“That” was move to Britain. We had been talking to a waiter who had learned good English and through some connection with previous tourists knew about the outside world in what we might call granular detail. He was particularly impressed with banks that gave out money via holes in the wall. He wanted to escape the repression and poverty of his country and get to London. We gently put him off the idea, which seemed too far-fetched to be realistic.

“It rains a lot,” we told him. “And it’s cold.”

“Wait till we all know about how you live,” he replied. “We could always wear coats. The problem is that you won’t want us to stay.”

“Nonsense,” we said.

“Come anytime,” we smiled, knowing that he would not, could not.

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The American Left is looking increasingly extreme

By Justin Webb

It’s one thing to predict events. Any fool with a Twitter account and modicum of luck can say “told you so.” The real sages are the predictors of the thinking that moulds events: people who can look ahead and see not the events themselves — who will win an election, whether he’ll start a war, and so on — but the context of them. Long before the internet and the connectivity of today, this man in Burma could see that if the world ever got smaller and more knowable for everyone, then mass migration would become a huge object of desire and cause of conflict. Both of those things happened.

Halfway across the globe, as we were talking in Burma, the philosopher Richard Rorty was thinking in Harvard and becoming less interested in the arcane stuff of academic philosophy and more interested in the field as it applied to politics. It was the 80s. Reagan in power, the American Left wondering what just happened.

Rorty predicted two things. The first is the more famous but the less important. He said something “would crack” in American politics and allow a strongman to become elected. The interests of the working class had been ignored in a globalising world and they would eventually notice and go elsewhere for satisfaction.

Not a bad shot at superforcasting.

But he made a wider set of predictions too, less celebrated but more important in the post-Trump world. What Rorty predicted, in a set of lectures that eventually became the book Achieving Our Country, published in 1998, was that the route back for the American Left was far trickier than it might appear. Sure, Bill Clinton won. So — after Rorty had died — did Obama. But a conflict on the Left would hobble them both, reducing their ability to be properly transformational presidents.

Rorty used the word “exhausted.”

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He believed that the old social democratic American Left “collapsed during the late sixties under the burden of the conflagration surrounding the Vietnam War” and might be replaced by a Left that believed the only way forward was a “complete dismantling of the ‘system.’”

The consensus view on the Left risked becoming shaped by this epoch-making event and the reaction to it. The Vietnam War, in the view of the activists, “not only could never be forgiven, but had shown us to be a nation conceived in sin, and irredeemable.” Rorty predicted that “a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left” would only ever be able to understand America in a way that:

“leads them to step back from their country and, as they say, ‘theorise’ it. It leads them to … give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”

Rorty predicted the context — the descent into identity and away from class — and suggested that without a way back to the old broad appeal of the Democratic party of Roosevelt and Kennedy and LBJ, the game was up. Even the great author and civil rights icon James Baldwin, Rorty pointed out, had thought that America was redeemable — as revealed in the Baldwin passage that inspired the title of Rorty’s book:

“we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

It seems odd to suggest, at the start of a new Democratic presidency — with a Biden mandate provided by easily the biggest number of votes cast in a presidential election, and the President-elect himself so obviously cut from the social democratic cloth of his forebears — that this project is so badly damaged. But Rorty, just as keenly as the Burmese waiter, could see that if something came along to trip the switch, to force the issue, then everything would change. And in both cases the arrival of social media has been the enabler of the contextual shift. Suddenly in poorer parts of the world it is easy to see, on the screen of a phone, what the fancy world looks like. And suddenly in America it has become easy to go head-first down the rabbit-hole that worried Rorty.

He was not an enemy of identity. He could see why it might be time to become more sensitive to what he called the “humiliation which previous generations of Americans have inflicted on their fellow citizens.” He actually endorsed modern campus culture: “Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call ‘politically correct’ has made our country a far better place.” But there was a limit.

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Baldwin drew a limit at being disgusted by America: be angry for sure, be horrified at the place, condemn its many failings and be sceptical of those who hold it up as a shining light without considering the darkness in which so many of its citizens live and have always lived. Do all of that. But do not condemn the whole project. Leave a chink of light, as Baldwin did, towards which people of good heart might still turn.

Rorty suggested that too many academic Left critics of the USA had already closed the door:

“To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce.”

So here we are in 2020. So much of that thinking now permeates the American Left. They see racism and misogyny literally everywhere in American life. They want to defund the police and open the borders. The former movement is the epitome of what Rorty feared because of the implication that policing in America cannot be reformed because America cannot be reformed and has to be burned down (sometimes literally) in order to be rebuilt. As the activist Vicky Osterweil put it “those who participate in rioting and looting tend to be the most politically informed and socially engaged in the neighborhood,” and that their actions should be understood “as essential tactics in fighting racial capitalism.”

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Joe Biden's one chance to save America

By Justin Webb

Osterweil’s book In Defense of Looting caused exactly the fuss she hoped for last summer and there is a performative side to it, and to her, that leads many Democrats to view the threat from these people to them as unserious.

Well, perhaps. Maybe Joe Biden from Scranton will just carry on back in his centre-lane as if nothing has happened. Perhaps Kamala Harris — a former prosecutor — will take up the mantle of centrism too when her turn comes, as it surely will.

But the Rorty warning from history is that the Left will lose the plot and, to the intense frustration of all those around the world who breathed a sigh of relief on November 4th, cock it all up. Specifically, they will cause the Democratic presidency such grief that the party enters the mid-terms in 2022 in disarray and the presidential poll in 2024 in outright civil war.

Our pal in Burma never got to write his predictions down and I imagine never left the nation. But the power of his prophesy has stayed with me. Richard Rorty has also departed the scene — at least, though, he left us this fine book. Which, last year, was reprinted. The American Left cannot say, come 2024, that it wasn’t warned.

