaning ‘that which is imitated’).

From ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ to ‘Pepe the Frog’, memes create a sense of belonging, but only for those who copy.

An example of an unwisely-chosen target is George Monbiot – a man of the green left, but interesting with it. To the annoyance of his detractors, he doesn’t just criticise capitalism, but also the underlying culture of consumerism. To an extent now quite rare on the left (and indeed the centre and right), Monbiot has opinions on how we ought to live, not just on the wickedness and privilege of a distant elite.

This is why he attracts such flak from the right, especially the libertarian right: How dare he tell us what to do with our lives! What his detractors don’t get is just how many people do want to be told. There is a unfulfilled appetite here, not for a personal challenge to one’s own conduct, but for a broader vision of a justly ordered society and the valued place that each of us would have within it.

In an essay for the Guardian, Monbiot argues that the most powerful way of communicating such a vision is through that fundamental building block of culture – the story:

“When we encounter a complex issue and try to understand it, what we look for is not consistent and reliable facts but a consistent and comprehensible story. When we ask ourselves whether something ‘makes sense’, the ‘sense’ we seek is not rationality, as scientists and philosophers perceive it, but narrative fidelity. Does what we are hearing reflect the way we expect humans and the world to behave? Does it hang together? Does it progress as stories should progress?”

Neoliberalism is a story. So was social democracy before it. And laissez faire capitalism before that. Obviously these dominant and once-dominant ideologies are also expressed as economic theories, political manifestos and government programmes; but the source of their power lies in the stories told about them.

Even when a story is overshadowed by real events – as neoliberalism has been by the financial crisis and other manifest failures – it can persist if no one tells a better story:

“You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another. When we develop the right story, and learn how to tell it, it will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum.”

This is spot-on and explains the political developments and non-developments of the last decade. In the immediate wake of the financial crash, a surge of support for the parties of the centre-left was expected. But, for the most part, it didn’t happen. Indeed, the trend across the West has been in the other direction. That’s because they failed to tell a different story. The centre-right parties weren’t telling a different story either, but at least their version of it made more sense (batten-down the hatches as opposed to carry on spending).

But if, in the longer-term, people yearn for change, telling an old story – even the best version – leaves you vulnerable to a new one.

Not just any new story, though; George Monbiot has some editorial guidelines:

“Without a new story that is positive and propositional, rather than reactive and oppositional, nothing changes. With such a story, everything changes…

…there is nothing to be gained from spreading falsehoods, it must be firmly grounded in reality.”

Unfortunately, negative storytelling can make a difference. As for spreading falsehoods, those who spread them have plenty to gain. Monbiot had it right the first time when he emphasised the power of “narrative fidelity” over “rationality” and “facts”.

A consistent story doesn’t have to be true. Indeed, consistency is easier to achieve in fiction; which is why populist politicians with little regard for the truth can run rings around their more scrupulous opponents.

Responsible leaders face the challenge of finding a fresh and compelling counter-narrative, but one nonetheless based in reality – a true test of the storyteller’s art.

George Monbiot believes that he has just such a story. But to get my take on it, you’ll have to wait until the next exciting episode of UnPacked…

Websites

Jacobin

Jacobin has in recent years become a go-to website for an American left that has become far less willing to play ball with the Democratic establishment since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential Election to Donald Trump. It is also impressively independent, at times taking on commonplace left-wing shibboleths.

The Intercept

Founded by Glenn Greenwald in 2014, the Intercept tends to focus on issues like surveillance and political lobbying.  Funded by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Intercept claims to “hold the most powerful governmental and corporate factions accountable”.

Alternet

Alternet is an American website which sees the dark hand of ‘the establishment’ behind almost everything. The American establishment, that is. In contrast, Alternet treats hostile foreign governments as unusually benign, and has attracted criticism in recent times for casting doubt on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians. If America or Israel aren’t responsible then Alternet is unlikely to care.

Novara Media

Founded by the British political activist Aaron Bastani, Novara is one of the most professional of the so-called ‘alternative media’ websites that have emerged in the UK in recent years to throw their support behind left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The Canary, The SkwawkBox and EvolvePolitics

Purporting, respectively, to be ‘fearless’, ‘truly independent’ and following the leads that ‘will rarely make it into the mainstream media’, these three websites (The Canary; Skwawkbox and EvolvePolitics) are popular examples of the rise of highly partisan activism masquerading as journalism. Relying on a clickbait model of content, the sites revel in the fact that nonsense can spread like wildfire on Twitter and Facebook as long as it taps into a person’s pre-existing prejudices. An equivalent on the right would be Breitbart.

The New Socialist

A theory-based look at politics from the left of the left, The New Socialist is a recently-founded blog which aims to provide Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party with the kind of intellectual sustenance once provided to the party by groups like the Fabian Society. Often stimulating, more often turgid and impenetrable.

Documentaries

#ThisisaCoup

A film by British Channel 4 economics editor Paul Mason and Greek filmmaker Theopi Skarlatos, #ThisIsACoup looks at Syriza’s 2015 election victory in Greece and subsequent disappointment when leader of Syriza and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras signed off the austerity measures he had been elected to oppose.

Política, Manual de Instrucciones (Politics, a Handbook)  

A documentary on the left-wing Spanish party Podemos, documentary maker Fernando León de Aranoa follows the party’s leading figures over 15 months, from the formation of the party in 2014 to the General Election of December 2015, where the anti-austerity party won 69 seats with a 20 per cent share of the vote. The documentary looks at the role of social media in Podemos’ rise, but also at the anger and frustration in a country where at one point nearly half of all young people were unemployed.

Inside Job

Presented by American actor Matt Damon, Inside Job is a look at what caused the 2008 financial meltdown and subsequent global recession. Available on Netflix, the film laments the fact that none of those responsible for the biggest banking crash since 1929 are behind bars. Something that we know – from YouGov polling for UnHerd – is a deeply shared regret on both sides of the Atlantic.

Books

Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup by Rosa Prince

An objective look at the unlikely rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the summit of the Labour Party by experienced biographer Rosa Prince.

Politics in a Time of Crisis by Pablo Iglesias

Written when Podemos was little more than a group of likeminded academics fed up with the direction of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Politics in a Time of Crisis by the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, is a stimulating read which looks at recent political turmoil in Spain and the failures of the establishment left (as well as European institutions) to offer solidarity to those suffering under austerity. Unlike so many of the books written by politicians, this one is actually interesting and forthright.

Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders

Just a few years ago Bernie Sanders was a relatively unknown Senator from Vermont. A self-described democratic socialist, Sanders’ campaign for the 2016 presidential election galvanised a section of the left fed up with the political mainstream. Our Revolution is a look by Sanders himself at how the momentum built up during his ultimately doomed campaign can be used to shape the future and continue the Sanders ‘revolution’.

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton

This is an impressively lucid take down of some of the most fashionable left-wing thinkers of the past 50 years. As some of these thinkers come back into vogue, Scruton’s book is worth reading even for those not predisposed to agree with his conclusions. Scruton may be far too sweeping in his generalisations about the left (and correspondingly too generous to the right), but his brutal dissections of an ephemeral and faddish ‘radicalism’ are often on the money.

Podcasts

Chapo Trap House

As with some of the left-wing websites that have come to prominence in recent times, Chapo Trap House has received a boost from the failures of the centre-left in hanging on to the White House. Offering a humorous and ironic take on American politics, Chapo Trap House is part of what some have called the ‘dirtbag left’, and is tapping into a growing discontent among younger, Bernie Sanders-supporting voters who are fed up with neoliberalism and a Democratic establishment seen as hopelessly compromised.

Daily Kos Radio

An entertaining American progressive podcast, Daily Kos Radio is hosted by Daily Kos contributing editor David Waldman.

The New Statesman Podcast

Stephen Bush and Helen Lewis offer an irreverent look at events in Westminster. This weekly production is one of the best British podcasts out there for those interested in the internecine ups and downs of the political village.

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And worth adding a mention of UnHerd’s new weekly podcast at this point. Recorded on Thursday, the special guest was Sam Tarry, a staunch and closely-connected supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.

Peta Credlin: “There’s no doubt that the corrupting influence of the post-modernist left in universities has had an impact. How many high school students, for instance, have converted “everyone is entitled to an opinion” into “all opinions are equal”? Still, you can’t design a car or build a bridge on the basis of gender studies and identity politics. The hard sciences, and the need actually to get on in the world, will eventually produce a fightback.

“In some communities, it is already under way. With some of the world’s largest coal, gas and uranium resources, Australia is facing an energy crisis because we have re-cast sound economic policy in the light of climate change zealotry. Common sense and conservation should go hand in hand but we lost our way thinking we could change the world without a fiscal cost. It doesn’t work like that and when we’re responsible for less than 1.4 per cent of global emissions, it’s an economic suicide note. Climates change might just be the catalyst as politically correct climatology inevitably gives way to empiricism.”

Sunder Katwala: “Culture and identity do appear to be at least as important as economics. Increasingly, the most important cleavage in many electoral contests is educational status: that the left is doing well among the increasing number of graduates is a potential source of long-term strength, but a considerable challenge in how to secure or manage a broad coalition to get elected or govern. The danger this presents for social democratic and centre-left parties is endlessly discussed.

That a similar dilemma faces the democratic right has been rather less discussed, partly because academia is much more interested in the state of the left than the right. Both major British parties will want to win in Kensington and Mansfield at the next General Election. If parties of the right hope to make gains by being the socially conservative party of the blue-collar and left-behind voters, they may need to become less committed to a small state, low tax agenda and become more open to state intervention in the economy. If, as seems perhaps more likely, centre-right parties will remain ideologically sceptical about the size of the state, then it may need to pitch to more socially liberal younger voters in the south of England, the children of their existing voters, adopting a more measured approach to managed migration that could fit more comfortably with a generally pro-market philosophy.

“The right would hope to attract young voters whose ambition is to get a decent degree, find a good job and take out a mortgage on a property. So-called left-behind voters may then feel their voice is ignored, whether the issue is the financial crisis or immigration.”

Steve Richards: “The left-liberal dominance in education, arts and entertainment has been a constant factor for decades and has made no difference to the fate of left-wing or right-wing political parties. In the UK during the 1980s a radical, left-inclined Channel Four was launched and left-wing comedians from Ben Elton to Alexei Sayle sold out theatres across the land. The Conservatives still won landslides. There was no connection between the two. The left-liberal ascendency in education, arts and entertainment is also countered by a largely Conservative supporting media in the UK, although the nature of that support has not always helped the Conservative Party, encouraging at times complacency or shallow thinking dressed up as modernisation.

