The left has had a hard time in America for a long time. One important man knew why around 1990 and that was Barack Obama. In his Harvard days, he and an economist friend wrote 250 pages in which he analyzed the failures of the left. The manuscript never became a book. It sat gathering dust in a basement until an Obama biographer discovered it, then years passed before historian Timothy Shenk drew attention to it this month in The New York Times.
I immediately caught on because Shenk’s article says a lot about America and indirectly about Europe. The analysis by Obama and the economist Robert Fisher that the American Democrats have alienated the working class too much, I think also explains why many left-wing European parties have been living a moribund existence for years now.
The left just doesn’t know how to deal with workers. They are progressive in the economic field, but often conservative in the socio-cultural field. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, American workers have consistently voted for Democrats for economic reasons. That changed after the rapid progressive changes of the 1960s and 1970s, which were seen by workers as a threat to the traditional family and other conservative values. They flocked to the right, to Reagan’s Republican party.
Young Obama thought the Democrats should get the workers back. Yes, they were culturally conservative and even racist, but that could be circumvented by refocusing on the economy as the main factor in determining their vote. The goal was a coalition of progressives, blacks and white workers. After all, America’s individualistic system worked to the detriment of workers of all races. Reforming it would benefit white and black. Think class, not race, Obama said.
Stagnation
He entered politics, achieved success, but the workers did not return to the Democratic nest. Victories in the presidential election yielded meager majorities, and subsequent midterm elections repeatedly ended in a hostile Congress. The result: political stagnation. “Even if the Democrats win an election, they don’t have the numbers to make reforms,” Shenk writes. The worker’s voice is sorely missed on the left.
Also in Europe. Here too, a large part of the working class has defected to the right and the populist right. Here too, this has happened on the basis of cultural conservatism. And here, too, the left has not gotten any stronger. It was forgotten that there are still many workers. See the countless work vans on the highway, look inside the football stadiums, which are larger and more crowded than hockey stadiums. They are everywhere, but the established politicians hardly listened to them.
Social Democracy ignored the complaints of its natural grassroots about mass immigration. It was the neighborhoods of the workers that changed into neighborhoods with sometimes more than 120 nationalities and cultures, but they were not allowed to say that they no longer felt at home. Then they were xenophobic. Feeling unheard, the workers swerved to the right and the far right. And just like in America, that leads to stagnation. Majorities for a strong policy often do not exist.
Cultural displeasure
Left has to get the workers back. Shenk wants to do that by putting the emphasis back on economics. He points out that two-thirds of Americans believe that the minimum wage should be raised and that millionaires should pay more taxes. But this purely material approach ignores cultural discontent and is therefore unlikely to work as it did under Obama. The culture war in America between right and left is only getting more intense and is now also crossing over to Europe.
It won’t be easy, there is a social media-fueled radicalization going on, yet the left must try to take the sting out of the culture war. By showing greater understanding of the concerns in working class circles about immigration, as the Danish Social Democrats do. And by identifying less with the most extreme manifestations of the prevailing drive for change. Even a bunch of flowers is actually no longer possible, while the ban on cocaine must be scrapped. Do you get it? As a former worker child, I say to the left: do what is reasonable cut the crap.
Arie Elshout is a journalist. He writes an exchange column with Arnout Brouwers every other week.