After Stunning Victories in Britain and France, Where's the US Left?

With no significant socialist movement workers are easy prey for a fascist "populist" while liberals can't even seem to get rid of a doddering old relic of the Cold War.

When the US had a significant Socialist Party: Eugene Debs running for president against against Taft and Teddy Roosevelt. He received 6 percent of the vote that year. (screewn grab from WFYI documentary “The Revolutionist: Eugene. Debs”

How is it that in France, a disputatious nation of many competing ideologies and philosophies, the land of Descartes, Voltaire, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Cohn-Bendit, when confronted with a serious threat of an electoral takeover of their government by National Rally, a fascist party, was able to quickly cobble together the largest electoral bloc in the French parliament? Meanwhile here in the US, the same threat elicits panic among liberals and leftists, but no mass movement to prevent it from happening.

When National Rally, formerly the National Front, founded by racist Jean-Marie Le Pen and veteran Nazi Waffen SS member Pierre Bousquet, and now headed by Le Pen’s daughter Marine, shocked political experts and pollsters by winning the first round of a national parliamentary election, with a chance to capture a majority of seats in a second round between top vote getters in each election district, the French left did something incredible. 

Historically a fractious competitive hodge-lodge of four large parties including Marxists, Communists and non-marxist socialists of various stripes and sizes, as well as smaller parties, the left quickly established a united front and even agreed that in any district where a candidate of the left was behind another left front candidate, the candidate who had received the fewer votes in the first round would drop out and endorse the leading left candidate in that district. 

This strategy not only made it more likely that the left would win seats, but the very idea of such a collective strategy electrified a broad French electorate that had apparently sat out the low-turnout first round, but that was appalled and frightened at the thought of a fascist majority entering  parliament. 

            With heavy turnout just a week later, the left United Front won a plurality of the seats in the Parliament while Renaissance, France’s liberal centrist pro-capitalist party, headed by the unpopular President Emmanuel Macron (who had called the snap election), ended up in second place, leaving National Rally with a lower-than-expected showing and just third place. 

  When the dust settles from the surprise outcome of a left coalition winning instead of the expected fascists, and if the four left parties can manage to stay together for the larger goal of ruling well and preventing a fascist president in 2027, the first challenge will be having a compelling leftist prime minister appointed. That responsibility belongs President Macron — no friend of the left. (Under the French Constitution, the president appoints a prime minister. It can be anyone but by tradition the first choice is typically the leader of the party with the most seats in the parliament. In the present situation, that would be Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed, the party which won the most support of the parties in the United Front, and is the most radical of those four parties that make up the Front.  Mélenchon would also be a logical choice for PM as he ran very strongly in the last presidential race, and was certainly the strongest candidate in that race among parties of the left.)  

So far, Macron, who created this situation inadvertently by shutting down parliament and calling a snap election. His intent was to improve his own political standing with a win by his party but the effort backfired. Now he is not making things easy for the left. 

In no hurry to replace the current centrist Prime Minister, Gabriel Atta, who resigned right after the second round results came in yesterday, Macron refused to accept his resignation. Eventually though, he will have to chose someone new as Prime Minister. 

Conceivably a government of the left headed by a coalition that does not have a majority of seats, could nonetheless govern. It could do this  by choosing issues that are popular — for example repealing Macron’s wildly unpopular raIsing of the retirement age — and that strategy could gain the votes of members of the other parties who won’t want to go into the next election seen as obstructionists. 

At this point, the big win by the left’s united front has leftists pouring into central Paris and taking over the streets in and around Stalin Square and Republic Square, to celebrate their win and the blocking of National Rally with fireworks, dancing and cheering. No Doubt Bastille Day on the 14th will see similar celebration. What will follow is negotiating among the parties that compose the coalition. If they can settle on a viable candidate who can keep it together while bringing along enough support from the other parties to get popular measures passed, it could be a new era for France. 

Coming in the same month that the Labour Party in Britain delivered a crushing defeat to 15 years of Conservative rule in Britain, the French Left’s win represents a turnabout in the politics of two of Europe’s biggest economies and polities away from right-wing populism, and in France, perhaps also a turnabout in unquestioned support for US militarism.

