In my previous post I described the phenomenon of gentrification of the left and placed in a decades-long process of demographic and ideological evolution of the left in Western countries.
This is a very interesting article about an exceptionally important topic. I believe that what you call the "Gentrification of the Left" is one of the most important trends of the last 60 years.
I am not sure, however, that I am convinced by your argument.
The decline of the traditional factory working class does not necessarily present problems for parties of the Left maintaining their social coalition. There were still plenty of service workers with below-average income and education to appeal to with economically distributive policies. And there still are.
And women did not tilt heavily left until quite recently.
If you look at it historically, one can see a large expansion in the support for the parties of the Left among the highly educated young people in the late 1960s, with the Baby Boomers coming to age. Those people chose to join the Left long before these long-term trends that you mention in this article were fully in effect.
Those Baby Boom activists on the Left brought with them a concern for a very different type of inequality: race, gender, plus environmentalism and anti-militarism. Those activists gradually worked their way up the organization of Leftist parties and gradually changed what Leftism meant.
In the following decades, working-class voters reacted to this by gradually leaving Left parties. This reinforced the hold of affluent activists over the party organization, thereby reinforcing the trend.
Party leaders tried hard to balance the view of the two coalition, but the activists who worked their way up the party were invariably college-educated professional, so their views took precedence.
There is no fundamental reason why Left parties could not have combined redistributionist economic policies plus more traditional cultural views. That is, in fact, what much of the so-called Populist Right that is growing so strongly now advocates for.
So the Gentrification of the Left is not about parties looking for new social coalition as much as a relatively small group of activists gradually capturing the party and reorienting policy platforms towards their views. Then voters react to that as the change becomes obvious over repeated election campaigns.
I admit that this theory does not explain why the affluent activists and professional-class voters became Left in the first place, but it does better fit with the history of how parties of the Left have changed over the last 60 years. The trend were created by activists, not demographic change.
Thanks for your insightful comment, Michael. My take is demand-driven (political parties reacted to social changes) rather than supply-driven (parties and their elites changed). I find the supply explanation more demanding, as it requires the same takeover of party elites to have occurred in different countries. The demand-driven explanation seems to me more parsimonious.
Note that the gentrification process has taken place slowly and steadily since the post-war period (https://www.optimallyirrational.com/i/156293007/the-evolution-of-the-leftwing-coalition). This evolution parallels the progressive breakdown of the working-class bloc, the feminisation of the workforce, and the growth in the student population. It does not seem to be the result of developments in specific decades over the period.
Also, the breakdown of the working-class bloc does not reduce the number of voters on relatively low incomes, but it breaks their cohesion, organisation, and unity around strongly redistributive principles (as opposed to others like identity). This reduces the bargaining power of low-income workers in a left-wing coalition. Hence, left-wing parties could have combined redistributionist economic policies with more traditional cultural views, but the intracoalitional bargaining over party programmes became less favourable to working-class voters.
As for major trends since the 1940s, there were a huge number of societal changes, so just showing that your three does not establish causality.
I agree that long-term decline in the percentage of voters in the traditional factory working-class played a causal role, but I am skeptical of the other two.
There is not a big gap in voting behavior between working women and non-working women, and both had the right to vote throughout the period. And students make up a very small portion of the electorate.
Nor is it clear why either trend would cause upper-income voters to be more Left-wing, the dependent variable that needs to be explained.
Regarding parsimony, my theory has one causal variable, while yours has three independent causal variables. It would appear that my theory is more parsimonious.
And I also do not see why supply cannot have cross-national trends, as you claim demand does.
Yes, the Gentrification shift is a long, slow trend, not an abrupt jump because of partisan identification and generational change. Older voters tend to cling to their favored party out of loyalty, even when the party changes its policies. Older voters eventually die. Younger voters are less tied to party identification, so they tend to react more to issues stands taken in recent elections. This shows up in the voting data. I think partisan identification and generational change explain the long slow change.
I would also point out that for at least the last 20 years, Social Democratic/Labor parties have been in long-term decline, so they are apparently not following demand very well. Many of their policies are clearly driving away working-class voters, yet the parties are stubbornly clinging to those stands. So clearly, party leaders are making irrational non-demand decisions about the party platform.
