France's Front National president Marine Le Pen and former US President advisor Steve Bannon at the FN annual congress. March, 2018, Lille. Sylvian Lefevre/Press Association. All rights reserved.
The decade that has elapsed since
the financial crash in 2008 has not been an easy one for progressive politics.
As contributors to this series have pointed out, the fortunes of liberal
centrist politics have collapsed in many western democracies, and new illiberal
democracies and authoritarian regimes are on the rise across the world. Since
the end of the cold war the number of democracies has been steadily rising
according to the Economist Intelligence Unit index, but in recent years it has
rapidly gone into reverse. Only 19 states still qualified as full liberal democracies
in 2017. Both the United States and France were classed in the flawed democracy
category. After the high hopes at the beginning of the 1990s of a new era of democratic
advance following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid we
have entered a period of democratic retreat.
What is especially alarming, as Edmund
Fawcett makes plain, is not just the declining fortunes of democracy and
fears about the stability of the ones we have in the face of the severe
challenges they face, but also the growing support for new parties and
movements of the hard right. They see themselves as insurgents against the
established order, and are explicitly against liberalism, against the rule of
law, against the rules based multilateral international order, and against science
and objectivity. Many questions which were thought to have been settled have
been reopened.
Populist nationalists
There is a lot of dispute about
what the new insurgent movements should be called. Fawcett is right that these
are not Fascist parties, although they share some of the same roots. They are a
strange coalition as he puts it of economic libertarians and socially
conservative nativists. The term that best captures them is populist
nationalists. They are primarily nationalists, seeking to take back control of
their countries with slogans like America First, reversing decades as they see
it of decline and humiliation. They are against multilateralism of all kinds
and want to tear down the institutions of the liberal world order and reverse
the trend towards ever greater interdependence. They are part of a wider
anti-globalisation movement. They also use the rhetoric of populism, pitching
the people against the elites, claiming that only they represent the people
against the remote liberal cosmopolitan elites, which includes all the
mainstream parties of the Centre Right and the Centre Left which have governed
western democracies for the last seventy years. Fawcett is right to note that
this populism is a style of political self-justification. The leaders of these new movements are an elite
contesting established elites.
The leaders of these new
movements are an elite contesting established elites. They are now a presence
in almost every established western democracy, and their recent successes
include the election of Trump, the Brexit vote in the UK and the formation of a
government in Italy between the Five Star Movement and the League.
Who is responsible for the global
rise of this new hard right insurgency? Much attention has been focused in
contributions on this site on the failure of progressive politics. Michael
Sandel has argued that Trump tapped a well-spring of anxieties,
frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no
compelling answers. The Centre-Left embraced a technocratic liberalism which
did not challenge the assumptions of the reshaped international market order
which emerged from the battles of the 1970s and 1980s, and which led to a sharp
rise in inequality and the internal fracturing of societies into winners and
losers from globalisation. Francesco
Ronchi thinks that what we face is not primarily an attack on liberal
democracy from without but the implosion of liberal democracy from within.
Liberals have been so entranced by technocratic administration that they
readily embraced the depoliticization and marketisation of huge swathes of
public policy. Democracy was hollowed out and progressives forgot how to
articulate a vision of community. Jon
Cruddas speaks of a loss of ethical grip, and Michael
Sandel of the unwillingness of liberals to engage in substantive moral
argument.
Financial crash
All these criticisms have some
validity but we need to remember the wider context. Many of these hard right
insurgencies, although not all, were active in the early 2000s and the 1990s.
What has given them such traction is the events which followed the financial
crash in 2008. The puncturing of the boom ushered in a period without parallel
in the western capitalist economy since 1945. The failure of the economy to
bounce back as it had done after every earlier recession meant a period of very
slow recovery and grinding austerity, accompanied by exceptional policy
interventions, including quantitative easing and zero interest rates to
preserve liquidity and prevent a meltdown. In 2018 the western economies showed
some signs at last of a real recovery, but there have been warnings from many
quarters that with a continuing savings glut, huge imbalances, high levels of
unsecured debt, and continuing reckless behaviour in the financial markets, the
possibilities of another major financial crisis and global depression are very
real. There could be any number of triggers for it, including the growing risk
of an all-out trade war between the US and China.
