Brahmin left has no future; the left needs to reinvent itself

Left needs new stories and new imaginations; it needs to acquire a more modern image; and it needs to create its own narrative of nationalism

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should lose when inequality is rising. Winning and losing are part of the electoral game. But the left parties are in danger of losing the battle of ideas as well.

Political scientist Max Lerner says that ideas are weapons, but ideology is a loose cannon. The left intellectuals broadly agree that the great dialectical processes that had helped drive social advance have stalled, thanks to neoliberal globalisation.

Through the practice of social democracy, some Nordic countries, Sweden in particular, protected themselves from the storm clouds of fascism gathered over interwar Europe. In Sweden, socialists were able to outmanoeuvre the radical right and cement a stable majority coalition, thereby escaping what political scientist Sheri Berman calls the “collapse of the left and democracy that occurred elsewhere in Europe.” But that is no more the case today.

So confident are leaders of the European right, like Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, that she now ridicules the left as “salon left”, “caviar left”, and “Rolex left”. Jacobo Custodi of Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence believes that class dealignment has “devastated the Italian left”.

“Class de-alignment” signifies an erosion of the mass party coalitions and breakdowns in support among key social groups. Class-based factors no longer influence voting behaviour, as they used to. The political landscape has undergone a major change.