The parties of the Left are stubbornly clinging to issues that appeal to more affluent voters even while the demand of the electorate is clearly moving in the other direction. I do not think demand can explain that.
Political parties cannot follow shifts in demand as easily as corporations can because many party leaders and activists are committed to what they view as moral choices.
Thanks again, Michael. I think your argument presents a relevant and credible alternative. The idea that baby boomer activists gradually rose through party structures and reshaped them from within is plausible. If this process led parties to drift away from their traditional working-class base, then it would be a version of the "betrayal of the left" thesis. The mechanism you describe has a degree of credibility, especially given the growing presence of highly educated individuals within the elite ranks of left-wing parties across Western countries.
That said, I tend to look for explanations rooted in structural changes. From that perspective, a shift in ideological supply that comes mainly from elite preferences raises further questions. Why did those preferences come to dominate? If the new direction taken by party elites reflected a shift in demand and a change in the coalitional structure that supported their parties, then it is essentially a story of socio-economic evolution, as described in the post.
If not, then we need to consider how such a shift was possible given the pressure of political competition with other parties to win elections and with other politicians within the party to lead the party. If we continue the economic metaphor, when consumers lack information or alternatives, firms are able to push less favourable products (they have "market power"). In a similar way, left-wing parties may have been able to shift their platforms away from their voters’ preferences without facing immediate consequences. I tend to be careful about explanations suggesting voters are duped by the parties they vote for. My inclination is to think that people are pretty good at recognising what they want and whether a party is delivering. Ideological beliefs and group identity create some friction that make voters sticky to their side, but I think it is fair to assume that a side which underdelivers will see its support erode enough to lose elections.
Having said that, I believe the type of elite-driven change you describe is possible. It is reasonable to argue that there has been some of that happening too, in particular in recent times when some of the themes promoted by left-wing parties were not aligned with answers from popular voters in political surveys. But then, it requires an explanation of the mechanisms that allowed these elites to deviate from partisan preferences and move towards their own preferences. I'll write about it in a later post.
I agree with you that neither of our theories explain WHY above-average voters (based on income or education) gradually shifted their ideological preferences towards the Left starting around the 1960s across the Western world. To me, that is the critical trend that needs to be explained, and I do not think your article does that. Nor did I think political elites created that change in political preferences of upscale voters.
The difference is that my theory explains better HOW a relatively small group of college-educated activists could take over and gradually transform the platform of parties of the Left by adding in new policy stances on their most important issues..
Party leaders can do what they want, but this does not guarantee that voters will like it. Without that long-term ideological shift among upscale voters, nothing else the elites did would matter.
I do not doubt that there were structural reasons for that transition, but I am very skeptical that the three factors you mentioned in your article were the main causes.
Fewer factory workers does not make upscale voters more Leftist. Nor does more students or more women in the workforce.
And to be clear, I think that party leaders added on their ideological preferences for culturally left-of-center issues (race, gender, immigration, environmentalism, pacifism) while continuing economic and social policies that were more important to working class voters (unions, pensions, health care). They never got rid of the old Social Democratic economic and social policy stances. Different constituencies voted for parties of the Left for different reasons. During the 1980s and 1990s, Social Democratic/Labor did extremely well off this strategy.
Until about 2007, this was quite successful means to appeal to both constituencies. So during that time there was not much reason for older working-class voters to abandon a party just because they disagreed with it on some issues that they cared less about. They simply cared less about race, gender, immigration, environmentalism, and pacifism than upscale Leftist voters (who were highly motivated by those issues). Different constituencies voted for parties of the Left for different reasons.
But that strategy was based on long-term economic growth that enabled continual increases in social spending. Stagnant economies since 2007 have made that strategy impossible outside of USA. Hence, the rapid decline of parties of the Center Left and the rise of the new populist Right with working-class support:
Thanks for the link to your post. I see your take. I think the difference between our views is one of nuance.
As I said in my previous answer, I don't think supply-side explanations are impossible. They do, however, need to be explained, as political entrepreneurs face the pressure of political demand and cannot impose their views without constraint. I plan to discuss such mechanisms in later posts.
