By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 19 2015 (IPS)

The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of seats it now holds in Parliament (24 seats less than the previous 256).

Roberto Savio

If the proportional rather than uninominal system had been used, the Conservative Party with its 11 million votes would have won 256 and not 331 seats in Parliament (far short of the absolute majority of 326 needed to govern), while at the other extreme the United Kingdom Independence Party with nearly four million votes would have landed 83 and not just the one seat it ended up with – results that would be hard to imagine anywhere else and a good example of insularity.

To an extent, the recent British general elections mirrored the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 when Democratic candidate Al Gore won around half a million more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush but failed to win the majority of electoral college votes on which the U.S. system is based. The outcome was eight years of George W.  Bush administration, the war in Iraq, the crisis of multilateralism, and all the paraphernalia of “America’s exceptional destiny”.

Let us venture now into an analysis that will have the politologues among us cringing.“The left has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 … it has had no real answer to the crisis”

It is now generally recognised that the end of the Soviet Union has given free way to a kind of capitalism without control, marked by an unprecedented supremacy of finance which, in terms of volume of investments, overwhelmingly exceeds the real or productive economy.

In its wake, neoliberal thinking has found the left totally unprepared, because part of its function had been to provide a democratic alternative to Communism, which was suddenly no longer a threat.

The left therefore has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 (with its bail-out cost so far of over four trillion dollars), it has had no real answer to the crisis.

Ever since the industrial revolution, the identity of the left had been to press for social justice, equality of opportunities and redistribution, while the right placed the emphasis on individual efforts, less role for the state and success as motivation.

Continuing with this brutal simplification, we have to add that the left, from Marx to Keynes, always studied how to create economic growth and redistribution – Marx by abolishing private property, social democrats through just taxation.

But it never studied the creation of a progressive agenda in the event case of an economic crisis such as the one we are now facing, with structural unemployment, young people obliged  to accept any kind of contract, new technologies which are making the concept of classes disappear, and rendering trade unions – erstwhile powerful actors for social justice – irrelevant.

It is unprecedented that the top 25 hedge fund managers received a reward in 2014 of 11.62 billion dollars, yet neither U.S. President Barack Obama nor Ed Miliband, then still leader of the Labour Party at the recent British general elections (until he resigned after election defeat), saw it fit to denounce this obscene level of greed.

Meanwhile, Europe as a political project is clearly in disarray, and now faces a “Grexit” on its southern flank and a “Brexit” on its northern flank.

In the case of a “Grexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Greece), Greece faces the prospects of having to make substantial concessions to Europe, thus reneging on the promises of Alexis Tsipras who was voted in as prime minister in rebellion against years of dismantlement of public and social structures imposed in the name of austerity.

What is at stake here is the very neoliberal model itself and not only is ordoliberal Germany supported by allies like Austria, Finland and the Netherlands erecting a wall against any form of leniency, but countries which accepted painful cuts and where conservatives are now in power, like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, see leniency as giving in to the left.

A “Brexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Britain) is a different affair. It is a game being played by British Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate a more favourable agreement for Britain with the European Union.

A referendum will be held before the end of 2017 and the four million people who voted for the UKIP in the recent elections, plus the country’s “Euro-sceptics”, threaten to push Britain out of the European Union, especially if Cameron does not manage to obtain some substantial concessions from Brussels.

Meanwhile, if Europe is in disarray, the United States has a serious problem of governance. Analyst Moisés Naím, who served as editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine from 1996 to 2010, has pinpointed a few examples of how this has translated into self-inflicted damage.

One concerns China which, after waiting five years trying to get the Republican-dominated Congress to authorise and increase in its stake in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from a ridiculous 3.8 percent to 6 percent (compared with the 16.5 percent of the United States), got fed up and established an alternative fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Washington tried unsuccessfully to kill the initiative by putting pressure on its allies but first the United Kingdom, then Italy, Germany and France announced their participation in the new bank, which now has 50 member countries and the United States is not one of them.

Another example was the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to kill the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) which has provided support for U.S exporters to the tune of 570 billion dollars since it was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.  In just the last two years, China has provided 670 billion dollars in support for its exporters. Moral of the story: U.S. companies will be at a clear disadvantage.

As Larry Summers, a great proponent of U.S. hegemony, put it, “the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system”.

The latest snub to the U.S. role of world leader came from four Arab heads of state who snubbed a U.S.-Gulf States summit at Camp David on May 14. The summit had been called by Obama to reassure the Gulf states that the ongoing negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement would not diminish their relevance, but the rulers of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain deserted the summit.

However, there is no more striking example of mistake-making than the joint effort by the United States and Europe to push Russian President Vladimir against the wall over his engagement in Ukraine by imposing heavy sanctions.

There was no apparent reflection on the wisdom of encircling a paranoid and autocratic leader, albeit one with strong popular support, by progressively also bringing in all Eastern and Central European countries. The result of this encirclement of Russia is that China has now come to the rescue of Russia, by injecting money into the country’s asphyxiated economy.

