The Guard Dies But Does Not Surrender!

I found this piece by Peter Zeihan on what he sees as the collapse of the center-left not just here but in Europe as well interesting:

The only significant country where the Left is holding any ground is Germany, a country artificially re-constructed after World War II to have a very specific — and durable — political system. And even there the Social Democrats are on course to lose their fourth consecutive election this fall. (Yes, the center-left actually rules Canada — the only place of note that it still does. but Canada both lives in strategic nirvana and is disastrously complicated from a domestic political organizational point of view so I’d not draw too many lessons from the Great White North.)

What’s left of the economic Left is being subsumed by populism, a movement that broadly speaking is unhappy with the current state of affairs, thinks that everyone is out to get them, wants change, wants it now, and wants to use a mass government overhaul in order to force the issue (in the 1930s we would have called this national-socialism). Populism has managed to capture much of the Left’s thunder in a wide variety of countries including — but hardly limited to — Hungary, Poland, Austria, Finland, Israel, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Yes, Trump is a symptom of the Populist rise. But so too are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (There are many types of populists. None have ever ended up delivering what they promise.)

It is tempting to say that politics is cyclical and the Left will recover, or that it botched the chance to rule in the past two decades and it just needs a little time in the wilderness to reconnect to its roots, or that the Left can embrace other issues like identity politics and social issues to reinvigorate itself. But that misses the point. The economic Left has lost power everywhere. The grab bag that remains is important and will obviously color political and social evolutions, but it cannot define the era. Such awkward coalitions can garner votes, but not in the quantities sufficient to govern. The term “Left” itself may be appropriated by new and varied causes — the most likely is to support the coalition of those devastated by Apple, Amazon, Uber and the rest — but those are not workers, but instead the opposite. The rubric that has defined the Left for nearly two centuries is gone.

One incidental point: both Germany and Canada operate in protective cocoons we’ve devised. Neither is emblematic of anything other than Germany and Canada.

As I’ve said before I think I don’t think we’re seeing a collapse of the Left. I think we’re seeing a much broader political realignment. Yes, progressives in the United States continue to believe, without a great deal of evidence, that bargaining organizations established for craft workers and industrial workers can be expanded to cover unskilled service workers effectively and those will heal a wide variety of ailments. But conservatives have their own articles of faith, for example that tax cuts in the top marginal rates always produce robust economic growth.

I think the realignment has multiple causes including the pace of change in the modern world, China’s entering the global scene, and the failure of the established political parties to see today’s world for what it is. You can’t expect a dichotomy laid out in the 18th century to be relevant forever.

Our problem is that regardless of state of denial or relevancy our political parties continue to hold power. Power without relevancy. There’s an idea to conjure with.