When you say that "above-average voters (based on income or education) gradually shifted their ideological preferences towards the Left" and that this is "the critical trend that needs to be explained", I would, in my framework, rephrase it as higher-education (less so higher-income) voters shifting to support left-wing parties as: 1) these parties adopted positions more amenable to them, and 2) the life phase as students experienced by highly educated voters contributed to their political socialisation on the left. This political consciousness then tends to persist somewhat over time, particularly among those who did not go on to earn very high incomes in their professions (e.g. teachers, civil servants, journalists, artists, charity workers).
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my comments. The Gentrification of the Left is a very complex and important phenomena that likely has many causes. I appreciate your thoughts on the topic.
National Socialism also explains why prominent 'leftists' such as Tony Blair can also be multimillionaires and directors of JP Morgan. Middle class students and academics are now not Leftists, they are Internationalists. They are New Racists https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/the-new-racism
Those baby boomer leftists often subscribed to what I call “college student liberalism”: they grew up with the civil rights movement, opposed Vietnam, and often (e.g. the Clintons) cut their teeth politically working on the McGovern campaign. But they were individualistic high-performers who had no intention of going back to the working-class communities they came from and felt no connection to the New Deal.
Such people had no resistance to the personal, professional, and fundraising advantages of steering the party toward becoming a party of capital as long as they could retain their social liberalism. I think this change in elites was the driving force (I can only speak to the U.S.) in gentrifying the left, but I think the change was only made possible by demographic changes changes, e.g. union membership falling almost in half from the 60s to the Clinton era and robbing organized labor of its power to push back. When it comes to resisting the drift of the party, nonunion workers aren’t a substitute for unions because they lack the same leadership and organization.
I largely agree with you and the decline of private-sector union membership clearly played an important role in the USA and the rest of the West (except perhaps Scandinavia).
What is odd to me from an historical perspective is that those liberals moved into the Democratic Party instead of the Republican Party in the late 1960s and 1970s.
We forget, but the Republicans tended to be more culturally liberal from 1860 to 1960, while the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow segregation and the Vietnam war.
It would seem more logical for these “campus liberals” to maintain their traditional Republican loyalty and then push the Republican party to the Left in social/cultural issues. There was already a very powerful Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, so this would not be a huge change.
This did not happen in the USA or the rest of the West. In the USA this may have been partly because of the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, which was the first truly conservative presidential campaign, but this does not explain other nations.
A culturally liberal but fiscally conservative Republican Party and a culturally conservative Democratic Party could have emerged. Just like Social Democratic/Labor parties of Europe could have adopted the culturally conservative views of most of their working class supporters.
I think the key was that the Democrats were the party of civil rights, which would have been happening while that generation was coming of age. I think that would matter more than past practices.
But the Democratic Party was not the party of civil rights. People forget how different the parties were in the 1960s.
It was the Republican party that supported civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Southern Democrats were the supporters of segregation. And that had been the case since the 1860s.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were both more strongly supported by Republicans in Congress than by Democrats. Yes, it was pushed by a Democratic president, but the strongest opposition was also from Democrats.
The pro-civil rights coalition was Republicans + Northern Democrats and the opposition was essentially Southern Democrats.
That it why it would have been entirely consistent for upscale pro-civil rights people to prefer the Republicans party. Of course, this issue is not relevant for other Western nations.
You're overstating the Democratic opposition; they voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, just not by the same margins as the as the Republicans. More importantly, the segregationists themselves held the Democrats responsible. Strom Thurmond left the party in late 1964, before even the Voting Rights Act, and went to work for Goldwater.
I assume this is because Democratic presidents were responsible for pushing it through, going back to Truman desegregating the armed forces. The Democratic *leadership* was the more pro-civil rights of the two parties. The North had far more clout within the party than the South; the party wasn't evenly split.
But for whatever the reason, the segregationists started switching to the Republicans to the point that Nixon was using the "Southern strategy" by 1968. The realignment of the Democrats into the party of civil rights had already happened by the time boomers started coming of age circa 1970.
