In recent years, narratives about a conservative counterrevolution<\/strong>, the decline of the left, and even the revival of Catholicism in the secularized West have multiplied. Each of these claims tempts us. But is each of them entirely true? Perhaps these intuitions describe a series of phenomena that belong to a far broader process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across Western democracies, we do indeed see the relative weakening of left-wing formations. Yet this decline does not unfold in a straight line, and it differs greatly from region to region. Nor does it simply come at the expense of traditional right-wing organizations. Look more closely, and traditional right-wing politics has also been losing ground in recent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The vacuum has been filled by organizations, parties, and ideas of the New Right<\/strong>, sometimes called the alt-right interchangeably, though not always accurately. This current has captured part of the social base once held by social democracy and the traditional left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new left on the other side of the barricade<\/strong>, however, remains largely an aspiration, not to say a slogan. The left, which had been merging with liberals since the 1990s, perhaps partly without even realizing it, began its own transformation. It now differs considerably from the old social democratic parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the old social democracy was never uniform, nor was it free of its own radicalisms. At its best, with some Scandinavian parties serving as the model, it managed to keep a balance between the market economy<\/a> and redistribution. In international politics, it could be assertive, realistic, and strongly rooted in identity. Community and civic life did not stand in opposition to social policy<\/strong>. In other words, in many respects it embodied what the contemporary right now aspires to become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After its marriage with liberals and corporations, and after the significant realization of egalitarian demands, the left began drifting toward its current shallows. The community gave way to communities<\/strong>. These were often small communities, radicalizing as they built a shared sense of exclusion and discrimination. Workers\u2019 rights yielded to the influence of lobbyists. The left shifted its rudder from redistribution toward consumption and radicalism. Trade unions were replaced by HR departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Significantly, the example of the United States and the Make America Great Again movement now shows that the right has begun moving along similar tracks. The difference is that within right-wing axiology, this does not strike at its own foundations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition, the language of the left, which in Poland we might call the language of the intelligentsia, or at least of experts, began giving way to academic language. For decades, the university was where the left could dominate discourse. The conceptual world it developed there became incommunicative, exclusive, and, in short, foreign to everyone outside its own bubble. The academy, in turn, began creating the world anew, together with the problems it would later heroically set out to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe left searches for a new identity<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The paradox of the left, the paradox of a passing world<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A language no one understands anymore<\/h3>\n\n\n\n