After Kamala Harris’s defeat, progressives must regain the people’s trust

Social democracy is increasingly looking weak and timid, even cowardly.

Photo by Evelyn Hockstein / AFP via Getty Images

Politics is a contest of ideas to reconcile rival interests, and the contemporary left is bad at politics. Where it was once interested in debate and winning the political argument, today it lacks intellectual curiosity and the courage to lead public discussion. While in the past it sought to forge coalitions between social classes, nowadays it represents mostly the interests of capital and the liberal bourgeoisie. A left intelligentsia steeped in history, philosophy and traditional popular culture has given way to a professional-managerial class whose middlebrow metropolitan culture is contemptuous of provincial working-class communities. It’s no wonder members of the Labour government struggle to define who “working people” are.

Whereas historically the left was committed to democracy and social solidarity, in recent decades it has become economistic and complicit with the oligarchy of finance and tech. Since Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the US Democrats have defended the interests of the donor class while largely ignoring the needs of the service class. Once a broad church that famously owed more to Methodism than to Marxism, the UK Labour Party under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now Keir Starmer has progressively morphed into a narrow band of secular priests who have become petty authoritarians. With the NHS on its knees, pushing ahead with the law on assisted suicide betrays an astonishing absence of political judgement and moral compass. The left has stopped doing politics in the sense of exercising power with purpose. What’s Labour’s moral mission other than death on demand?

With every defeat the left reveals its own inner emptiness – a lack of political principles that reflect people’s priorities, such as greater economic and cultural security, combined with a policy programme that is variously vague or unambitious. President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the postwar model embedded markets in civic institutions, saving democracy from totalitarian overthrow. Today, social-democratic thinking has shrunk and capitulated to capitalism and technology.

Devoid of intellectual imagination and energy, the left reduces politics to allocating rights or resources while ignoring bigger questions about the lives people wish to lead. Questions of meaning and purpose, worth and esteem, respect and just reward for contribution, or resentment, pain, humiliation and anger are ignored. They don’t sit well with the left’s language of progress, aspiration and opportunity that reflect a cold utilitarian calculus. Social-democrats are so obsessed about how short-term fiscal pain will lead to longer-term material gain that they become detached from people’s everyday concerns.

Instead of engaging with the world as it is, the left loves seeking solace in abstract vacuous values that leave wealth, power and status unchanged. An adherence to liberal legalism and procedure overrides common sense about people, as we saw with the shameful Post Office scandal.

The left fails to articulate an attractive alternative to the status quo, which for most people means economic hardship, rising immigration and polarisation linked to culture wars. Faced with the advance of authoritarian populism, the left oscillates between soulless technocracy and moral panic about identity. The Trump campaign capitalised on Kamala Harris’s decision to privilege transgender rights over women’s rights by running election ads saying: “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” He stood for political contestation while she stood for non-politics.

Labour won a landslide seats majority against an unpopular incumbent party, but elsewhere the left is either in opposition or being ejected from power after one term. Biden-Harris will likely be followed by Germany’s SPD in elections next year. And this fate could yet befall Starmer’s government, especially if it continues to blame most of the country’s ills on “the snake oil of populism”.

In reality, populism is not just a blowback against the social disruption produced by progressive policies, as John Gray has rightly argued in these pages. Populists also re-politicise issues that the liberal left has sought to exclude from political contestation, such as globalisation, technology and mass immigration. These have become impersonal forces imposed upon ordinary people who feel overwhelmed, their fears and anxieties dismissed, ignored, even ridiculed.

If the left has lost people’s trust, it’s because it represents the worst of both worlds – polarising when people want a sense of common endeavour and anti-political when populism marks the return of politics. Worse, social democracy looks weak and timid, even cowardly. Labour blames the summer riots on right-wing thugs while ignoring deep-seated deprivation and legitimate grievances about the impact of immigration that feed the forces of Reform.

The left needs much more than a credible policy programme. What’s missing is a deeper public philosophy and political position to rebuild a popular coalition around an ethical vision that fuses radical economic transformation with social reconciliation. At a time when social-democrats resort to ever more technocracy and liberal legalism, who will lead a “left conservative” revival to meet the challenges of the new era?

[See also: The Democrats’ working-class problem]