The most fundamental fault line in contemporary politics runs through the centre of its dominant right-wing alliance, that between neoliberals and conservatives, and sets two different kinds of political power against each other. It is a conflict that leaves the political left to one side, with the ironic consequence that what should be a moment of major opportunity for social democrats to break that alliance is in fact having the opposite consequence. The fault line is that between the economic globalization fostered by neoliberalism, representing the extraordinary power of business wealth, and the xenophobic form of conservatism, representing the power of mass fear and hatred.

It is in relation to these that the political left is weak. It has become routine for debates about “the state of the Left” to bewail a lack of ideas to challenge neoliberalism, but in his contribution to this book David Coates shows how in fact there is an abundance of ideas and practical policies coming from left of centre; the weakness lies in a mobilizing capacity strong enough to confront its opponents. I would go further and argue that, so important are centre-left policies, these opponents cannot avoid embracing aspects of them. Nowhere in the democratic world, and particularly in Europe, have neoliberal governments been able completely to destroy public health and education services, public pensions, publicly funded infrastructure, regulation of business behaviour and consumer rights, or taxation that has some redistributive effect. On the conservative right, leaders who are building their power base on hostility to immigrants, the European Union (EU) and foreigners in general, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Theresa May in the UK and the Danish People’s Party, feel a need to reinforce their position by rejecting the neoliberal approach to social policy. Social democratic policies live on and even revive, despite the growing weakness of the parties to which they belong.

In this essay, I shall concentrate on constellations of power in the electoral and other mass mobilization arenas, but always bearing in mind that this is by no means the only and probably no longer the most important place where political power is wielded.

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.

In 1917, not only those parties engaged in insurrectionary revolution but even those committed to gradual reform still spoke of eventually transcending capitalism. Half a century later social democrats had explicitly come to define their political goals as compatible with a welfare-state variety of capitalism; and well before the end of the century they would be joined in this by many who had formerly embraced the legacy of 1917. Yet this occurred, just as the universalization of neoliberalism rendered threadbare any notion of distinct varieties of capitalism. The realism without imagination of the so-called “Third Way” was shown to lack realism as well as imagination.

However reactionary the era of neoliberal globalization has been, it has seemed to confirm the continuing revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, at least in terms of creating “a world after its own image”. Nevertheless, the financialized form of capitalism that greased the wheels not only of global investment and trade, but also of globally integrated production and consumption, was clearly crisis prone. The first global capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century was rooted in the contradictions attending the new credit-dependent forms through which, amidst stagnant wages in the neoliberal era, mass consumption was sustained. Yet as the crisis has unfolded over the past decade, in sharp contrast to the two great capitalist crises of the twentieth century, it did not lead to a replacement of the regime of accumulation that gave rise to it. Unlike the break with the gold standard regime in the 1930s and the Bretton Woods regime in the 1970s, neoliberalism persisted. This could be seen in the rescue and reproduction of financial capital, the reassertion of austerity in fiscal policy, the dependence on monetary policy for stimulus, and the further aggravation of income and wealth inequality – all of which was made possible by the continuing economic and political weaknesses of global working classes through this period.

We are now in a new conjuncture; one very different from that which had led to the perception, at the height of its embrace by Third Way social democracy, that neoliberalism was “the most successful ideology in world history”.

Reflecting on the future of the Left we are too easily drawn into debates on what needs to be done to “solve our problems” – end exploitation, establish global peace, reverse the rise of inequality, restore the balance between nature and society. This begs the question of who wants those problems solved and is willing to do something, the right thing, to this end. Who is The Left, or can become it, apart from those of “us” who want to see it recreated and re-empowered because without it our reflections will never be more than idle chatter? Who are our constituents, our popular base waiting to be mobilized and organized, our class an sich whose interests, and indeed whose practicable interests, we can hope to define so as to coincide with the general interests of mankind?

VANISHING CONSTITUENCIES

Surveying the social landscape of the advanced capitalist societies from which we hail and which we know best, many of us have sympathy with and still feel somehow indebted to the old working class, the generation of trade union and left party members under postwar democratic, state-administered capitalism. Many of them are now retired, or about to retire. Their industries, the factories where they have toiled, have shrunk or disappeared, leaving them behind in their now depressed and decaying local communities. Their labour is no longer die quelle allen reichtums, they now depend for their livelihood on a society more-or-less willing to pay for their pensions and healthcare. In a neoliberal, turbo-capitalist society, such dependence is a stigma. Even where governments and the public treat them respectfully, the legitimacy of the social entitlements their generation has instituted is fragile, as indicated by recurring discussions on pension reform and healthcare costs. “Grandfather clauses” freezing benefits for current recipients that the next generation will not receive further de-legitimate the welfare state in its present form. They also reinforce perceptions of the old working class as an unproductive surplus population that, fortunately, will wither away with time.

