The left-of-centre parties in Western democracies are failing because both their economic policies and their social policies have alienated the majority of middle-class voters.
By embracing globalization and deregulation of financial markets they have spiked the income- and wealth-gaps, leaving the middle class, at best, treading water; more usually, actually losing wealth and income against inflation; and at worst, jobless and unemployable after the export of manufacturing jobs to developing economies overseas.
At the same time they have adopted increasingly marginal social policy reforms that have alienated many voters, generated backlash, and left the minority groups they aimed to help little better off than before. The two trends go together, of course: economic resentments feed social resentments, and vice versa.
Meanwhile the upper-class elites of the Left have been padding their stock portfolios, planning their next exotic holiday travel, and hobnobbing with celebrities at gala dinners. The geniuses who championed globalization seemed utterly oblivious to the families thrown into poverty by the closure of factories. All they noticed, apparently, was the cleaner air and water. They have allowed public education to flounder for generations, while sending their own children to private schools. They have failed to lift marginalized communities—indigenous people, immigrants, people of colour—out of endemic poverty, while they and their families live in posh suburban communities equipped with parks, recreation facilities, and state-of-the-art security systems.
These failures have produced apathy among marginalized minorities, along with a majority population dominated by low-information, low-skilled citizens ready to welcome populist demagogues and vote for them—and decidedly not ready to listen to well-reasoned policy discussions by guys in $500 suits who seem to know nothing at all about the way most people are living. The populist demagogue in the $500 suit who sounds like he is just as pissed off as they are seems a better bet.
And that’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say, in December 2024.
Billionaires abound in the new Administration, so combine that with the Left’s ineffectiveness and it does not bode well for you if you are not wealthy.
Correct!