Left needs new stories and new imaginations; it needs to acquire a more modern image; and it needs to create its own narrative of nationalism

Ideology and theory can often be woefully inadequate to explain complex phenomena. We hoped the 21st century would be an age of greater enlightenment, enriching society through ideas, action, and a return to core principles of autonomy, universalism, and humanism. With ideas and ideologies losing their illustrious pedigree and philosophy in retreat, we are moving towards the demise of critical thinking. Ideas and ideologies seem to be losing their illustrious pedigree. The battle of ideologies threatens to become a battle of leaflets.

The left-right metaphor has generated a blizzard of jargon. Yet, it doesn’t adequately explain why the right is on a winning spree and the left and democratic parties continue to lose elections across the globe. Latin America seems to be the only exception. The right is today leaning into what is being described as “new fascism”. Despite their homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, and White supremacist discourses, the neo-fascist groups are winning. On the other hand, the left, increasingly less rigid ideologically, fails to capture the imagination of the masses.

Has the world changed, or have left-democratic ideologies lost their moorings? It is even more puzzling that the right parties and coalitions should win while social democrats should lose when inequality is rising. Winning and losing are part of the electoral game. But the left parties are in danger of losing the battle of ideas as well.

Political scientist Max Lerner says that ideas are weapons, but ideology is a loose cannon. The left intellectuals broadly agree that the great dialectical processes that had helped drive social advance have stalled, thanks to neoliberal globalisation. 

Through the practice of social democracy, some Nordic countries, Sweden in particular, protected themselves from the storm clouds of fascism gathered over interwar Europe. In Sweden, socialists were able to outmanoeuvre the radical right and cement a stable majority coalition, thereby escaping what political scientist Sheri Berman calls the “collapse of the left and democracy that occurred elsewhere in Europe.” But that is no more the case today.

So confident are leaders of the European right, like Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, that she now ridicules the left as “salon left”, “caviar left”, and “Rolex left”. Jacobo Custodi of Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence believes that class dealignment has “devastated the Italian left”. 

“Class de-alignment” signifies an erosion of the mass party coalitions and breakdowns in party support among key social groups. Class-based factors no longer influence voting behaviour, as they used to. The political landscape has undergone a major change.

Some commentators argue that over the years, a phenomenon of working-class conservatism has also become apparent. A sizeable number of people from lower-income groups now vote for conservative parties. Marginal voters probably don’t think a great deal about politics. The socialist/progressive parties also don’t develop their electoral plank purely on ideological socialist premises. ‘Exclusionary welfarism’ has become a new plank for populist parties in Europe and elsewhere. 

Today, both left and right parties follow populist and welfarist programmes. This has been necessitated by a dramatic decline of industrial manufacturing. British political scientist Ivor Crewe observed decades ago that what we have today is a smaller labour force, a smaller working class, a contraption of trade unionism, mass unemployment and a much larger peripheral workforce of temporary workers. 

This is where the left faces a major challenge. The left’s crisis is that it no longer believes in its own virtue. Its fault is in making the ideology afraid of its own shadow. The left’s response to critical national and global issues is at best reactive, not innovative. The right has shown greater imagination, both at programmatic and propagandistic levels. Having seen the traditional left retreating from class politics, the far-right has developed a culture-based class narrative. It has partly succeeded in winning over sections of the traditional left supporters.

Some sections of the left refuse to see the gradual trend of working-class voters shifting towards the populist right. The tendency to create a false narrative that they are only abstaining, not shifting, is self-defeating. The left is becoming what Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left”, as it is seen to be getting increasingly reliant on highly educated and culturally elite individuals.

The left needs new stories and new imaginations. It needs to acquire a more modern image and a fresher language. It needs to create its own narrative of nationalism. After all, the history of twentieth-century anti-fascism was also imbued with patriotism. The Bolivarian left in Latin America, particularly exemplified by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, illustrates this well: a socialist left steeped in patriotic rhetoric and national symbolism. For Chavez, if Venezuela was the patria, then Latin America was the patria grande.

The democratic left is in power in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay. While the old left built its identity around class and nation, the new left, including the climate left, has added democracy building and democracy deepening as the third axis. Realising that the old proletariat is no more relevant, they are now championing the interests of the ‘pobretariado’, the poor, and the disenfranchised class as victims of exploitation and social exclusion. There is a lot to learn from the Latin American experience.

Is the left unable to reinvent itself? Has it lost the philosophical basis that once invigorated it? It has paid a price for embracing the free-market ideology of neoliberalism. While the left has broadly lost the working-class constituency, it hasn’t got any significant chunk of the middle-class vote. Europe is changing due to migration. Sadly, the left is yet to offer a convincing narrative on migration and identity politics.

The left needs to resolve its inner contradictions. Stéphanie Roza, a Paris-born philosopher and author of The Left Against the Enlightenment, isn’t too optimistic about the left’s resurgence. She argues that the reconstruction of a credible alternative to capitalism won’t be possible “if we destroy the foundation of the emancipation project: the universalist, progressive, and rationalist heritage of the Enlightenment.”