https://fee.org/articles/left-wing-economics-is-no-match-for-alt-right-resentment/
The Democratic leadership, and its leftwing intellectual base, are feeling implausibly smug these days. They figure it this way: the Trump era is going to inspire a blowback. Trump will make a terrible mess, destabilize income security and health care access, and skew social power in favor of fat cats, and all of this will make people angry.
Then the Left will hold all the cards. They will say: told ya so. They will tap into populist impulses with their own plan for greatness, tacking further Left than Obama was willing to go. They offer up vast income guarantees, expanded economic regulation, a puffed-up welfare state, universal health care, a war on rich people like Trump, and then they rule, forever and ever, saecula saeculorum, amen.
They should rethink this. It’s probably not going to work.
It is precisely in reaction to such policies, and the complex demographics of class and race resentment they give rise to, that hard Right movements rose in the US and Europe. There will be no mass regret for turning away from social-democratic policies. On the contrary, sticking to big-government economics will perpetuate far-Right rule here and abroad. The Left has to rethink, and fast, and it means raising fundamental questions about their economic orthodoxies.
Internal Critique
Don’t take my word for it. This analysis actually comes from a solid article in the center-Left media site Vox, “Why Left-Wing Economics Is Not the Answer to Right-Wing Populism.” Keep in mind that this was written by friends of the Left, and they are sending a serious warning: there is no evidence that tacking Left has any chance of succeeding.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism
I would correct the last sentence: it means that they must fix their problem with good economics or be doomed to continued marginalization. The Vox piece points out that since World War II, most European countries have adopted some model of social democracy: generous welfare states, regulated markets, high taxation, universal education, and socialized health care. The high-water mark of the political parties that embody that vision was in the 1970s.
They have all been losing support since that time. A Rightist revolt – not in a push against big-State policies but for a more nativist application of those same policies – began in France in the late 1970s and extended to Austria in the 1980s, and the movement has gained steam since the end of the Cold War through the new millennium. It is now rocking Europe from France to the Netherlands.
A study by Simon Hix and Giacomo Benedetto tracked the support for social democracy in 18 countries from 1945-2016. They find a long secular decline at the polls.
There is no reason to think this is going to reverse. The rise of the Right represents a repudiation of these policies, not in total, but in a particular form: the perception that the receivers represent a different tribe than the payers. Vox calls it “welfare chauvinism — an economic platform fairly similar to that of social democrats, but paired with an idea that immigrants should be excluded from receiving these benefits.”
Vox sums it up: “If social democrats see their future as a competition for votes with right-wing populists, then they have two choices: lose the election, or lose their progressive identity.”
The Democratic leadership, and its leftwing intellectual base, are feeling implausibly smug these days. They figure it this way: the Trump era is going to inspire a blowback. Trump will make a terrible mess, destabilize income security and health care access, and skew social power in favor of fat cats, and all of this will make people angry.
Then the Left will hold all the cards. They will say: told ya so. They will tap into populist impulses with their own plan for greatness, tacking further Left than Obama was willing to go. They offer up vast income guarantees, expanded economic regulation, a puffed-up welfare state, universal health care, a war on rich people like Trump, and then they rule, forever and ever, saecula saeculorum, amen.
They should rethink this. It’s probably not going to work.
It is precisely in reaction to such policies, and the complex demographics of class and race resentment they give rise to, that hard Right movements rose in the US and Europe. There will be no mass regret for turning away from social-democratic policies. On the contrary, sticking to big-government economics will perpetuate far-Right rule here and abroad. The Left has to rethink, and fast, and it means raising fundamental questions about their economic orthodoxies.
Internal Critique
Don’t take my word for it. This analysis actually comes from a solid article in the center-Left media site Vox, “Why Left-Wing Economics Is Not the Answer to Right-Wing Populism.” Keep in mind that this was written by friends of the Left, and they are sending a serious warning: there is no evidence that tacking Left has any chance of succeeding.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism
I would correct the last sentence: it means that they must fix their problem with good economics or be doomed to continued marginalization. The Vox piece points out that since World War II, most European countries have adopted some model of social democracy: generous welfare states, regulated markets, high taxation, universal education, and socialized health care. The high-water mark of the political parties that embody that vision was in the 1970s.
They have all been losing support since that time. A Rightist revolt – not in a push against big-State policies but for a more nativist application of those same policies – began in France in the late 1970s and extended to Austria in the 1980s, and the movement has gained steam since the end of the Cold War through the new millennium. It is now rocking Europe from France to the Netherlands.
A study by Simon Hix and Giacomo Benedetto tracked the support for social democracy in 18 countries from 1945-2016. They find a long secular decline at the polls.
There is no reason to think this is going to reverse. The rise of the Right represents a repudiation of these policies, not in total, but in a particular form: the perception that the receivers represent a different tribe than the payers. Vox calls it “welfare chauvinism — an economic platform fairly similar to that of social democrats, but paired with an idea that immigrants should be excluded from receiving these benefits.”
Vox sums it up: “If social democrats see their future as a competition for votes with right-wing populists, then they have two choices: lose the election, or lose their progressive identity.”
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