The opposition to civil rights was almost entirely from the Democrats, and it dominated the politics of the period for at least a decade (1955-65).
My point is that it was far from inevitable for pro-civil rights Baby Boomers to join the Democratic Party. It is only with hindsight that it looks inevitable. Same with those opposed to Vietnam war or pro-environment.
I think the period was an inflection point in the Gentrification of the Left (the point of this article) particularly in the USA. It could have come out very different.
I have read this point elsewhere and agree. Page points out that party elites can't be the explanation because the changes to the Left parties happened across many countries. But so did the movement among youth into radical counter culture. As an American (born in 70s), it wasn't until I was a grown up that I learned that the 60s youth movement was international -- yes, America, but also Europe.
These movements were initially the territory of educated middle class kids. Their consciousness may not have followed Maslow's hierarchy as proposed, but I do think Maslow's hierarchy offers a decent approximation of what they valued -- worldliness, music/art/poetry. They were a movement without a party, and as your comment points out, there was no guarantee they'd choose any party let alone the left.
These people became the PMC, it's true. But critically, they were anti manager when they started out. They were left leaning but already at odds with labor, in particular on Vietnam (at least in US).
Oh, and of course, they were literally fighting for their lives as a class -- to stop the Vietnam war. And it was the future PMC who could get out of the draft.
Once you understand that left parties are simply the political manifestation of the class consciousness of the PMC, with various grievance groups as junior partners, while the right parties are basically Local Gentry, with (in the US) white Evangelicals as their loyal sidekicks, everything they do makes sense.
This is why the left focuses so much now on LGTBQXYZPDQ+ issues at the expense of economic issues.
The subtext is that, because we are a natural aristocracy, an aristocracy of virtue, taste, education and intelligence, and we have the consumption patterns to prove it, it is only fitting and proper, natural even, that we, the PMC are entitled to the lion's share of The Goodies.
Besides, the clods would probably spend that money on tacky stuff, and therefore should not have that money, lest rewards be misdirected.
I don't think this explains the reason for Gentrification of the Left.
Much of this trend goes back to the late 1960s when there was not much of a professional class. And the hard work of transforming the ideology of parties of the Left is typically done by ideological activists who did not work in any professional capacity.
I believe that it was only in the 21st Century that you really see parties of the Left identified with the college-educated professional class. This is the outcome of the political evolution, not the cause.
Great article. I think the one aspect you don't quite give enough explicit attention to is the rising power of the finance industry. That finance has grown in power since the 80s , globally, is obvious. This was caused by a mixture of the ideological defeat of Marxism and Keynesianism by free market ideology and by trade flows, as explained by Varfoukis in his book on Technofeudalism.
What is less apparent, unless you have worked with people from corporate finance as I have, is how much the finance industry despises labor. They hate them. They hate the literal ways they obstruct what financiers want to do, and they hate what they stand for -- solidarity, equality, satisfaction with limited work, craftsmanship. Finance is all about ruthless competition, voracious greed, and uncapped ambition.
It follows then that as finance gained power, it poisoned labor. It struck a settlement with the PMC to espouse their values, so long as there was no cap on the flow of money. They also cultivated the libertarians and negotiated a settlement with Christians on limiting (secular) state power. But there would be no quarter for labor in either right or left wing form. So labor was going to be weakened and replaced in whatever party it had been in prior to the rise of finance.
You begin by stressing the global then move on to the internal dynamics of Left Wing parties. Mussolini had already seen the end of Marxism in1914-1920. Mussolini's reasoning plays out globally as Russia, China, Vietnam and all other communist countries evolve into National Socialist States (Totalitarian socialism + Market Socialism ie: capitalist industry).
Another great article about the gentrification of the left. In some ways this is a good problem for the left to have . The problem is that automation has made the traditional working class be much less numerous and also less male in terms of composition . The left needs to focus on representing small businesses in addition to the working class . Not easy ! Also I think that Inglehart and Norris are excellent writers to read if you want to understand global change in politics and culture!
This is a very interesting article about an exceptionally important topic. I believe that what you call the "Gentrification of the Left" is one of the most important trends of the last 60 years.