The more recent rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and others is related much more to economic issues than to a leftish culture. The fashionable slogans of our time are more revealing than they seem. Some voters feel ‘left behind’. The same voters want to ‘seize back control’. In the UK these terms are seen solely through the prism of Brexit, but they imply a need for mediating agencies that would help to make voters feel more connected.  They reflect also a fear of more fractured working lives that leave some voters with a sense of fearful impotence.

“To some extent Corbyn and Sanders offer hope to voters in their faith that the state can intervene to address the fundamental causes of voters’ insecurity. In highlighting their outrage at widening inequality they imply at least that they would be willing to pull levers that will make a difference. Neither has been tested in government, but from the relative safety of opposition they offer hope. There is also plenty of space for One Nation Conservatives to put the case for powerful but efficient national or local institutions to play a more robust role in a global economy. Such a positive approach will have more impact than an attempt to emulate the ‘fashionable left’ in education and the arts.”

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Yesterday the jury examined the general rise of the Left in advanced nations. Tomorrow it will look at volatility in democracies.

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Are advanced nations at a political turning point, with public moods favouring bigger state, bigger spending, more economically interventionist policies?

Peta Credlin: “Not necessarily. Americans elected Donald Trump not Hillary Clinton, let alone Bernie Sanders, and the Brexit vote was arguably a rejection of the statist EU. People are unhappy with the political establishment for numerous reasons: since the global financial crash (and for much longer in some countries) wages have been stagnant while asset prices have moved beyond the reach of many working people; the international pecking order has changed against the West; many people feel that their values and instincts are under assault due to the long march through the institutions of the counter-cultural left; but most importantly, the political establishment of the centre right and centre left has seemed impotent to deal with people’s concerns, ignoring them (David Cameron), attacking them (Hillary Clinton), or failing to address them (George W Bush).

“People want a government that makes a difference and improves their lives but they don’t think that money grows on trees or that big government can solve every problem. In Australia the only issue that matters is energy policy. The push by adherents of the climate change religion was embraced when it meant virtue signalling and a cost-free nod to the climate agenda. Now that it has sent businesses to the wall and taken Australia from one of the world’s most reliable, most affordable energy nations to one of the most expensive – on the back of a purge of coal and expansion of taxpayer-subsidised renewables – the people are starting to push back.

“I don’t believe there’s enough evidence that the political mood has swung to the conventional left; just that politics is less predictable than ever and success goes to the people and parties who are most carefully listening and most plausibly responding to a very discontented public.”

Sunder Katwala: “No. I think people are pretty agnostic about the size of the state itself. The libertarian case for a much reduced role for the state seems to fall away quite quickly when the state is doing things that people like or want. Pressure for a stronger state comes from the right – on crime, borders and defence – as well as from the left, which wants less state on social issues, and more on economic ones. But I don’t see strong evidence of any sustained public desire for a much bigger state overall, especially once it has to be paid for.

“That is partly because the shrinking of the state was exaggerated too. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did more to reshape expectations about the scope of the state than to actually shrink it. Public spending was 43% of GDP in Britain in 1979 and it was 42% in 1996. Reagan cut taxes much more than he reduced spending: that put him on the popular side of both arguments, at the price of a booming deficit. More than any sustained shift to the left or right, there is often more of a ‘thermostatic’ balancing tendency in public attitudes over time. A long period of right-of-centre government, focused on sound finances, can lead to increased concern about investing in public services. When the left is in, increased spending on schools and hospitals is popular, but there are more concerns about taxes, efficiency and value for money. Voters in most big democracies remain torn by that dilemma, unless other people can pay the taxes to spend more money.”

Steve Richards: “We are at a turning point as significant as the sea change that swept James Callaghan out of power in the UK in1979, a tide that formed the backdrop to the Reagan/Thatcher ideological dominance of the 1980s and 1990s. The financial crash in 2008 triggered new tidal waves. The UK general election earlier this year reflected the changing landscape with the main issues relating to how the state could be more active. Key debates in the UK campaign included how to raise the funds required for a growing elderly population and how the government could and should mediate in markets perceived to be failing.

“The so-called outsiders, from Donald Trump to Jeremy Corbyn, are bound by one common theme. They meet a demand for the state to intervene more. Trump might be ‘anti-government’ in theory but he was elected on a programme of intervention and high spending on capital projects that was not dissimilar in some respects to the programme advocated by Bernie Sanders. Trump reconciled his loathing of ‘big government’ by personifying the state. He, Donald Trump, would intervene in labour markets and invest billions in infrastructure.

“The question of what governments can do dominates virtually every election in advanced nations. Compare this with elections before the 2008 financial crash where the main theme was what governments should not do. Tony Blair won a landslide in 1997 after a campaign in which the leadership pledged to stick to the previous Conservative government’s spending plans and income tax levels. Although Theresa May remains Prime Minister, the 2017 election campaign marked a shift to the left in terms of the stated aims of all the main parties.”

***

Tomorrow we’ll post the jurors’ answers to question two;

“Is the advance of left-wing politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders down to economic issues or are we seeing the long-term fruits of a gradual left-liberal ascendancy in education, arts and entertainment?”

***

UnHerd has been exploring the global march of the Left.

Think Iglesias in Spain, Tsipras in Greece, Melenchon in France, and Corbyn and Sanders in the UK and US. Some have established new parties, others have radicalised old ones. Either way, in capturing the popular imagination, these socialist candidates have helped shake up mainstream political parties which had become overly comfortable in their grip on power. The financial crash – with its big bank bail outs and years of austerity – created a sense that ‘traditional’ parties and politicians just weren’t serving the people. That the rich have largely recovered their pre-crash wealth while lower and middle-income families continue to struggle appears to prove the point.[1. See, for example, Larry Elliott, ‘Top 1% of households in UK fully recovered from financial crisis’, the Guardian, 15 July 2017; Jim Tankersley, ‘The wealthy have nearly healed from recession. The poor haven’t even started’, The Washington Post, 18 August 2016]

It’s easy to dismiss the populist positions espoused by the hard-Left (and from the hard-Right, too, who uncannily often promote the exact same populisms). And certainly, basic economics shows that some of the policies put forward – from protectionism to huge, unfunded increases in public spending – would end up hurting the very people they are supposed to help. It is lazily partisan to reject their platforms entirely, however.

So, further to Liam Halligan’s “What the Left gets right” column, here are two other policies that sensible people should get behind.

First… minimum wages DO need to rise

“Millions of Americans are working for totally inadequate wages. We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase it to $15 an hour over the next several years.”[1.  ‘A Living Wage’, Bernie, accessed 5 September 2017]

There is undoubtedly merit in Bernie Sander’s argument, which has clearly been recognised by the 19 US states that, with varying levels of generosity, raised their minimum wages at the start of this year[2.  Michael Edison Hayden, ‘19 States Increase Minimum Wage at the Start of 2017’, ABC News, 1 January 2017] – a mixture of both Democrat and Republican. In Britain, George Osborne, the Chancellor in a Conservative government, legislated for what he called the National Living Wage in 2015.

Across advanced, capitalist economies, the share of wealth going to labour has decreased. As Ryan Avent highlights in his book The Wealth of Humans:[3.  Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans, Penguin Books, 2016]

“[In America] Prior to the early 1970s… as workers got better at generating output, the fruits of those improvements accrued to the workers themselves, in the form of higher pay. Thereafter productivity growth slowed and workers failed even to capture the benefits of that slower growth; from 2005 to 2014, for instance, productivity grew at about 1.4 per cent per year, or about twice as fast as growth in real wages.”

In fact, as Avent goes on to say, the use of averages masks an even worse reality – instead, using median wages, “since 2000 the real wage for the typical American has not risen at all”, and “from 1995 to 2012, the average real wage in Germany, Italy and Japan all underperformed that in America”. At the extreme, between 2011 and 2013, Greece saw three consecutive years of 10% reductions in total gross wages.[4.  ‘Wage developments in the euro area Increasingly unequal?’, Briefing, European Parliament, July 2015]

Productivity gains are increasingly going to the owners of capital (exacerbating income inequality). Around half of the decline in the labour share (i.e. that going to workers) can be explained by automation, and a further quarter by globalisation (especially the offshoring of jobs).[5.  Mai Chi Dao, Mitali Das, Zsoka Koczan and Weicheng Lian, ‘Drivers of Declining Labor Share of Income’, IMF Blog, 12 April 2017] While this makes sense, rational explanations, of course, do nothing for the low and middle earners struggling to make ends meet and turning to the politicians promising a pay rise. And many of the (typically big) businesses reaping the benefits of technology and globalisation could afford to give one.

Critics of minimum wage hikes will shout about job losses. Indeed, the UK Office for Budget Responsibility – tasked with providing independent scrutiny and forecasts for the public finances – predicted 60,000 job losses as a result of 2015’s National Living Wage. It will be some time before we can assess the accuracy of that projection, but several studies looking at the impact over time challenge this common pessimism. One study of US federal minimum wage increases between 1938 and 2009 found that:[6.  Paul Sonn and Yannet Lathrop, ‘Raise wages, kill jobs? Seven decades of historical data find no correlation between minimum wage increases and employment levels’, National Employment law Project’, 5 May 2016]

“Basic economic indicators show no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and lower employment levels, even in the industries that are most impacted by higher minimum wages. To the contrary, in the substantial majority of instances (68 percent) overall employment increased after a federal minimum-wage increase. In the most substantially affected industries, the rates were even higher”.

