Hey, does anyone remember that glorious new dawn when voters throughout the major democracies were just saying no to Trump-flavored pseudo-fascism and it seemed like “regular-order politics” was making a triumphant comeback? (Those quotation marks are a tribute to Jeb Bush, all the way back in the 2016 New Hampshire primary, perhaps the last time any Republican suggested that might be a good idea. Pour one out!)
Of course, the new dawn I’m talking about was just last spring: The tide was turning, or so it seemed, and muted celebrations broke out among the better-informed liberal classes. Britain’s Labour Party had won a big majority in Parliament. The not-quite neo-Nazis of AfD didn’t come close to winning in Germany, despite (or because of) Elon Musk’s fanboy meddling. Voters in Canada and Australia rejected Trump-style populists and returned normie center-left governing parties to power. Even lower-prestige destinations joined in: Anti-immigrant firebrand Geert Wilders’ right-wing coalition fell apart in the Netherlands, while an earnest math nerd defeated a pro-Putin TikTok conspiracy theorist in Romania (who had claimed, among other things, that water is a form of information technology rather than straight-up H₂O).
What a relief, right? Light at the end of the tunnel at last! You probably don’t need me to supply the obnoxious punchline to that joke. Let’s just say that the muted celebrations of fascism’s defeat were premature, and those apparent big wins for democracy were a lot messier and more tenuous than they looked in those halcyon days of, um, four or five months ago.
In one European capital after another, mainstream political leaders have tried to shift the narrative away from doom and decline, and have almost universally failed. In virtually every case, they are sinking in the polls and facing incoming fire from all directions, and now seem to hang by a thread over a dark electoral abyss. It is entirely conceivable, and even likely, that far-right parties will hold power in several of the largest so-called democracies before the end of this decade. Maybe even all of them.
This may be unfair to the actual life and career of Joe Biden — a tragic tale if ever there was one — but the same mysterious virus of depression, despair and impending doom that infected his presidency now seems to have spread widely throughout the major democracies. I’ve been using that line myself lately, but I’m afraid the idea is irresistible. Political scientist Jean-François Drolet told the New York Times this weekend that Britain is currently experiencing “a rerun of the Biden presidency.”
The same mysterious virus of depression, despair and impending doom that infected Joe Biden’s presidency now seems to have spread widely throughout the major democracies.
This is partly a story about the enduring allure of the almost-fascist far right in societies plagued by rising inflation, worsening inequality and internal tensions over race and immigration. Beyond that, it’s a story of social and political failure on a grand scale. On one hand, we have the abject failure of the supposedly hard-headed centrists, who spent 40 years doing the bidding of bankers and plutocrats while promising that slashing government spending and deregulating the financial markets — along with the other dogmas of neoliberal gospel — would someday, somehow, bring universal prosperity.
While charismatic neoliberal pioneers like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair gleefully steered the world into the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, their more cynical and less impressive second-generation heirs — Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz among them — have steadfastly refused to address its long-term global consequences or challenge the dogmas of their faith. They are now desperately seeking to borrow or ventriloquize just enough of the far-right agenda to win elections without going all the way to blood-and-soil racism or entirely shredding the social contract. They seem surprised that it’s not working.
Let’s consider Starmer’s shambolic Labour government in London, which made headlines this past week with a long-expected Cabinet reshuffle, including the dismissal of deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, customarily identified as the only major “leftist” in Starmer’s inner circle. Officially, Rayner got sacked over personal financial misdeeds — she failed to pay adequate taxes on a second home — but any excuse would have done. Starmer and his party have been in permanent crisis almost since taking office 14 months ago, and needed both a scapegoat and the appearance of decisive action.
If it seems deeply bizarre that Nigel Farage’s Trump-style anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, now leads Labour by double digits in most polls — even though it has exactly four seats in the current Parliament, and nothing resembling a coherent policy agenda — welcome to the pseudo-reality of current British politics. First and most important, the so-called Labour landslide of the July 2024 general election was an illusion, or at best an artifact of the U.K.’s increasingly dysfunctional electoral system. Labour won 411 of the 650 seats in Parliament, which is undeniably impressive — after winning less than 34 percent of the national vote in a low-turnout, intensely divided election. (They’ve already lost 12 of those seats in various ways, and the erosion is likely to accelerate.)
