All Unhappy Social Democratic Parties Are Alike: They’ve Lost the White Working Class

In the recent U.K. elections that gave Boris Johnson’s Tories a resounding victory, Britain’s Labour Party was decimated in what had long been its working-class home. The new brand of nativist Tories ousted one Labour member of parliament (MP) after another in England’s north, once the United Kingdom’s industrial heartland, today its Rust Belt. The migration of Britain’s abandoned workers to the anti-immigrant nationalism at the root of Brexit closely tracks the pattern we have seen elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. In France, for example, the longtime proletarian strongholds of the French Communist Party have turned to the insular nationalism of two generations of Le Pens in recent elections. (The Communists have also failed to win many votes in France’s newer proletarian strongholds, the banlieues that are home to African and Arab immigrants and their children and grandchildren.) In Germany, the historic home of European social democracy, the world’s oldest social democratic party is polling close to single digits. And here in the United States, the Trumpified Republicans have their base in the white working class—the reason why Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin put Trump in the White House in 2016.

Last fall’s election in the United Kingdom marks the worst performance by Labour since 1935—just as the most recent elections in Germany and France also marked low points for the Social Democrats and Socialists, respectively. Socialists do govern in Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Sweden (though the Swedish Social Democrats also experienced their worst election in 2018 and govern now in coalition with that nation’s Greens), but these are exceptions to the painful decline of European social democracy.

The migration of Britain’s abandoned workers to the anti-immigrant nationalism at the root of Brexit closely tracks the pattern we have seen elsewhere in Europe and in the United States .

Three kinds of fragmentation have vexed the parties of the European left over the past twenty years, just as they have vexed the Democratic Party in the United States. The first stems from the growing presence in those parties of urban upper-middle-class professionals, who are often at odds on cultural questions, broadly defined, with the parties’ more traditional and patriarchal working classes. The second results from defections from the left due to racism and nativism. This phenomenon is no stranger to the United States but is only now impacting Europe with the diminution (not sudden, but perceived as such) of many nations’ relative racial and religious homogeneity. The shift of England’s north from Labour to the Tories summoned memories of George Wallace’s surprising successes in Northern states in the Democratic primaries of 1964. Wallace’s vote marked a resurgence of white nationalism that heralded the end of the New Deal coalition and the subsequent electoral victories of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The third fragmentation results from geographic divergence—with minorities and the culturally liberal young and professionals clustering in cities with large service sectors, while rural and formerly industrial areas, increasingly poor and elderly, experience both the reality and the sense of abandonment.

As Rust Belts have moved to right-wing populism, cities have moved correspondingly left. Following San Diego’s mayoral election later this year, every one of America’s thirty largest cities will have a Democratic mayor. Indeed, the economic and demographic gap between major cities and rural areas has become a defining and common feature of politics in virtually every Western nation. Last December, the mayors of Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, and Bratislava met in Budapest to declare their allegiance to green, liberal, and anti-nativist policies—in diametric opposition to the policies of their respective nations. ¹ “Populism striving for hegemony cannot win over cities,” Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony declared. While their right-wing national governments have opposed European Union proposals to go carbon neutral by 2050, these city leaders support such plans and are asking the Union to direct its funds directly to the cities, bypassing recalcitrant national regimes.

Indeed, the economic and demographic gap between major cities and rural areas has become a defining and common feature of politics in virtually every Western nation .

In the United States, the scope of the economic abandonment of the nation’s heartland can be hard to grasp for Americans who live in metropolitan areas, but a study from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) documents its extent in pitiless numbers. When the report was released in mid-2016, it was largely ignored; had it rung the appropriate alarm bells, Trump’s victory would not have been so shocking. And if the Clinton campaign had had it on its radar and understood its implications, it is just possible Trump’s victory might have been averted altogether.

As Rust Belts have moved to right-wing populism, cities have moved correspondingly left .

What the EIG did was to compare the locations of business start-ups during the last three economic recoveries. In the recovery of 1992-1996, the share of new business establishments created in counties with more than one million residents was just 13 percent. That share rose to 29 percent in the recovery of 2002-2006 and to 58 percent in the recovery of 2010-2014.

In counties of one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand residents, the share of new businesses was 39 percent in the 1992-1996 recovery, slumping to 36 percent in the 2002-2006 recovery and to 19 percent in the Obama recovery of 2010-2014.

And in counties with fewer than one hundred thousand residents, the share of new business in the 1992-1996 recovery was a robust 32 percent, tumbling to 15 percent in the 2002-2006 recovery and to a flat zero percent between 2010 and 2014.

In short, private capital completely abandoned non-metropolitan America—as it had largely abandoned England’s Midlands and North, France’s Northeast industrial belt, and other non-metropolitan regions of Europe. Nor did the Democratic Party in the United States, or the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, or the Socialist Party in France compensate for private capital’s flight with the kind of regionally based public investment that had characterized the New Deal’s investment of rural electrification and hydropower in Southern and Western states—or with Eisenhower’s interstate highway development or the military Keynesianism that sustained much of the American economy during the Cold War.