One of the main reasons liberal
democracy appears to be imploding is that the liberal international capitalist
order on which it has been based for the last seventy years is imploding. No
parties of the liberal centre, whether Centre-Left or Centre-Right have yet
developed policies which can resist the storm which is engulfing them. These parties
were once so good at delivering prosperity and security. Their failure to do so
in the last ten years has created the opportunity for the new insurgencies,
both of the right and of the left. Another major financial crisis would be
devastating for the stability of many liberal democracies. The new hard right
international which Steve Bannon and his associates are seeking to organise is
well aware of this. It thrives on chaos and collapse.
Open Left
How can any of this be countered?
We certainly need a new moral vision and a new readiness to engage in moral
argument and political persuasion. But we also need a new political economy,
and most important of all we need to find a new way of doing politics, we need
to build an Open Left. Such a project can be advanced by many different
political parties and movements – liberal, green, social democratic and
socialist. We need to abandon the idea that one tradition of progressive thought
has all the answers. We need to abandon the idea
that one tradition of progressive thought has all the answers.
We need openness to new policy
ideas and openness to learning from past mistakes and the experience of others.
We should be prepared to listen to very different voices and draw from very
different intellectual traditions, engaging with people from a wide range of
communities and backgrounds and from many different countries learning from
their experience in putting progressive ideas into action. We need to reject
false polarisations between economic nationalists and economic globalists,
nativists and cosmopolitans. We can be citizens of the world and at the same
time citizens of particular nations, cities and communities. We have to be
concerned with issues of place and identity as well as international
cooperation and global networks, and that means giving greater priority to
relationships and to communities, families and households than to the profit
and loss calculations of faceless state and corporate bureaucracies.
Multicultural societies
We live in complex post-industrial
economies and multicultural societies. Many old certainties and landmarks have
disappeared and are doing so at an increasing pace. We have to live with deep
divides in opinion, interests, and knowledge. There are many values and
perspectives and no single right way. But there are also certain principles
which any progressive politics must uphold. Edmund
Fawcett puts it well when he says that after 1945 a frame of politics was
established in which the gap between avowed aims and actual achievements became
measurable, discussable in practical terms and to a degree closeable. It is
that frame which the insurgents most want to tear down.
An open multilateral international order
There are also clear policy
priorities for an Open Left. The first is an open multilateral international
order. The current one is broken, and what replaces it must go beyond the
western-centric order of the past and fully involve the rising powers in Asia,
Africa and South America in determining the rules which should govern this
order. If we fail to maintain multilateral institutions, imperfect although all
of them are, we risk a return to economic nationalism and military adventurism.
The second priority is an
inclusive and sustainable economy. We have to abandon the pursuit of economic
growth at any cost and the maximisation of shareholder value. Instead we need a
political economy which safeguards the biosphere and maximises value for all
stakeholders, particularly domestic households and local economies. We cannot
do any of this without strengthening state capacities to make possible a more
decentralised, egalitarian and sharing economy.
The third priority is a remodelled
welfare state, based on policies that can provide both security and autonomy
for all citizens,so that no citizen is left behind, reviving and reformulating
the idea of democratic citizenship that lay at the heart of the universal
welfare states which were one of the great progressive achievements of the last
century. There are many creative ideas for doing this. The quest for equal citizenship targeting
the many forms of discrimination, disadvantage and abuse remains a central
progressive aim.
The fourth priority is a renewed
democracy. Much has been achieved in the last hundred years since women won the
vote, but much remains to be done. The quest for equal citizenship targeting
the many forms of discrimination, disadvantage and abuse remains a central
progressive aim. We also need to find ways to decentralise power to get real
local accountability and participation, and to be constantly vigilant about the
many threats, some old some new, to the rule of law, media plurality, freedom
of association and freedom of speech.
A politics from below
Liberals and progressives have to
recover their voice and their moral compass. It carries risks, as Benjamin
Tallis observes about Emmanuel Macron and his offensive liberalism. That is
because democracy carries risks. But we no longer live in a time when
technocracy suffices. There has to be a new politics of passion and commitment
and belief, and there is no guarantee of success. But to refuse to engage in
the debate and the struggle against the hard right would be a guarantee of
failure. One key task is to develop the kind of policies which make sense to
citizens in their everyday lives. Progressives have huge resources on which to
draw, but they need to rediscover the energy that comes from a politics from below.
They need to become insurgents too. Anthony
Barnett is right to say that the old order is broken and cannot just be
patched up. We do not all have to unite under the same banner, but we do need
to co-operate and to learn from one another. An Open Left is not an impossible
dream. It is something we urgently need to combat the dangers we face.