This is in line with UK evidence that minimum wage rises since 1999 have had no negative employment effects on the overall labour market (though part-time workers do seem to have been impacted, which deserves attention).[7.  Marco Hafner, Jirka Taylor, Paulina Pankowska, Martin Stepanek, Shanthi Nataraj and Christian Van Stolk, ‘The impact of the National Minimum Wage on employment: A meta-analysis’, RAND Corporation, 2017]

More generally, where there is evidence of a negative impact on jobs, it invariably focuses on the lowest skilled, and in particular low-skilled young people.[8.  David Neumark, ‘The effects of minimum wages on employment’, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 21 December 2015] That is why any pay-rise for those on the lowest wages should be accompanied by a much greater focus on up-skilling, something which businesses have failed to invest in (unsurprisingly given the abundance of cheap labour). A recent report by think tank IPPR found English businesses are spending £5 billion less on training, in real terms, than a decade ago; and spend per employee per year is half that of the European average.[9. Skills gap threat to post-Brexit economy – UK employers spend £6bn less on skills than Euro average, IPPR, 18 February 2017] The risk to youth employment posed by increasing the minimum wage is also why pay levels staggered by age are important (in the UK, the rate for under-18s is almost half that for over 25s), and why training schemes such apprenticeships that provide a partial wage are key.

Of course, while a pay-rise is a worthy (even essential) policy in the short to medium-term, the longer-term challenge is preparing the labour force for an era of robots and algorithms. As my colleague Nigel Cameron highlights in a recent piece on the rise of robots, we just don’t know what the employment impact is going to be, but we do know the future world of work is going to require different skills (ones Nigel sees as more suited to women). Which is another reason for politicians of all stripes to prioritise not just fair wages, but the skills that will equip workers to earn them.

Second… BIG infrastructure investment is essential

Big spending promises are at the heart of the platforms put forward by the Left. And while extravagant general increases in public spending – pushing more and more debt on to younger generations – is poor policy and fiscally dangerous, there is one area in which they are bang on the money: infrastructure spending. Well, let me caveat that, big spending on the right infrastructure under the right circumstances (more on that later).

Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign pledged $1 trillion of investment over five years via his ‘Rebuild America Act’ – promising to upgrade everything from bridges and railways, to electricity and broadband.[10.  ‘Creating Jobs Rebuilding America’, Bernie, accessed 5 September 2017] In the UK, Labour’s 2017 manifesto included a £250 billion ‘National Transformation Fund’ to invest in infrastructure projects over ten years, including rail, housing and energy.[11.  For the Many Not the Few. The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, accessed 5 September 2017]

It’s a form of investing to save – or at least investing to stimulate. Infrastructure is ‘pillar two’ of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index, one of four ‘basic requirements’ for a competitive economy. The US ranks third overall for competitiveness, but is outside the top ten at number 11 for infrastructure. The UK is seventh overall, but ninth for infrastructure – and it ranks just 27^th for roads and 19^th for rail.[12.  Klaus Schwab, ‘The Global Competitiveness Report 2016-17’, World Economic Forum, 2016]

For Sanders and Corbyn, however, pledges of serious spending for infrastructure renewal are couched in a more fundamental truth: the building blocks of economic success matter on a human level. As Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter puts it in relation to transport:[13.  Rosabeth Moss Kanter, ‘Why Can’t We Move? Solving America’s infrastructure problems’, Harvard Magazine, July-August 2015]

“The state of transportation infrastructure touches every important societal issue: health and safety, air quality, family budgets, productivity and use of time, inequality and social mobility, the nature of cities, jobs for today and jobs for the future. Public transportation in particular, I found, is an important ride out of poverty and into the middle class if it provides access to jobs and education.

Once America was the world’s acknowledged innovator. Now we’re stuck on the way to the future—stuck in traffic, stuck in congressional gridlock, and stuck in history.” 

One Harvard study found lower commuter time is a strong factor in low-income families escaping poverty and achieving upward mobility.[15.  Mikayla Bouchard, ’Transportation Emerges as Crucial to Escaping Poverty’, The New York Times, 7 May 2015] Which when you think about it, is not that surprising: employment is the best route out of poverty, but you have to be able to get to work. Common sense.

Crucially though, back to my caveat, not all spending is equal – or even good. Over-runs in time and budget are common in public projects (the UK’s high speed rail project HS2, for example, was reported to be £7 billion over budget in 2016[16. ‘HS2 rail link is $7bn over budget and facing delays say MPs’, Sky News, 14 September 2016]), wasting taxpayer funds. But as Tyler Duvall – a former under secretary for policy at the US Department of Transportation – argued in 2010, the greatest waste comes from the failure to act strategically:[17. Tyler Duvall, ‘Unclogging Transportation’, National Affairs, Spring 2010]

“Put simply, a business starts by asking the question: ‘What will the project achieve for us?’ The company then compares the expected return on the project’s investment with other potential uses of capital — treating the company’s available funds as fungible across a wide array of investment opportunities, and estimating the benefits of alternative projects in order to ensure the best use of a limited budget. Once a project is undertaken, a post-investment assessment is conducted to determine whether it was a success, and whether the returns on investment met the company’s expectations. The results of the review then shape decisions about future investments. The private-sector approach is hardly rocket science: It requires simply prioritizing needs, investing in the projects that will yield the most benefit and value, and keeping track of what works and what doesn’t.”

Again, common sense. It also means, as Duvall points out, considering that the best approach might not create the best photo-op. Congestion charges and market pricing, for example, enable more efficient use of existing transport capacity, but don’t generate the ‘local investment’ headlines of pork barrel projects. The difference is, they actually deliver value: in 2005, to deal with congestion, differential pricing (based on peak and off-peak times) was introduced at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, within two months around a third of shipping traffic was shifted to off peak.[18. Ibid]

Likewise, the political bias is often towards a shiny new, ribbon-cutting opportunity rather than the essential upgrade of crumbling infrastructure. Yet, as a paper by Brookings argues: “It’s easier to allocate maintenance money efficiently than money for new projects.”[19. Peter Olson and David Wessel, ‘The case for spending more on infrastructure maintenance’, Brookings, 31 January 2017]

Big investment is needed, but, as is invariably the case with public spending, it’s how you spend it.

(Steve Hilton Discusses the populism sweeping many Western economies, and his belief that it can be converted into a positive agenda for a change.)

The policies of the Left are imbued with a sense of hope and a promise of change

Both these policies have clear, tangible benefits to people’s lives. They are not abstract arguments about debt and deficit (as important as those are); they are about giving not taking, in the form of a hand up not a hand out. They are, ultimately, a promise of a better standard of living. And that, perhaps, is the most compelling part of the Left’s platform. They offer hope. In his essay for UnHerd last week, Angus Robertson, Deputy Leader of the Scottish National Party, argued that:

“In Greece and Spain, Syriza and Podemos ran on a ‘hope agenda’ that things can and must be better for society, something that resonated especially for many young voters in countries with mammoth levels of youth unemployment.”

Pablo Iglesias, Secretary-General of Spain’s Podemos party, says “we saw ourselves as a force for renewal”, which in an era of stagnation for many is compelling.[20.  Pablo Iglesias, Understanding Podemos, New Left Review, May-June 2015]

In an interview with UnHerd, Steve Hilton, former adviser to UK Prime Minister David Cameron and current Fox talk show host, advocated ‘positive populism’. Hilton sees in the populism sweeping the West a chance to turn “it into an agenda for real reform and for change, that actually ends up really improving the daily lives of people.” If mainstream politicians are to compete, if the centre is to regain ground, then it is ‘positive populism’ they must embrace. They could do worse than starting with policies that increase low wages and create opportunity.

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FURTHER READING

For a discussion, and evidence review, of the decline in labour share see Silvia Merler, ‘The decline of the labour share of income’, Bruegel, 24 April 2017

Klaus Schwab, ‘The Global Competitiveness Report 2016-17’, World Economic Forum, 2016

Tyler Duvall, ‘Unclogging Transportation’, National Affairs, Spring 2010

In the age of social media, though, rallies make sense. The audience for them is not primarily the diehard supporters who will turn out in the rain. It’s the hundreds of thousands of people who will see footage on regional news bulletins, and as ‘B-roll’ – the silent footage which is used as a backdrop to a voiceover – on Facebook videos. (Incidentally, if you want to tell whether a political party or candidate “gets” the internet, see if they have subtitles on their videos. If they don’t, it’s a red flag: many videos are watched on public transport or work computers, with the sound muted.)

Since Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, his team has placed huge importance on social media – which they see as the antidote to the right-wing domination of the newspapers, and the way they set the agenda for the “impartial” broadcasters. His tweet announcing his victory in September 2015 included an embedded video of his acceptance speech, and was retweeted more than 2,700 times. From the start, his team recognised the importance of the digital sphere. In 2015, the TSSA union’s head of digital operations, Ben Soffa, was seconded to the leadership campaign. (He has since married Corbynite MP Cat Smith; the Labour leader was at the wedding.) Soffa, who created a phone-banking tool called Canvassing App, is now Labour’s head of digital organising.

Labour has also benefited from a large activist base full of digital natives: the campaign group Momentum holds regular gatherings of software programmers for what are called “hackathons”. By way of example, these fast and creative sessions built a carpooling app called “My Nearest Marginal” in just a week when the snap election was announced. That allowed Labour to capitalise on its far larger membership (Labour now has 550,000 members; the Conservatives have just 150,000, while both the SNP and Lib Dems have around 100,000) by directing canvassers to the most useful seats.

Just as a previous generation looked to the Obama campaign for insights into the latest fundraising and contact database tools, Momentum has built links with Bernie Sanders supporters. American activists held training sessions in Britain before the election, and veterans of his tilt at the Democrat nomination came over to help code tools such as a version of Hustle, his texting service to motivate volunteers.

There is a recognition among insurgent campaigns across Europe that the digital space is a counterweight to the established channels: the team behind the leftist candidate for the French presidency, Jean-Luc Melenchon, created a videogame called Fiscal Combat, where he seizes money from bankers.

An Obama-influenced digital consultancy, Liegey Muller Pons, created volunteer training apps for Emmanuel Macron which recorded simple canvassing questions such as: “What works for France?” (Macron also employed a digital guru to lay traps for hackers.)

For Corbyn’s team, the two important lessons from Sanders were “hold big rallies, make great videos”. Facebook’s algorithm pushes videos into news feeds – the website believes the format is key to its continued expansion – and shareability is vital. These controlled messages also reduced the number of risk-laden interviews Corbyn needed to give to what his team saw as hostile media groups.

Online, the Tories leant heavily on attack adverts, often featuring Diane Abbott. By contrast, the left pursued a divided strategy. Momentum posted adverts about the cruelty and callousness of the Tories which fired up the base and got out their core vote. Some dwelled on generational conflicts — such as a group of well-heeled pensioners sneering at younger voters, which reached two million people — which mattered in an election where the biggest divide in voting intention was by age. The official Labour adverts, however, often had a soft-focus, optimistic feel: one featured Lily Allen singing Somewhere Only We Know, over photos of workers in various industries, finishing with the slogan: “For the many, not the few” (see below). On Facebook, positive messages are particularly shareable; “I love the NHS” is a more appealing badge to pin on yourself than “I hate the most senior black politician in the country”.

