November 2, 2010
SO CLOSE TO AN INSIGHT:
Why center-left parties are collapsing:Democrats sacrificed the working class to woo bankers and professionals -- and now they're paying a steep price (Michael Lind, 11/02/10, Salon)
The setbacks Democrats are poised to suffer in the midterm election have to be viewed in a trans-Atlantic context. The backlash against Barack Obama and the contemporary Democratic Party is part of a global wave of popular disapproval of social democratic parties that abandoned their traditional working-class constituents in order to woo bankers and professionals.Parties or coalitions of the left hang on to control in Norway, Spain and Austria. But every major country in Europe -- Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- is now ruled by the center-right. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, social democratic parties are crumbling.
For most of the 20th century, Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats were the model for center-left parties elsewhere. In September’s election, the Swedish Social Democrats received only 30.9 percent of the vote, their worst showing since 1914. Earlier in 2009, Germany’s Social Democratic Party suffered its worst electoral defeat since World War II, winning only 23 percent of the vote. In Sweden, Germany and elsewhere, Social Democrats are losing voters to populist parties of the right, Greens and hard-left parties.
It would be a mistake to believe that the voters, in rejecting social democrats, are rejecting the middle-class welfare state that social democratic parties built in the 20th century. On the contrary, center-right parties like David Cameron’s Conservatives and the ruling Moderate party in Sweden have been forced to limit their libertarianism in order to win office.
Except, of course, that when New Labour and the New Democrats were in bed with bankers and professionals and the like they won elections pretty easily. It was when the parties reacted against their leaders--ostensibly in the name of the working class--that they imploded. Gordon Brown essentially ran against Tony Blair and against Blairism as represented by David Cameron, just as Al Gore had run against Bill Clinton and Clintonism as represented by George W. Bush. The congressional GOP having turned on W--and Maverick being tempermentally incapable of embracing Bushism--Barack Obama had a golden opportunity to reclaim the New Democrat mantle and ditch old Democrat politics. He wasted it--yielding control of policy to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid--and is paying the price for that today.