I am not sure, however, that I am convinced by your argument.
The decline of the traditional factory working class does not necessarily present problems for parties of the Left maintaining their social coalition. There were still plenty of service workers with below-average income and education to appeal to with economically distributive policies. And there still are.
And women did not tilt heavily left until quite recently.
If you look at it historically, one can see a large expansion in the support for the parties of the Left among the highly educated young people in the late 1960s, with the Baby Boomers coming to age. Those people chose to join the Left long before these long-term trends that you mention in this article were fully in effect.
Those Baby Boom activists on the Left brought with them a concern for a very different type of inequality: race, gender, plus environmentalism and anti-militarism. Those activists gradually worked their way up the organization of Leftist parties and gradually changed what Leftism meant.
In the following decades, working-class voters reacted to this by gradually leaving Left parties. This reinforced the hold of affluent activists over the party organization, thereby reinforcing the trend.
Party leaders tried hard to balance the view of the two coalition, but the activists who worked their way up the party were invariably college-educated professional, so their views took precedence.
There is no fundamental reason why Left parties could not have combined redistributionist economic policies plus more traditional cultural views. That is, in fact, what much of the so-called Populist Right that is growing so strongly now advocates for.
So the Gentrification of the Left is not about parties looking for new social coalition as much as a relatively small group of activists gradually capturing the party and reorienting policy platforms towards their views. Then voters react to that as the change becomes obvious over repeated election campaigns.
I admit that this theory does not explain why the affluent activists and professional-class voters became Left in the first place, but it does better fit with the history of how parties of the Left have changed over the last 60 years. The trend were created by activists, not demographic change.
Thanks for your insightful comment, Michael. My take is demand-driven (political parties reacted to social changes) rather than supply-driven (parties and their elites changed). I find the supply explanation more demanding, as it requires the same takeover of party elites to have occurred in different countries. The demand-driven explanation seems to me more parsimonious.
Note that the gentrification process has taken place slowly and steadily since the post-war period (https://www.optimallyirrational.com/i/156293007/the-evolution-of-the-leftwing-coalition). This evolution parallels the progressive breakdown of the working-class bloc, the feminisation of the workforce, and the growth in the student population. It does not seem to be the result of developments in specific decades over the period.
Also, the breakdown of the working-class bloc does not reduce the number of voters on relatively low incomes, but it breaks their cohesion, organisation, and unity around strongly redistributive principles (as opposed to others like identity). This reduces the bargaining power of low-income workers in a left-wing coalition. Hence, left-wing parties could have combined redistributionist economic policies with more traditional cultural views, but the intracoalitional bargaining over party programmes became less favourable to working-class voters.
I am having a hard time following your logic.
As for major trends since the 1940s, there were a huge number of societal changes, so just showing that your three does not establish causality.
I agree that long-term decline in the percentage of voters in the traditional factory working-class played a causal role, but I am skeptical of the other two.
There is not a big gap in voting behavior between working women and non-working women, and both had the right to vote throughout the period. And students make up a very small portion of the electorate.
Nor is it clear why either trend would cause upper-income voters to be more Left-wing, the dependent variable that needs to be explained.
Regarding parsimony, my theory has one causal variable, while yours has three independent causal variables. It would appear that my theory is more parsimonious.
And I also do not see why supply cannot have cross-national trends, as you claim demand does.
Yes, the Gentrification shift is a long, slow trend, not an abrupt jump because of partisan identification and generational change. Older voters tend to cling to their favored party out of loyalty, even when the party changes its policies. Older voters eventually die. Younger voters are less tied to party identification, so they tend to react more to issues stands taken in recent elections. This shows up in the voting data. I think partisan identification and generational change explain the long slow change.
I would also point out that for at least the last 20 years, Social Democratic/Labor parties have been in long-term decline, so they are apparently not following demand very well. Many of their policies are clearly driving away working-class voters, yet the parties are stubbornly clinging to those stands. So clearly, party leaders are making irrational non-demand decisions about the party platform.
The parties of the Left are stubbornly clinging to issues that appeal to more affluent voters even while the demand of the electorate is clearly moving in the other direction. I do not think demand can explain that.