All this meant Labour benefited from organic reach alongside its paid adverts.

Facebook does not release data about how political adverts use its targeting capabilities, whether based on geography, identity or interests. But Sam Jeffers, the co-founder of ‘Who Targets Me’ – which tracked 7,000 political Facebook adverts during the campaign – noticed that the Conservatives’ online adverts focused on potential gains rather than defending their own marginals. Jeffers claims that in the final stages of the campaign, there were no Tory adverts shown in Hastings and Rye – which Amber Rudd held by just 346 votes. That matters beyond election night: the tiny majority is regularly cited by Conservative MPs as a reason not to back her in any future leadership contest.

Similarly, Labour’s greater strength online is a reflection of its bigger membership, and the demographics of that membership. The Conservatives “remain a declining party, with a shrinking membership of fewer than 150,000, stuck in the elite-driven, broadcast-era mode that they (and Labour) perfected a generation ago, bolting on digital media targeting without the engagement,” Professor Andrew Chadwick of Loughborough University wrote this summer.

Throughout her leadership, Theresa May has been reluctant to engage personally with social media – seeing it as unserious. Her official Twitter account follows zero people, and according to Tim Ross and Tom McTague’s new book Betting The House, her team refused to issue statements on social media following the Manchester terror attack because “reacting quickly on Twitter” was “what David Cameron did”. While Twitter’s user numbers may be tiny in comparison with Facebook, it is the watercooler for all political journalists and commentators. May’s decision to cut herself off from it might be high-minded, but it has repercussions for her ability to communicate. (May has 360,000 Twitter followers; Corbyn has 1.4 million; he also has double the number of Likes on Facebook.)

Labour’s greater digital clout is also a reflection of Jeremy Corbyn’s persona, which is more suited to the social media age. His Snapchat account, run by his staff, posted “candid” photos of him drinking tea and travelling by train; it also shared straight-to-camera endorsements by celebrities such as grime star JME. It spoke to younger voters in a register that felt natural and unforced. (This carries risks, however: could even Corbyn’s anointed heir inherit his support, or is built too strongly around his “personal brand”?)

By contrast, Mark Wallace of ConservativeHome reports that “CCHQ did have a Youth Outreach officer, Calum Neilson, of whom volunteers and candidates speak positively. But he had been ‘hamstrung’, I’m told, by a Party ‘freaked out’ about youth campaigning, and was effectively forbidden from social media engagement during the campaign – leaving the Tory operation even further behind in online engagement.” There were also complaints from Conservative candidates that constituency Facebook pages were centrally controlled, and focused too relentlessly on anti-Corbyn messages at the expense of local issues.

This presents a dilemma for future campaigns. How do you maintain message discipline, while also cultivating the relaxed style which looks like authenticity on social media? Several high-profile Conservative MPs have decided to embrace the looseness of Twitter: Nicholas Soames uses endless hashtags; James Cleverly is unafraid to be an attack dog; even Jacob Rees-Mogg has now opened an account, starting with a tweet in Latin. Still, the party is lagging behind Labour, which has many big personalities (such as Jess Phillips) on Twitter.

Quietly, senior Labour figures have also developed relationships with the “alternative media”, such as the aggressively pro-Corbyn Skwawkbox and Canary websites. These sites, along with independent campaigns run by trade unions and single-issue groups, amplified Labour’s key messages. One of the little-noticed stories which harmed the Tories was their decision to drop a proposed ban on ivory sales; although this got minimal coverage in the papers, it reverberated around petition sites and blogs. (The Tories should have seen this coming; any MP will tell you that they are bombarded by automated emails about animal rights.)

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the 2017 election, though, is that it no longer makes sense to talk about “digital strategy” as a discrete phenomenon, or as an added extra. The Tories pouring digital resources into the wrong areas is consistent with the broader picture of the election. Theresa May also visited solid Labour seats in the early days of the campaign, when it looked as though she could expect to make sweeping gains. The same bad information was used to decide both digital and real world campaigning.

The Corbyn team and Momentum, on the other hand, exceeded expectations by combining the latest tools – such as the My Nearest Marginal app – with old-fashioned legwork from their large activist base. If the Conservatives want to “win the internet”, they first need to find more activists who intuitively understand it.

*

“Housing policy… perhaps nowhere has Tory policy failure been so complete and so damaging to our people,’ boomed Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour conference in October 2016. Corbyn was absolutely right. This is part of a trend of left-wing politicians and writers highlighting the genuinely important problems – even if they often propose heavy-handed, misguided solutions.

For decades, far too few homes have been built in the UK. Under governments of all stripes, house building has fallen woefully short of what is needed to accommodate even the natural expansion of British population, let alone immigration. The result has been spiraling prices and the emergence of ‘generation rent’. A decade ago, almost 60% of 25 to 34 year-olds owned their own home. Now it’s under 40%.

The Conservatives made the disastrous error of stoking up the demand side of the housing market via its ‘Help to Buy’ scheme – rather than taking measures to rein in prices by ensuring more homes are built. Since taking office in 2010, the Tories have allowed the UK’s oligopolistic house-building industry to amass vast landbanks and delay the conversion of planning permissions in actual homes, boosting prices and profits by imposing a deliberate house-building go-slow.

Corbyn, in his October 2016 speech, hit the nail on the head. Tory housing policy has indeed failed –including for voters who should be natural Conservatives. It was the unaffordability of housing, I’d say, more than any other single factor, which explained Corbyn’s appeal among young adults, professionals and non-graduates alike, in the June 2017 general election. Tory policy has not only failed to address the UK’s chronic housing shortage, but has actually made it much worse.

The Corbyn position on housing is a good illustration of ‘what the left gets right’. Another is the stand US Democrat Elizabeth Warren has taken on banking reform. The Senator for Massachusetts has spent years highlighting how some of the US banks that almost brought down the global financial system, and then required multi-billion dollar bailouts, remain ‘too big to fail’.

Warren has campaigned ceaselessly to restore a proper split between US investment and commercial banking. She has identified – correctly – that the Western financial system remains unstable because large banks take in the deposits of ordinary firms and households that enjoy a state-guarantee, but also engage in high-risk trading activities.

The ‘co-mingling’ of these two activities means traders gamble irrationally, knowing their institution will be bailed-out given the need to protect ordinary deposits. Such ‘moral hazard’ continues despite measures brought in since the 2008 financial crisis to separate trading and deposit-taking – measures repeatedly watered-down by the mighty banking lobby. Important elements of the sweeping Dodd-Frank Act have been repealed under both the Obama and Trump administrations – and there are signs of more dilutions to come.

Warren wants to restore the ‘Glass Steagall’ divide between investment and commercial banking, breaking up the large ‘universal banks’. Amen to that. Introduced in 1933, the Glass-Steagall legislation, and its less formal UK equivalent, protected Western banks from major systemic crises for over sixty decades. Since the Depression-era law was repealed in 1997, after President Bill Clinton succumbed to Wall Street lobbying, financial markets everywhere have lurched from crisis to crisis.

“For years, banks have been in a feeding frenzy, swallowing up smaller competitors to become more powerful and, eventually, too big to fail,” said Warren, in a seminal speech in June 2016. “And today, eight years after the financial crisis, three out of the four biggest banks in America are even bigger than they were before”.

Very few Conservative politicians, on either side of the Atlantic, have called out the post-Lehman banking reforms for the inadequate half-measures that they are. Warren, almost alone among senior legislators anywhere, is carrying the flame for necessary root-and-branch changes – even though the Federal Reserve itself has designated America’s five largest banks as ‘too big to fail’.

She has, in fact, launched a broadside against growth of competition-stifling consolidation across a range of US sectors – from airlines to banks and health insurance. Warren was also the first senior politician I know of to point the finger at the overwhelming monopoly power of the tech giants Google, Amazon and Facebook. “They deserve to be highly profitable and successful – but the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors that want their chance to change the world again,” she said in the summer of 2016. “Today in America, competition is dying … concentration threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy”.

Sometimes the Left’s analysis is good but its answers are dangerous nonsense. Part of Corbyn’s solution to the UK housing crisis is draconian rent controls – which would, of course, simply cut the number of properties available to rent. The Labour leader wants to use ‘people’s QE’ – a turbo-charged version of central bank money printing – to fund the building of hundreds of thousands of state-owned homes. Such ideas are deeply counter-productive. Yes, the UK needs more low-rent social housing but far better to get the incentives right so the private sector builds quality homes on the scale required to address the UK’s chronic home shortage.

In other cases, such as Elizabeth Warren’s analysis of the Western banking complex, the Left gets it right in terms of both the problem and what needs to be done. I personally think that Warren’s manifesto, in the hands of a Democrat who can connect with the US ‘rust-belt’, reestablishing the party’s blue-collar credentials, would go a long way towards winning the White House.

I’m generally a business-friendly commentator who believes in low taxes and a small state. In my view, much of what Americans call ‘liberalism’ – in its modern-day, reactionary form – is unwise. Yet I’d increasingly credit ‘the Left’ with some of the best, most courageous and clear-sighted policy analysis – lots of which I agree with, even if the proposed solutions sometimes make me balk.

Big companies across the Western world have become far too powerful. Our political, business and media elites are much too intertwined. Such cosy relationships have resulted in an enfeebled competition policy, which is further increasing the might of a small number of corporations, to the detriment of consumers, smaller firms and broader society. We’ll soon need the kind of bold anti-trust measures that America reached for in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – policies championed by Ida Tarbell, the journalist whose name is the title of this column and was the subject of this UnHerd video profile.

These views are increasingly finding favour with a broad swathe of the electorate. Yet such positions, which are essentially pro-market even if they aren’t pro-business, are now more likely to be posited by left-wing commentators and politicians, rather than those on the right.

Part of the reason, of course, is the link between ideas and vested interests. While the Left has traditionally generated party funding from trade unions and small individual donors, the Right relies to a greater extent on corporate cash. That’s not helpful when voters have fallen out of love with the big banks and utility companies and are increasingly sick of ‘big corporations’.

