Ewald Engelen, a social scientist at the University of Amsterdam, argues that the old paradigm of a left arguing for strong government intervention and a right preferring market solutions to social problems has been replaced. “Today,” he told Al Jazeera,“we see that the dominant dichotomy has become globalism versus nationalism.”
Stewart Patrick, the director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, elaborated on these trends in an email:
The most salient political division today is not between conservatives and liberals in the United States or social democrats in the United Kingdom and France, but between nationalists and globalists. The victory of the Leave campaign in Britain, the triumph of Trump, and the unprecedented success of Marine Le Pen’s National Front (albeit in a losing effort) were underpinned by economic and cultural anxiety that transcended traditional ideological lines — and a rejection of conventional parties and a political establishment that had too long ignored those concerns.
In the United States, Sean McElwee, a policy analyst at the liberal think tank Demos, and Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University, examined data from American National Election Studies and reported in The Nation that
Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism, across several different measures of racial animus — and that it helped him win. By contrast, we found little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump. The American political system is sorting so that racial progressivism and economic progressivism are aligned in the Democratic Party and racial conservatism and economic conservatism are aligned in the Republican Party.
In their essay, McElwee and McDaniel graphed data documenting their findings, which is reproduced in the accompanying chart. White voters who supported Trump were decidedly strong on measures of anti-black affect and hostility to the integration of immigrants into the population of the United States.
Elections over the past two years here and in Britain, Austria, France and the Netherlands have demonstrated the depth of this transformation of the organized left and the organized right. Whatever the outcome of the voting in a particular country, a clear pattern appears. The emerging or nascent partisan divide has a strong cultural subtext: for or against “traditional values”; young versus old; rural versus urban; the college educated versus those without degrees; blue collar against white collar; us versus them; whites versus nonwhites; immigrant versus native born; European versus non-European.
The rise of an affluent left — sometimes triumphant, sometimes not — can be seen in the victories of Emmanuel Macron and his new La République en Marche (the Republic on the Move) party in France; in the surprise showing of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in the June 8 parliamentary elections in Britain; in the composition of the electorate that unsuccessfully backed Hillary Clinton; and in the victories of Alexander Van der Bellen, president of Austria, and of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy in the Netherlands.
In much of Europe, although not in Britain, the growth of the populist right has devastated once powerful labor and social democratic parties on the left. In the Austrian presidential election, for example, the success of the far right Freedom Party resulted in a fourth place showing for the Social Democratic candidate. In the French parliamentary elections this month, the ruling Socialist Party saw its 280 seats dwindle to 29 out of 577. In the Netherlands, the number of seats held in parliament by the Dutch Labor Party fell from 38 to 9 after the March election.
On the surface, the success of the British Labour Party in the elections two weeks ago would appear to stand apart. But Labour’s gains were not based on improved margins in traditionally Labour leaning constituencies. Corbyn’s Labour Party actually lost ground on its home turf, but it more than made up for those setbacks by prevailing in Conservative constituencies.
The Financial Times has documented a steady decline in class-based voting in Britain. In 1987, the British middle class voted for the Conservative Party by 40 points more than the national average, while the working class voted for the Labor Party by 32 points more than the national average — a 72-point spread. By 2017, the spread had dropped to 15 points. Once a Tory stronghold, the British middle class now splits its vote evenly.
A parallel voting pattern emerged in the case of education, as Labour Party gains were strongest in districts with high percentages of voters with college and advanced degrees. The outcome of the contest for a parliamentary seat in the Kensington section of London has become a symbol of the election. “Labour wins Kensington — UK’s richest constituency — for first time,” declared the June 9 New Statesman headline.
In other words, the Labour Party in England can no longer be considered a labor party in the traditional sense of representing the working class. In this respect, there is a growing demographic convergence between the Democratic Party, the Labour Party in England, Macron’s En Marche in France, the voters who elected Van der Bellen president of Austria and those who voted for the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy in the Netherlands.
In France, Macron’s margin of victory over Marine Le Pen grew larger as the average income and average level of education in a community rose — as the average percentage of working class voters declined. The Financial Times noted that the pattern in France was echoed in the 2016 Brexit referendum, in the presidential election here and in the recent Dutch election. In each of these plebiscites, education emerged as the strongest predictor of votes for a right populist option, where the less educated chose it more often than those with degrees.
The FT could have added Austria to this list. The presidential election there in May of 2016 pitted Van der Bellen, the center-left candidate, against the hard right populist Norbert Hofer. Polls showed that Van der Bellen won decisively among the well-educated and the better paid, while Hofer won workers and the less well educated in a landslide. The election in the Netherlands was also emblematic of the disruption of traditional partisan divisions. Koen Damhuis, a Dutch sociologist at the European University Institute in Florence, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that this new dichotomy has been problematic for all traditional parties — “some of them haven’t decided yet how they want to position themselves” — but especially so for labor: “They are visibly confused.”
According to Steven Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations, globalization and the Great Recession of 2007-9 have resulted in a “pervasive anxiety” that provides
fertile grounds for populists who promise a reassertion of control and national sovereignty, including over borders, as well as a renewed focus on those left behind in the global economy.
Patrick shares with a number of internationalists the hope that Macron and En Marche represent a viable political solution to contemporary conflicts that could be applied in other countries:
Macron’s genius has been to argue that he can thread the political needle, by embracing globalization and reinforcing social protections to compensate those exposed to its downside. In the process, he has obliterated traditional parties of the left and the right, while promising a synthesis tailor made for the twenty-first century. If he can bring it off, he will become a model for other leaders to follow — including in the United States.
In the 2016 election, as issues of race and immigration became more salient, the percentage of Trump and Clinton support among voters making more than $50,000 was virtually the same. If anything, those at the top making $200,000 or more tilted slightly to Clinton.
Even more striking, among all voters, Clinton won 52-42 among the college-educated while Trump carried those without degrees 51-44.
There is no question that in the days after Trump’s victory, Bernie Sanders’s call on “CBS This Morning” to revive the New Deal origins of the Democratic Party — “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from” was powerful. A candidate making that appeal, however, and seeking to build a broad majority biracial coalition, must in fact have broad biracial appeal. As of now, Sanders is far from personifying broad majority biracial appeal. Worse, existing Democratic candidate recruitment and nomination processes have paid insufficient attention to the selection of candidates who are competent to build bridges across America’s immense cultural gaps.
Instead of trying to bridge these gaps, as two of my Times colleagues, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, wrote earlier this week, there is a “growing tension” between the Democratic Party’s “ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain.”
The “ascendant militant wing” — a colorful, if controversial, description of the Sanders-Warren wing of the party — has the moral high ground within Democratic ranks but the votes they want the party to seek are those of some of the least reachable constituencies — white men and women whose views on immigration, race and political correctness are in direct conflict with liberal idealism. It would be an extraordinary challenge to get these particular voters to join with minorities and progressive activists.
Peter Beinart, writing in The Atlantic, addresses the way this plays out. He argues that party leaders have to draw the line on issues dear to the heart of the left:
Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity.
In practical terms, Beinart writes, “it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.”
The hard part
is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Beinart cites Karen Stenner’s 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, in which she wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference — the hallmarks of liberal democracy — are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
Americans, Beinart contends,
know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he — a black man with a Muslim-sounding name — twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.
What we are seeing now is the replacement of class-based politics, a trend apparent in the United States and Europe. This gives us a more racialized and xenophobic politics, on one hand, and a politics capitalizing on increasing levels of education and open-mindedness in the electorate on the other. If the building of a viable left coalition is possible, it is likely to require some thoughtful and humane co-optation in the form of deference to our limits and boundaries.