Democrats contesting offices in areas where the party is not dominant (as it is in Ocasio-Cortez’ district) are running substantially more Left-wing campaigns than previous Democratic aspirants. And Abrahams and Gillum both put emphasis on mobilising the most Left-wing constituencies in their states—minorities and the young—with platforms to match on social and economic issues.

But how far Left is this surge? And what does it stand for? Can it really be compared with the hard Left radicalism seen elsewhere across the globe?

Rhetorically, this new Leftism rejects ‘business as usual’ and involves a sweeping indictment of the economic and political system for generating inequality and doing little to help ordinary people in the wake of the great financial crisis. Substantively, Democrats today – in particular aspirants for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination – are far more willing to entertain and endorse ‘big ideas’, such as going beyond the ACA, aka Obamacare (which is now vigorously defended) to ‘Medicare for all’, free college education, universal pre-kindergarten provision, vastly expanded infrastructure spending and even a guaranteed jobs programme. Taxing the rich is ‘in’ and worrying about the deficit is ‘out’.

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Democrats are also highly unified on core social issues such as opposing racism, defending immigrants, promoting LGBT and gender equality and criminal justice reform. In short, the centre of gravity of the Democratic party has decisively shifted from trying to assure voters of fiscal and social moderation, to forthrightly promising active government in a wide range of areas.

But this hardly means the Democrats are in any danger of becoming a radical party. Far from it. As Leftism goes, the current Democratic iteration is of a fairly modest variety, approaching, at most, mild European social democracy. Those who call themselves ‘socialist’ (as Ocasio-Cortez does) are few and far between.

Nor is it the case that incumbents and moderates are being thrown out wholesale and replaced with candidates much farther to their Left. Across the country, only two Democratic incumbents in the House lost primaries, and none in the Senate did. A Brookings study found that self-described “progressive Democrats” did well in primaries this election season but establishment Democrats actually did somewhat better. Thus, the change in the party is less a Leftward surge featuring new politicians (though this is happening to some extent) and more a steady party-wide movement to the Left.

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By James Bloodworth

So what caused the shift? This is, after all, a party that was dominated by aggressively moderate ‘New Democrats’ in the 1990s and, even under Barack Obama (after a spurt of major legislation early in his first term), shied away from big programmes and repeatedly tried to broker deals with Republicans to bring down the deficit and reform ‘entitlement programmes’ – Medicare and Social Security, America’s names for government-subsidised health care for the aged and pensions. Many, many Democrats were still scared of the ‘tax-and-spend’ label Republicans were only too happy to pin on them.

One thing that did happen is time. As Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary for Obama and Harvard economics professor, noted, the last 15 years of economic, social and political developments, with the fissures and unsolved problems they have revealed in American society, should have moved open-minded people to the Left. These challenges are simply too big to be solved by mild, ameliorative steps. This is a widely shared view within the Democratic party, including most fervently among some of its strongest supporters – minority and younger generation voters. But increased movement to the Left is not confined to these groups; Democrats as a whole, including leading intellectual lights like Summers, are simply becoming more, and more consistently, centre-Left.

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By Liam Halligan

Indeed, we even see former President Obama in a recent speech urging Democrats to go beyond “good old ideas like a higher minimum wage” and embrace “good new ideas like Medicare-for-all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate”.

And, from the heart of “Hillaryland”, as the cluster of operatives around Hillary Clinton is termed, comes this robust call from Jake Sullivan, her campaign’s senior policy advisor, for going big:

“Democrats should not blush too much, or pay too much heed, when political commentators arch their eyebrows about the party moving Left. The center of gravity itself is moving, and this is a good thing… We Democrats do need to embrace a big, bold policy agenda. We do need to heed the calls of Franklin Roosevelt, who asked us to save capitalism from its excesses, and Lyndon Johnson, who asked us to think ambitiously about how government – and yes, government programmes – can help do that.”

Strong words coming from a fully-paid-up member of the Democratic establishment! But of course the real progenitor of ‘big ideas’, Left-wing politics in the Democratic party was Bernie Sanders. His insurgent campaign, which featured multiple large-scale policy proposals and fierce denunciations of the “billionaire class”, took the 2016 Democratic primaries by storm, injecting this rhetorical and policy approach into the Democratic mainstream. He particularly captured the imaginations of young voters, who gave him gave outsized majorities in most states.

Given Sanders’ success, particularly with young voters, and his continuing influence within the party (even though he is not formally a member), it is fair to ask whether the Democrats’ future lies in continuing to move Left to the point where the Democrats really become his party – or, at any rate, a party dominated by his ‘democratic socialist’ politics. In other words, could there be a “Corbynisation” of the Democratic party?

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Is global momentum with the Left?

By Angus Robertson

I am sceptical. Leaving aside structural-political differences between the UK and US – the Democratic party is not a parliamentary party and does not elect a ‘leader’ in the manner of the British Labour party – the Democrats are likely to remain a big tent party, in which the preponderance of voters and elected officials subscribe to a more moderate brand of Leftism than that espoused by Sanders. Think Elizabeth Warren, who combines big proposals with savvy-bridge building within the party and forthright support for capitalism (albeit of a reformed variety).

If there is a wild card here, it is less likely Sanders than an increasing Leftism on ‘identity politics’ issues around race, gender, LGBT issues and so on. It is possible that the Democrats could embrace these issues so thoroughly that it would come to define the party to the exclusion of economic and policy issues, however big. My sense is that Democratic politicians are aware of this possibility and will strenuously seek to avoid it out of sheer electoral self-interest. But we shall see.