Frank Augstein/AP Photo
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson poses with workers during a visit to Wilton Engineering Services, during a campaign stop in Middlesbrough, in North Yorkshire, England, November 20, 2019.
All unhappy social democratic parties are alike: They’ve lost the white working class.
Britain’s Labour Party was decimated in its working-class home last night, when Boris Johnson’s nativist Tories ousted one Labour MP after another in England’s North, once the U.K.’s industrial heartland, today its rust belt. The migration of Britain’s abandoned workers to the anti-immigrant nationalism at the root of Brexit closely tracks the pattern we’ve seen in France, where the longtime proletarian strongholds of the French Communist Party have turned to the insular nationalism of two generations of Le Pens in recent elections. And in the historic home of European social democracy, Germany, the world’s oldest social democratic party is polling close to single digits.
Last night’s election in the U.K. marks the worst performance by Labour since 1935—just as the most recent elections in Germany and France also marked the low points for the Social Democrats and Socialists, respectively. Socialists do govern in Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Sweden (though the Swedish Social Democrats also experienced their worst election in 2018 and govern now in coalition with that nation’s Greens), but these are exceptions to the painful decline of European social democracy.
Four kinds of fragmentation have vexed the parties of the European left over the past 20 years, as they’ve vexed the Democratic Party in the United States as well. The first stems from the growing presence in those parties of urban upper-middle-class professionals, who are often at odds on cultural questions, broadly defined, with the parties’ more traditional and patriarchal working classes. The second is no stranger to the United States but is only now impacting Europe with the diminution (not sudden, but perceived as such) of many nations’ relative racial and religious homogeneity—defections from the left due to racism and nativism. The shift last night of England’s North from Labour to the Tories summoned memories of George Wallace’s surprising successes in Northern states in the Democratic primaries of 1964, heralding the end of the New Deal coalition and the subsequent electoral victories of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The third fragmentation results from geographic divergence—with minorities and the culturally liberal young and professionals clustering in cities with large service sectors, while formerly industrial and rural areas, increasingly poor and elderly, experience both the reality and the sense of abandonment.
Underlying all three of these fragmentations is the de-linking of class interests: As globalization and financialization (the latter particularly pronounced in the U.K. and U.S.) have undermined the egalitarian achievements of the postwar era, parties of the center-left have been stretched ideologically, often to the breaking point. The ’90s saw Britain’s New Labour under Tony Blair, America’s Democrats under Bill Clinton, and Germany’s Social Democrats under Gerhard Schröder all move to globalize and deregulate their economies, to the benefit of those nations’ banking and corporate sectors and the detriment of their working-class voters. The collapse of 2008 and the hugely unequal recovery that followed has led to battles between the center-left and a more militant left in virtually every industrialized nation.
In France, the venerable Socialist Party has given way to the further left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the vapid, top-down Buttigieg-ness of President Macron, while much of the white working class has cast its lot with the Yellow Vests and the Le Pens. In Germany, the Social Democrats have joined themselves so tightly at the hip with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats that the young have left them for the Greens, while the workers of the East have drifted to the nativist AfD. Just this month, the SDP elected new, younger, further left leaders in a belated attempt to halt the party’s slide. In the U.K., of course, the Corbynistas took control of Labour, shifting its economics well to the left—and more damagingly, exhibited some of the blind, romantic infatuation with the left authoritarian regimes in developing nations that had helped bring down the New Left of the late 1960s. Within the Democratic Party in the U.S., of course, a battle is now raging between the party’s left and more centrist wings, though neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren, thankfully, has shown signs of the revolutionary romanticism that characterized Corbyn and his Momentum supporters.
One consequence of yesterday’s U.K. election is that the Tories will now have to represent voters who actually want higher public investment in the National Health Service, in schools, in industry—more of a mixed economy, albeit for White England. In this, the Tories will be following the Le Pen-ites in France, who are assiduous defenders of the nation’s generous welfare state so long as it doesn’t extend to immigrants, Muslims, and the like. Donald Trump was elected, of course, vowing not to cut Social Security and to replace NAFTA—promises he has now marginally and imperfectly made good on. But true to Republican orthodoxy, he and his Republican congressional ilk also spent the first year of his presidency trying to take health coverage away from tens of millions of Americans and rewarding the rich with an immense tax cut. His base, like Johnson’s, is knitted together by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and a rage against the advocates of a modernity that late capitalism has rendered harsh and degrading to many of his voters.
Social Democrats and Socialists still govern in Europe in Iberia and Scandinavia—though regional separatism and nativism pose threats in those regions as well. In Spain, the center-left Socialists and the more anti-capitalist Podemos have agreed to form a coalition government—a combination that the various wings of the Democratic Party in the U.S. will, one way or another, have to create their own version of if they’re to defeat our own nativist authoritarian next year.
Marx never wrote about what would become of the industrial proletariat if and when history passed it by and cast it aside—much less what would become of it if the agents of its demise included such center-left parties as those led by Blair, Clinton, and Schröder. From Michigan in 2016 to Manchester last night, we’re seeing what’s become of it, and it will require a reinvention of social democracy, and years of hard political work, to build a governing left anew.
