Bhaskar Sunkara in The Ideas Letter:
Can you build social democracy without workers? This question would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Today, it captures a central challenge that left-of-center parties face around the world.
In the United States, even as the Democratic Party has moved leftward on both social and economic issues, it has less working-class support than ever. In 2020, Joe Biden lost non-college educated voters by 4 points. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, Harris was trailing by 17 points. The shift in the party’s appeal is evident even among unionized workers. In 1992, Bill Clinton won that demographic by 30 points. In 2020, Biden beat Donald Trump by 19. In the latest forecasts, Harris’s advantage is just 9 points.
Similar shifts are in play across the advanced capitalist world, such as in Germany, where the socialist party Die Linke (the Left Party) went from receiving nearly one third of the vote in the country’s industrial eastern states in 2019 to barely registering as an electoral force there this year. Likewise, even though it is still in power, the Social Democratic Party has tended to fare poorly among workers, who are increasingly drawn to the far-right appeals of the Alternative for Germany: The AfD recently became the biggest group in Thuringia’s state parliament.
For decades, those still committed to a traditional social-democratic program have responded to this crisis of support with some combination of downplaying the problem, looking for substitutes for lost working-class voters, and trying to re-engage their former base by moving rightward on social issues. So far none of those answers has proved satisfactory.
More here.
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