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rfmcdonaldThis Dan Gardner article on the problems of the left in the Anglophone North Atlantic, the inability of people on the left generally to effectively capitalize on the financial crisis.
Gardner interivews the New Democratic Party's Jack Layton, who puts forward a collection of proposed policy changes that, yes, are quite worthy and, yes, are interesting, but are too small, are micro-movements, nothing adding up to an ideology more convincing than that of a government enabling good choices on the parts of its citizenry.
What paradigm can we come up with next?
In the United Kingdom, an austerity budget introduced by the governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has done little to help Labour, which continues to muddle along in the polls. In Germany, Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats are unpopular, but the left has fractured and the Social Democratic Party is weaker than ever.
In the United States, the Republicans are intellectually bankrupt but the Democrats still managed to lose the House of Representatives last month and a Democratic president was compelled this week to accept tax cuts for millionaires — casting the American left into the sort of despair it felt during the Bush years.
And Canada? The Conservative government gets under the skin of left-wingers like no Progressive Conservative government ever did, and the Liberals have gone from the weak leadership of Paul Martin to the laughable campaigning of Stéphane Dion to the incessant stumbling of Michael Ignatieff. This is the time for New Democrats to surge.
Gardner interivews the New Democratic Party's Jack Layton, who puts forward a collection of proposed policy changes that, yes, are quite worthy and, yes, are interesting, but are too small, are micro-movements, nothing adding up to an ideology more convincing than that of a government enabling good choices on the parts of its citizenry.
The problem is the same one that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution vanished from the intellectual climate, leaving free-market thinking to dominate the unspoken assumptions which are the foundation of political debates. There was a time when a leftist who embraced those assumptions could still seem fresh and different, but that was before Bill Clinton sold his soul, Tony Blair invaded Iraq and “third way” became a punchline.
British historian David Kynaston noted that even if Winston Churchill’s Conservatives had won the election of 1945, “they almost certainly would have created a welfare state not unrecognizably different from the one that Labour actually did create.” That was the intellectual paradigm of the day. There was no escaping it.
The free-market paradigm was rattled in 2008, but it still stands. If the left steps outside the paradigm, it makes itself unelectable.
If it stays within, it has nothing more exciting to offer than minor variations on the status quo[.]
What paradigm can we come up with next?
