SH

Although the battle of ideas can’t explain everything, one is struck by the poverty of thinking among European social democrats or American Democrats over the last thirty years whenever they’ve tried to distinguish themselves from their more left-wing and labor-aligned predecessors.

There are certain things you have to inflict on yourself at least once in life to get a full sense of this theoretical impoverishment. For example, read Gary Hart’s book A New Democracy, published in 1983 when he was starting up his campaign against Walter Mondale, who at the time embodied the wing of the Democratic Party that was closest to the American trade unions. Or Bill Clinton’s 1996 book, Between Hope and History. Or, in 1998, Anthony Giddens’s and Tony Blair’s The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Reading these, you feel like your brain has shut down, like you’re turning the pages of a catalog of clichés and empty words invented by some PR firm.

Basically, what all of these writers tell us is: the past is behind us, the future beckons; we must embrace risk, stimulate creation; new ideas are replacing old, outdated categories; the ownership of the means of production is no longer a real issue; cooperation between labor and capital is replacing class struggle, which is ultimately a kind of social conservatism; free trade and open borders are birthing a society that is open, modern, diverse, etc. For more than thirty years, this managerial stew has been the philosophical framework behind social democracy and the chatter of journalists. After computers spread, they just added the phrase, “We need a new operating system” to the list of older slogans like “left-wing realism,” “reconciling with business,” “carrying out our own Bad Godesberg.”

Corbyn and Sanders, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, are breaking with these ideas, reviving a social language that foregrounds the inegalitarian and environmentally destructive logic of the market. Their programs vary; sometimes, especially on foreign policy issues, Sanders concedes too much to his political allies, the Democrats, who’ve always been the loyal managers (and even the architects) of America’s imperial policies. But for now, Corbyn, Sanders, and Mélenchon are sticking to a line that rejects both Third Way liberalism and the lefty academic and postcolonial verbiage churned out in elite American institutions. Here I’m thinking of the obsession with “diversity” that, in celebrating all identities, often hardens and essentializes them — as long as the identities in question aren’t class identity defined by one’s relationship to capitalist production.

So how can the new forces escape the fate of the socialist parties? I think the first answer is precisely to win back the social groups that once made up the backbone of a left coalition: those who were sacrificed by the policies carried out by socialists and who will never be persuaded by leftist blather that’s more preoccupied with deconstructing language than with ensuring free tuition. But we also have to understand why the social-liberals abandoned the people.

There’s a whole analysis behind it. And as harsh as I was about Anthony Giddens’s intellectual work, I have to acknowledge the quality — and the candor — of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s (DSK) thinking fifteen years ago when he explained the developments that had been going on in Europe, which he intended to extend and deepen. Basically, he was theorizing the social democrats’ prioritization of middle-class and upper-middle-class voters, and their concomitant abandonment of the working classes to the far right and abstention. Put more bluntly, it’s a preference for what Christopher Lasch called “civilized minorities” over what Stendhal termed the “filthy majority.”

In his 2002 book La flamme et la cendre (The Flame and the Embers), DSK, who had been economics minister and would later head the IMF, explained that socialists should stop defending “the proletariat that has nothing to lose but its chains,” and instead defend those who have “acquired culture, education, sometimes a little bit of money, an apartment. In other words, not the least fortunate, but not the richest, either. They represent the backbone of a society like ours.” Basically, not the bottom 20 percent, or even the bottom 50 percent — though not (or not yet) the top 1 percent — but rather “the middle group.”

So the bourgeoisie owning “a little bit of money and an apartment” became the favored constituency of a socialist movement born in the nineteenth century thanks to working-class trade unionism intended to unite the proletariat of all nations. DSK, charitably, doesn’t entirely forget the poor: he suggests “caring about them, helping them, training them to try to bring them into the middle layers.” But he suggests no longer “relying on them, because most of the time they don’t want to participate in political life, since they feel excluded.”

Thus, instead of combating the ongoing slide back towards nineteenth-century-style limited-suffrage politics in Western countries (last June, zero blue-collar workers and forty-six business people were elected to the National Assembly), European social democracy gave its blessing in every sphere to the domination of the upper-middle classes, the educated bourgeoisie. With the DSK-style left (in other words, that of Hollande, the German SPD, Matteo Renzi, Justin Trudeau, etc.) finding itself ever more abandoned by a working-class milieu that can see it’s being abandoned, in turn, by the Left, it looks to other social groups for political support.

This disdain for the people easily becomes an aristocratic fear of the proles. A bit like Tocqueville writing on the 1848 June Days, DSK writes: “One unfortunately cannot always expect participation in a parliamentary democracy from the least privileged groups. It is not that they lack interest in History, but their irruptions sometimes manifest in the form of violence.”

Yet this “least privileged group” was long the left’s core base! And caring about it, giving it power, was its raison d’être. So it seems to me that, with the socialists having abandoned this group, and having forgotten along the way that blue-collar workers still make up around 50 percent of the population, the “new forces of the left” that you speak of ought to turn to them. Are they doing enough? I’m not sure. Are they trying to? I think they are.