Yet it’s not as simple as that. The Democrats, under both the Clintons and Obama, took corporate dollar on a huge scale, becoming deeply enamored of the tech titans and getting even closer to Wall Street than their Republican rivals. Warren’s financial reforms might make some headway, were lawmakers from her own party not constantly urging her to keep her mouth shut. The UK’s Labour party, too, under Tony Blair, abandoned its traditional loyalty to lower income voters, making up for years of frosty relations with business by becoming far too close. Blair’s ‘New Labour’ tribe was transfixed by the corporate money-men, putty in the hands of corporate lobbyists (as Douglas Murray recognised in his column last Friday).

While the Right’s link to corporate money is umbilical, from the mid-1990s the Left has been determined to get in on that act. The response in the UK has been Jeremy Corbyn, saying things about the political-financial nexus that very much need to be said. And, of course, another left-wing firebrand, Bernie Sanders, has been making the running on campaign finances in the US.

“We now have a political situation where billionaires are literally able to buy elections and candidates,” Sanders says, without apology. “This is not what this country is supposed to be about”.

Whether you come from the Left or the Right, however you vote, Sanders is surely right to shout about this problem and to keep shouting.

“This is not Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Amen to that, too.

Brits and Americans are united on one thing – 80% of respondents on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that terrorists were among the most dangerous people in the world today. No surprise there. But after that? ComRes presented a list of other possible ‘baddies’. The full list was…

• Big businesses… or High-taxing governments;
• Capitalists… or Communists;
• Fake news;
• Left-wing unions, politicians and campaigners… or right-wing pundits, politicians and donors;
• Military leaders;
• Religious leaders;
• And then Terrorists.

The main reason for our asking was to establish the popularity/unpopularity of left-wing versus right-wing flag-wavers. The overall totals suggest little difference in either suspicion of the two ideological camps or, indeed, between the two countries. 20% of Americans saw right-wingers as dangerous and, very nearly the same, 18% saw left-wingers as dangerous. The numbers in Britain were 17% and 16% respectively. As with the data we published last week, however, the totals hide a significant generation gap…

• Within Britain, 27% of those aged 65+ see left-of-centre unions, politicians and campaigners as most dangerous – but only 10% of 18 to 24 year-olds say the same. All of the Tory efforts in the recent general election – focusing, for example, on Jeremy Corbyn’s historical links with IRA paramilitaries – did, indeed, fall on stony ground.
• In contrast 24% of young Brits saw right-wingers as “most dangerous” and only 11% of older Britons agreed.

The numbers from America were, perhaps, more surprising…

• Older Americans are significantly more likely than younger Americans to consider political ideology dangerous: 34% of those aged 65+ say that right-wing pundits, politicians and donors are dangerous in the world today compared to only 14% of 18-24 year olds.
• On left-wing unions, politicians and campaigners, 22% of those aged 65+ say they are dangerous in the world today, compared to 12% of 18-24 year olds.

***

ComRes interviewed 2,059 UK adults on 7th and 8th August. 1,011 US adults were interviewed between 7th and 9th August. Both surveys were conducted online.

The tides of democratic politics have always come in and out, but never have they done so with such speed or pitch. It is hard not to celebrate a part of this.  For as long as the franchise has existed British and American politics has been regularly poisoned by the perception that there is an ‘elite’ or ‘establishment’ that makes decisions over the heads of the voters.  The idea that everything that matters can be cosily arranged in ‘smoke-filled’ (more likely detergent-scented) rooms and that nothing really changes has a strong pull on popular grievance.

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn, like that of Donald Trump in America, is – among other things – an angry shout against this trend. When people criticise either Corbyn or Trump for their lack of political experience they miss the point. Both Trump and Corbyn are the result of generational forces which are satisfied to throw a stun-grenade into the political class and find justifications for their action after the fact.

In America the relevant parts of the right now find themselves called upon to give ever-more frequent, as well as better, answers for their actions. In Britain the people who supported Corbyn have seen a different phenomenon occur. For the time-being the demands for explanations have gone away. Because Corbyn did not lead the Labour party to utter collapse in June’s unwise general election, the demise or splitting apart of the Labour party did not occur. Instead the Labour party is more united this year than it was last year, though it is now cohering and unifying around what was until very recently recognised to be one of the wildest extremes of British politics. If there is to be a reckoning over this – as there is bound to be – it has been delayed longer than that on the other side of the Atlantic.

It shouldn’t be especially surprising that Britain’s grenade-throwers emerged on the political left.  The political right in Britain is – even, or perhaps especially, after the Brexit vote – a relatively unified political force.  Its views on free trade, immigration and education – for instance – remain fairly uniform.  On the British left, however, a period of correction would appear to have been needed since at least the 1990s.

A portion of the left was never happy or content with the era of Tony Blair, any more than Bernie Sanders voters were ecstatic about the Clinton era.  Blair and Bill Clinton, like Gerhard Schröder in Germany, inhabited and encouraged a language of political moderation and ardent positioning on the centre-left, even as they portrayed any and all political opponents as motivated not so much by wrong-headedness as by deep evil. The positioning was not all verbal. These leaders all appeared to signal a genuine new era on the left, with a political movement finally at peace with the free market as well as the free movement of peoples in an era of increasing prosperity.

There were two blows to this apparent consensus: one global, the other personal.  The global blow came with the 2008 financial crash – a crash which also exacerbated the concern that a certain level of free movement created cultural as well as economic draw-backs for any local labour force.

But perhaps even that could have been weathered had the personal not intruded. Until Bill Clinton’s retirement former Presidents in the US made some money out of office by writing their memoirs. None had previously achieved Clinton’s level of wealth by giving speeches which earned him in an hour more than the average worker could hope to save in a lifetime[1.  CNN calculated that “Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring.” Report from 6 February 2016.]. Tony Blair watched his friend’s amassing of Croesus-like wealth and appeared to think it was good thing, spending his time after office with the apparent sole aim of joining the super-rich in as short a time as possible[2.  Estimated to have a personal wealth of £60 million (a Daily Telegraph investigation from June 2015), there has been a particular complaint that he has made his money by consorting with the wrong kind of people. The Daily Mail ran a series in March of last year that set out to tell “the sickening truth about how Blair’s made millions from doing dirty deals with dictators”.] Worse was the behaviour of Schröder, who appeared to have signed up to work for Gazprom even before he had left his elected office,[3.  See The Guardian from 13 December 2005 when the former German Chancellor abruptly resigned as his party’s leader and walked into a lucrative job with Russia’s Gazprom and, more recently, the Financial Times of 13 August 2017 reported: “Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, looks set to deepen his already close ties with the Russian energy sector, after he was nominated as an independent director to the board of state-controlled oil company Rosneft…Mr Schröder’s appointment to a senior role in a commercial project he had championed while in government proved highly controversial at the time, with many German politicians accusing him of an ethical lapse. He has consistently denied he had done anything wrong.”] and rewarded his new employer in Moscow by reprimanding Eastern European leaders whenever they expressed concerns about Vladimir Putin and his potential direction of travel.

The backlash against this was always bound to be not only considerable, but personal. And these events could have churned up no better lodestar than a ploddingly consistent backbench MP, who never made his peace with the post-1980s model of western capitalism (or the general consensus against the use of political violence) but who had said the same things in his obscure corner of politics for more than a quarter of a century. If everybody else was only out for themselves, what reason other than deep personal integrity (and potential rightness) could be found to explain the career of Jeremy Corbyn? And who better to support at such a juncture of confusion and self-interest?

Perhaps the Labour party’s remaining moderates are waiting for an accident.  Perhaps they are waiting for a miracle. Yet in the process they have actually proved one of the fears of many Corbyn supporters – which is that political survival appears to interest politicians more than any residual sense of what is right or wrong.  Moderates in the Labour party have chosen their poison, and will have to account for it one day. But in doing so they have also dug the trench of public cynicism several feet deeper.

That this is only true in theory – such a move would not end well – doesn’t disguise the fact that the British constitution is a mess, that it resembles an organogram drafted by a madman, and that this has always been so. It has evolved piecemeal over centuries to meet the crises, bulges and political fashions of the times. Outside the comment pages of The Daily Telegraph, it has rarely been the subject of the impassioned patriotic fervour its codified US equivalent attracts. And in truth this Heath-Robinson set-up has suited the UK, which is anyway a bodge job of four proud nations that often have differing cultural and philosophical expectations. For the system to work, there needs to be a lot of give.

Has that ever been truer than today? It is now twenty years since the biggest British constitutional upheaval for centuries, when Scots voted to create their own parliament in Edinburgh. Devolution, said Donald Dewar, the first First Minister, was a process not an event, and he was right. Since its inception there has been a steady transfer of further powers from Westminster to Holyrood as Scots have begun to enjoy making decisions for themselves. Brexit will deliver a whole new tranche of responsibilities in areas such as agriculture and fisheries.

The question is, where does it end? The independence referendum of 2014 delivered a barely decisive result of 55% for staying in the Union. In its aftermath, amid a spasm of tartan emotionalism, the popularity of the SNP surged and it has won every election since. Nicola Sturgeon would still like to hold a second referendum before the next devolved election in 2021. Has devolution only meant the drawn-out death, like a slow puncture, of the United Kingdom?

I focus on Scotland only because it provides us with a particularly dramatic example of the restlessness we currently witness across Western democracies. The old, top-down ways that saw strong central governments ruling at snail’s pace over subservient populaces – who were largely forced to take whatever gruel they were given no longer seem appropriate or durable. In our contemporary, fast-moving world of heavily politicised populations that are liberated, informed and engaged by social media, of big data that enables policy analysis and delivery at micro levels, of hyper-consumerism that expects responsive, individualised service from the state as well as the private sector, things must – and will – change.

If you have any doubts about this, look at research by Harvard’s Yascha Mounk and others, which has found public support for democracy is dropping, particularly among millennials. Alarming statistics abound: the share of Americans who say army rule would be a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ thing was one in 16 in 1995 but just one in 6 by 2014. Only 19% of US millennials thought it illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent, compared to 43% of older Americans. In Europe, 53% of older people thought a military takeover would be wrong, but only 36% of millennials.

Mounk finds the same trend across many long-established democracies. ‘In Germany, younger cohorts used to be reliably more pro-democratic than older ones. Now, both the young and the middle-aged express more authoritarian values than people did at similar life stages in the past. The picture is even less encouraging in the United Kingdom and the United States, where millennials surveyed today are markedly more favorable to having a “strong leader” than their parents’ generation was at the same life stage.’

