Here’s a tiny observation. The left should be winning — with ease — but it’s not. In this political climate, in this economy, winning election after election should be a layup for the left. A slam bunk. A no brainer. And yet, in fact, in country after country, the extreme right is what’s rising.

Think about it for a second.

A full seventy percent of Americans want something like a genuinely modern social contract. Public healthcare, education, finance, pensions working safety nets, retirement, childcare, elderly care, leisure time, and so on.

And yet, nobody’s offering it to them. Whose job is it, though? It’s the not the right’s job, really. The right is the force which has fought all these things for decades — and won. Hence, Trumpism: when people don’t have decent lives, they’ll do indecent things.

It’s the left’s job to propose a New Deal, a Marshall Plan, call it what you like. To offer people a more robust, stronger, and broader social contract. From abolition to civil rights, it always has been. And yet, today, the American left seems completely uninterested in even considering doing such a thing. It seems a whole lot more interested in appeasing the bad guys, or maybe just shouting at them, instead — a point I’ll return to. But just shouting at bad guys is not nearly the same thing as offering people the working social contract they are hungry for. Relying on voters hating your opponent is not nearly the same thing as relying them prizing you.

Now, of course, the are the “socialists”, who want a better social contract. But they are a small force, so far. And even what they’re proposing is relatively weak, if you ask me. Perhaps they will rise to mainstream power atop it. But it only proves the point. The left as it is seems totally incapable of grasping basic realities of political economy. Why wouldn’t you offer 70% of people what they’re crying out for — and sweep every branch of government, in just a few short years? Do you see how weird it is?

(It’s not enough to say: “but they’re bought!” Even bought parties should want power, otherwise even those who’ve bought them haven’t acquired much. The left today seems utterly disinterested in, maybe oblivious to, the realities of power. Hence, it’s powerless — by design. Even the kingpins feeding a corrupt political system should at least want them to win — not go on losing forever, because nobody wants to be the Soviet Union.)

So why is the left choosing to lose, at the price moment it should be surging to power?

It’s true that America’s captive to 30% of extremists, who take advantage a poorly designed system of democracy, in which land weighs more heavily than people. But it’s truer to say that the 70% who oppose them have no reason to mobilize, stand up, get on their feet, participate in democracy — because nobody is offering them what they want.

The 30% are constantly offered the social contract of their dreams, aren’t they? No government whatsoever! Everybody pays for their own firefighters! Kansas tried that — and it failed disastrously.

Yet the same isn’t true for the 70%. What they’re hungry for, what they’re desperate for — nobody offers even a glimmer of it to them. And so the same old pattern repeats itself. They don’t vote enough, they don’t turn out, they don’t participate — and the 30% easily capture the government. So the 30% may be represented like 50% — but the 70% aren’t really represented at all. Bang! Democracy implodes.

No, not even Obama really represented the 70%. They’ve long wanted a working social contract. But even Obama only offered a half-baked healthcare system — and no form of other expansions to the social contract at all. No childcare, elderly care, retirement, pensions, and so forth. Hence, the 30% who are represented like 50% are offered exactly what they want, time and again — which motivates them to participate, vote, and turn out to a relentless, fanatical extreme — but the 70% aren’t offered anything, really, by comparison, and so in frustration, rage, and disillusionment, many have simply given up. They walk away.

But if you don’t offer people a real alternative, what do you expect? And yet, the damnable thing is that because 70% of people want a better society, were the left to offer it to them, they’d win the equivalent of the lottery almost overnight — they’d easily sweep election after election on a platform of broad-based social change.

Yet, this pattern, so evident in America, is now becoming globally true, too. The majority of people now oppose Brexit. But the Labour Party is busy indignantly defending itself against accusations of anti-Semitism — instead of representing people in any serious or determined way on the problem of the whole country about to screech to a grinding halt. If it did, it too would rise to power, almost overnight. The same is true in Europe more generally — social democrats have begun compromising with extremists. But the majority of people don’t want to accommodate and accord with extremists — they are quite happy with the working societies they have struggled so hard to build. Do you see the pattern? The left should be destroying the right. Eating its lunch. Taking it to school. Shattering it like a fist through glass. But it is capitulating.

And because the left is capitulating before it has begun to fight, it’s unable to win. It won’t offer people what they really want from politics — which isn’t “socialism” in the Soviet sense, but it is something like a modern social democracy. Instead, it offers half-baked, poorly-thought-out, tasteless, and shallow compromises with fascists, extremists, and half-wits, to put it bluntly. The result is that people throw their hands up in disgust, walk away shaking their heads, and abandon the left in droves. And the most extreme fringes of the right — supremacists, fascists, racists — sweep to power instead.

So the question is this. Why is the left back in the 1930s? Trying to appease the bad guys — instead of simply offering people what they want? The people very, very rarely want the bad guys to win. The bad guys win when the good guys give up before the fight has even begun. That may sound impossible, oversimplified, but its true. Hitler never won a majority. How did he rise? The left’s explicit theory was “give him enough rope, and he’ll hang himself.” It took the left abdicating its responsibility to represent the people to hand him power. The rest is history. But have we learned anything?

That pattern of capitulating, instead of representing people, by offering them a new social contract, which they need to be galvanized to vote, participate, and turn out, leaves a void. The most extreme fringes of the right skyrocket to power in it. At the precise moment the left should be winning — times when economies are stagnant, and genuine social change is required. All that is exactly what the left is doing today. It’s right back in the 1930s.

Instead of living up to its most basic responsibilities, it’s abdicating them. It’s appeasing the bad guys, the fascists, authoritarians, extremists, and monsters, instead of standing up to them. And yet the irony is that this is the precise moment it should be sweeping to power — by not doing all that. That is the lesson history is trying to teach us, all over again.

Umair

July 2018