I know what you did last decade

Political failure is okay – we've been doing it for a century. But let's try and stop...

Together with my colleagues and long-time friends, Philip Cunliffe and George Hoare, we have been discussing and debating the ins-and-outs and dead-ends of what we mostly referred to as “left populism”, but could equally be called the “millennial Left”: in sum, all those left initiatives that followed in the long wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-08.

It was a centrepiece of discussions since 2017 on Aufhebunga Bunga (or Bungacast for short). We pronounced death on the millennial Left in late 2019 (I can think of our post-2019 UK election show, for instance) and were even more explicit about its demise across the West in an episode originally published in April 2020. It was around that time that we were putting the finishing touches on the book the emerged from the podcast, The End of the End of History.

The big idea of the book is that the period of consensus, privatism and relative geopolitical peace between great powers that emerged from the end of the Cold War was over. The subsidiary idea was that there was a rejuvenated Left that emerged since 2011 which contributed to and surfed upon a renewed politicisation of society – but that it too was now “over”. As we wrote in the very first pages of the book:

…[left populism] aimed to move beyond neoliberalism, to defend welfare, and to create a new, collective and egalitarian politics. They felt promising; they made it feel like maybe politics was back, after a long time away.

The failure of left-populism, strangely, happened at the same time as right-wing governments adopted policies that strongly departed from neoliberal orthodoxy. […] Policies the Left had been proposing were recuperated by the Right, and this was done at just the moment of the greatest popular demobilization in history: the lockdowns. There is deep irony to this, since one of the main problems with left-populism was that it had tried to do socialism without the masses.

Last year, three books emerged dedicated to the proposition that left populism or the millennial left had failed and was dead. I have a review essay in American Affairs that evaluates these analyses and in turn tries to build on what we collectively have been doing on Bungacast for seven years: not just analysing but trying to provide a deep critique so that we might move forward. As I write:

We should be angry. The 2010s gave us masses in the streets and revolts at the ballot box, and we ended up quite possibly worse than where we started. But as always, the real catastrophe would be not to learn any lessons—or to learn the wrong ones.

I would of course say “read the whole essay” but here are my main takeaways (including excerpts of the key paras), over and above my evaluation of the books under review.

1. The millennial Left was too short-termist and media-focused:

In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? Too many of its practices reflected back some of the worst features of the current order: short-termism; a bias against political programs, mass organization and institution-building; and reliance on media and charismatic leaders. This is why the 2010s are a historic missed opportunity: when amid signs of mass revolt for the first time in decades, the ostensible forces of utopianism sought to change the content of politics without challenging the neoliberal shell that contained it—to make an omelet without breaking any eggs.

2. The millennial Left underestimated the problem of state power; and it avoided hard choices in a play to please everyone

The left-populist gamble may have represented an attempt to seize power, but it also evinced a radical underestimation of power. In the best of cases, left-populists took office, yes, but never power. In another ironic reversal, the millennial Left dropped the notion of being self-consciously marginal and began addressing, and seeking to represent, basically everyone. But this meant avoiding hard ideological choices. You can’t be friends with the Eurogroup and the 61 percent of Greek voters who rejected the Memorandum. You can’t lead middle-class met­ropolitan Remainers and Northern working-class Leavers in the UK. You can’t unify a coalition of college-educated woke culturalists and working-class provincial materialists simply through the lure of execu­tive power. There remains a potentially hostile legislature, a certainly hostile judiciary, a diabolical deep state, and even supranational institu­tions that will scupper the best laid plans. The long-term crisis of politics cannot be ignored in a rapid quest for executive power, under the illusion that neoliberalism will be swept away with the stroke of a pen.

3. The left has been arriving late to the party for maybe a century, certainly since the 1970s.

We should be alert to a troubling fact: over the past one hundred years, the left has mostly arrived post-festum, certainly in the West. It plays a role in ushering in a new era, then attacks the new era, and finally finds itself nostalgic for it. So the Left attacked the stultifying welfare-warfare state in the 1960s in the name of individualism, actions which, despite their intentions, laid the ground for neoliberalism once the post­war order fell into crisis. The Left then set up its stall as the resistance against the reorganization of capitalism along neoliberal lines, accompanied by the most forceful, moralized rhetoric in defense of society against individualism. Finally, the Left finds itself neoliberalism’s last defenders in the face of so-called right-populism in the form of Trump, Le Pen, Brexit, Vox, Fratelli d’Italia, or what have you. The Left may not defend neoliberal policies, but it holds to neoliberal or neoliberalized organizations and institutions, be it the Democratic Party or the EU or the university or the NGO.

4. Organisation and spontaneity are both necessary, and the millennial Left mostly failed on both counts.

Why was the Left unable to achieve even its reformist goals, let alone any revolutionary dreams it may have had? A central question raises itself across the three eulogies of the millennial Left: when politics itself is in crisis, is the necessary first step to reconstruct civic association as a building block of a credible, mass left-wing political party? Or must the Left be prepared to act quickly, to seize authority, and to lead at moments when the masses’ conservatism rapidly evaporates and the status quo is rejected—as happens with some frequency, albeit unpredictably?

We should answer these questions with another question, already asked earlier: “how does political organization enable transformative, emancipatory, and not foreclosing action?” The answer, to take our two alternatives above, is surely “both.” The millennial Left’s failure was to do neither. It neither was able to bind the masses, to whom it briefly appealed, in new political organizations, nor was it able to act and lead in moments of crisis when the destruction of the old order (however conceived) was in shooting distance.

That’s enough on this for now, undoubtedly I’ll return to it. But I would recommend reading the three books under review, alongside our The End of the End of History, if you haven’t yet.