This is yet another attempt by me to bring to your attention the fact that there are very real similarities between the political landscape in the USA and that in Europe, inspired from a diary on the front page of the
European Tribune.
Quite simply, we are facing the same problem: there is an overwhelming discourse that favors the right in the media, and the left is stuck between (i) proposing only a tamer version of the same to be heard or (ii) proposing a serious alternative and being ignored or dismissed as kooky.
This is an attempt to propose solutions to fight this, in an European context. Some of it will be familiar to you here, and to some extent, dKos and other progressive blogs already provide a way to be heard. We need to build the same in Europe, and your support for our ifghts and issues will be appreciated.
Coming on the same day as Martin Wolf's lament in the Financial Times (
Fragile governments augur ill) that France, Germany and Italy are unreformed, unreforming, and ungoverned, the article below from the Guardian (
Italy's knife-edge election results are a symptom of this age of stalemate), also an opinion piece, by Jonathan Freedland (supposedly an anti-Blair lefty) really annoyed me - "here they go again, piling on the big continental countries and calling them hopeless". But as I prepared for another deconstruction, I found some interesting bits in it which are worth pondering.
As in Germany and France, Italian voters were denied a clear alternative to the rightwing agenda of Silvio Berlusconi
The more pressing trend is the paralysis that seems to be gripping continental Europe's three biggest nations. In Germany, France and Italy the political class (spurred on by business) has become convinced that a specific remedy is urgently required to treat their ailing economies. They must, the elites long ago concluded, submit themselves to radical restructuring, deregulating their industries, liberalising their labour markets. There are a variety of names for the medicine - Thatcherism, Blairism, neoliberalism, the Anglo-Saxon model - but the masters in Paris, Berlin and Rome are in no doubt that it must be administered if these three arthritic European lions are not to be mauled to death in the globalised jungle by India and China.
This may be annoying to read, but it is FUNDAMENTALLY TRUE. But what is true is NOT that the countries need Thatcherism, but that the elites spurred by business are universally convinced that they need it.
That's the situation we find ourselves in, and there's no reason for us to hide that fact - we are a minority amongst / against the elites / the chattering classes in arguing that the remedy is not "radical restructuring" (lay offs), "deregulating" (less oversight over business) and "liberalising labor markets" (paying workers less and breaking unions).
And I'd like to add here, specifically for the DailyKos audience: a number of you have expressed skepticism at my version of things, and think that French workers are needlessly pampered and protected, or that Europeans in general have overburdened social protection systems, rigid labor markets, and declining economies. But consider for a second: where do you get your information on Europe from? Unless you have very direct experience and access, it's likely to come from the same corporate media which you trust so little on US political issues. Why trust them on European issues, especially when, naturally enough, their vision of things supports the rightwing, freemarket, anti union, anti-labor, anti tax discourse of the right?
The good news is: facts are on our side - and so is the population. I've crossposted already a number of diaries presenting different visions of the French and European economies that belie the vision of declining, sclerotic economies and I can only encourage you to go read them again. The most recent are those:
Facts about the French labor market
Blair and Brown's dirty little secret
The trouble is, citizens of the European troika refuse to submit to the treatment. Either they fail to endorse it at the polls, as they did in Germany by converting Angela Merkel's initial lead into the narrowest of victories over Gerhard Schröder. Or they take to the streets, as they just have in France, forcing Dominique de Villepin to drop his relatively modest plan to make France's under-26s more sackable and therefore more attractive to employers. Either way, they will not allow their leaders to impose the Thatcherite reforms the leaders say are essential.
The case for layoffs, less pay, less rights, less protection has not been made as such (and one wonders why...)
But, confusingly, these voters do not rally to a clear left alternative either - partly because of the failure of progressives around the world to articulate one. They know what they're against, but they are yet to gather round a programme they're for. The result is a stagnant stalemate, repeatedly reflected at the ballot box.
Again, while it is annoying to read this, it brings to our attentiion an important point: the case for progressive policies is not heard. And I am careful to say "not heard" and not "not made". Indeed, that distinction is crucial, and it is what we need to work on: not to make our case, but to get it across.
