I can't find the text that this Guardian Long Read podcast says is there, which would be useful to addressing some of John Harris says in detail. His question is Does The Left Have a Future? He tells about how, all over the West, Britain, The United States, France, Germany, Spain,... that "the left" is floundering, unable to win elections and mount governments that can make laws and implement policies. While a lot of what he says is worth thinking about, I do see one really big problem he leaves out, the systematic discrediting of the left by corporate and commercial media which serve the interests of the right. That is true just about everywhere and the problem has gotten steadily worse as electronic, broadcast, cable, etc. media take over the majority of the attention of populations. Unless such media is forced to a. not lie or distort reality, b. to carry information which is not favorable to the interest of their owners and control voters can't know the truth and their choices won't make them free or produce justice and egalitarian democracy.
Beyond that, being a typical Brit leftist, Harris's focus takes in the failing unions and other things the left has relied on - the failures of which vary from place to place - he doesn't seem to take into account that people have to have some sense of morality which makes them think past their own interests and that sense of morality outside of the context of religious belief in moral obligations doesn't seem to be very strong or at all durable.
I think the decline of the real left, the left that can produce egalitarian democracy, not the Marxist or quasi-Marxist pseudo-left, is a predictable result of the decline of firm belief in the traditional religions that have produced egalitarian democracy. To go back to the observation of the Marxist-atheist philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, all of those things which comprise the substance of that real left are a product of the Jewish principle of JUSTICE as expressed in the Christian commandment of LOVE. His declaration is that all of real modernism, the dignity and autonomy of the individual, the moral obligation to respect equal rights, etc. have no other source and, even today, they are fed by nothing else as secularism has not produced anything that succeeds in producing and sustaining them. Harris touches on one of the proposed replacements, the true but insufficiently strong or binding observation that the personal is political but that doesn't work to replace the firm belief that our Creator wants us to do to others what we would have them do to us, that what we do to the least among us we do to God, that we are to love each other with the love that Jesus's apostles felt he had for them and that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
Since January I've been studying the Old Testament guided by the observations of the great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann and I am stunned how virtually everything we see as a crisis of the left, everything even down to the parched landscapes that come with global warming are not only mentioned in those old texts but they are extensively analyzed in terms of people failing to follow the practices of equal justice, love, treating the least among us with love and dignity, of abusing people, animals and the environments by those with power in a quest for endless acquisition. That is also something which America's greatest living writer, Marilynne Robinson has also addressed in powerful essays.
I read that and see far more for the left to benefit from than virtually any secular centered vision. That isn't to say that there isn't some valuable content in some secularists' thinking. Many secularists are quite smart. But it has, increasingly, failed politically, it has failed to produce results. Such thinking can't be imposed by the fiat of the wise, it must be the result of the vote. Without the firm belief in the moral obligations that produce a willingness to look past our own, narrow interest towards universal and equal justice in a sufficient number of people all of their secular analyses will be insufficient. It's not as if the secular left isn't smart, it's that its areligious and, in too many cases, anti-religious motivation and content is guaranteed to defeat what is necessary to produce egalitarian democracy.
Lacking the substance to produce egalitarian democracy in their very foundations, the detour that so many even very clever lefties took in everything from Marxism to Fabianism and various other, futile, often anti-religious and, ultimately, anti-democratic isms proves that cleverness is hardly enough. I would wonder if any such past success that left has had, politically, wasn't a product of Christians and others with a sense of religious obligation voting for candidates who promised to produce policies enabling that. I wonder if it isn't a decline in that basic religious belief as a firm obligation under a barrage of secular media which isn't the real cause of the failure of the Harris left. And it does take a real belief that no one less than God requires us to not be selfish, narrowly concerned with ourselves and our tight circle of loved ones. If voting isn't directed from the motivation of justice and love and moral obligation of a kind which will only be found with a belief that those are the will of God any vote will fail to produce the result of that moral obligation, an equal and just society governed by democratic rule.
If The People are corrupted to the extent that an effective majority don't believe that God wants them to do unto others what they would have done unto them, you will never achieve the end result, the goal of genuine liberalism. I think a diet of mockery of Christianity and Judaism in Britian probably has a lot to do with why people don't vote for candidates who promise to produce the kind of society Jesus and the other Jewish prophets envisioned would result from equal justice powered by love. Without the firm belief in a moral obligation to do what produces egalitarian democracy, asking people to not be selfish, self-centered, ego-centric, ethnocentric, units of economic acquisition and utility makes no sense at all to them. A secular left will always, eventually, fail as the Western left has in so many places.
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