Sarah Leonard casts some light on why progressives in the US and Europe are moving way left, over into anti-capitalist socialism country. Because the political parties that formerly stood up for the middle and working class threw that all away, and became the centrist left of the worldwide Capitalist Party.
Sarah Leonard, Why Are So Many Young Voters Falling for Old Socialists?
The post-Cold War capitalist order has failed us: Across Europe and the United States, millennials are worse off than their parents were and are too poor to start new families. In the United States, they are loaded with college debt (or far less likely to be employed without a college degree) and are engaged in precarious and non-unionized labor. Also the earth is melting.
There’s nothing inherently radical about youth. But our politics have been shaped by an era of financial crisis and government complicity. Especially since 2008, we have seen corporations take our families’ homes, exploit our medical debt and cost us our jobs. We have seen governments impose brutal austerity to please bankers. The capitalists didn’t do it by accident, they did it for profit, and they invested that profit in our political parties. For many of us, capitalism is something to fear, not celebrate, and our enemy is on Wall Street and in the City of London.
Because we came to political consciousness after 1989, we’re not instinctively freaked out by socialism. In fact, it seems appealing: In a 2016 poll conducted by Harvard, 51 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 rejected capitalism, and a third said they supported socialism. A Pew poll in 2011 showed that the same age bracket had more positive views of socialism than capitalism. What socialism actually means to millennials is in flux — more a falling out with capitalism than an adherence to one specific platform. Still, within this generation, certain universal programs — single-payer health care, public education, free college — and making the rich pay are just common sense.
We’ll have to see how this plays out as an aspect of the political reailgnment that few seem to be attuned to. We have a left wing, so-called liberal press and mainstream Democrats that continues to rant in opposition to populism out in the hinterlands, branding it as extremist right wing craziness. Likewise, we see the right wing media and ‘mainstream’ Republicans attacking Hillary and Obama, trying to unmake Obamacare and screwing up the social policies that Trump promised to keep in force for his base. Underneath all that apparent left versus right jousting, the deep realignment away from left versus right to up versus down has shaken politics to the core.
That realignment is what brought Trump to the White House, Brexit to Europe, and Marine Le Pen to a runoff in France.
And behind Leonard’s words, this realignment is animating a new generation of anti-capitalists. But they aren’t leftists: they’re downists, united in their opposition to the policies and rhetoric that keep the powerful and their machinery in place, and frames the discourse about policy to exclude those who want to redefine the stratigraphy of power and polity.
The new radicalism is downism, not trying to pull so-called leftist political parties further left. It’s time to abandon left versus right, and pull all the tribes, trials, and troubles of the bottom together, to find common cause, instead of being divided by the lies of left versus right.
I’m no longer a leftist: I’m a downist. Hopefully, more progressives like Leonard will lean into the realignment.
The article does not address the deep illiberalism and intolerance of the “down” movement, whether it is on the far left or the right, that makes me very uncomfortable. Holding up a conservative like Linda Sarsour as an example of the new leadership is telling.
If that is the future, our liberal-democracy experiment is doomed indeed. What would emerge is anyone’s guess, but I have a feeling that liberals like me, and any minority of any kind, will not like it.
tinfoilparachute 