End of love affair with the left? | Ash Narain Roy

Are 21st century ideologues suffering from a kind of ecotopia and a paralysis of imagination? We seem to be moving towards the slow decay of critical thinking. We don’t see new great ideas and new revolutions emerging from competing ideas. Philosophy is on retreat. French intellectual giants no more offer us the promise of a new dawn. The Left Bank in Paris, known for its vibrant arts scene, historic landmarks, and intellectual heritage, has ceased to be a major centre of innovation in the humanities and social sciences. It is a pale shadow of its eminent past.

The left drew its sustenance from great philosophical thinking. So did many intellectuals and philosophers from great revolutions. In 1980 when Jean-Paul Sartre died, 50,000 people joined the funeral procession. William Rowlandson of the University of Kent explains Sartre’s engagement with the Cuban Revolution in his book, Sartre on Cuba, Cuba in Sartre. In the early 1960s Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Cuba, travelled across the country with Fidel Castro and fully endorsed the revolution and later published his Cuba reports in France-Soir.

Colombian novelist Garcia Marquez too was a great friend of Cuba and Fidel Castro. Marquez saw the Cuban Revolution and the implementation of a socialist society corresponding with his hopes for a better future for Latin America. He joined other Latin American intellectuals offering public support to Castro’s revolution.

Andre Glucsmann, French philosopher and Bernard-Henry Levy, French public intellectual, believe the French intelligentsia’s love affair with the radical left has ended. They say, today the French people follow Johnny Halliday, the Elvis Pressley of France. Pierre Nora, French historian, puts it rather bluntly, today, France is suffering from “national provincialism.”

The talk of left-right binary is no longer appealing. In France, for example, you have anti-Islam, anti-imperialist and anti-radical left groups. Then you have pro-European and anti-European, and anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear left groups.

Is another organising principle emerging which we are not able to discern? Willy Brandt’s slogan was “dare more democracy”. Cancel culture is choking the spirit of open debate. The left-right metaphor has, no doubt, generated a blizzard of jargons. 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 far-right is today leaning into what is being described as “new fascism”. Despite its 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.

Today, the left has become a marginal political force in the world dominated both politically and culturally by the US. The disintegration of Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European pro-Russia regimes created an ideological void that has been filled by post-modernism. The new light shown by philosophers has dimmed.

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 has 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 says, “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 Georgia 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”.

Many scholars attribute left’s growing electoral marginalisation to “class de-alignment”. It signifies an erosion of the mass party coalitions and breakdowns in party support among key social groups. Class-based factors no more influence voting behaviour as these used to be. The political landscape has undergone a major change.

Some commentators argue that over the years, a phenomenon of the working -class conservatism is also becoming apparent. Sizeable number of people from lower income now vote for conservative parties. This is also the case in India.

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. There is high salience of welfare issues and strong support for welfare state expansion.

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 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 “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. Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of nazionale-popolare to indicate what is both national and popular.

The Bolivarian Left in Latin America, particularly exemplified by Hugo Chávez, illustrates this well: a socialist Left steeped in patriotic rhetoric and national symbolism. For Hugo 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 bult its identity around class and nation, the new 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 disenfranchised class as victims of exploitation and social exclusion.

There is a lot to learn from the Latin American experience. Is the left in Europe unable to reinvent itself? Has it lost the philosophical basis that once invigorated it? It has paid a price for embracing free-market ideology of neoliberalism. While the left has broadly lost the working -class constituency, it hasn’t got them any significant chunk of 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. Stephanie Roza, 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.”

Social democracy is in the midst of a major crisis not just existential but also theoretical. The left must first admit there is a serious crisis. To remain relevant, it must counter vigorously that the leftist ideology has lost its essence and that the left has exhausted itself. As Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells says, new ideas don’t come from parties, but rather, from social movements. Hence, it’s necessary to integrate them.

It must broaden the tent. As Spanish writer Sergio C Fanjul argues, the left must find common causes with emerging movements such as LGBTQ, anti-racist and feminist collectives. No less important is to bridge the gap between the classical left championing economy, labour, housing and the identity left which focusses on LGBTQ rights, feminism and oppressed minorities.

The world has changed and become much less political – that is, focused on institutions and electoral politics. It’s much more about a politics of meaning related to one’s individual identity, rather than to a politics of advancing group and minority interests in the system. The left must offer fresh ideas on future of work, basic income and work on a new social contract.

No less important is to offer a bold project of democratic renewal. American political philosopher Michael Sandel says that what the left needs is a “political vision that combines populism and patriotism – a radical critique of inequality and unaccountable, concentrated economic power and a greater emphasis on community, solidarity, and our mutual obligations as citizens”. (New Statesman, 22 January, 2025).

Critics accuse the left parties of suffering from self-flagellation. To be relevant, the left needs new imagination and new visions of future. It must generate new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront varying challenges. While it must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance, it must also build an intellectual infrastructure. 

The moderate left espoused noble traditions of humanism and universalism, and a strong moral sense that once made the left parties a credible political force as also a powerful force for good. Today, hardly innovative ideas are coming from either classical left or identity left. Are they waiting for, what Jon Lichfield, former foreign editor of The Independent, says “their time when there will be no bad guy left at all?”

(Author: Ash Narain Roy writes on global affairs)