How the left was lost

Part - I

The PPP is struggling to define its future role. Its young chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has a legacy which was placed in another time by his grandfather and mother who were not only astute but flexible enough to create the relative context. If ZAB was a pure leftist and coloured his party in social-democratic hues, Benazir moved right from her father’s position to the centre-left of the political spectrum because that was what would work in the political context.

Bilawal’s father, Asif Ali Zardari, was more of a political opportunist without a creed other than what the party had historically stood for. Most of his uttering(s) were rhetoric around past sloganeering without a substance to fill in the vacuum of a philosophy that would become the central theme of how the party must develop in the 21st century. Having survived in the government for five years it did little else to give any meaning for the future. It thus lost both its representation and its base.

That is the dilemma which faces young Bilawal. He began with the same sloganeering that was coined by and for his grandfather and mother, who practiced their politics in the 60s and the 90s respectively. Twenty-Five years down the line both, the nation and the world have changed. So not only is it important to address the 60 percent twenty-five year olds and below in the demographic placement, it must be with a clear message of hope and vision which can resonate with them per the prevailing context. Mere invocation of the brilliance of ZAB and BB is more a historical rendition without a clear vision on how their philosophies must evolve to keep relevance. That is why BBZ, or under his chairmanship his party, are unable to make little traction with the masses.

The reason for the PPP’s ideological muddle is evident. The world and its societies have moved significantly to the right and where they earlier grappled between the ideological division of the left and the right in the political spectrum, the current fault-line is more civilisational, where within the struggle may well be between the two rights. The left seems to have fallen by the wayside, and there is good body of work to prove it. A chimera of left in societies only reflects a part of what it was meant to represent in its original incarnation.

The new left has unfortunately degraded to a fad, more indicative of the socially liberal value-based belief system rather than an incorporation and inclusiveness of the entire social and economic creed which founded the politics of the left. Today’s so-called left is elitist and that is why it has shrunk to insignificance. Not that the grounds for a politics of the left don’t exist. The market economy capitalism has truly pulled the rug away from under the leftist political creed which hasn’t been reframed since, gradually fading into oblivion.

This is what young Bilawal must do. Pick up a recent piece by Happymon Jacob of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who – in his quest to investigate how the right has found increasing space to dominate Indian politics pushing the liberal Congress to embarrassing sidelines – has established that over time liberal politics reduced itself to the elitist domain. From a contract between those who espoused a more inclusive, egalitarian and a people’s approach it restricted itself to the drawing rooms of those who sought societal liberties than something related to the common masses. Once out of the domain of the masses only the shell of liberal thought has survived. It lacks substance and thus any meaning in the current context.

A recent piece in the NYT on the fate of Britain’s Labour Party suggests similar failures. The article is horrified to note that ‘in a recent by-election, Labour failed to obtain even 5 percent of the vote’. It’s the same in Scotland; where once Scottish Labour Party ruled, it is now a distant third behind Scottish Nationalists and the Conservative Party. The piece goes on to say, “there is no such thing as a core Labour vote anymore”. Sounds familiar – the PPP in Punjab? If that isn’t instructive enough, what is? And it hasn’t only to do with Brexit and the wave of opinion built on the fear of the immigrant. Those may be the underlying triggers as indeed the signs of a society’s march ahead with time. These are also signs of how the left has withered for being out-of-time, or simply faded for not being relevant enough.

The Labour Party of Tony Blair was far different from the Labour of Jeremy Corbyn. The latter lags behind Theresa May, the current UK PM and a Conservative, by 57 points in approval rating. Now that may have something to do with Corbyn’s person too but his far-left strain of Labour politics is just not cutting any ice with the popular base. And that is where Labour seems to be suffering. It is simply not congruent with the societal mood. The more one focuses on this point alone, the more it might sink in as the dominating dilemma of left politics in today’s global society.

In the US the rise of Trump was based on his brash denunciation of the increasingly liberal and socialist hue that Obama managed to institute. Without a doubt, since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism, and perhaps Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, Barack Obama was the most left democrat to reach office and pursue an overtly socialist agenda. If ever there will now exist the opportunity to classify liberal politics as a reference in modern history – in the US and anywhere in the world – it shall have to be what Obama exhibited during his term of office.

Trump didn’t win, Hillary lost; because the reaction of the popular base to the extremes of social democracy was intense. Bernie Sanders only scared the rural majority back into its conservative shell. And once you lose intuitional contact with the masses the race is as much as lost. This has been the Left’s biggest failure – the loss of intuitional contact. Bill Clinton was a centrist and did little harm to the Democratic cause, rather survived his years well with remarkable success but to Obama’s dominant socialist strains the reaction was equal in intensity. Trump simply leveraged the reaction in congruence with a global shift rightwards.

Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent, sums it up well: “irreconcilabl(y) different views ... reflect a widening divide that is eroding the electoral power of social democrats. It derives from the incoherence of ... middle-class professionals in ethnically diverse liberal enclaves and less-well-educated, working-class whites in communities that feel forgotten or ignored”.

Closer to home, the middle-class professional is replaced by the professional elites while the ‘working-class’ remains the working class – just even more desperately ignored and forgotten. The political liberal was lost to the socially liberal – not in the political sense but as a mere lifestyle denomination.

 

To be continued

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com