Realignment for real, part 4

As the United States starts to pay some attention to the Iowa caucuses, the first event next year in the presidential nomination contest, I happened to look back at a post I’d written for the previous cycle, in 2020. There, contrasting the two more left-wing Democrat candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I said that the choice between them was

… typical of the choice currently facing the left worldwide. Do they throw in their lot with liberal civilisation, of which capitalism is a part? Or do they seek more fundamental change, even at the price of alliance with some of the forces of illiberalism?

A lot has happened since then, but that choice is still there. In parts two and three of this series we looked at the way in which recent events, especially the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have exposed divisions within the right. The same division, although less prominent, is also to be found on the left, and particularly the far left.

If you think of the left as a movement of humane and egalitarian values, it’s hard to imagine how any of its adherents could support a brutal imperialist invasion. But there are darker strands on the left as well, and although the majority have stood firmly behind Ukraine, there are dissenters. Their motives range from a reflexive anti-Americanism to a sort of muddled pacifism, to nostalgia for the Soviet Union (even though Vladimir Putin seems to take the Tsarist empire more as a model).

Most interesting, though, are the currents in European left-wing parties that, in supporting Putin, have drawn closer to the far right. Robert Fico’s Smer-SD, the first-placegetter in last weekend’s Slovak election, is a striking example, but there are worrying signs elsewhere. A minority faction in Germany’s Left Party is often reported to be ready to split over the Ukraine issue – the same people that tried to take the party in an anti-immigrant direction five years ago.

Convergence between far left and far right is not a new theme; the similarity in methods between communist and fascist dictatorships has been remarked on many times. But support for Putin goes further. It involves abandoning anything that could be described as distinctively “left” apart from opposition to capitalism – something that’s never been much of a problem for the far right, as long as their preferred cronies are looked after.

A few years ago, John Quiggin argued that “the only serious threat to democracy is now coming from the right.” While I agree that it’s much the more serious threat, there’s a danger in ignoring the collaborators in your own backyard. But it’s a natural consequence of seeing the political spectrum in a particular way.

If you’re coming from the left, whether as a Marxist or as a social democrat, you see the liberals as standing in the middle of the spectrum and having to choose their side in a left-right struggle. Even if you’re not thinking about a planned economy, you think about democracy as collective empowerment (perhaps a sort of non-liberal republicanism), not individual choice, and it’s all about which direction it should go. (The view from the far right looks much the same, but in a mirror image – a life-or-death struggle against “woke leftism”, as in the metaphor of the “flight 93 election”.)

But from the liberal point of view, in which democracy is primarily a constraint on government rather than an enabler of it, things look completely different. On that story it’s the left and the right that need to make a choice, and although they have their differences it’s basically the same choice: do they side with liberty or with tyranny.

Neither far left nor far right is strong enough to destroy civilisation on its own. If they co-operate (as they did, for example, in early-1930s Germany) they can do enormous damage. Alternatively, they can choose to work within the system, accept some of its values and become more or less normal participants in the democratic process. Many far-left parties, and some on the far right, have taken that path.

Next week I’ll try to sum up some conclusions from this series, but no doubt the debate will be ongoing.