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fpbTo be fair, this is a poor title. The split within the ranks of the British Left which I diagnosed in my article on the English local elections three weeks ago - http://fpb.livejournal.com/303307.html - is better described as Progressivism vs. Trades-Unionism, were it not that most trades unions today have Progressivists at the top and seem more concerned with being Politically Correct than with the interests of their members. The choice of words partly reflected my anger at the useless and misguiding yet widely popular theses of Mr.Goldberg.
However, since that article it has become increasingly clear that such a split not only does exist but is becoming an increasingly major feature of politics in much of the West, damaging the position of the conventional left and making governance more difficult and wavering.
(Another widespread phenomenon, not visible in America but dominant in Canada, is the rise of the regional parties - Basque and Catalans in Spain, Lega in Italy, Scots and Plaid Cymry in Britain, and most poisonously of all, Vlaams Belang in Belgium. France and Germany seem thus far exempt from the plague, which may have to do with the fact that some at least of the major German parties have distinctly regional features - the CSU is based in Bavaria, and the ex-Communists have even today a definitely Eastern flavour.)
In Italy, the split has been masked in the last election by the utter collapse of the Rainbow Coalition and the comparative success of Mr.Veltroni's Democrats, who have made a complete void around them to the left; but the hard-left tradition is not dead, and what has happened amounts more, in my view, to a demonstration of anger by the left electorate towards the politicians whose petty bickering left Berlusconi back in, than a genuine sea-change in the make-up of the Italian left. The forces of green-red radicalism are still active, and will, in my view, reappear at the next elections.
(In which, incidentally, I am convinced that Mr.Berlusconi will also take a beating. He is forgetting who put him there, forgetting that Catholics were an important part of his electorate, and both in his choice of ministers and his post-electoral communications has made it clear to Catholics that he expected them to obey and shut up. This is the same idiot mistake that the Republican leadership made after 2004 to the "Values voters" who put them there, and he will pay as bloodily. The next Italian parliament will have no stable majority and likely enough a centrist Catholic grouping of anything from ten to fifteen percent, which will decide who is going to govern. Come back in five years and see if I was wrong.)
In Germany, the obstinate holdovers of the Communist regime in the East have successfully started a coalition with the more embittered elements of the Social-Democrats, and now are a force west as well as east of the old border. The result is that in the next elections, both left parties are expected to lose big, and the Christian Democrat alliance will probably be able to form a government without allies.
In France and Spain, the split, if it exists, is less visible. But one has to wonder whether every Spanish Socialist is happy with the increasingly isolated, wavering Zapatero government, looking for trouble abroad by criticizing the Berlusconi government for no clear reason while changing its policies at home under the impact of facts that its opponents had clearly predicted, and kept in place by increasingly aggressive and uncooperative regional allies.
However, what shows most clearly that the split between the trades union tradition and the progressivist tradition is real and profound is the development of the American election. Hillary Clinton started her campaign with positions undistinguishable from Barrack Obama's; it has been the force of circumstances (to which it has always been the Clinton genius to adapt) that has recast her as the champion of the unideological, moderate, working-class roots of the Democratic Party. Perhaps, if it had not found a leader so willing to exploit it, the split between working-class and academic, rural and suburban, gun-owning and anti-gun, would not have come to the surface quite so swiftly and so viciously; but the Senator for New York, who spent half her adult life in Arkansas and knows that kind of country much better than Senator Obama ever will, could not possibly have created her own movement if it had not been there, silent, sullen, perhaps only half aware of its own specificity, but ready to be awakened and exploited.
However, since that article it has become increasingly clear that such a split not only does exist but is becoming an increasingly major feature of politics in much of the West, damaging the position of the conventional left and making governance more difficult and wavering.
(Another widespread phenomenon, not visible in America but dominant in Canada, is the rise of the regional parties - Basque and Catalans in Spain, Lega in Italy, Scots and Plaid Cymry in Britain, and most poisonously of all, Vlaams Belang in Belgium. France and Germany seem thus far exempt from the plague, which may have to do with the fact that some at least of the major German parties have distinctly regional features - the CSU is based in Bavaria, and the ex-Communists have even today a definitely Eastern flavour.)
In Italy, the split has been masked in the last election by the utter collapse of the Rainbow Coalition and the comparative success of Mr.Veltroni's Democrats, who have made a complete void around them to the left; but the hard-left tradition is not dead, and what has happened amounts more, in my view, to a demonstration of anger by the left electorate towards the politicians whose petty bickering left Berlusconi back in, than a genuine sea-change in the make-up of the Italian left. The forces of green-red radicalism are still active, and will, in my view, reappear at the next elections.
(In which, incidentally, I am convinced that Mr.Berlusconi will also take a beating. He is forgetting who put him there, forgetting that Catholics were an important part of his electorate, and both in his choice of ministers and his post-electoral communications has made it clear to Catholics that he expected them to obey and shut up. This is the same idiot mistake that the Republican leadership made after 2004 to the "Values voters" who put them there, and he will pay as bloodily. The next Italian parliament will have no stable majority and likely enough a centrist Catholic grouping of anything from ten to fifteen percent, which will decide who is going to govern. Come back in five years and see if I was wrong.)
In Germany, the obstinate holdovers of the Communist regime in the East have successfully started a coalition with the more embittered elements of the Social-Democrats, and now are a force west as well as east of the old border. The result is that in the next elections, both left parties are expected to lose big, and the Christian Democrat alliance will probably be able to form a government without allies.
In France and Spain, the split, if it exists, is less visible. But one has to wonder whether every Spanish Socialist is happy with the increasingly isolated, wavering Zapatero government, looking for trouble abroad by criticizing the Berlusconi government for no clear reason while changing its policies at home under the impact of facts that its opponents had clearly predicted, and kept in place by increasingly aggressive and uncooperative regional allies.
However, what shows most clearly that the split between the trades union tradition and the progressivist tradition is real and profound is the development of the American election. Hillary Clinton started her campaign with positions undistinguishable from Barrack Obama's; it has been the force of circumstances (to which it has always been the Clinton genius to adapt) that has recast her as the champion of the unideological, moderate, working-class roots of the Democratic Party. Perhaps, if it had not found a leader so willing to exploit it, the split between working-class and academic, rural and suburban, gun-owning and anti-gun, would not have come to the surface quite so swiftly and so viciously; but the Senator for New York, who spent half her adult life in Arkansas and knows that kind of country much better than Senator Obama ever will, could not possibly have created her own movement if it had not been there, silent, sullen, perhaps only half aware of its own specificity, but ready to be awakened and exploited.
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Date: 2008-05-22 09:30 am (UTC)*cough* My godfather's family-- he would be about 105 now, if he hadn't died-- left Spain because of the "political" split between the Basque and other folks.
Hard to call something a "rise" when it's got over a hundred years behind it, isn't it?
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Date: 2008-05-22 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-22 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-22 01:55 pm (UTC)