Today, the situation is different. In 2012, François Hollande was elected with exactly the same majority as François Mitterrand in 1981 (51.7 percent), and had an absolute majority of socialists in the National Assembly, a socialist majority in the Senate, control of every regional government in France but one (Alsace), a majority of departmental governments, big cities. Never in France’s history has a head of government of the Left held so many of the levers of national power. And what did he do with it? One of his ministers, Arnaud Montebourg, summarized it well: “When they voted for the socialists, the French people didn’t know they were voting for the program of the German right.” [...]
Corbyn and Sanders, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, are breaking with these ideas, reviving a social language that foregrounds the inegalitarian and environmentally destructive logic of the market. Their programs vary; sometimes, especially on foreign policy issues, Sanders concedes too much to his political allies, the Democrats, who’ve always been the loyal managers (and even the architects) of America’s imperial policies. But for now, Corbyn, Sanders, and Mélenchon are sticking to a line that rejects both Third Way liberalism and the lefty academic and postcolonial verbiage churned out in elite American institutions. Here I’m thinking of the obsession with “diversity” that, in celebrating all identities, often hardens and essentializes them — as long as the identities in question aren’t class identity defined by one’s relationship to capitalist production. [...]
So the bourgeoisie owning “a little bit of money and an apartment” became the favored constituency of a socialist movement born in the nineteenth century thanks to working-class trade unionism intended to unite the proletariat of all nations. DSK, charitably, doesn’t entirely forget the poor: he suggests “caring about them, helping them, training them to try to bring them into the middle layers.” But he suggests no longer “relying on them, because most of the time they don’t want to participate in political life, since they feel excluded.”
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