When we were young, we sometimes found solace in the belief that “the revolution advances on the mortality tables”.

This volume makes for inspirational reading. The analysis is never anything less than penetrating, the conclusions profound. Read individually, we begin to see the current political predicaments of both the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary left through the eyes of leading thinkers of their generation, every one of whom has gained a well-deserved reputation for the clarity of their writing on the never-ending drama of left politics in a largely hostile world. I am merely one member of a following generation who was schooled in the issues of left-political reinvigoration through familiarising myself with their work when I was a student. Read collectively, their contributions remind me once again today of lessons that a younger me learnt from their earlier insights. The world moves on, the issues of the day change, the targets for our opposition come in different forms, our aspirations for the future likewise, but one thing remains steadfastly the same. Together the individual essays collected here show that there is no magic bullet that will suddenly make everything right, no better world that will miraculously drop from the skies and be embraced by political friend and foe alike. There is still much work to be done, much ink to be spilt, many meetings to attend, many demonstrations to go on, many disagreements to be had, as different versions of a shared progressive future are suggested, discussed and argued over. All of that requires clarity of analysis as the first step to outlining the pathologies of the current condition, and it would be hard to imagine a single volume making a better start to such a task than this one does.

Of course, exactly where one starts is a function of historical experience, historical memory and historical imagination. Inevitably when setting off to reflect on the issues that the contributors were asked to write about, the question of whether we have been here before asserts itself as a significant background presence.

Echoes of past debates and past struggles will naturally be called to mind. As the preceding chapters amply demonstrate, though, it is equally natural that they will do so in different ways.

Writing as I have been – first in the middle and then at the end of an election campaign in which I feel some engagement – I have had to exert self-discipline and resist the temptation to chase fast moving events. I found the advice of writer Italo Calvino useful. He says: “I reject the role of the person chasing events. I prefer the person who continues his discourse, waiting for it to become topical again, like all things that have a sound basis”. It’s not for me to judge whether my discourse has a sound basis, but I will argue the case on the assumption that it does. And so, tempting as it is, I will not chase the events leading up to election day, 8 June 2017, or the consequent repercussions for the Labour Party, for Jeremy Corbyn, and for the movement that his campaign to be and then to remain leader of the Labour Party – though I do intend to reflect on the movement’s prospects, the new openings since the electoral successes of Corbynled Labour, the obstacles it still faces and the pitfalls it needs to avoid, drawing on lessons from the experience of Syriza.

My discourse in this chapter concerns “a new politics from the left”, in particular, the importance as a foundation of this politics of an understanding of power learnt from social movements of the past half-century; and related to this, a distinct understanding of knowledge and what kinds and sources of knowledge matter in public decision-making. My argument will focus on the incubation of this new politics, and its underlying understandings of power and knowledge, in the movements of the late-1960s and 1970s; and their re-emergence after decades of neoliberalism in the twenty-first century – with the movements of the squares in Southern Europe followed by Syriza and Podemos (though with scattered, regionally specific, antecedents in the 1980s). I also will explore the understandings of power and knowledge that underpin the “old politics” historically associated in the UK with the Labour Party.

If further proof were still needed of the fact that one swallow does not make a summer, try comparing the performance of the Labour Party in the UK’s June 2017 general election with that of the French Socialist Party in the elections for the National Assembly, the first round of which occurred just three days after the UK election. In both cases, centre-left parties went down to expected defeat: but whereas in the British election, the Labour Party’s unexpectedly strong performance cost the Conservative Government its majority, in the French one the Socialist Party and its allies, in government as recently as the previous month, lost all but 44 of their 284 seats. Given that the French performance was by far the more typical of the two, given recent results in both American and European elections, it remains the case, therefore, that – the results of the 2017 UK general election notwithstanding – these are not great days for centre-left parties in developed capitalisms. And a hundred years out from the Russian Revolution, they are even worse days for the revolutionary Left. Indeed, it is quite difficult to think of a recent time in which left-wing prospects of either a moderate or a more radical kind have looked so problematic. Which means, among other things, that reflecting on the future of the Left against such a background is likely to be neither an easy nor a pleasing affair; but then, precisely because it is not, the need for such a reflection has arguably never been greater.

