Wayne O'Leary

The Yellow and the Green

In the wake of November’s midterm elections, the usual suspects in the Democratic Party are being heard from once more. The party stalwarts who ran things through the 2016 presidential cycle, along with their allies in the establishment think tanks and the mass media, are calling for a rebirth of good, old-fashioned centrism as the antidote to rampant Trumpism; the Clintons may be gone, but Clintonism survives.

Typical in this vein was an op-ed piece that ran in the New York Times shortly before election day, authored by Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at that refuge for out-of-favor establishment Democrats, the reliably centrist Brookings Institution. Kamarck examined the lively contemporary progressive movement within the Democratic Party and found its impact to be exaggerated and unrepresentative.

The party was not swinging left, Kamarck confidently asserted, nor was it leaning toward democratic socialism. Apparent changes were more racial, gender-based, and generational than economically populist. No “civil war” was evident among Democrats, merely a movement of women, minorities, and younger moderates into positions of power — intra-party business as usual with a more diverse cast of characters.

This viewpoint is shared among the so-called liberal media, which is pining for a return to the uncontentious glory days of the worldwide corporate globalization project. At the supposedly leftish Times and its friendly rival the Washington Post, prominent columnists (the Times’ David Brooks is typical) regularly demean progressives and Trumpists alike as extremist, while boosting centrists and extolling the supposed bipartisan virtues of such figures as the late George H.W. Bush and John McCain. And at erstwhile left-leaning MSNBC, a steady stream of expatriate moderate Republicans — Max Boot, David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, William Kristol, and others — slide comfortably into commentary slots, replacing blacklisted left-progressives and moving the Democratic conversation incrementally rightward.

This is despite recent opinion polls showing the Democratic rank and file would prefer a genuine out-and-out progressive (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, or even union favorite Joe Biden) as their 2020 presidential nominee. How the Democratic field will ultimately shake out is as yet uncertain, although a reversion to Clintonism is unlikely given that new leftist members of the congressional class of 2018 (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al.) have committed to working within the existing framework, Michael Harrington-style, and not forming an independent third force.

Things political are evolving differently across the Atlantic, where third parties are proliferating everywhere in the face of the international dislocations globalization has generated, a fact of some interest to American centrist-oriented opinion makers, who view developments there with trepidation bordering on panic. The hegemony of “enlightened” global capitalism is worldwide, of course, and the type of neoliberal political leadership it prefers (socially moderate, economically free-market conservative) is identical here and in Europe.

That’s the source of extreme consternation as centrist governments overseas, ranging from center-left to center-right, either fall outright (Renzi in Italy) or teeter on the edge (May in the UK, Merkel in Germany, Macron in France). Thomas Friedman, viewing developments in France through the eyes of a convinced globalist, finds this trend disheartening. After all, he wrote in a December Times editorial entitled “The End of Europe,” President Emmanuel Macron had done all the right things: pro-investment tax reforms, reduced public entitlements, flexible labor rules, expanded worker training. What’s not to like? Yet, the French, obstinate ingrates, had turned on him, imperiling “the European idea” dependent on their president’s status as the presumed post-Merkel barrier to right-wing populism on the Continent.

But a closer look at Macron and his “needed” economic reforms (needed by global capital) makes obvious why working-class France spontaneously erupted in the form of the “Yellow Vests,” who took to the streets in violent resistance to an onerous fuel tax, cheered on by three-quarters of the public. Macron, a millionaire investment banker elected as an independent in 2017 on a promise to renew the economy, has sought to do so by imposing class-based austerity that favors corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes; it has earned him the sobriquet “president of the rich.”

Macron’s program is indeed calculated, as has been said, to make France “more capitalist.” Some specifics: a repeal of the national wealth tax, a radical cut in capital-gains taxes, a new tax on state retiree pensions, reductions in unemployment insurance and social security, and labor-code revisions to ease restrictions on firing workers and downsizing companies. All this threatens to exacerbate an inequality mirroring our own, with the French upper 20% earning five times the bottom 20%.

Enter the Yellow Vests, a loosely structured and as yet unaffiliated movement that, while “populist,” does not identify with the organized populist right of Marine Le Pen, which has so alarmed American centrist globalists and prompted kneejerk support for Macron. The Yellow Vests, it turns out, are neither hypernationalist nor anti-immigrant; they are a class-based economic protest favoring things like higher salaries, increased minimum wages, fairer taxes, and more direct democracy. And in their rejection of both the far right and the center, they represent the nascent emergence of a new European leftism.

A similar change is underway elsewhere on the Continent, mostly in the form of assorted “green” parties that are replacing the compromised socialist parties of the establishment left. In Holland, the Green Party was a big winner in the 2017 parliamentary elections, quadrupling its seats while running on a pro-Europe platform. And in Germany, a populist rival is now contesting the rightist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AFD, that has lately made Angela Merkel’s life miserable. The left-leaning Greens, campaigning on an eclectic blend of pro-environmentalism, pro-Europeanism, and pro-democratic socialism, took nearly a fifth of the vote in conservative Bavaria’s recent state elections; they are now part of the government in nine of Germany’s 16 states, and polls rank them the country’s second-most popular party, displacing the nearly moribund Social Democrats (SPD).

There’s a lesson here for America’s Democrats: Life exists outside the political dead center. The party could opt for an Emmanuel Macron of its own; billionaire financier and social liberal Michael Bloomberg would be a perfect replica. Alternatively, it can embrace a future not dictated by untrammeled globalization and its accompanying corporate value system — a future tinged in yellow and green.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2019

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