What’s Next for the Left?

In a thoughtful piece at Vox, Mike Konczal outlines how US politics shifted right in the 1980s and that only now the Democratic Party is finding its way back. For decades, “socialism” and “welfare” were bad words that evoked the failure of Soviet communism, and the success of the United States was ascribed to libertarian capitalism.

Now that Hillary Clinton’s loss to a nincompoop has called the status quo into question, the left is wondering how it came to this. Konczal points out that neoliberalism is being used as a meaningless catch-all phrase to describe a Dark Ages of the American left.

I think it would be productive to ask not only where things went “wrong” with politics, but also question what engenders the new perspective today. While avoiding oversimplifications that ascribe everything to those inscrutable Millennials.

I suspect we’re at the tail end of a prosperity-fueled delusion. Late-20th-century America had a seemingly unstoppable economy. Maybe this was due to our perfect growth position for post-war globalization, accelerated exploitation of domestic resources, economic colonization of oil-rich lands, the information revolution, or some other historical force my layperson perspective neglects. Perhaps it could even be ascribed to New Deal policies that fell victim to their own successes. Probably any narrative of clear causality is foolish.

So most voters felt their quality of life improving. The only set eager to change the way things are going are those oppressed through…