The center-left, the dominant political ideology since the end of WWII, is threatening to be snuffed out of existence all over the western world.

The far-right Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time in 2010, winning 6% of the vote. On Sunday, they finished in third place with 18% of the vote. And while the center-left Social Democrats finished ahead of the Sweden Democrats, they registered their worst electoral performance in more than 100 years. Sweden’s Social Democratic Party is not an anomaly. In legislative elections held over the past two years, the French Socialist Party, German Social Democratic Party and Dutch Labor Party – three other major left-of-center parties – recorded their worst-ever results in the postwar era. Once-strong center-left parties in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Spain are also near historic lows in terms of their most recent legislative election results.

It isn't just Europe.

In Japan, the center-left Democratic Party is moribund.

The destruction of the centrist Democrats in the U.S., Blue Dog Democrats in particular, is well known. What isn't talked about as much is that this isn't happening in isolation.



The spectre that haunts Europe’s centre left has a name: Pasokification. In 2009, Greece’s once-great social democratic party won 43.9% of the national vote. Barely six years later, it could manage just 6.3%.

Atomised in France, all but wiped out in the Netherlands, humiliated in Germany, Europe’s mainstream centre left is in full retreat. Even in its one-time stronghold of Scandinavia, social democracy is now struggling.

There are many reasons. The embrace-the-market “Third Way” policies of leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder worked fine in the turn-of-the-century boom years but seem to offer little to today’s vulnerable centre-left voters.

If you are wondering why this is happening, consider what passes for center-left these days.

With Emmanuel Macron’s election in France and the rejection of the far-right Marine Le Pen, the neoliberal establishment breathed a sigh of relief. The populist backlash was "over". It was time to crank out more privatization, austerity, and increased military spending.

Macron, now called the “president of the rich”, has been known to say things like “people who are successful and those who are nothing”; or when he said “we spend a crazy amount of dough” on welfare; or when he told protesters to “stop making a mess and look for a job”.

This is the kinds of people being celebrated by traditional center-left parties.

One of the few exceptions to this trend is the UK Labour Party under socialist Jeremy Corbyn. Labour received more than 40 per cent of the popular vote in 2017 – more than any Labour leader since Tony Blair in 2001.

What was truly amazing is that he did this while he had to fight his own party every step of the way.



Corbyn won with 59.5 percent of the vote. Burnham, the runner-up, received 19 percent. According to the Guardian, “shell-shocked members of the shadow cabinet, some on the verge of tears, gathered together in small groups in the foyer” in reaction to the victory, while others “continued plotting, in the manner of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of the second world war.”

The neoliberal Blairites failed at preventing Corbyn from becoming the leader of the Labour Party, but that doesn't mean they just gave up.



Instead, within mere hours of Corbyn’s victory, Yvette Cooper — one of his former leadership rivals — and six other shadow cabinet members declared they wouldn’t serve under him.

...His own MPs yelled “Resign” at him in the middle of a parliamentary debate. They passed a no-confidence motion against him by 172 to forty, and nearly sixty former Labour parliamentary candidates called for his resignation.

...Labour MPs’ efforts to defeat Corbyn failed a second time, however, with Corbyn beating his sole challenger, Owen Smith, by an even larger margin than in his first victory.

The neoliberals stopped at nothing to bring down their party leader. When the Tories called a snap election, thinking they were going to destroy Corbyn once and for all, the Blairites jumped on board.

Their criticism of Corbyn became absolutely bizarre and hysterical.



The Blairites are so consumed by hatred, and so incensed that anybody should offer a political alternative to neo-liberalism, that they simply cannot stop....The BBC Newsnight “policy editor” has just been tipped off, by two of the usual anonymous Blairite MPs, that Corbyn has stooped so low as actually to ask people to vote Labour, as part of his vile plot to seize power. I am not making this up.

Finally came the election and Corbyn's Labour, now with a socialist agenda, surpassed all expectations. So did the neoliberal Blairites finally admit they were wrong and give up?

Of course not. They immediately started plotting on forming a centrist party to steal moderate voters from Labour, to the benefit of the Tories.

The center-left has been totally captured by the neoliberals, and they are on a suicide mission.

The thing is, its impossible to destroy the left without having a huge impact on the right as well. You can't have a right without a left, a conservative without a liberal, to compare it to.

So the largely successful, 40-year long corporate assault on everything to the left is distorting the right-wing as well. The more they crush everything working class, the more twisted and ugly the right-wing will become.