The majority of these parties traditionally not only have a mass electoral base, but also a broad base of members or a network that supports them, for example in the trade unions. You can call this the lower middle class or working-class; the terms are imprecise here, but many of the people concerned no longer feel represented by Social Democracies or other centre-left parties, and not even by other parties of the traditional party system. They feel that contemporary politics is being pursued by a political establishment in complicity with the economic elite.
That the political elites and the economic elites are a caste. La Casta, as Podemos in Spain says. They might not be entirely right, but they are not entirely wrong either. Above all, however, they have the feeling that they are not actually represented by anyone. What Social Democracies really said was: Vote for us, because with us it gets worse slower. This has to do with the mechanisms and rules of professional politics: with the detachment of political actors from normal people, with the change among the functionaries of social democracies, with their transformation to middle-class parties.
These sections of the population that feel they have a vote, but not a voice, are vulnerable to migrating to right-wing protest parties because they are frustrated that there is no one to represent their concerns. Many say that the solution to all these problems would be to turn to the working class. Forget the artists and people like us here who go to film festivals. And stop speaking up for minorities, because you will scare off the white working class. First, because Social Democracies have not stopped making capitalism fairer because they started to stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians.
Third, because the parties of the democratic Left have a great historical tradition: they have always been both parties of social progress and democratic modernisation.
Social Democracies have achieved both the eight-hour day AND the democratic right to vote; they have achieved both the protection of workers AND freedom of expression and the protection of minorities. They fought for all of this at the same time. And they achieved all of it. They have always been an alliance of the working classes and the urban democratic middle classes.
Credibility is needed that left-wing parties will at least try. Indeed, six of the top seven statements, in terms of level of agreement, were progressive statements.
These statements included such items as the need for government investment in education, infrastructure, and science; the need for a transition to clean energy; the need for government regulation; and the need to provide financial support for the poor, the sick, and the elderly.
From to there was a net change of 22 percent in favor of progressivism. Latinos make by far the largest contribution to this growing minority population. The youth vote demonstrated not only strong turnout in the election, but also strong progressive affinities, voting 66 to 32 percent in favor of Obama.
Millennial eligible voters—those born between and —will also undergo a remarkable growth-spurt in the near future. The demographic, which is much more diverse than the rest of the population, will nearly double from 48 million eligible voters in to 90 million by Although non-college-educated or working-class white voters tend to be economically populist they are strongly conservative in other areas, particularly cultural, military, and foreign policy issues.
Neoliberalism is fundamentally a system that argues individualism and the methods of individualism are what drives the world around us, and that the role of the hierarchy—the role of the state—is fundamentally to facilitate individualism, to expand markets, to maximise the scope of individualism, its dynamism, its innovation, its creativity—to do its magic work.
And, if the state supports the dynamics of individualism, then what individualism gives back through economic growth is some money to the state, which the state can use to ameliorate some of the effects of rampant individualism.
That is the neoliberal model. The progressive governance initiative fundamentally starts with that assumption. This is what Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder are talking about in the beginning. This is the story: we will facilitate individualism and this will generate growth and we can use that growth to do some good things.
Now, the interesting thing to note is that solidarity is largely absent from that story. As long as people are getting better off, it does not matter if there is growing inequality.
And, there is a kind of blindness to the fact that many places are being left behind. So, a blindness to how places are being left behind.
But as well as a blindness to a kind of left account of social justice and social inclusion, there is also a blindness to a right account of solidarity which has to do with nation and tribe, belonging and cohesion, and tradition. Under neoliberalism, solidarity is pushed to the margins. What we see now in politics is the expression of a solidarity deficit. That solidarity deficit takes different forms. This politics of the solidarity deficit is visceral. But if you have a solidaristic debate, it is my tribe vs your tribe, it is my values versus your values.
It is a visceral debate, drenched in morality and identity, which is why politics feel so intractable right now. Let me draw some conclusions. So left and right populism have an implicit belief that we simply need to dial up their form of solidarity to get back on track. But that does not work. It does not work because the system is dynamic. For the last thirty years, governments around the world have practised something you call new public management. New Public management is the attempt to drive individualism to public services.
Government is good at hierarchy. So what do we get? We get billions of dollars, huge amounts of change around it imposing markets on public services, stronger incentives on public services, contracting out of services. But the evidence is now clear. New Public Management has been a failure and a pretty catastrophic one. There is another example: corporate social responsibility.
It is the attempt of corporates because businesses are good at hierarchy and good at individualism to assert that they also have strong and benign shared values. The rise of corporate social responsibility has been accompanied on the one hand by a whole variety of examples of growth corporate malfeasance ranging from the banks to VW Diesel emissions to probably Boeing will turn out to be the biggest corporate scandal of all time, I suspect.
And it has been also accompanied by an ever-lowering public trust in big business. So, these two examples have been an abject failure. You cannot tinker with the system. The system as a whole needs to be reformed. We have to reimagine a new social settlement.
We have to be as bold and as brave and as creative and as determined as were the architects of the post war settlement.
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