Here's a startling fact: There have been eight leaders of the British Labour Party in the past 40 years. Seven of them failed to win a single general election. The exception, Tony Blair, was a Labour politician only in the most technical sense. Leftists saw him as a disguised conservative, a cuckoo in the nest. To this day, Labour activists use "Blairite" as the worst of insults, viler even than "Tory." Let's widen the camera shot a little. All over Europe, traditional parties of the Center-Left have been losing badly. As I write, opinion polls show the French Socialists in fourth place, the Dutch Labour Party in seventh. Greece's PASOK, the leading party since the early 1980s, is now polling at 7 percent. Spain's PSOE, which had a comfortable majority as recently as 10 years ago, has been displaced by the more radical Podemos. Social Democrats in former communist countries, such as Poland and Hungary, have, if anything, fared even worse.
What is going on? The immediate explanation is clear enough. The established parties of the Center-Left backed the merger of Europe's currencies in the 1990s. As the euro brought poverty to the south and tax increases to the north, voters turned against the politicians whose fingerprints were on the murder weapon.
In most cases, those parties then made things worse by backing the 2008 bank bailouts, convincing many of their former supporters that they were on the side of wealthy financiers rather than of working people.
But a collapse on such a scale doesn't happen overnight. The parties aligned to the Party of European Socialists – the main Center-Left bloc in Europe – dominated Europe in the 1990s and, as late as 2004, were still more likely to be in office than not. Now, according to the latest opinion survey, their support is below 20 percent in the EU as a whole. True, there are one or two holdouts. Socialists have managed to win elections in Sweden and – mystifyingly given how badly it suffered from the euro racket – Portugal. But something is going on that is deeper than the recent downturn.
That something has to do with changes in how we live and work. The parties of the mainstream Left were, in most cases, closely tied to labor unions. Membership of those unions, especially those representing private sector workers, is falling in every industrialized country. That fall reflects a shift from mass industrialization to self-employment. As technology accelerates, we are likelier to become portmanteau workers, specialists who constantly renew our expertise.
I'm not sure my kids will ever have "a job" as we understood the concept in the 20th century. Unless they become government employees, they are likely to do different things at different times, freelancing and re-skilling to meet demand. We can already see the change in white-collar work. I used to work at a newspaper. Now, papers are disappearing, and those that remain employ fewer journalists. Yet there are still people who write, often as a way of supplementing other work. Similar things are happening across the economy. Fewer nurses work for particular hospitals, for example, and more work through agencies.
It is in this context, perhaps, that we should consider American politics. The rest of the world has spent three months asking itself why Donald Trump won. But the more useful question is surely why the Democrats lost. Trump underperformed Republican congressional candidates and secured fewer votes than either John McCain or Mitt Romney. But Hillary Clinton performed execrably – as Democrats have been doing in legislative, gubernatorial and state elections since the 1990s.
This weakness should give conservatives no pleasure. Without serious opponents, we can become flabby, self-serving, even corrupt. Ask yourself, for example, whether the absence of a credible alternative makes Trump more or less likely to distinguish between his commercial interests and his public office.
Eventually, the Left will renew itself, appealing to a more individualist generation that has little time for the rhetoric of class strife or identity politics. There will always be a space in politics for parties that favor more equal outcomes. It is possible to be pacifist, ecologist and even redistributionist without being corporatist. I just hope the Left gets its act together soon. Someone needs to offer an opposition.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