The thing we on the left here in the US need to figure out is why this dramatic leftward  turn in Britain and France is happening while the US we have trouble even getting past a doddering and befuddled.  81-year-old  President Biden, an ardent militarist, ally of Israel, and a promotor of Cold War 2.0 against not just Russia and China, both nuclear super-powers, but also Iran, an almost-nuclear nation too. 

While there is alarm among most US leftists and liberals about the increasing likelihood of Donald Trump's returning to the White House with his talk of ruling as an authoritarian, there is not even any effort afoot among the small leftist parties in the US to run a single candidate. All of them put together hardly make a dent in the poll numbers of Republican and Democratic candidates. These micro parties  have difficulty even getting any of their candidates for legislative offices elected at the state level, much less at the federal level. Robert Kennedy Jr., oldest son of the assassinated former Senator and 1972 presidential aspirant is a conspiracy-minded, anti-vaxer who is disavowed by the whole Kennedy clan, yet even he is polling higher than all the left candidates combined, despite his name recognition and personal wealth. None of the minor candidates running for president has the slightest chance of beating Trump or whomever it is that the Democrats end up running for president. They just offer disgusted citizens an easy protest option.

Biden meanwhile, who seems to be losing gobs of neurons by the day, is responding to louder and more insistent calls for him to renounce his candidacy because of obvious serious signs of memory lapses and other brain disorders, by taunting his critics to try and challenge him at the August Democratic Convention. 

Where are the massive street campaigns from the public calling for him to drop his campaign and let someone younger and more ‘with it” take on Trump? Nothing so far, probably because nobody else on the Democratic side offers much more in the way of an appealing argument for voting for them beyond their ability to make it to the end of sentences without wandering into incoherence.

Would Americans vote for a leftist candidate?  Probably, if there was a genuine socialist party based in the working class ready to organize on the behalf of electing such a person. But this country's two-party duopoly of capitalist parties, Republican and Democratic, share a common interest in denying them ballot access ballot access, something that is controlled by state governments. They are aided in this endeavor by the mass media, which rarely mention any other parties or candidates that the two main ones. 

Consider this: Polls for years have shown that most Americans would like to have a union on their job, if they could get one, most Americans say that the US military is to large and too expensive and should be reduced in size, as well as not get involved in wars all around the world, most Americans favor a reduction in or ban on nuclear weapons, most Americans support public education and want better funded public schools as well as free public colleges for their kids and themselves, most Americans want a secure and improved Social Security program and a government-run health care program for all, and most of us also recognize that climate change happening fast and want something done about it to save the world for our kids and grandkids.  But neither of the two dominant parties is going to do any of those things. 

A socialist party would.

If’s obviously too late to create and build such a party, much less put up a candidate who would call for such things in this election year. Just getting a independent candidate on the ballot in 50 states would be impossible at this late date (even RFK Jr. can’t do it with all his money and name recognition). And if Trump and a Republican Congress are elected in November, it may turn out to be too late to try and found one. But we need to try. The effort should begin now though, not in 2028, the year of the next presidential election.

The surprise leftist voting surges in Britain and France have different explanations, but they are both because of sudden changes as well as historical experience. In Britain, 15 years of Conservative policies, and the legacy of attacks on social services under Margaret Thatcher before that, have destroyed the former welfare state society built over half a century, and Brexit has destroyed the country’s economy. People in the UK remember things were better with a well-funded government health service and publicly owned railways and utilities. In France, there is still the memory of the country under Nazi rule and under the fascist Vichy government of French Quislings. The majority of French voters don’t want fascist rule.

The US has never had a fascist government or been occupied by a fascist country, but it has experienced  many years of right-wing rule and cuts in government social service funding. The difference is there hasn’t been, since the 1930s, a significant socialist movement in the US to present an alternative. Perhaps if we could begin now building one, then should a Trump presidency go predictably off the rails, with the economy tanking, and with the reality of ultra-pro-capitalist corruption becoming obvious, US citizens, with an established socialist movement and party to turn to, could pull off a surprise the way Labour has done in Britain and the United Front has done in France.