Prospects For A Harsher, Bleaker World

Click here for a frightening article in The Washington Post, by James McAuley and Griff Witte, entitled "Clinton’s loss is one more nail in the coffin of center-left politics in the West."

Is the center-left world order, the unquestioned state of affairs since 1945, coming to an end? It's certainly in crisis, and the possible changes don't look pretty.



In the aftermath of 1945, says the article, "... politicians across war-torn Europe banded together to build a new continent that would never repeat the grave mistakes of the recent past. This was the genesis of the European Union: an economic union that was meant to become, at least in theory,committed to the common cause of social justice, largely a leftist ideal."

If the three decades that followed World War II coincided with the longest period of growth in Europe’s history, voters today see neither leftist economic policies nor the E.U. itself as necessarily worth preserving. Britain voted to leave the bloc in June, and separatist movements have spread across the continent to France, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

In Germany and Britain, once-mighty center-left parties have been badly diminished, locked out of their nations’ top jobs for the foreseeable future. In Spain and Greece, they have been usurped by newer, more radical alternatives. And in France and Italy, they’re still governing — but their days in power may be numbered. The rout of the center-left has even extended deep into Scandinavia, perhaps the world’s premier bastion of social democracy.

Overall, the total vote share for the continent’s traditional center-left parties is now at its lowest level since at least World War II. Like the Democrats, these parties have been marginalized, with little influence over policy as the right prepares to place its stamp on the Western world in a way that could endure for decades.

“If the left and the center-left don’t get their act together, then we’re looking at a period of very unstable right-wing hegemony,” said Alex Callinicos, a European studies professor at King’s College London.

The decline of the European center-left is part of a broader unraveling of the continent’s mainstream consensus as electorates fracture and a political kaleidoscope of alternatives emerges.

But unlike the center-left, traditional parties of the center-right have managed to hold their own amid the populist fury, clinging to power in London, Berlin and Madrid — with a strong chance next year to take Paris, as well.

The article goes on to discuss the dimming electoral prospects for the left in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Britain.

“The merger of traditional social democracy with neoliberalism and globalized free-market policies has fallen apart in fairly disastrous fashion,” he [Callinicos] said, suggesting that the turning point was the global financial crash of 2008, when working-class voters saw their jobs disappear or their wages stagnate even as the net worth of the wealthy continued to race ahead.

First Brexit, then Trump:

Trump’s victory in the United States rested at least in part on a similar phenomenon — a billionaire tycoon using appeals to xenophobia and racism to scoop up support from voters who no longer believe the party of the working man has their interests at heart. As in the Brexit vote, Trump won certain key states with the help of working-class voters who had supported Barack Obama, a Democrat, in 2012.

One implication of the growing void on Europe’s left could be profound political instability, both within specific countries and geopolitically. Another could be the emergence of a right-wing stranglehold, based on widespread nostalgia for a world that, in Snyder’s view, never actually existed. “All these continental parties are nostalgic for the interwar nation-state, which was a total disaster,” he said. “There was never any moment when they were happy, independent nation-states. There was never such a time, and their nostalgia is a kind of disguise.

The article concludes:

“If you plunge into that abyss,” he added, “very bad things lie ahead.”