When Italy’s Democratic Party lost the election in September, I told Newsweek they had made a mistake running on abortion, LGBT and immigration rights:
That helped the right more than it helped the left. Social justice resonates with university-educated Italians in big cities like Bologna and Florence. It doesn’t convince the garbage collector in Naples or the unemployed single mother in Palermo that the left has their interests at heart.
So of course they doubled down on it. (more…)
The easiest way to win an election is to appeal to the voter in the center. Fanatics will come up with all sorts of reasons to deny it, and lose. It’s not a perfect rule. In a tight election, turning out your base matters too. But in a two-party system, the party that puts the most distance between itself and the median voter is the one most likely to end up in opposition.
Take Britain’s Labour Party. It kept Jeremy Corbyn as leader for five years through six defeats. His supporters insisted his policies (raising the minimum wage, a four-day workweek, universal child care) were popular, and many, polled individually, were. But his approval rating was always under water. Middle England didn’t trust the man who opposed the Falklands War in 1982 and the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; who called the assassination of Osama bin Laden a “tragedy” and praised Hamas for their commitment to “peace”. Corbyn’s fans mistook his refusal to compromise for principle. It accomplished nothing for Labour voters.
Democrats in the United States are in the process of making a similar mistake. Many of their policies — the $1.9-trillion coronavirus recovery program, $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, canceling the worst of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, subsidizing child care, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement — are popular, but the party is not.
43 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Democrats. 42 percent support Joe Biden and 42 percent plan to vote for a Democrat in the midterm election.
The only consolation is that Republicans are disliked even more: just one in three have a favorable view of them. Yet 46 percent would vote Republican in November. It seems Republicans don’t need to be loved to win. (more…)
Portugal’s far left put purity before power and lost power.
Until 2015, neither the Communists nor Left Bloc had ever been in government. That year, the Socialists fell short of a majority and António Costa made a deal with the smaller parties. In return for policies like free textbooks in schools and a higher minimum wage, the far left would vote to make Costa prime minister. They were involved in annual budget negotiations, but they didn’t join his cabinet.
The right dubbed it a “contraption,” but it worked. Costa could avoid the stigma of forming a coalition with extremists. The Communists and Left Bloc could still criticize Costa when, for example, he refused to raise salaries in the public sector or overturn the labor market reforms of his conservative predecessor.
Until the left decided they wanted more. When Costa insisted on reducing Portugal’s budget deficit, from 5.8 percent of GDP in 2020 to a projected 4.4 percent in 2021, the Communists and Left Bloc withdrew their support. (more…)
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are out in force arguing his successor, Keir Starmer, must surely resign after losing the Hartlepool constituency, a Labour bulwark since 1974, to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.
Corbyn lost all seven elections (local, national and European) during his five-year leadership and still his supporters refused to accept he might be damaging the party, but Starmer loses one seat and it’s all the proof they need to conclude that he can’t defeat the Conservatives?
Big if true. (more…)
The three largest parties on the Dutch left could post their worst election result in decades.
At best, Labor, the Greens and far-left Socialists will defend their 37 seats in parliament, according to an aggregate of polls. At worst, they would fall to 31 out of 150 seats, down from a recent peak of 65 seats in 2006.
What happened? (more…)
Big government is back.
Massive rescue programs have prevented business failures and unemployment on the scale of the Great Depression, even though last year’s economic contraction was nearly as bad. The European Union agreed a €750 billion recovery fund, financed, for the first time, by EU-issued bonds. The money comes on top of national efforts. The United States Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus, worth 10 percent of GDP, in March and added $484 billion in April. An additional $900 billion in relief was included in this year’s budget.
Joe Biden, the incoming president, wants to spend $2 trillion more over the next four years to transition the United States to a greener economy and create a public health insurance program. Corporate tax would go up from 21 to 28 percent.
In Spain, a socialist government has introduced the biggest budget in Spanish history — partly to cope with the impact of coronavirus, but also to finance digitalization, electric cars, infrastructure, renewable energy and rural development. Taxes on income, sales and wealth are due to increase.
In the United Kingdom, the ruling Conservative Party is building more social housing and thinking about renationalizing rail. Unlike during the last economic crisis, it does not propose to cut spending even though tax revenues are down.
Same in the Netherlands, where all the major parties agree the government needs to do more to reduce pollution and prevent people at the bottom of the social ladder from falling through the cracks.
I’m not opposed to more government per se. I’ve argued the United States should imitate the policies of Northern Europe to improve child care, health care and housing.
But let’s be careful not to throw more government at every problem. Sometimes government is the problem. (more…)
Democrats in the United States were hoping for more than a simple victory over Donald Trump. Polls had suggested they could win in a landslide.