Political parties cannot follow shifts in demand as easily as corporations can because many party leaders and activists are committed to what they view as moral choices.
Thanks again, Michael. I think your argument presents a relevant and credible alternative. The idea that baby boomer activists gradually rose through party structures and reshaped them from within is plausible. If this process led parties to drift away from their traditional working-class base, then it would be a version of the "betrayal of the left" thesis. The mechanism you describe has a degree of credibility, especially given the growing presence of highly educated individuals within the elite ranks of left-wing parties across Western countries.
That said, I tend to look for explanations rooted in structural changes. From that perspective, a shift in ideological supply that comes mainly from elite preferences raises further questions. Why did those preferences come to dominate? If the new direction taken by party elites reflected a shift in demand and a change in the coalitional structure that supported their parties, then it is essentially a story of socio-economic evolution, as described in the post.
If not, then we need to consider how such a shift was possible given the pressure of political competition with other parties to win elections and with other politicians within the party to lead the party. If we continue the economic metaphor, when consumers lack information or alternatives, firms are able to push less favourable products (they have "market power"). In a similar way, left-wing parties may have been able to shift their platforms away from their voters’ preferences without facing immediate consequences. I tend to be careful about explanations suggesting voters are duped by the parties they vote for. My inclination is to think that people are pretty good at recognising what they want and whether a party is delivering. Ideological beliefs and group identity create some friction that make voters sticky to their side, but I think it is fair to assume that a side which underdelivers will see its support erode enough to lose elections.
Having said that, I believe the type of elite-driven change you describe is possible. It is reasonable to argue that there has been some of that happening too, in particular in recent times when some of the themes promoted by left-wing parties were not aligned with answers from popular voters in political surveys. But then, it requires an explanation of the mechanisms that allowed these elites to deviate from partisan preferences and move towards their own preferences. I'll write about it in a later post.
I agree with you that neither of our theories explain WHY above-average voters (based on income or education) gradually shifted their ideological preferences towards the Left starting around the 1960s across the Western world. To me, that is the critical trend that needs to be explained, and I do not think your article does that. Nor did I think political elites created that change in political preferences of upscale voters.
The difference is that my theory explains better HOW a relatively small group of college-educated activists could take over and gradually transform the platform of parties of the Left by adding in new policy stances on their most important issues..
Party leaders can do what they want, but this does not guarantee that voters will like it. Without that long-term ideological shift among upscale voters, nothing else the elites did would matter.
I do not doubt that there were structural reasons for that transition, but I am very skeptical that the three factors you mentioned in your article were the main causes.
Fewer factory workers does not make upscale voters more Leftist. Nor does more students or more women in the workforce.
And to be clear, I think that party leaders added on their ideological preferences for culturally left-of-center issues (race, gender, immigration, environmentalism, pacifism) while continuing economic and social policies that were more important to working class voters (unions, pensions, health care). They never got rid of the old Social Democratic economic and social policy stances. Different constituencies voted for parties of the Left for different reasons. During the 1980s and 1990s, Social Democratic/Labor did extremely well off this strategy.
Until about 2007, this was quite successful means to appeal to both constituencies. So during that time there was not much reason for older working-class voters to abandon a party just because they disagreed with it on some issues that they cared less about. They simply cared less about race, gender, immigration, environmentalism, and pacifism than upscale Leftist voters (who were highly motivated by those issues). Different constituencies voted for parties of the Left for different reasons.
But that strategy was based on long-term economic growth that enabled continual increases in social spending. Stagnant economies since 2007 have made that strategy impossible outside of USA. Hence, the rapid decline of parties of the Center Left and the rise of the new populist Right with working-class support:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-left-has-hit-a-historical-dead
Thanks for the link to your post. I see your take. I think the difference between our views is one of nuance.
As I said in my previous answer, I don't think supply-side explanations are impossible. They do, however, need to be explained, as political entrepreneurs face the pressure of political demand and cannot impose their views without constraint. I plan to discuss such mechanisms in later posts.
