Recent political earthquakes including Trump’s election, the Brexit vote, and the electoral threat from the far right in the French and German elections make it obvious that parties of the centre-left must reinvent themselves if they are to regain their relevance and their electoral support. I agree with much of David Coates’ diagnosis in his chapter in this volume, but I would formulate the issue somewhat differently. For these parties to become once again serious governing parties, they must meet both an organizational and a programmatic challenge. The organizational challenge is to rebuild the parties on a democratic and inclusive basis so that rank and file party members exercise real influence on party leadership. The programmatic challenge is to develop strategies that would actually improve the lives of much of the electorate.

My focus here is on the US case, but I think some of the analysis is relevant for other advanced societies in Europe and Asia. Most of my attention is on the programmatic challenge since solutions to the organizational challenge are outside of my areas of competence. After a brief description of the organizational challenge, I argue that the United States and other developed societies are experiencing a transition to a “habitation society” and this diagnosis opens up the possibilities of new political strategies that cut across traditional class and locational divides. In the conclusion, I suggest that this diagnosis can also be helpful in thinking about how to meet the organizational challenge.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGE

It was socialist organizers who invented the modern mass political party. Before the emergence of these parties based in the industrial working class, political parties had been loose alliances of notables who gathered together under a party umbrella to compete for elected offices. This conformed to Schumpeter’s definition of democracy as a political system in which voters have the opportunity to choose which elite groups will rule over them. To be sure, the programmatic differences between such parties could be extremely serious, but the process of articulating connections between candidates and voters was limited to the period of hotly contested electoral campaigns.