"The Left Can Win"

[ingemann]

I have to agree with him. Sometimes political militants are stuck in their own theoretical world. If you say to someone who doesn't know about class theory that he is a worker, he is going to answer "yes and? I work, you work, everyone works, so what?."
The left sometimes fail to talk to the emotions of the people they want to convince, while the right and the far-right are good at it. For example, humans tend to be afraid of unknown and unusual things, and the far-right connects with that.

I blame vanguardism, the trouble are that Socialism and other left wing movement became dominated by people, who intellualised it all and transformed the slogans into buzz words. Socialism have always had a good deal of populism and common sense approach in it, and that was a good thing. Sadly the socialist parties have become filled with people who think both are fascist.

[ingemann]

Aside a specific type of xenophobia, what do you think islamophobia is?

According to a British organisation, islamophobia is characterised by:

1) Islam seen as a single monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to new realities.

2) Islam seen as separate and other – (a) not having any aims or values in common with
other cultures (b) not affected by them (c) not influencing them.

3) Islam seen as inferior to the West – barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist.

4) Islam seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism, engaged in 'a clash
of civilisations'.

5) Islam seen as a political ideology, used for political or military advantage.

5) Criticisms made by Islam of ‘the West’ rejected out of hand.

6) Hostility towards Islam used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.

7) Anti-Muslim hostility accepted as natural and 'normal'

http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/islamophobia.pdf

I would not like to deviate the discussion, but feel free to start another topic on this particular subject. In what concerns the left and Islam...  In my opinion, it'd be an analytical error de-contextualise legitimate criticism and condemnation of certain extremist manifestations of Islam (ISIS, burka, etc) in order to disqualify anything related with Islamic peoples and societies.

I'd agree on that certain naivety and well-intentioned 'good vibe' attitudes towards Islam and immigration may have been costly for the left. However, my impression is that the huge strategical error on the part of political advisers is trying to compete with the far-right on the grounds of appealing to the fear of the other. People use to prefer the original to the copy (Le Pen better than Sarko or Valls).

I think that focusing on this perceived danger distracts the attention from the real problems. In what regards the South of Europe and Spain in particular, the diagnosis made by the Podemos' strategists has proved a success as it's largely identical to that of the Spanish society. The last part of the swl's post mentions some of these concerns. This has been achieved without resorting to foreign scapegoats. Another question, the tougher one, is the proposals and the practical measures to address problems and challenges.  

I think you have just shown why the Left will keep losing elections.

[ingemann]

I think you have just shown why the Left will keep losing elections.

Do you have the correct diagnosis and the recipe to save the European Left from disaster?

There is no recipe for victory, there is only hard work, luck and political fingerspitzengefühl, but that you showed in your post is a recipe, a recipe for defeat.

The recipe you make is by lumping every "islamophobe" together. There's real islamophobes out there and the left will never be able to get them to vote for them. But here's the thing a lot of the people you call islamophobes have nothing against Islam as such, for them it's much more simple, they live together with Muslims, and they don't like the values, behaviour and general problems, they see from them (or at least from some of them), and they tired of well off intellectuals calling them racist, when they bring it up.

Let's give a example, in Malmö some time ago, a African man and his child was attacked, the usual suspect brought it up, and began using it as example of the racism in Swedish society and when ... there was just silence.
I found that weird, so I began to read up on it, when I found out it was a family which had attacked him, which made some bells ring. So I did some more research, and funny enough it happened near Rosengård, a area known for its ...diverse population, soon I found out it was a Kurdish family with a ugly record.
Here's the thing people are not stupid, they find these things out, and when they do, they are disgusted by the hypocrisy and they lose trust in the ypocritical elite.

That's the left's true problem, we have lost the trust of a significant segments of the working class, because we have let this kind of hypocrisy run loose without reacting. They don't trust us any more, some of thm still vote for the left, but they doesn't trust their own politicians, when they do things which hurt, but they say are necessary. We have simply made it easy for the populist right to pick these voters up.

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Right now we can't do much, we have lost the trust of much of the working class, the only way we can get them back, is by showing the populist right for what it is, and that ironic demand that we stop treating them as untouchables, we need to force them to take responsability for the state, make compromises with them in other issues like pensions, taxes and all those things, where we will either force them to the left or make them show their true face.

Also we need to stop the hypocrisy. Sometimes a racist is just a racist, that's not something we should be afraid to say, but other times the people we call racists are people who bring important issues, and we need to listen to those.

If we do those two thing, maybe the left can win again, but at the very least it may force the populist right to moderate themselves and move to the left.

[ingemann]

There is no recipe for victory, there is only hard work, luck and political fingerspitzengefühl, but that you showed in your post is a recipe, a recipe for defeat.

Hard work, sure. A bit of luck doesn't harm. Sure instinct (fingerspitzengefühl) is rare amongst European politicians, especially those aligned in the socialdemocracy. It's a gift for a party having a solid leadership, is it enough? Can the decadent European environment provide political animals like Lula or Pepe Mújica? Also, what is what I showed in my post? I only said that in my opinion is a big mistake copying the far-right agenda.

