We have been told for some time now that social democracy is on the run. The marea rosa [Pink Tide] in Latin America's most-discussed nations appears to have gone out, at least for the time being. Dilma Rousseff was forced from office in Brazil, Lula has been sentenced to jail, the Peronistas lost control in Argentina, Chavismo is discredited in Venezuela, Colombia is run – seemingly as ever – across competing factions of its light-skinned landholding oligarchy, and Mexico remains in the hands of corrupt, authoritarian neoliberals.
The social democratic parties in Western Europe have seen staggering declines in their membership and overall public support, most notably in France, where the last Presidential elections saw their virtual end as a political force.
And so pundits from across the ideological spectrum have declared democratic leftism to be over.
But they are wrong. The elections in France can be read as a vote for a democratized alternative to bureaucratic parties. The UK elections have seen a revitalized Labour Party drawing in members as never before in the name of an open process committed to socialist and parliamentary ideals. As per both those countries, the Dutch roundly rejected racist populism in their last elections. The immense popularity of the Christian Democrats' Frau Merkel is a sign of the center-right taking on more aspects of social democracy via its sense of collective responsibility and solidarity, evident in the country’s surprisingly rapid adjustment to Syrian refugees, at least in the year since so many arrived. The new German right appears to be in complete disarray.
In Spain and Greece, new and vibrant leftist challenges to the old social democrats have been astoundingly successful. And perhaps most notably among the bastions of Enlightenment socialism, France has birthed an innovative, successful political party. The fate of M Macron's new formation remains to be seen, and while his party promises deregulation of the labor market, its commitment to diverse social identities situates it on the left.
Meanwhile, the populism of recent campaigns from both the left and the right in the US and the UK leaves many of us confused. Old-fashioned machine politics won Mrs Clinton her party’s nomination, but not the presidency. Old-fashioned machine politics failed to prevent Mr Trump from gaining the Republican prize, but worked well in the general election, when the people who vote Republican (poor and affluent, exurban and rural white people without college educations) did what they have increasingly done over the five decades of wrapping racism in the cloak of states' rights – Mr Nixon's ‘Southern Strategy’ applied successively to the Sunbelt, by Mr Reagan, and now the upper mid-west, by Trump. A seemingly unpopular candidate in Mr Corbyn made a seemingly popular one in Mrs May barely credible in an astonishing swing of public opinion over just a few weeks.
Hovering over all of this is the sense that open financial markets, use of an international division of labor, socialism for the wealthy and capitalism for the poor (handouts to business versus cuts to welfare) have not produced the desired and promised outcomes; that globalization, so heartily embraced by the center left and center right alike, has indeed diminished the ability of governments to deliver the things they promise as they open their economies up to the world. This in turn leads to shifts such as the end of an industrial basis to economies and its substitution by services and imports, followed inexorably by the realization that service sectors, too, can be provided by a global workforce.
The effects of these changes are uneven, depending on other factors, such as local and international fiscal crises, imperialistic ideology (the bedrock of Western European thinking), nationalism, Keynesian public spending versus redistribution of money to ruling classes, levels of human-capital investment and rationality (the dogged refusal of the British working class to accept higher education when it was free, or to move geographically in search of employment), the strength of an educated civil society versus the politics of spectacle and refusal, environmentalism versus growth, and other ongoing tendencies and binary oppositions.
While the days of unified labor peacefully confronting unified capital in collective bargaining, and their political deputies doing the same in congress, are clearly gone, it remains the case that the coalitions that form across politics remain shaped primarily by a mixture of economy and identity. Social-democratic ideas are well placed to imbue such coalitions with sound arguments in the interests of all.