A Left At War With Itself

So the fascists didn't win the presidential election in France today. Hurrah!

Except the left appears to made itself an irrelevancy, by losing out in the first round, enabling centrist Emmanuel Macron (who some of my friends on Facebook describe as a neoliberal, about which more anon) to be the standard bearer for reasonable, non-fascist politics.

What's the opposite of hurrah?

I didn't vote in the French election, of course, and I don't really know Macron's politics. If I could have, of course, I would have happily voted for him, to do my part against Marine Le Pen. A quick glance at his Wikipedia page shows that his policy positions aren't too different from mine, though I'm not in total concordance with him on his support for forcing internet companies to allow government access to encrypted communications, and I'm not sure his €500 "culture pass" is necessarily the way to stop French Muslim youth from becoming radicalized.

I guess this makes me a neoliberal to be opposed as well?

This kind of talk has been depressingly common of late, and I'm here this week to call down a pox on both the houses of the left, throughout the world. From the US, to the UK, to France, and wherever people are attacking each other for being insufficiently socialist, or for being too socialist; effectively for replaying that "People's Front of Judea" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.



But I also don't want to apportion blame only to the really leftist side. I can get that out of the way now, if you like:

I was un-convinced by Bernie Sanders, though I agree with much of what he said and would have happily voted for him if he'd won the nomination. Specifically, I don't think he'd have automatically won those rural or Rust Belt votes that eluded Hillary Clinton, and it's hard to get a sense of his positions on foreign policy, beyond wanting to bring home the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet more than Senator Sanders himself it's certain segments of his support, who seemed to have swallowed wholesale the lies about Hillary Clinton, alongside the completely true things that made her not a great candidate. I don't know how big a demographic of Sanders voters went for Trump, but I have seen those people - they're out there, and the internet echo machine that turned Clinton into something slightly more hated than Satan is heavily to blame.

While we're talking about her, Clinton and her cabal need a lot of blame too. For one thing there was the whole "her turn" approach of her campaign, where everyone dissenting against her was considered to be insufficiently Democratic. This is the same group that pulled dirty tricks on the Sanders camp, and that has refused to fight down ticket, even at state or local level, leaving the Republicans (and worse) to crawl in.

In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn earns my nope because of his poor handling of the whole Brexit thing. Again, I agree with him on a lot of issues (though notably not on his opposition to NATO), but with his old-left distaste for the EU, he's failed to provide a reasonable alternative to the Conservatives, and I see it as eminently possible that after the June 8th elections Labour under Corbyn could find itself not just decimated but reduced to a party not much bigger than the Liberal Democrats. His heart is in the right place when he wants to protect the National Health Service, but what if he sided with Tim Farron and said that he'd stop the Brexit train if he became prime minister?

Again, I have some choice words for the Blairite wing of the party. My main objection is that they seemed determined to campaign as Tories-lite, which I think even Tony Blair himself was too smart to do - he is, after all, the only Labour leader in my lifetime to have won an election. But Ed Miliband's one advantage, as history will likely not recall, is that if he'd won the election in 2015 there wouldn't even have been a referendum on EU membership. The fact that everyone else on that side of the party was even less presentable than him is... distinctly uninspiring.

Then there's Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in France. I always find it worrying when I agree with the Economist on left-wing politicians, but I can't deny that he cut a not particularly reassuring figure. As with Corbyn, I didn't agree with his positions on Europe or NATO - which aren't all that different from Le Pen's.

To sum up, what I find annoying about these far-left wings of the parties is their supporters' lack of tolerance for viewpoints different from their own but still recognizably leftist - Corbyn supporters seem to be particularly prone to accusing people who disagree with them of being "red Tories", which is just absurd. This is Justin Bieber politics, where any divergence from your own views is seen as a personal attack on you, and it needs to stop.

And what else needs to stop is the traditional wings' insistence on moving ever further right. I've mentioned the Labour Party, but the Democrats seem to have gone as corporate as all get-out in the last decade - there are a lot of things I admire about Barack Obama, but I'm not convinced he saw the urgency of the growing income inequality in the US, or how it was translating into right-wing support and left-wing apathy. And there's only so much that he can blame on Republican intransigence.

The main thing that I need to criticize both sides of the left-wing parties for is choosing this moment, when radical right-wing populism and nationalist/racist demagoguery are resurgent, to focus on destroying one another. It's easy to blame the more leftist sides of each party, because they're louder (especially on Twitter), but if Donna Brazile had shifted more of the DNC's resources toward winning votes in key states, rather than smearing Senator Sanders, we'd at least have a safer ratio of Democratic senators and representatives in the Capitol.

What's heartening is that in the US in particular, people are mobilizing, and not just along party lines. Voters in both parties seem to have noticed that they're in danger of losing their access to healthcare and to national monuments, clean air and water, etc. Macron's victory in France today is another welcome step toward restoring sanity, but I hope both that it doesn't get undermined by the far left, and that he doesn't further discredit mainstream, centrist politics with scandals and overly corporate-friendly policies.