There has also been a marked increase in young people identifying as extreme left or right, which helps explain the success of Jeremy Corbyn, the alt-right and some of the rather sinister populists who have popped up around the EU. For decades, the number of countries ranked ‘free’ in Freedom House’s annual survey rose steadily, but over the past decade it has charted a reversal – think of the authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, for example.

Yascha Mounk of Harvard University discusses falling support for Democracy with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria

Mounk writes that:

“Complacency has been the dominant response of Western elites to the looming threats of Brexit, of Donald Trump and of the rise of illiberal politics. The comforting assumption that the past will remain a reliable guide to the future — that countries would not vote for extreme candidates when they never have before, or indeed that core norms of liberal democracy wouldn’t come under attack where democracy has always been “the only game in town” — hasn’t worked out very well so far. Now is the time to stop being complacent.”

Easy to say, perhaps, but what is to be done? One of my greatest worries is that we spend so much time freaking out about Trump’s latest idiotic tweet or quasi-fascistic policy, or railing against Brexit and its consequences, or denouncing the Marxist inanities of Corbyn’s Labour, that we are failing to address the roots of their support. As we run around with our hands in the air, claiming arrogantly to be victims of our own success, nothing’s getting fixed, no intellectual heavy lifting is being done, we’re not preparing for what comes next. And what comes next could be even worse – imagine a competent Trump or a clever, persuasive Corbyn.

How did we end up here? Well, because a massive financial crash proved that the system was rigged against the little guy; that these enormous institutions and the super-rich individuals who ran them had slipped the bounds of democratic accountability, despite their systemic centrality; that governments, countries and even supranational organisations were toothless in the face of collapse.

We missed or ignored the fact that globalisation and liberal overreach was leaving too many behind, ostracised from and increasingly angry at the great, shiny project; we dismissed the valid bit of human nature that values belonging, whether to a local community, a nation, familiar mores and traditions, to somewhere recognisably home. We took down barriers and borders, we connected and built, we lined our own pockets and luxuriated in the innate goodness of our intentions, and, in the end, we got our ass kicked.

It seems to me the solutions to our crisis lie somewhere in that Enoch Powell phrase: power devolved is power retained. To stay together we need to loosen up, certainly in the UK. Individual and group identities have become too strong to tolerate remote, faceless government, not just from Brussels but from Westminster too. A radical programme of decentralisation and modernisation is needed. Extreme devolution to our cities and nations, to our councils and classrooms, would place power – and therefore accountability – closer to the people. Does anyone today look at a government minister and expect them to have all, or even any, of the answers? What a crazy idea. Why would they? How could they?

Reform of the Lords, which even a decade ago could be still taken for a gorgeous if stuffy piece of historical flummery but is now a national embarrassment, is becoming a priority – make it a senate of the regions capable of telling the Commons what’s what with a degree of democratic authority and regional awareness, and where mutual problems can be worked through.

Build up civic society by uniting its component parts in the pursuit of great, ambitious projects. Due to the impracticality of prime ministers and presidents agreeing and delivering on targets, the fight against climate change is now largely driven by sub-national administrations and voluntary partnerships between the private, third and state sectors. This should be a model for future participation and project management, and for how to cut out the malign influence of self-serving idiots like Trump.

If we are to re-establish the credibility of democracy and its institutions, of free markets and competition as the best routes to wealth creation, then people need a greater input into the process and a greater stake in the outcomes. We might scratch our heads at why our young people can look fondly on the kind of socialist economics that have caused calamity around the world, but we should also look at why the failings of our own approach have driven them in that direction. We have not created the society many of our compatriots, especially the most disadvantaged, the non-urban, the less educated, were promised or had a right to expect.

Our democracy is plodding, ineffective and distant, and therefore increasingly unlike the rest of our lives, which are immediate, professional and connected. If we want to avoid demagogues – perhaps better and therefore more dangerous demagogues – we need to tackle them at the roots. We need to be tough not just on Trump, but on the causes of Trump.

More than a century has passed since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917; seventy years since the end of the Second World War; twenty-five since the end of the Cold War; yet arguments continue as to which form of political extremism, communism or fascism, has been responsible for a greater number of deaths.

The numbers themselves are disputed, muddied by distinctions between deaths in war and peace, between military and civilians, between those killed and those who died as a result of disease, famine or forced migration. Since the idea of mass murder is both sensational and shocking, media coverage inclines to big numbers and broad accusations[1.  See, for example, the blog by John J. Walters: ‘Communism killed 94m in the 20^th Century. Feels Need to Kill Again’, March 2013; Chairman Mao was the ‘greatest mass murderer in history’, The Daily Mail, 7 October 2014.]. Often the numbers are so large it is hard for an individual to process or relate them to events. Generations with no personal or family memory of global war can find it particularly hard to put these statistics into context[2.  See The Independent, 17 October 2016: ‘Millennials believe George W. Bush killed more people than Stalin’.].

Some argue that while the crimes perpetrated under fascism, especially in the form of National Socialism (Nazism) under Adolf Hitler, have been documented in detail, the same attention has not been given to crimes committed under communism. This argument can lead to a sterile wrangle over doubtful numbers, and may not be the most helpful way of comparing crimes attributed to fascism or communism. As Timothy Snyder wrote in his thoughtful analysis ‘Hitler vs Stalin: Who Killed More?’ the question raises issues of quality as well as quantity, and is much more complex than it may seem[3.  Timothy Snyder, ‘Hitler vs Stalin: Who Killed More?’ in the New York Review of Books, 10 March 2011.]. It is more illuminating to consider why murders committed by the extreme left or right tend to be talked and written about differently.

Thinking about the past: continuity and change

In the early 21st century it is more common for certain ideological assumptions to be rejected by a majority of people in democratic societies, than it is for them to be widely accepted. Both in Europe and the USA, for example, the idea of glorifying Nazi ideas of racial purity, with their evocation of the Holocaust, provokes widespread abhorrence. Even though Nazism was discredited with Hitler’s death in 1945, it retains the capacity to inspire rejection and inflame passions, and the equation of fascism with mass murder is potent. There have been many examples of post-war ethnic cleansing and genocide, from the Balkans to the Middle East to Rwanda. Though the causes of these terrible episodes are complex, the perception of a link with the Holocaust remains in the minds of many onlookers, even if not in the minds of those most closely involved. Similarly, the rise of right-wing nationalist or populist parties in supposedly democratic states causes unease and apprehension, and even if they achieve power they are very unlikely to call themselves fascists, let alone Nazis.

By contrast, the ideology, or perhaps more accurately the ideals, of communism retain the capacity for positive inspiration. This is most obviously true in Communist regimes like the People’s Republic of China, formed in 1949. Although the Soviet Union is widely thought of as the prototype of communist rule, the Chinese revolution was more ambitious and enduring than its Soviet counterpart, and more people lived – and still live – under communist states in East Asia than they ever did in post-war Europe.[4.  See Stephen Smith, Introduction to The Oxford Handbook on the History of Communism (Oxford University Press, 2014).] In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s economic policies, purges and deliberate terror campaigns between 1923 and 1953 led to millions of deaths (the numbers are disputed). During the Great Leap Forward under Mao Zedong from 1958 to 1962, an estimated 45 million people perished in China from starvation or overwork; in Cambodia, over 20% of the population were killed or died under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

Such crimes are not unreported: for example, The Black Book of Communism, published in 2006, set out in detail ‘crimes, terror and repression’ across the globe[5.  S. Courtois, N. Werth et al, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, 2006). Many detailed rebuttals can be found online, questioning elements in this work.]. Most people in non-communist states are aware that communism, as well as fascism, has been responsible for millions of deaths. Despite this, many people, not just in communist regimes but also in Western democracies, admire and are inspired by communist ideology, or at least by extreme left-wing ideals such as public ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. In a context of global financial and political instability, both left- and right-wing extreme views can seem attractive, but as a general rule those of the right seem more alarming to the majority of people than those of the left.

Looking back in order to look forwards

Admiring communism does not, of course, mean condoning mass murder, but it may mean talking about it in different terms. While fascism glorified war and violence for its own sake, Marxist theory saw force as the midwife of history – a means to an end. As the archives of former communist countries have become available since the end of the Cold War, it has become clear that however repressive those regimes may have been, many of their leaders continued to believe that they were building a better world. This idea of seeking to improve lives is key to understanding the different perceptions of the crimes committed by fascist, or communist regimes.

Hitler thought he was building a better world, too, based on Aryan supremacy and the elimination of ‘inferior’ elements. Those expressing such a view now face horrified opposition, even from the right. But a far greater number of people are attracted by the kind of ideals on which communism is based, however badly their implementation turned out in practice. Some argue that this means extreme left regimes are allowed to get away with murder, since those on the political left wing are reluctant to criticise them. But it is important to avoid the dangers of Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder, a phrase coined by the intelligence historian Professor Christopher Andrew: it means we must be careful to compare our current assessment of past events with what was, or could have been known about them at the time.

Media reporting of atrocities, civil wars or natural disasters can have a numbing effect, giving the impression that the world is in a worse state than ever before. But as every historian knows, in any given period many people live through terrible events without realising their full horror; while at the same time they feel that conditions – political, economic and international – are worse than in the past and deteriorating, even when the facts show otherwise. Understanding this helps to keep a grip on reality when judging what is known about crimes committed in the name of political ideology, rather than what is assumed to be true.

Today, here’s two findings where 18 to 24 year-olds and over 65s think almost identically.

Contrary to the suggestion that the young are socialists in the image of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Generation-Zers are actually pretty split on whether big government is as big of a problem as big government. Like with over 65s it’s a close-run thing. There are mirror-image challenges for both major British political parties here. Can Labour get past its ideological belief in the State and recognise when bureaucracy goes wrong[1.  I noted the neglect of government failure within economics in my November 2015 report for the Legatum Institute: “Economic textbooks are routinely full of the study of “market failure” and market failure, of course, provides the pretext for government intervention. But governments fail, too. There is the problem of policy by special interests of the kind described above and the growth of middle class entitlements as described in a previous chapter. There is also the short-termism that neglects investment in long-term infrastructure spending and instead prioritises the spending on immediate “goodies” that can help win votes at elections. In a 2014 survey the economists Jim Gwartney and Rosemarie Fike analysed 23 of the most common economic textbooks used in America and found that they were, on average, six times as likely to cover market failure as government failure. Don Boudreaux of George Mason University notes that the New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman did not mention government failure or public choice theory once in his introductory book to economics.”]? Can the Tories get past their admiration for wealth creation and take on big business when it acts against the public interest[2.  Taking on “creeping cronyism that is making free market capitalism an unfree and anti-competitive capitalism” was a key theme of Ruth Davidson MSP’s essay for UnHerd.]?

