In Europe, the city is aflame. But America’s Athens — Philadelphia, the city of the founding fathers — has lit a very different touchpaper: its Occupy movement is the first in the country to announce it is running for Congress.
Whether or not 29-year-old Nathan Kleinman beats the moderate incumbent, it says something about a new spirit of opportunism on the American left.
In December a poll by the Pew Research Center found that support for socialism now outweighed support for capitalism among a younger generation of Americans. In 2012 so far, in a spectacular series of victories, American progressives have taken on big oil, Hollywood and some people’s version of God — winning every time.
The European left, meanwhile, is in freefall: the social democrats, once synonymous with Scandinavia, won just more than 6% in last month’s election for the Finnish presidency.
In fact, the only socialists governing alone in Europe today are Carwyn Jones in Wales and the Moscow-trained president of Cyprus. What has gone so badly wrong for the Euroleft, and what can it learn from the United States?
The most recent progressive home run — the high-profile reversal by cancer charity Susan G Komen of its decision to stop funding the abortion advice charity Planned Parenthood — has followed a familiar pattern of Twitter-enabled people power.
In what politico.com has predicted will become the “textbook case on the political power of social media”, Komen executives were clearly overwhelmed by a half-a-million-a-day tweet tsunami: 80 to one against the decision.
The killing off of two internet censorship bills in January, in spite of big-battalion backing by the entertainment industry, and Bank of America’s binning of a proposal to charge for debit-card usage at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, were similarly internet-fuelled successes.
The progressive revival may be tech-enabled, but it is far from tech-driven. The real social web these movements have created is a web of values, a vision that somehow connects with people at an emotional level, joining the dots between the personal and the political to create a sense of shared purpose, though often using new digital tools.
It wasn’t a think-tank report — that staple tactic of the European left — that won the battle for Planned Parenthood, but people like Linda from Las Vegas, a breast cancer survivor, who became an overnight YouTube sensation, when she literally bared her scars to demonstrate her anger at Komen’s small-mindedness.
The American left learned its emotional intelligence the hard way in the culture wars of the 70s and 80s, when good arguments seemed powerless against ignorance and prejudice.
During the Bush era, Democratic thinkers like George Lakoff and Drew Westen started the push-back by teaching progressives the importance of “framing”.
But, the real secret of progressive success is a 68-year-old professor called Marshall Ganz, who dropped out of Harvard to organise migrant workers in 1965 only to return almost 30 years later to finish his degree and teach a new generation what he’d learned in the field.
Ganz’s work has inspired myriad movements, from Obama’s grassroots campaign in 2008 to the world’s first trade union for models. At the core of his teaching is the idea that leaders must build a public narrative explaining their calling, a sort of progressive elevator pitch in three parts: why they feel called to act (story of self), how this act relates to the audience (story of us) and what urgent challenge this action seeks to address (the story of now).
It sounds simple (which is part of its success), but if you doubt its power, take a look at a then little-known senatorial candidate’s speech at the Boston Democratic convention in 2004. You will hear how the son of a Kenyan goat-herder running for Senate (self) was a symbol of American meritocracy (us) threatened by the policies of the Bush White House (now).
Flash forward to British opposition leader Ed Miliband and we see the source of his difficulty. Miliband has a plausibly good story of now (“responsible capitalism”), a so-so story of us (“squeezed middle”), but hardly any story of self, so we fill in the blanks with our own version: David’s brother, Gordon’s spade, or the son of England’s greatest Marxist theorist (my favourite).
Political therapy for Ed, though, will never solve the wider problem: a European left that is tired, dull, top-down and moribund. The American left, historically weak, is by necessity decentralised and diverse. This once meant disorganisation and division.
But it has managed to find a new coherence across geography and generation. Technology allowed the anti-Keystone Pipeline campaign to connect Nebraska farmers with Washington DC environmentalists.
But connecting people across time is just as important. A phalanx of institutes funded by philanthropists and the breakaway Service Employees International Union has built a repository of knowledge of how movements win.
Today’s American left is where the old world of community organising and the new world of social media meet. The dismal official European left, by contrast, has neither invested in its past nor in its future; discarding its history, ignoring new technology. Our only hope, if Obama, as looks likely, is re-elected, is that he might perhaps consider a new Marshall Plan, to rebuild a left in Europe that is everywhere in ruins. —