It has been much remarked that American liberals and progressives seriously miscalculated on this economic downturn. Seeing it as a failure of unregulated financial markets, we expected calls for tighter financial regulation. Recalling how the Great Depression brought FDR to power in the US, and how the Latin American center-left came to power following a turn-of-the-millennium economic crisis, we expected this one, also, to turn politics to the left. Instead, politics, both in the US and Europe, have turned rather sharply to the right, and the hard right seems to be the biggest beneficiary of the downturn.
Looking back on it, perhaps we were naive to expect anything else. After all, while the Great Depression brought Roosevelt to power in the U.S., the hard right was its primary beneficiary across Europe. The Great Depression led to fascist movements arising all across Europe, and to a wide range of struggling democracies giving way to right wing dictatorships. Latin America's turn to the left following a turn-of-the-millennium economic crisis happened only after an earlier economic crisis in the 1980's led to a conservative tide and a wave of adopting free market economics. In the U.S. remembering that the Great Depression brought Roosevelt to power does not give a complete picture. The landmark election of 1932 was a great realignment moving away from the realignment that followed the Panic of 1893. That economic crisis took place after President Grover Cleveland signed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. William Jennings Bryan ran on his famous Free Silver platform and eloquently appealed to the interests of farms and labor, but the American people blamed the Democrats and silver money for their misfortunes and saw William McKinley and sound money as the remedy. Republicans won by a landslide and remained dominant until the Great Depression.
Many people have proposed the thesis that economic crises tend to favor the "outs" over the "ins." I believe this logic is sound, but would add another hypothesis. By and large, economic crises tend to shift politics to the right, unless the right has been thoroughly discredited. Consider:
In the United States, the Great Depression brought the center-left Roosevelt Administration to power. it was also the heyday of left-wing parties like the Communists and the Socialists. The United States has an unusually strong two-party system. Third parties have at times made significant inroads at the state or local level, but nationally, the choice is binary. The Depression hit with the center-right Republicans in power. By 1932, Herbert Hoover and his party were thoroughly discredited. Given the workings of the two-party system, the American people had nowhere else to turn except to the center-left Democrats, led by Roosevelt.*
Much the same dynamic was at work in Latin America during its turn-of-the-millennium crisis that brought the left to power. Prior to the 1980's, the hard right, in the form of brutal military dictatorships, held power. They were brought down by a seemingly endless economic crisis, and gave way to democracy. With the restoration of democracy, center-right parties stepped forward with free market economic platforms and won. Only after a decade (or more) of disappointing results, followed by yet another crisis, did the left come to power. The center-right had no one else to blame for the region's economic problems, and the far right (in the form of military dictatorships) was hated and thoroughly discredited. There was nowhere else to turn.
Or consider the dynamic this time around. Yes, the center-right Republicans lost in the U.S. because they were, after all, in power when the crisis happened. But has the center-left Democrats have yielded disappointing results, Republicans are moving sharply to the right and racking up electoral victories. In Europe, conservatives and the far right have been the big winners. But there have been notable exceptions. Iceland is an obvious one. Like most Nordic countries, Iceland is little troubled by political extremism. Since its conservative government was thoroughly and utterly discredited, there was little room to turn except the center-left. In Greece, as elsewhere, the mainstream parties have been thoroughly discredited, but the far left is outpolling the far right. Why this should be so is less than clear. My guess, though, is that Greece had the experience of being a right wing dictatorship more recently than most of Europe, and that the hard right has been severely discredited as a result. The same has been suggests (can't find link) about Spain -- that despite the severity of Spain's economic crisis, neofascism has made little appearance in Spain because of the memory of the Franco dictatorship.
My general prognosis: Rough sailing ahead.
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*There is another reason the far right lacked power during the Depression in the US that I will get to in a later post.
Interesting hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteThis might explain why communism has never overthrown a democracy internally, while fascism and right-wing military dictatorships have brought us all the way to serfdom on multiple occasions.
If democracies have a tendency to swing to the right during economic crises (and while communism did well in democracies in the 1930s, it never got very far even in Germany) then that means that the primary opportunity for communists to overthrown capitalist democracies actually becomes a difficult time for them.
The UK picture is quite complicated: fascism has run aground as the British National Party has crashed, but an increasing number of right-wing voters are switching from the centre-right Conservative party to the mid-right UK Independence Party who got their best result ever in 2010 and are at a record high in the polls for them (7-9% i.e. about the same as the UK's third party, the Liberal Democrats).
Part of that is that the eurozone crisis has helped euroscepticism, but also there are a lot of traditionalist Conservatives who are fed up with David Cameron's moderate Toryism and want a Thatcherite party, which UKIP essentially are.
Meanwhile, Labour are riding high in the polls, but only after they've shifted back to a Blairite-type centrist position after a brief flirtation with the left under Gordon Brown.
However, it is interesting that for all the Tea Party bluster and the undoubted shift to the right, the Republicans have nevertheless nominated the second-most moderate candidate for 2012 whom many of them call a "Massacheusetts liberal". The US isn't anywhere near fascism and in fact the more fascistic elements of Neo-Conservativism have (bliss!) largely gone into hiding.