Yet the electorate was not presented with a clear course of action. On the one hand, the neoliberal case was not argued directly. The arch free-marketeer Berlusconi promised an increase in the state pension and greater social protection, not less. Meanwhile, it was the social democrat Prodi who called for a cut in the amount employers pay towards the social security of their workers. Each was trying to wear the clothes of the other. That's partly because both men had large coalitions to hold together. But it was also because the Italian right did not dare offer an unvarnished Thatcherite programme, fearing the electorate would reject it. So the parties hedged their bets - and the voters did, too.
But if the right failed to offer a clear programme, so did the left. It did not have a distinct vision of its own, one that might counter the neoliberal ideology of privatisations and liberalisations. That's hardly Italy's fault: the left worldwide, its confidence wrecked since 1989, lacks a coherent view of political economy, a proposed system it might put to voters. "Too often the alternative to neoliberalism is just conservatism, like those French students who want to keep the world the way it was," says Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform.
That paragraph makes it obvious why our task is difficult. what matters is not actual content of policies, but the labels that are attached to them. (And the obvious complicity of journalists and columnists in propagating these labels and focusing an them to the detriment of facts)
- anybody that talks about "liberalisation", the "Lisbon agenda" (the European agenda to deregulate everything in Europe) and is vaguely pro-American, is promoted to the lofty title of "freemarketeer" and "liberaliser", and thus a good guy. Calling Berlusconi a liberaliser is so absurd on its face that it's hard not to laugh, but there it is (he is a populist who has spent the past 5 years in government putting up laws that would improve his business or keep him out of jail for earlier white collar crimes, and blaming everything under the sun on the communist threat. Seriously);
- any feeble economic results under the watch of a "liberaliser" are blamed on the fact that he had to tone down its policies in the face of an hostile, "conservative" electorate. Thus the - systematic - economic failures of the right in power are blamed on not enough "reform", and not on the misguided policies they push, their wasteful use of the budget and their utter corruption;
- politicians of the left are either demonised as dinosaurs ("communists", "conservatives", "reactionaries" - all come from the hard left these days) and thus ignored, or lionised as "third way reformers", trying to insert reasonable sense into their otherwise misguided leftist policies. They are the only ones given airtime, and thus grows the idea that everybody on the right and the left agrees that "reforms" are necessary; policies coming from the left are thus either described as "reform", or not even debated as they supposedly come from crazies;
- presented with a choice of diluted liberalism cloaked in populism or the most rightist form of social democracy dressed up as the "sane left" - two essentially identical policy proposals (well, not exactly, in one case you get power hungry crooks, in the other case, mostly competent opportunists), it's no wonder that the electorate gets disgusted at the lack of alternatives and has trouble distinguishing them when the alternatives don't exist - or votes for the noisiest alternatives when they do (like Jean-Marie Le Pen or the unreconstructed Trotskysts in France).
What we need is not so much for the left to have a programme, because in most countries, it actually does, but for that programme to be heard and promoted.
So the question is - how do you pierce that wall of common wisdom shared by politicians and pundits alike - that conviction that everybody has that "reforms" are needed? Especially at a time when the Right Wing Noise Machine is busy developing in Europe, with seemingly limitless funds and the same kind of message discipline we've seen in the US:
afew's deconstruction of their official tripe:
Here's what these freedom fighters propose:
# Reforming European welfare states and creating a more flexible labour market = bring labour costs down
# Updating European pension systems to empower individuals = privatise pensions
# Ensuring more consumer-driven healthcare, through reform of European health systems and markets = privatise healthcare
# Encouraging an informed debate on intellectual property rights as an incentive to innovate and develop new knowledge in the future, whilst ensuring wide public access to such products in the present = you will pay through the nose for software/CDs/DVDs/seeds/drugs or go to jail
# Reforming European energy markets to ensure the most beneficial balance between economic growth and environmental quality = privatise energy to burn coal and gas
# Emphasising the benefits of globalisation, trade and competition and creating an understanding of free market ideas and institutions = Pangloss was right
Free at last, free at last...
I am not sure, but I have two suggestions:
Sounds familiar? It is very close to the modus operandi of DailyKos - except that we do not yet have such a great tool at our disposal. Now that may seem self-interested (and it is); but will you help us make the European Tribune a similar tool for the left in Europe? Will you make its publicity? Will you note the deep resemblances in our fights, even if the economic cultures of out two continents are undoubtedly different?
There is an alternative to thatcherism/reaganism/corpocracy. Something that actually works. For all of us. It's the left, building on its history and track record, and unashamed of either.
Help us be heard in Europe.
