What Owen Jones Almost Gets Right, I Mean Left

Owen Jones is a brilliant columnist for The Guardian. His writing is always worth a read. His most recent piece, “To move on, Labour must learn lessons from the left’s failure worldwide,” is up to his usual standards but curiously leaves out the obvious conclusion to which his argument clearly leads.

Jones adroitly lays out the worldwide left’s trend of failure. Left-wing parties suffered dramatic losses in the U.K., France, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Greece to name but a few. Hard-right governments have taken hold in Poland, Hungary, Brazil, India, and the U.S. We can’t expect Jones to provide us with a silver bullet answer to the left’s recent electoral difficulties, but a better try at answering the question is in order. I will offer the beginnings of an answer, or at least one aspect of the answer.

The left in the year 2020 find itself stuck in a self-inflicted malaise several decades in the making. It is a problem that most older leftists can’t or won’t admit and younger leftists lack the historical perspective to even recognize. In short, the left got complacent, started to slip, then panicked and lost their way.

To use an imperfect analogy: Sometimes, when a sports team runs up a big lead, they start to ease off — the match is won, they think. And sometimes, when they ease off, the trailing team…