I doubt Lula would make it in Europe as leader of a major party, and that has nothing to do with any kind of decadence, but in his own qualities, in fact I fail to see how European political environments can be called decadent, when what it suffer under is center (from right to left) dominated by overeducated technocrates, a socialist left dominated by bleeding hearts and a far right dominated by populists.

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First of all, I don't make recipes and don't have remedies. Second, why do you say I lump islamophobes together? I copied the commonly accepted definition of islamophobia, a concept coined in 1991 by a Britsh organisation called Runnymede Trust. That characterisation is recognized by the EU Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia. Do you think it's offesive? Why?
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I think it's stupid, over intellectualised and lacking any connection with reality, it fundamental build on the idea that dislike of Muslims is ideological in nature, which it rarely is. It's fundamental a strawman which make any idealog with people critical of Muslims impossible.

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Of course if we have to have discussion, where we may not talk about any group as a collective, let's stop the discussion and just enjoy watching the populist right grow and grow.

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If you look at my post, I don't talk about Islamic values or Islam at all, I really don't find Islam interesting in this discussion, but Muslims.

I

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I think people not causing trouble are not a problem, but that's really a meaningless discussion, if the average Muslim immigrant was a person with a secondary or tertiary education, we would not have this discussion, but that's really not the case, so that "what if" is not just meaningless, it will also fail to convince any person ever to change their opinion. Of course we can ask why the reaction to immigrants from China, Vietnam and Poland have not seen the same reaction, but everybody with a little common sense understand that.

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This example you provide is a clear sample of counterproductive overreaction, especially if it wasn't rectified. I think such attitudes from well intentioned progressives can be costly, indeed. [/quote]

That's not a rare example, yes it's rare in severity, but lot of people have seen how the Left ignore things, which they condemn in the ingineous population.

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I think there's something more like that. What you call "hypocrisy" -my impression is that it's more an issue of not dealing with problems- may be a reason for distrust. However, I'm not sure if it's really the most important factor in play. In what regards socialdemocracy, which has been traditionally the most significant portion of the "European Left", the core of the problem is the loss of identity. It's hard to keep the trust of your potential voters when your policies are indistinguishable from those of the mainstream right. I'm talking of economy, obviously. I think the problems of the "radical" left are different, maybe more related with chronic infighting and disconnection from reality: those students complaining because "workers" don't understand them.[/quote]

No the left have often even in the "Good Old Days" implemented right wing economical ideas (just as the Left have in Brazil), when it make sense, but their voters trusted them to take those decisions then. They don't anymore, and the failure to take their voters problem seriously, and the hypocrisy in how they treated minorities is a major part of this.

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As for the last paragraph of your post, I'm not sure of how to deal with far-right xenophobes and right-wing populists. Luckily, they aren't strong in my country. For sure, the left must fight them by showing for what they are. I think that you may be right on that treating them as untouchables -the cordon sanitaire- is not going to work anymore. The challenge is how to fight them without losing the core values of the left -such as social justice, brotherhood or tolerance- and counter demagoguery with argumentation accesible to common people.  I doubt that if they touch power, they are going to "moderate" themselves or moving to the left. Maybe the first, to some extent, but not the latter.
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Tolerance was never a integrated part of the Left, they supported solidarity, but when people didn't show solidarity the other way, it was not extended that way. One of my relative run foul of the unions, because he didn't wanted to be member of one, his co-workers ensured he was fired. As ugly as that were, it was necessarity. But today we have become a bunch of bleeding hearts, not willing to make any hard decisions, pushing a wishy washy ideology of niceness.

[ingemann]

Clearly, the European left needs to re-invent itself. I'm not sure if the approach offered by parties like Podemos and SYRIZA is the correct one but it's more inspiring and certainly more "social democratic" in spirit than the tepid promises offered by the traditional parties of the center-left.

I think these parties are doing a good job by pushing new ideas like the universal basic income. It's not for tomorrow and they would probably not be able to implement it if they came to power in one or two years, but other revolutionary ideas like tax income, or paid annual leave were also very polarizing and took a long time to be accepted, and that's a kind of 'bright future' that makes people enthusiastic.

I hoenstly think that's a good idea

[ingemann]

Slowly gearing into possibly considering maybe actually looking at this. And with that in mind I would like to point out one very important (very obvious thing) already: 'The Left' is not the same thing everywhere and pretending otherwise leads to confused arguments, woolly thinking and ultimately to the creation of a new imaginary political reality that has little resemblance to the actual one. Is the experience of Podemos and SYRIZA particularly relevant to Britain or Germany? Probably not. Is the PSOE the same sort of political party as the SAP? Not really. Things become even more complicated attention turns from Europe and the rest of the old First World. Sometimes the internationalism that good socialists are supposed to pay at least lip service towards blinds them (us) to what the world is actually like...

I would say that most countries are more interconnected political, than we sometimes find obvious, the spread of populist parties like the Pirates is a good example and it's not alone. But yes some parties are not always relevant on the other side of the borders, and some borders are harder to cross than other, example in Scandinavia we have seen relative much cross border inspiration and discussions.
Even a moron like Cameron have had some influence on Eurosceptism in conservative parties abroad.