The self-serving fable that Labour and much of the British media told themselves, heading into and just after that victory, went like this: Starmer and his non-ideological army of pragmatic policy wonks — if you just fell asleep or threw your laptop across the room, my apologies — had rescued the party from left-wing irrelevance after the disastrous reign of former leader Jeremy Corbyn, who got blitzed by Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party’s big win in 2019. Well, it’s true that Corbyn lost and Starmer won — so case closed, right? Except that Starmer’s supposedly centrist, normal, mainstream-friendly Labour Party got 9.7 million votes last year, which is 560,000 fewer than Corbyn’s party got five years earlier — and, more amazing still, about 3 million fewer than Corbyn won in 2017.
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There’s an overarching theme at work here that plays a decisive role in the current crisis of democracy, and that’s the enduring power of mainstream or centrist politicians and parties to control the narrative, with the eager collaboration of most of the political media. It’s an unquestioned article of faith, for instance, that left-wing policies and programs are both impractical and politically toxic. Any evidence to the contrary is dismissed as airy-fairy daydreaming or a distasteful fluke. If leftists or progressives suffer a defeat, that is taken as proof that they can’t be tolerated and must be purged. Whenever centrists lose, however, it’s always someone else’s fault — sometimes the Russians’ fault, but usually the left’s.
To observe the observable and obvious fact that Corbyn’s overtly ideological version of the Labour Party was more popular with actual voters than Starmer’s, and that the latter only won because the Conservative Party imploded in spectacular fashion after 15 years in power (losing more than half of its 2019 vote), is essentially forbidden under the terms of accepted mainstream discourse. It would be like the pope abruptly announcing that the doctrine of transubstantiation is nonsense; it’s just a cracker and a cup of watered-down wine.
Alongside the total failure and self-justifying mythology of the centrist ruling parties, there’s another failure that might almost be worse: the near-total defeat, disempowerment and internal disorder of the left.
I won’t go into the parallel political crises in France and Germany in detail here, except to say that the circumstances are different in each case but the overall pattern is about the same — and that alongside the total failure and self-justifying mythology of the centrist ruling parties, there’s another failure whose long-term consequences may almost be worse. That would the near-total defeat, disempowerment and internal disorder of the left, using that term loosely to cover everyone from old-school welfare-state liberals to full-on socialists. (One exception, perhaps, is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, crusty Bernie-style leader of the left-wing opposition in France, but as usual French politics is anomalous and merits a longer dive down the rabbit hole.)
Both the fact that the left has been defeated, demoralized and fragmented and the accepted doctrine that it can’t possibly ever win are major reasons why Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign has made worldwide headlines. His success threatens established political verities and offers a possible model for left-populist victory, even amid a climate of chaos and despair. The other reason, of course, is that the leadership and donor class of his own political party — which relies on left-liberal voters, but wants to keep that relationship on the down-low — is trying to destroy him.
You may have noticed that I’ve barely mentioned Donald Trump, and that’s because none of this stuff was caused or engineered by him. To Americans, he may still appear as the all-powerful ogre at the center of the political universe, driving sinister populist-nationalist forces all over the world. That was never exactly true: At the peak of his powers, Trump channeled and surfed a rising tide of reactionary opinion that in many ways aligned with his natural tendencies, but he didn’t create that wave and has never really controlled it (as the Epstein saga, among other things, has made clear).
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Today, at nearly 80 years old, visibly enfeebled and pursuing a range of incoherent and massively unpopular policies, Trump appears on the world stage as both dangerously unhinged and increasingly unreliable, which is why Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi started a club and forgot to invite him. Widespread revulsion at his return to power clearly shifted the electoral winds in Canada, Australia and Germany. Trump will no doubt retain considerable political capital in America as long as he keeps breathing, but the global right is ready to move on.
As I’ve suggested, it’s not so much that the far right is now ascendant in most liberal-democratic nations. That’s true largely by default, but the larger problem is that the political center has collapsed but refuses to admit it and still controls the major institutions, while the left has largely been rendered invisible or irrelevant.
At this point, it’s fair to say that the central bankers and neoliberal technocrats have had their shot. Their mission was to create a new world after the fall of communism, but their true legacy will be the return of fascism.
We’re on the edge of a new age of autocracy, and it does no good to sugarcoat that or to keep pretending that some new version of centrist coalition politics will fend that off much longer. There is no plausible pathway to the other side of this ugly and painful era without rebuilding the left, or perhaps building many different lefts. Easier said than done, obviously. Right now, none of us can imagine exactly what that will look like, what labels it might carry or how long it will take.
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from Andrew O’Hehir on a world of chaos
