The Left’s 21st Century Project Has Failed

Time to face the facts.

The 20^th century encompassed the era of social democracy followed by an attempt to resurrect the left through the Third Way after that era’s ignominious end. In the 21^st century, the left embarked on a new project they hoped would remedy 20^th century weaknesses and inaugurate a new era of political and governance success. We are now a quarter of the way through the 21^st century, which has witnessed both a genuine “crisis of capitalism” (the Great Recession of 2007-09) and the systemic breakdown of the COVID era (2020-22). Enough time has gone by to render a judgement: despite ample opportunity to advance their cause, the left’s 21^st century project has failed and failed badly.

Consider:

• It has failed to stop the rise of right populism.

• It has failed to create durable electoral majorities.

• It has failed to achieve broad social hegemony.

• It has failed to retain its working-class base.

• It has failed to promote social order.

• It has failed to practice effective governance.

• It has failed to jump-start rapid economic growth.

• It has failed to generate optimism about the future.

Of course, the project hasn’t been a complete failure. Left parties, including the Democratic Party, have succeeded in building strong bases among the educated and professional classes and, if they have lacked broad social hegemony, they have generally controlled the commanding heights of cultural production. As a result they have mostly set the terms of “respectable” discourse in elite circles.

But that’s pretty weak beer compared to all those massive failures and the heady aspirations of those who presume to be on “the right side of history.” Most on the left would prefer to believe that the left’s 21^st century project is basically sound and just needs a few tweaks. This is whistling past the graveyard. After a quarter century, it is time to face the facts: the project is simply not fit for purpose and needs to be jettisoned.

When we look at what has been distinctive about the left’s 21^st century project, it is not hard to see why it has not had its desired result. Here are the key strands of the project:

Mass immigration. In the 20^th century, the left was generally suspicious of uncontrolled immigration. But all over Europe in the 21^st century, immigration surges abetted by the left have contributed to results like these:

At the end of Milan’s M1 metro line you’ll find Sesto San Giovanni, a sizable blue-collar city. It was once called “Italy’s Stalingrad,” not only for its Brutalist concrete block apartment buildings and hulking steelworks, but also because Sesto San Giovanni was consistently one of the most left-wing towns in Italy…

That’s all over. In 2017 Sesto elected a right-wing mayor for the first time in 71 years. And in 2022, Sesto voted for Giorgia Meloni’s right-populist alliance by double-digit margins. Over the same period, Milan, rich as ever, has drifted to the left.

Immigration was the issue at the heart of these elections.

Such trends have been repeated in working-class areas in the rest of Italy and all over Europe. And of course we have many such equivalents in our own country as working-class areas have moved to the right, with the immigration issue playing a starring role. But, as in Europe, the American left has repeatedly refused to see anything wrong with a de facto policy of mass immigration, which is considered an unalloyed good contributing to a more diverse society. Therefore, to oppose mass immigration is to oppose diversity, which can only mean that you are racist and xenophobic. It’s that simple.

This attitude is a huge mistake because in fact there are rational reasons for voters to oppose mass immigration that cannot be reduced to racism or xenophobia. As Josh Barro notes:

Democrats…need to get back in touch with the reasons that both uncontrolled migration and excessive volumes of migration really are problems—not just political problems, but substantive ones. That is, they need to get back in touch with the feeling that illegal and irregular migration reflect a failure of our civic institutions, a misuse of the social safety net, and a breakdown of the rule of law, and that all of that is actually bad…

Illegal immigration, and other forms of irregular migration that happen with the authorization of the executive branch, really do hurt Americans by putting strain on public resources, imposing costs on taxpayers, and undermining social cohesion. And this has been particularly noticeable because of the huge surge in three categories of migration over the last few years: old-fashioned illegal immigration; migrants abusing our asylum system to gain years of legal access to the U.S., even without claims that are likely to be judged valid in the end; and the Biden administration’s large-scale use of the Temporary Protected Status designation to admit about a million mostly low-skill, mostly non-English-speaking migrants into our communities, especially from Haiti and Venezuela.

Here and in Europe, promoting and defending mass immigration has been a core part of the 21^st century left’s project. And it has been a massive failure.

Climate change politics. At the end of the 20^th century, climate change was an issue on the left but generally a peripheral one. A time-traveler from the year 2000 would be shocked to discover how the status of the issue evolved in the intervening decades. Far from peripheral, it became a core part of the left’s 21^st century project in country after country including the United States.

This was despite a thunderous lack of interest from these countries’ working classes. But for these parties’ burgeoning Brahmin left constituencies, it became a non-negotiable commitment—after all, they were saving the world! As the 21^st century unfolded, more and more of left parties’ policy plans centered around combating climate change and promoting a rapid clean energy transition. The claim was that the clean energy transition was not only a virtuous thing to do but would actually drive the economy forward. Hence, the Democrats’ Green New Deal, a version of which was implemented by the Biden administration, and similar schemes in other countries.