To the contrary, a chief feature of social democratic policy since the 1990s has been the delinking of working-class interests—more particularly, the delinking of the interests of the industrial proletariat—from the purposes and policies of the center-left parties. The support that Democrats in the United States and Labour in Britain gave to trade agreements decimated their manufacturing sectors. As globalization and financialization (the latter particularly pronounced in the United Kingdom and the United States) have undermined the egalitarian achievements of the postwar era, parties of the center-left have been stretched ideologically, often to the breaking point. The 1990s saw Britain’s New Labour under Tony Blair, America’s Democrats under Bill Clinton, and German’s Social Democrats under Gerhard Schröder all move to globalize and deregulate their economies, to the benefit of those nations’ banking and corporate sectors and the detriment of their working-class voters. All three were no better than indifferent to the ongoing decline of their nation’s union movements, although, most especially here in America, the shrinking of unions and their ability to influence working-class voters were a primary reason why long-Democratic Midwestern states voted for Trump in 2016.

. . . [A]chief feature of social democratic policy since the 1990s has been . . . the delinking of the interests of the industrial proletariat . . . from the purposes and policies of the center-left parties .

The financial collapse of 2008 and the hugely unequal recovery that followed have led to white working-class defections from social democratic parties and to battles between the center-left and a more militant left in virtually every industrialized nation. In France, the venerable Socialist Party has given way to the further left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the vapid, top-down Buttigieg-ness of President Macron, while much of the white working class has cast its lot with the Yellow Vests or the Le Pens. In Germany, the Social Democrats have joined themselves so tightly at the hip with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats that the young have left them for the Greens, while the workers of Eastern Germany have drifted to the nativist Alternative for Germany (AfD). This winter, the Social Democratic Party elected new, younger, further left leaders in a belated attempt to halt the party’s slide. In the United Kingdom, of course, the Corbynistas took control of Labour, shifting its economics well to the left—and more damagingly, exhibited some of the blind, romantic infatuation with the left authoritarian regimes in developing nations, such as Maduro’s Venezuela, that had helped bring down the New Left of the late 1960s. Within the Democratic Party in the United States, of course, a battle has raged between the party’s left and more centrist wings.

The financial collapse of 2008 and the hugely unequal recovery that followed have led to white working-class defections from social democratic parties and to battles between the center-left and a more militant left in virtually every industrialized nation . . .

Since the financial meltdown, the economic and demographic gap between major cities and rural areas has become a defining and common feature of politics in virtually every Western nation. One consequence of the U.K. election is that the Tories will now have to represent voters who actually want higher public investment in the National Health Service, in schools, in industry, in the Midlands and the North—more of a mixed economy, albeit for white England only. In this, the Tories will be following the Le Pen-ites in France, who are assiduous defenders of the nation’s generous welfare state so long as it does not extend to immigrants, Muslims, and the like. Donald Trump was elected, of course, vowing not to cut Social Security and to replace NAFTA—promises he has now marginally, imperfectly, and provisionally made good on. But true to Republican orthodoxy, he and his Republican congressional ilk also spent the first year of his presidency trying to take health coverage away from tens of millions of Americans and rewarding the rich with an immense tax cut. His base, like Johnson’s, is knitted together by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and a rage against the advocates of a modernity that late capitalism has rendered harsh and degrading to many of his voters.

Social Democrats and Socialists still govern in Europe in Iberia and Scandinavia—though regional separatism and nativism pose threats in those regions as well. In Spain, the center-left Socialists and the more anti-capitalist Podemos Party have formed a coalition government—a combination that the various wings of the Democratic Party in the United States will, one way or another, have to create their own version of whether they are to defeat our own nativist authoritarian in the coming election.

Marx never wrote about what would become of the industrial proletariat if and when history passed it by and cast it aside—much less what would become of it if the agents of its demise included such center-left parties as those led by Blair, Clinton, and Schröder. From Michigan in 2016 to Manchester last fall, we are seeing what is becoming of it, at least at election time.

America . . . is far more racially diverse than our European counterparts, for which reason the Republican war on minorities and immigrants . . . gives the Democrats an electoral advantage that their European counterparts, . . . cannot claim .

America, however, is far more racially diverse than our European counterparts, for which reason the Republican war on minorities and immigrants—which, let us never forget, preceded Trump—gives the Democrats an electoral advantage that their European counterparts, the one-time standard-bearers of social democracy, cannot claim. Add to that advantage the revolt of the young against America’s increasingly dysfunctional capitalism, and the Democrats will likely claim a popular majority in the presidential election next November. To claim an electoral college majority, however, they will need to run better among Midwestern white workers than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. If they can plausibly spell out how they will invest public funds in America’s abandoned regions (which is a key component of any Green New Deal), they may just reclaim enough white workers to win not just the popular vote count, but power.