The second infographic below captures the finding by ComRes that young voters overwhelmingly share with their grandparents’ generation the view that a loving home is more important for the upbringing of a child than a good school.

More results tomorrow – with the first publication of our survey of US adults.

UnHerd today publishes polling from ComRes that suggests the weakness facing Britain’s Conservative Party – among the same age group – run even more deeply with the newest generation of voters holding attitudes on the balance between freedom versus equality; national power; Christianity; and the causes of crime which suggest the Left’s grip on values-generating institutions including schools, universities and the entertainment industry is strong. Very strong.

I’ve written about this research for The Guardian and concluded in this way:

“Tories determined to remain optimistic could hold on to Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that the facts of life are conservative. By that she meant that there were limits to how much a government could raise taxes without damaging the economy, for instance. David Willetts, the two-brained former Tory minister, once joked that a conservative was a libertarian with children. And certainly, as young people get older and their own kids experiment with drugs or are the victims of muggers – they, themselves, get “mugged by reality” and become more conservative in their attitudes to law and order and social structure.

That gravitational downwards pull on liberalism will take time, however. In the meantime the schools, universities and ideas-generating powers in social media are continuing to shape young minds in liberal, progressive ways. Until it faces up to the cultural onslaught on everything it holds dear, conservatism is in more trouble than it realises.”

There’s much more to come from the ComRes poll over coming days and I’ll be publishing them in daily bursts. Please follow us on Twitter or sign up to our email alerts if you don’t want to miss them.

An influential advisor on this matter is Yanis Varoufakis – the former Greek finance minister and a sworn enemy of the EU establishment. In a fascinating piece for the New Statesman (“as told to George Eaton”), Varoufakis reveals the nature of radical left thinking on the European Union.

Quite a lot of it is compatible with the thinking of the eurosceptic right:

“As democrats, we must accept the result of the referendum. To seek to overturn it through a second vote would be to do to the British people what the EU did to the Irish over the Lisbon Treaty: keep repeating the question until they delivered ‘the right answer’. The UK electorate would rightly conclude that referendums only count when they deliver the result that the establishment wants.

“The promise of a second referendum, as my Brexiteer friends (such as the former Conservative chancellor Norman Lamont) have noted, would also give the EU a strong incentive not to yield on any front. After this, Britain would be left to go cap in hand to the EU, begging to be readmitted, without any of the concessions that Margaret Thatcher and others secured.”

That said, Varoufakis would rather Britons had voted to stay:

“From the beginning of my conversations on Brexit with the Labour leadership, I advocated a ‘radical Remain’ stance: the UK should be for the EU, but not this EU. The labour movement in Britain and elsewhere has been critical of the operations of the state at the national level without calling for its disbandment. Similarly, we can be critical of the EU without seeking to leave it.”

Sadly, there’s little similarity between the “state at the national level” and the EU. While one can be critical of both, only one – the nation-state – is open to change. Consider Britain’s post-war history, during which there’s been at least four radical changes in direction (1945, 1979, 1997 and 2016). Compare that to the history of the EU (and its predecessor bodies); since the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, there’s been evolution and expansion, but each development has served to make the European ‘project’ more like itself.

The EU is a neoliberal and transnational construct. That was true when Jeremy Corbyn was still making his mind up about things (i.e. many decades ago) – and on this issue he’s had no reason to change his thinking. It’s no wonder that Labour supports an interim agreement between Britain and the EU; delaying a final Brexit settlement (or the absence thereof) also delays the final showdown between the Europhile and Eurosceptic left.

Varoufakis is clear about where he stands:

“Labour has left open the option of permanent membership of the single market if the EU grants the UK new controls over free movement. But this won’t happen. Nor should it. Borders should be an enemy of all progressives: either we are internationalists, or we are not. Those of us who have been critical of neoliberal globalisation have always pointed out that we have the free movement of goods, commodities and capital – but not of people.”

A socialist surely ought to know the distinction between people on the one hand and “goods, commodities and capital” on the other. Indeed, treating these categories as essentially interchangeable is a defining feature of neoliberalism.

Varoufakis also talks of borders as if they were obstacles to progress, when the opposite is true. There can be no progress without change and no change without difference. Borders, and the nations they define, enable difference. One can disagree with Corbyn’s idea of progress (and I do), but in terms of achieving any kind of change at all, he is right and Varoufakis is wrong.

The European Union is a system for embedding the status quo. Which is why the establishment is so keen on it.

In recent years the advanced democracies have seen a wave of insurgent parties and movements of the left: from Syriza in Greece, to Podemos in Spain and the rise and rise of the ‘socialist’ Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders in the United States. But progressive populism has been matched if not eclipsed by anti-elite populism of the right – most notably from Donald Trump but including Victor Orban in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France.

How should we understand these developments? Is this part of a wider new politics, a new normal? In this context, what chance does moderate politics have to be relevant and successful?

***

A few years ago if someone was to tell you that Jeremy Corbyn would become the leader of the British Labour Party, you’d probably have scoffed. If someone predicted that in a General Election in 2017, not long after his own MPs tried to ditch him repeatedly, he would emerge from the campaign seen as a victor, you would probably have been sceptical. While Labour finished as the second largest party in parliament, it increased its share of the popular vote to 40%, and resulted in 32 more seats and a hung parliament. It was the first time Labour had made a net gain of seats since 1997, and its increase of nearly 10% in the popular vote was its largest since 1945.

It is worth recalling that at the start of the General Election campaign, polling was suggesting a defeat for Labour with the parliamentary party much reduced and a landslide victory for the Conservatives with a majority of between 110 and 174 MPs.[1.  ‘First combined forecast for the 2017 General Election’]

At about that time the wheels started to come off the Conservative campaign but it wasn’t inevitable that Labour would benefit. Jeremy Corbyn managed to do something all politicians dream of: cutting through directly to the electorate, gaining momentum and credibility, especially among the young.[2.  Britain’s youth regain their political voice in UK election: Professor Kevin Featherstone (London School of Economics).] He seemed authentic, sincere and not cut from the same cloth as the professional political class.[3.  ‘Leadership lessons learned from the Corbynite phenomena’. David Cliff (Gedanken).  ]  After years of austerity, he suggested that there were fairer policy alternatives and, in contrast to Theresa May, seemed approachable, empathetic, kind and, crucially, much less frightening than the assault on his character, credibility and abilities by large sections of the mainstream media had suggested.

By being almost universally underestimated he also managed a second trick – hitting the sweet spot when it was too late for others to recover.

The rise of populist parties of Right and Left

Insurgent politics are not new in advanced democracies but in recent decades the media focus has been on the populist Right rather than the Left.  Was this because the insurgent Right has been more powerful or because there is more fear of right-wing populism than left-wing populism in the mainstream media?[4.  What is Populism? Jan-Werner Müller (University of Pennsylvania Press)]

In the 1990s and early years of this century, the populist Right wasn’t just in the headlines. It also made it into government. In 1999 the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) split the duopoly of mainstream left and right, and became junior coalition partner in a European Union member state. This was the party of Jörg Haider, who infamously described the employment policies of Adolf Hitler as “orderly”, and rode to electoral success on an anti-immigration and anti-elites agenda[5.  Haider: Österreich und die rechte Versuchung, Hans-Henning Scharsach (Rohwohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)].

At about the same time, the charismatic Pim Fortuyn was making electoral progress in the Netherlands.  While he rejected comparisons with other right-wing populists, his outspoken views on multiculturalism, immigration and Islam put him in similar ideological territory.

In France, Jean Marie Le Pen of the National Front made it through to the second round of the 2002 Presidential Election. Populist and far-right parties also made big electoral gains in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and even Scandinavia.

During this period across Europe, notwithstanding the growth in ‘Green’ politics,  there simply wasn’t a mirror image development in social democratic or left politics. It was the time of electorally successful centrists like Tony ‘Third Way’ Blair or Gerhard ‘Neue Mitte’ Schroeder. It was also the time of the centrist Democrat President Bill Clinton in the United States.[6.  The Third Way and its Critics, Anthony Giddens (Wiley)]

Having been in office through much of the 1990s and into the new century, centrist social democrats lost to the pendulum swing effect of politics. Centre-right leaders took over in Britain, Germany the United States and elsewhere. This followed evident tiredness, lack of ideas, delivery and momentum from the moderate Left, but issues like immigration, and, in the case of UK Labour, the Iraq War legacy, also took their toll. It was evident then, as it still is in many countries now, that there has been little renewal or new thinking.

By the late 2000s the political and economic world was rocked by the global financial crisis, and its impact was felt most across southern Europe – in Portugal, Spain, Italy and, most notably, Greece.

In Greece the sovereign debt crisis was so severe it led to 12 different rounds of spending cuts, tax rises and reforms being enacted.  Debt levels reached the equivalent of  €30,000 for every Greek citizen. Social tensions were so extreme that there were nationwide protests and riots.

At the start of the crisis the party in power was the Greek Social Democrats (PASOK). Their unpopularity in dealing with the crisis became so problematic that in the space of six years they shrank from being the largest parliamentary party to the smallest. While PASOK implemented painful austerity measures it shed votes to the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) who became the leading party on the left and subsequently formed Greece’s government. The eclipse has been so complete it has been dubbed ‘Pasokification’, the decline of the mainstream social democratic party and the simultaneous rise of far-left and far-right alternatives. The neo-fascist Golden Dawn, after all, is now the third largest party in the national parliament.

The journalist Paul Mason spent 22 days on the campaign trail, as Syriza became Europe’s first far-left government in modern times, and captured a good insight into the transformation of Greek politics.  In his article ‘Hope begins today’: the inside story of Syriza’s rise to power, he interviews its charismatic leader and now Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and sees “an anti-austerity message delivered with youthful plausibility win over a nation”.[7.  ‘Hope begins today’: the inside story of Syriza’s rise to power, Paul Mason (The Guardian).  ]

In Spain, the impact of the global financial crisis was linked to a domestic housing bubble of gargantuan proportions and unsustainable GDP growth. The banks in Spain were able to hide losses and earnings volatility, mislead regulators, analysts and investors, and thereby finance the real estate bubble.