Strategizing among progressives is often infected by a sort of millennialism, in which there is an idea that a golden age awaits in the future. This view holds that something will happen that will open a space for progressive ideas that does not exist at present. This something could be an unforeseen upsurge of labour radicalism, or spontaneous organizing like Occupy, but an order of magnitude larger, or perhaps another economic collapse like we saw in 2008–9.

This is not a productive path forward for progressive politics. There will always be unforeseen events, but the idea that these events will open the door for the backlog of progressive reforms we have kept on the shelf is little more than wishful thinking. In fact, the failure of the economic crisis following the collapse of the housing bubble to lead to anything more than minor political changes should be instructive. Even a catastrophic economic event, which is unlikely to be repeated any time soon, does not necessarily open any doors for progressive politics. If we want to see progressive policies advance, then we will have to build from where we are today, not hope for a gift from the heavens to clear the path.

In this respect, we need to learn from the Right. They have made enormous headway by going step by step. They have worked to undermine every institutional basis for progressive support, most importantly the labour movement, but also programs like Legal Aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other sources of public funds, that could be used to support progressive causes. At least as importantly, they went behind the scenes to restructure the economy in ways that redistributed income upward.

While the right-wing is not shy about demanding a lower tax burden on the wealthy, making the tax system more regressive, their efforts to reshape the before-tax distribution of income have had far more impact on the living standards of the bulk of the population. They have pushed policies, many of them obscure and seemingly unimportant, which have led to the largest upward redistribution of income in the history of the world.

It is a feature of very dark nights that they tend to be followed by particularly bright mornings – or at least that the contrast between the two states of being always seems to be remarkably sharp. The morning of 9 June 2017 in the United Kingdom was one such moment of sharpness: a morning of unexpected brightness after an otherwise long night of political darkness for centre-left parties on both sides of the Atlantic – a night that stretched back to at least the May 2010 general election in the UK case, and in the US one to the Republican Party’s recapture of the House of Representatives later in that same year (with that capture softened only slightly by Obama’s retention of the presidency in 2012). There was brightness for the UK centre-left in June 2017 in the fact that the election result was far better for the Labour Party than most commentators, including sympathetic ones, had thought likely; and there was brightness too in the simple partisan pleasure of watching more conservative political figures no longer sweep all before them. But elections always tell wider stories, and the one in June 2017 certainly did.

Behavioural economics is almost certainly the most fun and influential field in economics today, setting out to explore human behaviour in all its scope and strangeness. Be it the cooperative behaviour amongst the Indonesian whale-hunters of Lamalera village or the reluctance of university students to avoid painful electrocution when presented with costless alternatives, behavioural economists seek to understand the forces that govern the decisions we make. In this field lie the keys to making this world a better and more compassionate place.

The 2008 financial crash

On 15 September 2008, the fourth largest investment bank in the United States filed for the largest bankruptcy in history. For many commentators, this marked the point at which the most severe financial crash the world had experienced since 1929 became unavoidable. In the years immediately following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, some 30 million people worldwide lost their jobs due to the crash, many being consigned to long-term joblessness; poverty and inequality rates in developed countries rose to levels unprecedented in recent history, with poverty rates rising above 15 per cent in both the United States and Europe; and rates of mental illness, suicide and abuse all increased markedly. The countries hardest hit lost a decade of economic growth, but the true human costs of the crash – the devastation experienced by countless individuals and families – will never be fully understood (Okter-Robe & Podpiera 2013).

The terrible economic events of 2008–13 have led to something of a revolution within the economics discipline, for many validating the dissatisfaction amongst economics students that had been growing throughout the preceding decade. Back in June 2000, a group of university students in Paris circulated a petition calling for an increase in the realism of their economics curriculum, which they believed was too narrow, abstract and detached from the real world. The following year, 27 PhD candidates at the University of Cambridge launched their own similar petition and other students gathered at Kansas City issued a letter calling on economics departments around the world to reform their courses. In March 2003, students at Harvard University joined the fray.

Making policy recommendations that seek to manipulate our behaviour by taking advantage of how we actually make decisions is arguably the key distinction between modern behavioural economics and the studies of decision-making that went before it (see Chapter 2). The modern school does not only seek to provide a descriptive theory of behaviour (outlining how we actually behave) – to contrast with and further enhance the normative theory provided by mainstream economics (outlining how in theory we should behave) – it also provides a prescriptive theory of behaviour that outlines how our behaviour can be altered.