That didn’t happen. Joe Biden decisively beat the president by more than six million votes, or a margin of 4 points, but Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives and failed to take the majority from Republicans in the Senate.
Democrats also lost seats in state houses, giving Republicans control of redistricting in most states; a power they could use to make it even more difficult for Democrats to win a majority of the seats even when they win a majority of the votes. (Districts are withdrawn every ten years following the Census.) (more…)
The 2008-09 financial crisis. Climate change. The coronavirus pandemic. Rising inequality in the United States. Stagnant middle wages.
It shouldn’t be difficult for left-wing parties to make the case for bigger government, and yet they are out of power in most Western countries.
Ruy Teixeira, who argued in 2002 that demographic changes would give Democrats in the United States an “emerging majority”, and who later criticized those same Democrats for forgetting about working-class white voters, believes there are five reasons the left has been unable to build durable mass support.
His perspective is American, but the European left has committed some of the same what he calls five “deadly sins”. (more…)
Britain’s Labour Party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1935 in December, because it chose to be led by a far-left extremist.
Center-left Democrats in the United States worry their party is about to make the same mistake. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist from Vermont, won the most votes in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and now places first in national polls. (Although he has yet to get more than 26 percent support.)
James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election victory, warned Democrats this week: “if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days.”
Andrew Sullivan, a British-born conservative commentator, believes a Republican campaign against Sanders would be brutal:
He’s a man … who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system.
On the other hand, Sullivan points out Corbyn had a net favorability rating of -40. Sanders is only at -3. Most polls show him beating Donald Trump with between 2 and 8 points.
Corbyn and Sanders are not the same — but they are not completely dissimilar either. There are differences in policy, but worrying similarities in strategy. (more…)
Few British voters outside the Conservative Party trust Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a one-time liberal who opportunistically embraced the reactionary cause of Brexit to advance his own political career and who shamefully besmirched Parliament to get his preferred version of Brexit through.
And still he is projected to win the election in December with support for the Conservatives trending toward 45 percent. Labour, the second largest party, is at 25-30 percent in the polls.
The reason is Jeremy Corbyn. He has pulled Labour so far to the left that middle-income voters no longer trust it.
Corbyn’s net approval rating is the lowest of any opposition leader since counting began in 1977. Just 16 percent of British voters have faith in him. (more…)
American leftists who are tempted to sympathize with the British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn — don’t. He is not an overseas version of Bernie Sanders.
Both men were political outsiders for much of their careers until they unexpectedly rose to the tops of their respective parties. Both appeal to voters who are disillusioned with old politics. Both argue for a break with the neoliberal-tainted “Third Way” in social democracy.
But that is where the similarities end. (more…)
American conservatives who worry that the Democratic Party is becoming “socialist” should take a look across the Atlantic. In Britain, Labour has re-embraced actual statism and it is nevertheless polling neck and neck with the ruling Conservatives at 40 percent.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn calls for nationalizing industries and lifting regulatory restrictions on trade unions. He blames NATO for the Cold War, supports unilateral nuclear disarmament and sympathizes with seemingly every anti-Western cause, be it republican terrorism in Northern Ireland or Hamas and Hezbollah in the Holy Land.
The so-called socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York candidate for Congress, and Bernie Sanders looks mild by comparison.
Universal health care? Debt-free college? More progressive taxation? That’s not even left-wing in Europe, it’s mainstream. (more…)
What is the future of European social democracy? Your answer may depend on where you live.
If you’re in the Mediterranean, it’s cooperation with the far left. Social democrats in Portugal and Spain have come to power under deals with far-left parties. In both cases, unwieldy coalitions were greeted with skepticism, but now Prime Ministers António Costa and Pedro Sánchez are riding high in the polls.
In Greece, Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza party has even supplanted the center-left altogether.
In Scandinavia, by contrast, social democrats are trying to win back working-class voters by taking a harder line on borders, crime and defense.
Both strategies appear to be working. (more…)
Polls show that Americans under the age of 35 are more sympathetic to big government than their elders. Democrats have a 48-point advantage among millennial voters, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey.
That is not so surprising when you realize that their generation may be the first in a long time that is worse off than their parents’.
Michael Hobbes’ feature about millennials in The Huffington Post contains some sobering statistics.
On average, he writes, Americans under the age of 35:
The stereotype of the overqualified liberal arts graduate working as a barista is only half-correct. Many young Americans are struggling to find high-paying jobs despite having spent tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars on their education. Less known is that one in five young adults live in poverty. (more…)
