The left in the Netherlands is like a melting polar cap, a little smaller every year. At the same time, left-wing themes are hipper than they have been in a while. People come from every nook and cranny who, following the example of the French star writer Édouard Louis, tell from their own experience what it is like to grow up in the underclass and how big the gap is between those who have joined and those who have dropped out. The underdog currently has the public’s sympathy.
Yet the majority votes for right-wing parties, which do not intend to fundamentally break that inequality. Geert Wilders may pass for the ‘social-economic left’, but his program reads more like the wish list of an angry teenager than as a coherent and feasible vision of social justice. “The PVV wants to spend money on the poor, but never collects it from the rich,” according to an analysis in NRC this Friday.
Why then does the left lose? Part of the explanation is known. The left has hit the less well-off voters hard: the purple Rutte II cut back on elderly care, social workshops and libraries, raised the state pension age, and abolished the basic grant. I gave another part of the explanation last week: the left does not recognize that ideals require sacrifices, and that making them is often not fun. For example, some of the old supporters are more affected by immigration than the left-wing leaders.
But I think there is more going on. The left is also the victim of successful and perhaps irreversible framing. The word ‘left’ itself has become radioactively contaminated.
I read the newly published this week The Politics of Language by the American philosophers David Beaver and Jason Stanley. They argue that even apparently neutral words can be used politically. They pay special attention to so-called ‘slurs‘: swear words, insults. Every word can be one slur be, according to Beaver and Stanley, as long as it is used in a certain ideological context. The normally neutral ‘boy‘ can take on a racist connotation, for example, if a powerful white man uses it against a black aide, as Donald Trump once did. The word “resonates” with the audience for which it is intended, write Beaver and Stanley. It’s the same with ‘left’, I think: for some people that word has become a swear word in itself, with a specific connotation.
The term ‘left elite’ played an important role in this process. In the LexisNexis newspaper archive, the word combination has appeared 544 times in national newspapers over the past thirty years, and the term ‘right-wing elite’ 56 times. Strange, if you consider that in those years there was one center-left cabinet, three purple, five center-right, and one center-right cabinet with tolerable support from the radical right. In 2009 in particular, the year after neoliberalism collapsed in the financial crisis, the number of articles about the left-wing elite exploded. The explanation: Geert Wilders started his crusade against it that year. In the Accountability Debate he said: “The Dutch people are waking up from a long left-wing nightmare and I tell you today: this elite is on its last legs.” Like no other, he managed to anchor the ‘left-wing elite’ stereotype in the collective imagination by speaking about “the art mafia” and “smooth-talking PhD students with designer glasses”.
If you repeat certain word combinations long enough, they burn a path in people’s minds. One word is intimately connected with another; It is therefore possible that the previously descriptive term ‘left’ has now also, or perhaps especially, acquired a normative connotation. Wilders no longer even has to use the combination ‘left-wing elite’: the word ‘left’ in itself is sufficient as a source of suspicion. It is associated with elitist, unworldly, moralistic, pushy, humorless. It is important that not only left-wing politicians are characterized in this way, but also the left-wing electorate. The ‘left’ has become a symbol for a group that a normal person does not want to belong to, from oversensitive boys with nail polish to five times average earners with subsidized Teslas.
The name ‘United Left’, which Frans Timmermans often used, may be recruiting for those who explicitly identify as left-wing, but for floating voters it probably sounds more like a warning: the unworldly lunatics have united, get out of here! Geert Wilders can be satisfied: he has achieved more through language than he could ever do in a cabinet.