The Left missed the political bus on both BREXIT and Trump, failing to see the democratic core, the left-wing components, the anti-immigration pulse, and the nationalist legitimacy, of both these populist insurgencies. All the usual reality-defying stratagems were set in play to explain away the Brexit and Trump populist events and to paper over the Left’s detachment from the working class voters who pushed Brexit and Trump over the line.
One such stratagem which enjoyed brief prominence, and has left a still-potent headline mental legacy, was the belief that Brexit and Trump were the illegitimate products of social media data mining for political ends by Cambridge Analytica in cahoots with Facebook. There was steaming outrage over Cambridge Analytica but it was generated not by ethical concerns about the ethics of their core business (targeting social media ads) but by the politics of their latest clients.
The science of applying data to politics has included time-tested population surveys, focus groups and opinion polls for the crafting of a sales pitch for specific voting groups. The contemporary digital upgrade of these old, uncontroversial methods has had a liberal client list for many years, including Obama in 2012, the British Labour Party in 2015, Justin Trudeau in 2015 (who specifically used Cambridge Analytica) and Hillary Clinton in 2016. These clients all earnt establishment praise for their digital political enterprise.
Cambridge Analytica did not give the Trump and Brexit campaigns unfair and sinister ‘informational dominance’. The US establishment, especially the mainstream media and corporate donors, financially backed a deep-pocketed Hillary Clinton whilst the anti-Brexit ‘Remain’ campaign in the UK raised twice the funds of the Leave campaign and was supported by the leaders and most of the parliamentary ranks of both major political parties (only 5% of Labour MPs voted Leave], the liberal media, business leaders and over 90% of university academics.
The over-hyped Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ is not only hypocritical by the liberal left but is revealing of how the left treats the voting public as dim automatons, responding with Pavlovian predictability to some digital advertisements on social media. The Cambridge Analytica hoo-ha is nothing more than the liberal political version of ‘we wuz robbed’.
The favourite weapon in the contemporary Left’s reality-defying political arsenal, however, is ‘racism’ used to attack populists particularly over their opposition to immigration. This one word is used repeatedly to justify the left’s refusal to accept democratic political outcomes, and to explain away the failure of their policies that have brought about recent populist insurgencies. It shoots wide of the mark, however. Immigration is the cutting edge policy area for Brexit and Trump voters, and for the Western white working class more generally, but it does not follow that for someone to support reducing immigration does not make them a hood-wearing bigot. Brexiteers and Trumpists are overwhelmingly decent, tolerant and fair-minded but concerned about their jobs and communities and services. To call them all ‘racists’ is not only wrong but insulting by implying that it is only the ‘anti-racist’ liberal elites which stand between the white working class stooges of dark populist demagogues and ethnic cleansing.
Brexit and Trump were not the result of data mining, social media mind games or a resurgence of racism but genuine class revolts against a status quo that had dudded an older generation of workers of their economic and cultural security to benefit global capital and its insatiable need for the lifting of national restrictions on capital and labour.
A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation in Europe found that two-thirds of people in the EU’s five largest countries felt that ‘life was better in the past’. This nostalgia was not limited to the usual suspects (men, the minimally educated, and those who identify as right-wing conservatives) but to all segments of the working class (other than the Millennials who had little past to make a comparison with). Similarly, in ‘Diverse’ America, seven in ten Trump voters felt that ‘life had changed for the worse’ since the 1950s whilst 41% percent of all Americans say the past was a better place (a percentage dragged down by Third World immigrants who had benefited from moving to the US).
The contemporary Western left may choose not to engage with this class experience by those in the West who have lost out from globalisation and open borders, by those who regret the loss of a nationalist identity based on economic protectionism and social homogeneity but a populist left, by contrast, would embrace a socialist nationalism which seeks to reclaim these elements and which would welcome the insurrectionary, status-quo-busting revolts against their globalist masters. The obvious objection that this phrase, ‘socialist nationalism’ flirts with fascism (the Nazis called themselves a ‘national socialist’ party in the 1930s) doesn’t hold up - the communists and socialists of 1930s Europe (if they had taken time out from being murdered or tortured by Hitler’s monstrous regime) would have been amused by the notion that Hitler’s party was any kind of socialist party, or, indeed had its sights set on just the country inside its own boundaries. What Hitler represented was not ‘national socialism’ but a fascist ‘internationalist’ politics of persecution and territorial conquest to benefit German capitalism.
‘Nationalism’ should not be a dirty word to socialists just because its most boisterous proponents have been sundry conservative political movements. Socialists, as their practice has demonstrated in the past, need to operate primarily at the level of the nation-state, the geo-political entity where political pressure can be most effectively applied, where politicians are elected, laws made and unmade, and policies implemented. The contemporary Left, however, has abandoned this national arena in favour of globalist fantasies of a borderless world. The Left’s political energy must be primarily addressed to winning over the domestic working class which has borne the brunt of the economic and social costs of capitalist globalisation. Sneering at Brexit voters, or directing profanity-laced tirades against Trump and MAGA-hat wearing workers, and calling everyone who doesn’t agree with hem, disgusting racists, won’t cut it and will, in fact, drive the Western working class into the hands of the populist right, in which genuinely popular political change would be welcomed but would drag a lot of conventional right-wing ballast along with it (such as opposition to abortion, corporate tax cuts, endless wars, attacks on trade unions, etc.).
While the Brexit and Trump revolts should be welcomed by the left because they struck powerful, and long-lasting, blows to the capitalist political order, they didn’t topple it. Brexit had, and still has, no mass political movement behind it, no party or leader that can give it real social force, whilst Trump has his voting base but one which is not mobilised between elections and has to compete for the President’s attention against conventional big-business, war-fighting Republicans in Washington.
Even after Brexit and Trump, politics remains an insular, elite business in which the zombie parties of the old establishment still walk the land. As the Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, put it last century – ‘the old is dying but the new has yet to be born’. A Left worth its name should be excited about the project for a populist rebirth of the socialist project, and a resurrection of the Marxist left’s political influence, and its absorption with identity politics will see it miss the gig.