The working class has not been impressed. In the United States, these voters view climate change as a third-tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate, and, if action on climate change it to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. Making fast progress toward net-zero barely registers. The left’s assurance that the clean energy transition will deliver prosperity has fallen on deaf ears. The working class just doesn’t believe it will. And it hasn’t.

Nor do they believe the end of the world is nigh if the green transition doesn’t proceed really fast. And Bill Gates thinks they’re right!

Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future…Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.

OK then! Sorry about all that “uninhabitable earth” stuff. As the entire world transitions away from the green transition, it’s now clear that making climate change politics core to the left’s 21^st century project has been a huge mistake.

Cultural radicalism. The 20^th century left generally tried to remain on the high ground of anti-discrimination, basic civil rights, and colorblind meritocracy. The left’s 21^st century project went in a much more radical direction.

The high ground was left behind in favor of an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. Those identities are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, an action is judged not by whether it is justified—or an argument by whether it is true—but rather by whether the people advancing it are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized group or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This doesn’t make much logical sense, and it has led left parties, including the Democrats, to take many positions at odds with the concerns of ordinary voters. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration by anyone is wrong and should be deterred, not indulged, as Democrats have frequently done. They believe crimes should be punished no matter who commits them, public safety is sacrosanct, and police and policing are vital necessities, not tools of oppression. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination.

Perhaps most pernicious: the ideal of equal opportunity has been compromised by commitment to a new ideal of “equity” that strives for equal outcomes. Lack of proportional representation by racial groups in desirable positions or achievements is taken as evidence of racism, structural or otherwise. Therefore, the outcomes should be equalized regardless of merit.

But voters’ common sense is that opportunities should be made equal if they are not, and then let people achieve as they will. There is no guarantee, nor should there be, that everyone will wind up in the same place. Indeed, voters deeply believe in the idea of merit and they in their ability to acquire merit and attendant rewards if given the opportunity to do so. To believe otherwise is insulting to them and contravenes their view about the central role of merit in fair decisions. As George Orwell put it: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

But perhaps nothing would surprise our time traveler from 2000 as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the left’s 21^st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing and employment, left parties in Europe and very much here in the United States have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities. The same goes for children whose gender dysphoria should generally be medically treated with puberty blockers, hormones, and, if desired, surgery to align their bodies with their “true” sex (their gender identity).

This remarkably radical approach has until very recently been met with very little resistance on the left, including in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality, the left’s identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Leaving the high ground of anti-discrimination, basic civil rights, and colorblind meritocracy for these radical alternatives has been a defining part of the left’s 21^st century project. And it has been a huge mistake.

Economic growth. The 20^th century left at its best understood the centrality of economic growth. That’s because growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. The left sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. They believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare.

The left’s 21^st century project has, at its core, been dedicated to other goals. They now prize goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth. This is remarkably short-sighted. Faster growth gives the left far more degrees of freedom to attain its goals. Hard economic times and slow economic growth typically generate pessimism about the future and fear of change, not broad support for more democracy and social reform. In contrast, when times are good—when the economy is expanding and living standards are steadily rising for most of the population—people see better opportunities for themselves and are more inclined toward social generosity, tolerance, and collective advance.

Reflecting this lack of interest in economic growth, the left’s 21^st century project has not been techno-optimist, tending to focus instead on mitigating the negative effects of technological change. This is very odd. Almost everything people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in those advances. From smart phones, flat-screen TVs, and the internet, to air and auto travel, to central heating and air conditioning, to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life, to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet, technology has dramatically transformed people’s lives for the better. It is difficult to argue that the average person today is not far, far better off than his or her counterpart in the past. As the Northwestern University economic historian and newly-minted Nobel Prize winner Joel Mokyr puts it, “The good old days were old but not good.”

Given this, the left’s 21^st century project should have embraced techno-optimism rather than techno-pessimism. Rapid technological advance is key to fast productivity growth and rising living standards. But the left has been lukewarm at best about the possibilities of new and better technologies, leaving techno-optimism to the libertarian-minded denizens of Silicon Valley. As British science journalist Leigh Phillips has observed:

Once upon a time, the Left…promised more innovation, faster progress, greater abundance. One of the reasons…that the historically fringe ideology of libertarianism is today so surprisingly popular in Silicon Valley and with tech-savvy young people more broadly…is that libertarianism is the only extant ideology that so substantially promises a significantly materially better future.

Sound familiar? The left has ignored growth and its drivers to its great detriment. In its place, it has squandered enormous political capital on a 21^st project that has largely failed. Twenty-five years is long enough; it is high time to try something new.