The human cost was devastating. In one-year alone two million people lost their jobs. Spain had a total of four million unemployed, the same number as France and Italy combined. By March 2012 Spain’s unemployment rate reached 24%, twice the Eurozone average. At one point youth unemployment was recorded at over 50%.

During this time in Spain the insurgent left party Podemos (We Can) emerged out of popular protest movements against inequality and corruption. Led by the charismatic young academic Pablo Iglesias it did politics differently and built a new kind of electoral coalition:

“Podemos’s irreverent style has obvious appeal to Spain’s disgruntled youth. Iglesias sports a hipster goatee as well as his trademark ponytail. He prefers jeans and open-necked shirts to the classically cut suits favoured by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. The party maintains a slick social network presence. Iglesias’s Facebook page compares Spanish politics to the television show Game of Thrones”.[8.  ‘Europe Looks Left’, Paul Ames (Global Post) ]

While establishing itself as the third largest party in parliament Podemos however failed to form a governing coalition with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the Centre Right remains in power – albeit only by its fingernails.

Insurgent politics has also been particularly successful in Italy but difficult to categorise. The Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle) is considered to be populist, anti-establishment, environmentalist, anti-globalist and Eurosceptic. It has surged in recent years to win more votes than any of the other political parties but has more recently moved backwards in municipal polls, especially in Rome where its inability to deliver better governance has cost it dearly.

All of these three parties challenged the political elites just as the establishment was floundering with the financial crisis, and failing to understand the scale of the social problems being suffered by people as a result of the economic downturn and impact of deep austerity cuts.

In Greece and Spain, Syriza and Podemos ran on a ‘hope agenda’ that things can and must be better for society, something that resonated especially for many young voters in countries with mammoth levels of youth unemployment. Using a mixture of traditional grass roots activist campaigning and clever use of social media, it worked.

Corbyn and Sanders – new momentum for the Left?

Recent years have demonstrated across Europe that there is now the norm to have more than one party on the left and right. This has been helped by proportional electoral systems that have allowed Green and left-wing parties as well as those on the populist and extreme right to gain parliamentary footholds. It has not been the case in the United States and United Kingdom, or more correctly England. In both countries their winner-take-all ‘first past the post’ rules have protected catch-all mainstream parties. Largely the party establishments have held sway in all of these parties against occasional challenges, but the recent progress of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders and the anti-Blairite Jeremy Corbyn in the UK is of a new order.

During the presidential primary races for the Democratic nomination the 75-year-old Vermont Senator confounded experts by securing an astonishing 43% of pledged delegates. Despite having the backing of the party establishment and overwhelming support of elected Democrats, Hillary Clinton lost the hearts of younger and more progressive members of her party as they turned out in droves to hear Sanders speak and to volunteer for his campaign.[9.  Bernie, Ted Rall (Seven Stories Press)]

Similarly Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015 despite only a minority backing from parliamentary colleagues, but galvanised a new and growing membership that warmed to his outspoken social justice message and embraced his understated authenticity.[10.  Jeremy Corbyn: Leading from the Left, Nigel Cawthorne (Endeavour Press)]

Despite the political orthodoxy that elections are won in the centre ground, both candidates were unashamedly true to their deep roots on the pre-Third Way left, and made pundit-defying advances across the electoral map.  But it was Hillary Clinton that secured the Democratic nomination and, although Jeremy Corbyn confounded his critics by boosting the Labour vote and depriving the Tories of their majority, he was still defeated in the popular vote and seat tally by Theresa May, despite her running one of the most inept campaigns of modern times.

Nevertheless, there has definitely been a ‘Corbyn effect’ in England, seen in opinion poll leads since the elections and felt in popular culture, including the Glastonbury Festival where he was cheered by the huge crowd singing ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn!’. The impact has been seen especially among young people, who have registered to vote in huge numbers, and on social media, where viral postings backing Corbyn have been watched by millions.[11.  ‘How Labour won the Media war’, Dino Sofos (BBC Radio)  ]

It apparently does not matter that both Corbyn and Sanders, and for that matter other leading left politicians, look and sound unconventional; in fact that is probably part of the appeal. Undoubtedly it is looking and sounding true to yourself and your beliefs, and being personally sympathetic that matters more. Going against all conventional political wisdom about the damage caused to divided parties, there is an argument that the internal opposition from Labour MPs to Corbyn actually bolstered his position with supporters, especially the newer membership.

Defeat for the populist Right

On the surface, recent elections in 2016 and 2017 have halted the populist Right. Despite media predictions of potential victories in Austria, the Netherlands and France, each pretender to office fell short – albeit in the case of  Austria’s Freedom Party presidential candidate by just 50.3% to 49.7%.

In the Netherlands, it was widely believed that the Islamophobic, Eurosceptic, far-right leader Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) could become the largest party. However, the moderate centre-right leader Mark Rutte stopped this in a muscular campaign. He held off the predicted surge by Wilders in the election, which incidentally saw the biggest defeat for the centre-left Labour Party in the history of Dutch politics.

In France, domestic and international election coverage was largely focused on the far-right National Front (FN) and its candidate Marine Le Pen.  In a split field from extreme left to far right, the centrist Emmanuel Macron emerged  to win the first round ahead of Le Pen, and comprehensively defeated her in the second round. His newly established On the Move (En Marche) movement subsequently went on to win an absolute majority in the National Assembly within weeks of him becoming the youngest French head of state since Napoleon.

These elections confounded the sense of inevitable progress by the populist Right. Nevertheless, the challenge has not gone away. Austria was less than 1% of the vote away from having the first far-right head of state in Europe since the Second World War. The editor of Vienna’s Die Presse, Rainer Nowak, wrote: “Above all, the past few months and the results have clearly shown what potential the FPÖ can have as a protest movement against the existing system”, and went on to warn that “the republic has once again mobilised resources to prevent the FPÖ at the top. This will not work again”.[12.  Sechs Jahre Schlafwagen statt Geisterbahn, Rainer Novak (Die Presse) ] In the Netherlands, Wilders didn’t win, but his party went from third largest to second.  The Dutch journalist Christiaan Paauwe described the result as a “pyrrhic victory” and added: “Don’t be relieved by the Dutch election – it’s done nothing to stop populism in Europe”.[13.  ‘Don’t be relieved by the Dutch election – its done nothing to stop populism in Europe’, Christiaan Pauuwe  ]

However, what does seem new is that there is a new generation of mainstream politicians who are prepared to take the fight to the populist right and left, and win. There are even the beginnings of a model.

Centre forward

During the 2017 French presidential elections, the most positive debate and polling feedback was for the insurgent left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In the popular vote he eclipsed the official Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon and received the same kind of plaudits as both Sanders and Corbyn: authentic and ground-breaking. Like them though, he also failed to  win the election.

The winner was the centrist Macron who had served as a minister under the outgoing socialist President, François Hollande, but resigned to set up his own centrist movement.[14.  France’s Liberal Strongman, Paul Taylor (Politico)] Distancing himself from traditional party politics he collected endorsements from left, right and centre and powered to victory. In subsequent parliamentary elections his movement ran a gender-balanced list of candidates made up in large part from civil society, not the world of politics.  Despite a low turnout his movement (En Marche) won a substantial majority in the National Assembly.

That approach is now being copied elsewhere with apparent success. The Austrian centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP) has been rebranded as a movement in the image of its 31-year-old leader, Sebastian Kurz, and is announcing a new range of outside candidates.[15.  Doing a Macron: can Austrian minister copy French election success? Philip Oltermann (The Guardian) ] Only weeks away from a General Election his party has powered from third spot into the lead ahead of both Social Democrats and populist Freedom Party. While hardly a sustainable long-term political strategy for good governance, it has clearly seems to be working as an electoral tactic to win at the ballot box.

Germany goes to the polls as well this autumn and it would be a genuine earthquake if Angela Merkel does not win – despite once high hopes for a breakthrough by the Social Democrat Martin Schulz that now seem a distant prospect. It is even possible that the outcome may deliver a Merkel-led coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). ‘Mutti’ (Mother) Merkel is in a totally different category to both May and Clinton, with personal and competence ratings so high and resilient she has successfully weathered incumbency flak, including over her pro-refugee policy from the populists of the Alternative für Deutschland. 

Populist potential

Since the international financial crisis and painful austerity policies in many countries there has been an electoral boost for the Left, which in some cases has eclipsed traditional moderate social democrats. Yet only in Greece has that led to electoral victory while elsewhere, from France to Austria and Germany, a more muscular centrism is in the vanguard.

Wealth inequality, intergenerational unfairness, immigration and the impact of rapid technological changes with its likely knock-on consequences for both white and blue-collar jobs will test policymakers for years to come, so the potential for populist parties of right and left remains potent. The jury remains out whether a more decidedly left agenda can reach and sustain a large enough electoral coalition to win power. However, even Tony Blair now says: “There have been so many political upsets, it’s possible Jeremy Corbyn could become prime minister and Labour could win on that programme”.[16.  Tony Blair: ‘I think Corbyn could be PM’ (BBC News) ]

What is too early to judge is the longer-term potency of the activist Left and the increasing number of voters who have supported the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Is it, as some would believe, just a product of anger and pain caused by austerity, globalisation, environmental challenges and automation – or is there a genuine hope of a better, fairer more optimistic future and a prospectus that can win power in a general election?

In addition to the social and economic challenges being confronted elsewhere, Britain faces the prospect of leaving the European Union. Far from having ‘strength and stability’ the minority centre-right premiership of Theresa May seems hopelessly out of its depth, unprepared and outgunned when it comes to Brexit.

Curiously Labour and Jeremy Corbyn have little distinctive to say at all about the largest political, economic and governmental challenge since the Second World War. Perhaps that’s the reason Labour has opened the door slightly on single market membership (for a transitional period). Ironically, given the rhetoric about providing a genuine alternative to the right, on this defining question of our time the Corbyn Left is aping the Tories. You couldn’t make it up.

In a time of extreme political volatility, what was previously unimaginable is now possible.