When you say that "above-average voters (based on income or education) gradually shifted their ideological preferences towards the Left" and that this is "the critical trend that needs to be explained", I would, in my framework, rephrase it as higher-education (less so higher-income) voters shifting to support left-wing parties as: 1) these parties adopted positions more amenable to them, and 2) the life phase as students experienced by highly educated voters contributed to their political socialisation on the left. This political consciousness then tends to persist somewhat over time, particularly among those who did not go on to earn very high incomes in their professions (e.g. teachers, civil servants, journalists, artists, charity workers).
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my comments. The Gentrification of the Left is a very complex and important phenomena that likely has many causes. I appreciate your thoughts on the topic.
Once Marxist economics is removed from Left WIng philosophy we have National Socialism. The middle class are very attracted to authoritarian 'do goodery' provided it does not affect their pocket. See https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/national-socialism-is-middle-class
National Socialism also explains why prominent 'leftists' such as Tony Blair can also be multimillionaires and directors of JP Morgan. Middle class students and academics are now not Leftists, they are Internationalists. They are New Racists https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/the-new-racism
Those baby boomer leftists often subscribed to what I call “college student liberalism”: they grew up with the civil rights movement, opposed Vietnam, and often (e.g. the Clintons) cut their teeth politically working on the McGovern campaign. But they were individualistic high-performers who had no intention of going back to the working-class communities they came from and felt no connection to the New Deal.
Such people had no resistance to the personal, professional, and fundraising advantages of steering the party toward becoming a party of capital as long as they could retain their social liberalism. I think this change in elites was the driving force (I can only speak to the U.S.) in gentrifying the left, but I think the change was only made possible by demographic changes changes, e.g. union membership falling almost in half from the 60s to the Clinton era and robbing organized labor of its power to push back. When it comes to resisting the drift of the party, nonunion workers aren’t a substitute for unions because they lack the same leadership and organization.
I largely agree with you and the decline of private-sector union membership clearly played an important role in the USA and the rest of the West (except perhaps Scandinavia).
What is odd to me from an historical perspective is that those liberals moved into the Democratic Party instead of the Republican Party in the late 1960s and 1970s.
We forget, but the Republicans tended to be more culturally liberal from 1860 to 1960, while the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow segregation and the Vietnam war.
It would seem more logical for these “campus liberals” to maintain their traditional Republican loyalty and then push the Republican party to the Left in social/cultural issues. There was already a very powerful Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, so this would not be a huge change.
This did not happen in the USA or the rest of the West. In the USA this may have been partly because of the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, which was the first truly conservative presidential campaign, but this does not explain other nations.
A culturally liberal but fiscally conservative Republican Party and a culturally conservative Democratic Party could have emerged. Just like Social Democratic/Labor parties of Europe could have adopted the culturally conservative views of most of their working class supporters.
I think the key was that the Democrats were the party of civil rights, which would have been happening while that generation was coming of age. I think that would matter more than past practices.
But the Democratic Party was not the party of civil rights. People forget how different the parties were in the 1960s.
It was the Republican party that supported civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Southern Democrats were the supporters of segregation. And that had been the case since the 1860s.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were both more strongly supported by Republicans in Congress than by Democrats. Yes, it was pushed by a Democratic president, but the strongest opposition was also from Democrats.
The pro-civil rights coalition was Republicans + Northern Democrats and the opposition was essentially Southern Democrats.
That it why it would have been entirely consistent for upscale pro-civil rights people to prefer the Republicans party. Of course, this issue is not relevant for other Western nations.
You're overstating the Democratic opposition; they voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, just not by the same margins as the as the Republicans. More importantly, the segregationists themselves held the Democrats responsible. Strom Thurmond left the party in late 1964, before even the Voting Rights Act, and went to work for Goldwater.
I assume this is because Democratic presidents were responsible for pushing it through, going back to Truman desegregating the armed forces. The Democratic *leadership* was the more pro-civil rights of the two parties. The North had far more clout within the party than the South; the party wasn't evenly split.
But for whatever the reason, the segregationists started switching to the Republicans to the point that Nixon was using the "Southern strategy" by 1968. The realignment of the Democrats into the party of civil rights had already happened by the time boomers started coming of age circa 1970.
