The Workers Of The World Are Uniting

“Workers of the world, unite!” So Marx concluded The Communist Manifesto. Today, it is happening. Not the way Marx or his ideological heirs intended. Rather, across the globe, working class citizens are voting out the progressive elite that has governed them for so long with so little to show for it.

A lead article in the Wall Street Journal proclaims The Progressive Moment in Global Politics Is Over. A team of three international reporters–Bertrand Benoit, David Luhnow, and Vipal Monga–gives the evidence. (The article is behind a paywall, but I’ll give you the gist.)

They say, “This past year showed that the progressive politics that dominated most industrialized countries over the past two decades or more is shifting to the right, fueled by working-class anxieties over the economy and immigration, and growing fatigue with issues from climate change to identity politics.”

What has happened with the re-election of Donald Trump is happening in country after country. Already, three-fourths of the governments of the member states in the European Union are led by or are in a coalition with a right-of-center party.

The left and center-left governments of Germany and France have fallen, with right and center-right parties winning in recent parliamentary elections and working to form governing coalitions. Canada’s left-leaning prime minister Trudeau has become deeply unpopular and his governing demise seem imminent.

The only outlier is Great Britain, who voted in a Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but after only six months his popularity has plummeted. The gainers are not the Tories, members of the “Conservative Party,” which was ousted after 14 rules of ineffective rule, but the populist Reform Party.

It isn’t that the working class has turned “conservative,” exactly. Marx was right that workers have grievances and class antagonisms, though he was wrong about their nature and their solutions. There were times when populism took a leftwing form, but in a time when the left has become the elitists and the establishment, the populist reaction is to the right. Says the article:

In country after country, many working-class voters—especially those outside the biggest cities—are signaling the same thing: They mistrust the establishment—from academics to bankers to traditional politicians—and feel these elites are out of touch and don’t care about people like them. . . .

“It’s a broad shift that goes across countries,” said Ruy Teixeira, a lifelong Democrat who now works for the center-right American Enterprise Institute think tank. “Working-class people are just p*ssed off—about immigration, about all the culture war stuff, and the relatively poor economic performance that has shaped the working-class experience in the 21st century.”. . .

Far-right parties “have solidified around a constant, ongoing critique of elites,” said Stefan Marschall, professor of political science at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. “Whereas right-of-center parties, which are much more firmly anchored in the political system, can’t really engage in this classic elite criticism.”

But existing “conservative” parties are considered part of the establishment and are run by the elite. Besides, the conservative parties want to slash government social spending, support free trade, and have made their peace with causes such as climate change and the European Union. The populists don’t like that. Nor do they like the left’s green agenda, which has sent energy costs soaring and has hurt manufacturing jobs, the left’s multiculturalism with its support of unassimilated immigration, which has sent crime rates soaring in historically peaceful European nations, or the left’s constant scolding of its old working class constituency in the name of the culture wars.

Parliamentary democracies tend to have multiple parties across the entire political spectrum that must form coalitions to gain a legislative majority that can choose a prime minister, who, in turn, can form a cabinet and thus, as they say, “a new government.” So the new populist parties are sometimes forming coalitions with traditional conservative parties. Europe still has its fascist legacy–there were different fascist parties in most nations of Europe during the pre-war years–so that is coming back with some, though by no means all, of the new populist parties. Traditional conservatives and “center-right” populists, however, are resisting that influence and are refusing to form coalitions with extremists.

The United States, with its two-party system, makes for democracies that are more stable. The populists have put Donald Trump into office, and the old style of conservatism is mostly out of power in the new Republican Party.

Now that the workers of the world are uniting, we’ll have to see if they can govern.

Photo: Demonstration of Farmers in Paris by Croquant via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 . [Sign: “No country without farmers.”]