Michael Brendan Dougherty argues at National Review Online that successful left-leaning centrist politicians are harder to find these days in the U.S. and Europe.
There was once a time when the center Left appeared like the natural governing philosophy and coalition in the West after the Cold War. The details were different in each country, but the general outline held. Having made permanent peace with capitalism, the center Left could capture upwardly mobile social liberals while expanding its coalition with new immigrant groups. …
… And now it’s just about all gone. In the U.S., young Democrats long to get away from the compromises of the Clinton era and wish for a new intersectionalist politics, or a socialist future. Tony Blair is one of the most unpopular political figures in modern British life, his party now run by one of the very few socialist holdouts against his New Labour renovation. In Germany, the once powerful Social Democrats saw their popularity decline by the day while in their “grand coalition” with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. …
… The results are everywhere to see. Almost anywhere that there is economic stagnation or deindustrialization — East Germany, Northern industrial towns in Britain, southern Italy, Appalachia — there is a populist politics that wants to reverse, slow down, or at least tame the economic and social consequences of globalism. Will there even be a center Left in five years?
Perhaps only in media institutions, the last places where the center-left sensibility continues to reign almost unimpeded. And that figures. Many people go into media precisely because they want to redistribute the honorific resources of society. They want to declare the heroes, villains, and victims of each social trend and political development.