The opposition to civil rights was almost entirely from the Democrats, and it dominated the politics of the period for at least a decade (1955-65).
My point is that it was far from inevitable for pro-civil rights Baby Boomers to join the Democratic Party. It is only with hindsight that it looks inevitable. Same with those opposed to Vietnam war or pro-environment.
I think the period was an inflection point in the Gentrification of the Left (the point of this article) particularly in the USA. It could have come out very different.
I have read this point elsewhere and agree. Page points out that party elites can't be the explanation because the changes to the Left parties happened across many countries. But so did the movement among youth into radical counter culture. As an American (born in 70s), it wasn't until I was a grown up that I learned that the 60s youth movement was international -- yes, America, but also Europe.
These movements were initially the territory of educated middle class kids. Their consciousness may not have followed Maslow's hierarchy as proposed, but I do think Maslow's hierarchy offers a decent approximation of what they valued -- worldliness, music/art/poetry. They were a movement without a party, and as your comment points out, there was no guarantee they'd choose any party let alone the left.
These people became the PMC, it's true. But critically, they were anti manager when they started out. They were left leaning but already at odds with labor, in particular on Vietnam (at least in US).
Oh, and of course, they were literally fighting for their lives as a class -- to stop the Vietnam war. And it was the future PMC who could get out of the draft.
Great post, Lionel. Looking forward to the next one in this series You should collect your posts in a book!
Thanks a lot, Marcos. Yes, that's on the cards!
Once you understand that left parties are simply the political manifestation of the class consciousness of the PMC, with various grievance groups as junior partners, while the right parties are basically Local Gentry, with (in the US) white Evangelicals as their loyal sidekicks, everything they do makes sense.
This is why the left focuses so much now on LGTBQXYZPDQ+ issues at the expense of economic issues.
The subtext is that, because we are a natural aristocracy, an aristocracy of virtue, taste, education and intelligence, and we have the consumption patterns to prove it, it is only fitting and proper, natural even, that we, the PMC are entitled to the lion's share of The Goodies.
Besides, the clods would probably spend that money on tacky stuff, and therefore should not have that money, lest rewards be misdirected.
I don't think this explains the reason for Gentrification of the Left.
Much of this trend goes back to the late 1960s when there was not much of a professional class. And the hard work of transforming the ideology of parties of the Left is typically done by ideological activists who did not work in any professional capacity.
I believe that it was only in the 21st Century that you really see parties of the Left identified with the college-educated professional class. This is the outcome of the political evolution, not the cause.
Great article. I think the one aspect you don't quite give enough explicit attention to is the rising power of the finance industry. That finance has grown in power since the 80s , globally, is obvious. This was caused by a mixture of the ideological defeat of Marxism and Keynesianism by free market ideology and by trade flows, as explained by Varfoukis in his book on Technofeudalism.
What is less apparent, unless you have worked with people from corporate finance as I have, is how much the finance industry despises labor. They hate them. They hate the literal ways they obstruct what financiers want to do, and they hate what they stand for -- solidarity, equality, satisfaction with limited work, craftsmanship. Finance is all about ruthless competition, voracious greed, and uncapped ambition.
It follows then that as finance gained power, it poisoned labor. It struck a settlement with the PMC to espouse their values, so long as there was no cap on the flow of money. They also cultivated the libertarians and negotiated a settlement with Christians on limiting (secular) state power. But there would be no quarter for labor in either right or left wing form. So labor was going to be weakened and replaced in whatever party it had been in prior to the rise of finance.
You begin by stressing the global then move on to the internal dynamics of Left Wing parties. Mussolini had already seen the end of Marxism in1914-1920. Mussolini's reasoning plays out globally as Russia, China, Vietnam and all other communist countries evolve into National Socialist States (Totalitarian socialism + Market Socialism ie: capitalist industry).
See https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/will-you-become-a-nazi
Another great article about the gentrification of the left. In some ways this is a good problem for the left to have . The problem is that automation has made the traditional working class be much less numerous and also less male in terms of composition . The left needs to focus on representing small businesses in addition to the working class . Not easy ! Also I think that Inglehart and Norris are excellent writers to read if you want to understand global change in politics and culture!