What does the left stand for? Social democrats across the West seem stuck, unable to move beyond the binary option of centrist technocracy or revolutionary populism. Devoid of ideas and energy, the left suffers defeat and division while the right reinvents itself and rules. Missing from progressive politics is a sense of purpose beyond rights and utility – a vision of human flourishing anchored in fraternity and friendship. Such a vision can be found in Pope Francis’s social encyclical “Fratelli Tutti”, published on 4 October.
The contemporary left lacks a distinctive conception of the good life. Appeals to left-wing values ring increasingly hollow. Of the three foundational values that have dominated politics since the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – the left has privileged the first two at the expense of the third. Yet without fraternity, liberty slides into individualistic free choice removed from the relational constraints of family or community. Equality becomes debased to mean either sameness or difference. As a result, the left is caught in an impasse between imposing uniform standards and promoting individualised identities.
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