Central to this is the approach of libertarian paternalism, which involves the government altering the appearance of the choices we face – the choice architecture – to guide us towards making the decisions that are best for us. Libertarian in that it does not impinge on our freedoms to choose. Paternalistic in that it increases our welfare by improving the choices we make. Popularized by the 2008 book of the same name, this is the nudge approach to policy-making: nudging us towards better choices. After making every minister in his Cabinet read Thaler and Sunstein’s book (2008), former UK Prime Minister David Cameron established the Behavioural Insights Team in 2010 to improve his government’s policy-making. Initially a government department, it is now jointly owned by the UK Government Cabinet Office, Nesta and BIT employees, having been part privatized in 2014; it consists of more than 70 employees located in London, New York and Sydney; and it advises authorities around the globe about policy. In 2015, for example, it entered into a three-year partnership with US group Bloomberg Philanthropies on a $42 million project to help local authorities across America use data to engage the public, make government more effective and improve people’s lives.

There are various ways in which the choice architecture in a given situation can be altered to manipulate our behaviour: using decoys, altering defaults, changing the ways in which choices are framed and seeking to prime or anchor us, being just a few. Each of these is examined in this chapter, before moving on to a specific case study and to the arguments that have been levelled against the nudge approach.

The emergence of behavioural economics as a field in its own right, over the past 35 years, has fundamentally changed both economics as a subject and the nature of policy-making. Adopting the empiricist approach, behavioural economics has started the process of returning modern economics to the form it took in the eighteenth century. This has not been without critique or contention, however. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a number of reflections – certainly not an exhaustive discussion – about what behavioural economics has already achieved and its future.

Competition, high stakes and experience

Findings have been presented throughout this book that show we do not always behave, or make decisions, in line with the assumptions of rationality generally maintained by economists. A commonly heard retort amongst economists to these findings is that they have been largely generated from laboratory experiments that fail to satisfactorily replicate the real world. When making decisions for real – in situations in which there are significant monetary implications, in which we have substantial experience of such decisions and in which we may actually be in competition with others – these behavioural anomalies will simply dissipate. The high stakes and competition will focus our minds in a way that can never be mirrored in a laboratory and our past experiences will enable us to successfully navigate the pitfalls in a way that we cannot do when faced with experimental questions for the first time (see List 2003, 2004 & 2008).

With the arena of professional sport being one in which participants are highly experienced and in which the competition is fierce to win often substantial monetary rewards, the field of sports economics has come to the fore in examining these doubts. In a study of 239 US Professional Golf Association (PGA) tournaments between 2004 and 2009, encompassing over two and a half million putts by 421 players, it has been shown that professional golfers do indeed exhibit the behaviour predicted by prospect theory (Pope & Schweitzer 2011). The number of shots required for par on a hole is a golfer’s reference point and so having to take more shots than that is considered a loss for a golfer.

Mainstream economics has tended to assume that we make our decisions in isolation: that we each selfishly seek to maximize our own utility, unconcerned with the utilities of others (see Chapter 1). That this is demonstrably not the case in many settings is the third facet of behavioural economics and the primary purpose of this chapter.

Goodwill games: the empirical evidence

Belief in the self-interested behaviour hypothesis began to weaken in the 1980s as it was increasingly challenged by findings from a number of games played in conventional laboratory experiments (see Chapter 1). These findings continue to be the bedrock of the empirical evidence that we have wider, more sociable concerns. Six such games are particularly instructive, each predominantly involving only one round and two key players: a proposer and a responder (the empirical evidence is taken from Fehr & Schmidt 2005; van Winden 2007; Camerer & Fehr 2002).

• 1. The Ultimatum Game: the first, seminal game identifying our social concerns (Güth et al. 1982). The game starts with the proposer receiving a set amount of money, the initial endowment, which she chooses to distribute, however she likes, between herself and the responder. The responder then either accepts the amount he is offered, triggering the game to end with the money being divided in the manner agreed, or rejects it, causing the game to end with both players walking away with nothing. According to the model of self-interested behaviour, responders should accept any amount offered: even the smallest amount represents an increase in their wealth. Knowing this, proposers should offer only the smallest amounts, maximizing their gains. The experimental results are very different, however. Offers that represent less than 20 per cent of the initial endowment tend to be rejected by responders 40–60 per cent of the time, with the probability of rejection increasing as the offer becomes less generous. Perhaps in anticipation of this, proposers tend to make offers that represent 40–50 per cent of the initial endowments.

• 2. The Dictator Game (Forsythe et al. 1994). This proceeds in the same way as the Ultimatum Game but in this game the responder cannot reject the proposer’s offer.