China will invest around six billion dollars in the construction of a high speed railway between Moscow and Kazan, is financing a 2,700 kilometre pipeline for the supply of 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas over a period of 30 years, plus several other projects, including the establishment of a two billion dollar common fund for investments and a loan of 860 million dollars to the Russian Sberbank bank.

So, the net result is that Russia has been pushed out of Europe and into the arms of China, and the two are now starting joint naval and military manoeuvres.  Is this in the interest of Europe?

At the end of the day, the decline of Europe and the United States perhaps comes down to a decline of political vision, with democracy being substituted by partocracy, and the statesman of yesteryear being substituted by very much more modest and self-referential political leaders.

This is all taking place amid a growing disaffection with politics, which is now aimed basically at administrative choices, making corruption easy. At least this is what around one-third of electors now appear to believe when they are asked if they think that they can make a difference at elections … and this is why a rapidly growing number of people are deserting the ballot box. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The U.S. Capitol Building undergoes a restoration project to repair more than 1,000 cracks that have appeared in the dome. Credit: Architect of the Capitol/cc by 2.0

By Joel Jaeger
NEW YORK, Nov 12 2014 (IPS)

Less than 15 percent of U.S. citizens approve of the job that Congress is doing, a 40-year low, and few expect last week’s congressional elections to herald a new era of political cooperation.

However, the polarised, gridlocked Congress reflects the increasing divisions in U.S. society itself.

“The share of Americans who are consistently liberal or consistently conservative is much greater today than it has been in the past,” said Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that conducts public opinion polling.

“About 20 percent of the public is across-the-board either liberal or conservative, and that’s about double what it was 20 years ago,” she told IPS.

Essentially, the Pew Research Center found that U.S. citizens are becoming more ideologically consistent.

This means that if a person holds a liberal viewpoint on one particular issue, it is safer to assume that he or she also holds a liberal standpoint on other issues as well. Likewise with conservatives.

It’s important to note that U.S. citizens’ political views are not becoming more extreme; they are simply lining up in two consistent camps more so than in the past, a phenomenon that has been called sorting.

In the past, each party had some appeal to the other side. In the mid-1900s, liberal Republicans existed in the Northeast, and conservative Democrats existed in the South. No longer.  Today, there is little to no overlap between the parties.

According to the Pew Research study, “today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median (middle) Democrat, compared with 64% twenty years ago. And 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican, up from 70% in 1994.”

Because of sorting, hostility between liberals and conservatives has risen.

When consistent partisans cannot think of a single issue on which they agree with the other side, they find it much harder to relate.

Pew Research found that, “In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies ‘are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.’”

Currently, 43 percent of those who voted for Republicans and 38 percent of those who voted for Democrats view the opposite party in strongly negative terms.

Partisan animosity has even expanded to aspects of life usually seen as apolitical.

Thirty percent of across-the-board conservatives and 23 percent of across-the-board liberals say they would be unhappy if a family member married someone from the other party.

When it comes to the news media, liberals and conservatives live in different worlds. Another study, Political Polarization and Media Habits, found that liberals tend to trust a variety of news sources, while conservatives distrust most news sources and orient around one single media outlet.

Consistent liberals were likely to name CNN, NPR, MSNBC or the New York Times as their main news source, but no single outlet predominated. On the other hand, 47 percent of consistent conservatives named Fox News as their main news source. No other outlet came close.

On social media too, partisans find themselves in ideological echo chambers.

When on Facebook, conservatives are “more likely than those in other ideological groups to hear political opinions that are in line with their own views,” while liberals “are more likely than those in other ideological groups to block or ‘defriend’ someone on a social network – as well as to end a personal friendship – because of politics,” according to the study.

Despite concerns over polarisation, U.S. politics does still contain a moderate centre.

As Kiley puts it, “There are still many, many Americas who are not ideological down-the-line liberals or down-the-line conservatives.”

So where are these centrists? Not participating in politics, usually.

Kiley explains what is known as the political activism gap: the more consistent a person’s political views, the more likely he or she is to be politically engaged.

“Fully 78 percent of people with consistently conservative views say they always vote, 58 percent of people with consistently liberal views say they always vote, but that number is closer to about 40 percent among people who have about an equal mix of liberal and conservative positions,” she said.

The political activism gap applies beyond just voting too. Consistent partisans donate to campaigns, volunteer for political causes, and write letters to public officials at a higher rate than their more moderate peers.

As a result, government policymakers miss out on the voices in the centre.

Combine ideological sorting, increased partisan animosity, media isolation and the political activism gap, and you have a recipe for government gridlock.

Congress has not been this polarised since the late 1800s, during reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War.

“Sorting makes it more difficult to form cross-party coalitions,” Morris Fiorina, a Stanford political scientist, told IPS via email. “Each party has a very distinct base, so members have no electoral reason to reach across party lines and may well incur a penalty.”

In next year’s new session of Congress, many commentators do not believe there will be much progress.

“Whether gridlock will continue depends on how a Republican congressional majority chooses to behave,” Fiorina said. “If they believe that winning the presidency in 2016 requires that they demonstrate a capacity to govern responsibly, there is some possibility for cutting deals with Obama.  But they may not be able to control their hard-right wings.”

Even if Congress does somehow find a way to pass any significant legislation in the new session, it can expect to encounter a deeply divided public reaction.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

All signs are pointing to a more polarised, less moderate U.S. Congress in the near future.

These include some of the recent Congressional primary elections in states throughout the U.S.; the retirement of longtime senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine; and the decline of the Blue Dog Coalition of centrist Democrats.

A recent book, “The Last Great Senate” by Ira Shapiro, reminisces about decades past such as the 1970s and 1980s where Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate seemed better able to work together for the good of the country.

“The pattern that has been present since the 1930s where you had a big conservative element in the Democratic Party and a big moderate element in the Republican Party, those days are pretty well gone,” Randall Strahan, a professor of political science at Emory University, told IPS.

Now, “the parties are more consistent in their programmatic and ideological views. It’s unrealistic to think any time in the near future partisan conflict will go away,” he said.

But Strahan argues that it is not entirely a bad thing.

“Some people say partisan conflict turns off voters. The evidence is just the opposite; hotly contested politics turns out voters. It (polarisation) clarifies choices for voters. When you have a Democratic Party all over the map, conservative segregationists in the South and liberals in the North, it’s very ambiguous when you vote for a Democrat what that means,” he said.

In fact, a highly polarised U.S. Congress has been typical throughout U.S. history, with the last several decades of moderation as the anomaly, Strahan said.

The conservative Tea Party celebrated last month when Thomas Massie, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for U.S. House in Kentucky, won the Republican primary there. He is expected to win in November’s general election.

Massie was backed by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican with libertarian ideology, also from Kentucky, who is attempting to strengthen the Tea Party Caucus. Rand Paul is the son of Representative Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican who has served Texas in the U.S. House for decades and ran for president multiple times. Rep. Paul is retiring this year.

Currently, there are four U.S. senators and 62 U.S. House members who are part of the Tea Party Caucus, including Senator Paul, as well as Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah, and Jerry Moran of Kansas, all Republicans.

Another Tea Party-backed candidate, Richard Murdoch, created a big upset last month when he defeated Senator Richard Lugar, a moderate Republican from Indiana.

Murdoch may have a difficult time winning in the general election. He faces U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana, this November, and the polls are currently tied.

On the left, progressive Democrats have made a some inroads by defeating moderate Democratic incumbents.

In late April 2012, Matt Cartwright and Rep. Mark Critz of Pennsylvania, progressive Democrats, defeated Tim Holden and Rep. Jason Altmire, centrist Democrats, respectively.

But progressive Democrats have not done well in all their races this year. State Senator Eric Griego, a progressive Democrat from New Mexico who had received the support of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, lost to a centrist Democrat earlier this week.

And U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a progressive Democrat from Ohio who made multiple runs for president of the U.S., was ousted from his Congressional seat by a moderate Democrat, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, in March. They had been redistricted to run against each other this year.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) currently has 73 voting U.S. House members, two non-voting House embers, and one U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

The CPC is likely to gain senators this year, as CPC members U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are both running for open Senate seats.

The Progressive Caucus and Tea Party Caucus are currently about the same size.

However, the once powerful Blue Dog Coalition (BDC), a group of centrist Democrats in the U.S. House, is seeing its members dwindling.

The Blue Dog Coalition’s membership was nearly cut in half in the 2010 election, in which 28 out of 54 members were defeated or chose not to run again.

The group’s membership is now down to 27 with the resignation of Rep. Jane Harman, a centrist Democrat from California. Rep. Janice Hahn was elected to fill the vacancy, and Hahn is now a member of the CPC.

Several of the remaining BDC members have said they will not run again; others, like Atmire and Holden, have already been defeated in Primaries.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Barrow of Georgia, the last remaining white Democrat in the U.S. south, and a BDC moderate, has been targeted for defeat by Republicans this year.

David Swanson, an activist who has supported numerous progressive candidates for Congress in the past, says that while he sees increasing polarisation in the legislature, overall, he believes Congress is moving to the right.

“I buy the right-warding of Congress, not necessarily the left-warding of Congress,” Swanson told IPS.

“I’m thrilled to have Rand Paul putting locks on measures that would start wars with Iran, regardless of what ideologies that’s coming from,” he added.

“You see a handful of liberals taking positions against wars and presidential power abuses, but not enough to make a real difference,” he said.

And he said that, despite partisan gridlock on many issues such as the federal budget, he sees Congress largely working together.

“When it comes to increasing military spending every goddamn year, enlarged war powers, letting presidents make lists of who they want to murder, sanctions on Iran… refusing to raise the minimum wage or protect the rights to organise or clean out the money and undo Citizens United, there’s pretty large bipartisan agreement,” he said.

The landmark and controversial Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission overturned longstanding election finance laws and permitted unlimited spending by corporations in elections.