Has the Left Forgotten How to Dream

The last decade has not been a great time for progressive left-wing politics. Trump and his MAGA have dominated US politics, and while the UK currently has a centre-left government, the far-right Reform party leads the polls in voting intention. Across both countries, traditional political cleavages are giving way to new identities and allegiances. Whereas thirty years ago most working-class people voted for left-wing parties and the wealthier voted for the right, today that dynamic has been flipped on its head.  

The Right’s success comes down to its ability to speak to economic and cultural grievances that sees the world as a struggle between us v. them, where the “them” are migrants and liberal city dwelling elites. Dreaming big is not a problem for the far right. Project 2025 laid out in crystal detail how the Trump administration would erode democratic guardrails to enact policy changes that would make America whiter, more Christian, and more of a threat on the international stage. The plan is unapologetic, clear – and crucially– coherent. In response the Left has struggled to come up with a convincing counter narrative. Pundits have accused the Left-wing agenda of falling into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone, resulting in an ambiguous and fragmented agenda. Who or what the Left stands for is no longer clear.    

Last week at The Conduit, Tom McTague, editor of The New Statesman, was joined by Parth Patel, Associate Director of Policy and Politics at the think tank IPPR, and Lea Ypi, Associate Professor of philosophy and political science at LSE to discuss a nagging philosophical question: has the Left forgotten how to dream? 

McTague began the discussion by saying that not only has the left forgotten how to dream, but also there is an overriding collective belief that the future will be worse than the present. In the post-war era every generation grew up expecting to live in more comfort and have higher incomes than their parents. That dream has since unravelled. About 95% of American men born in the 1940s outearned their fathers by the age of 30. By 1984 only 41% of American men outearned their fathers. Several social factors were in play during those interluding decades. In the 1970s, a high school dropout working a blue-collar job could afford to buy a house with a white picket fence for his family. Today that same man would struggle to pay rent and put gas in his car.   

Researchers from Standford and Harvard University attribute the decline in mobility to two factors. The first, in the last thirty years the economy has grown at a slower pace than in the postwar boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. But even if the economy had grown at the same rate, only 62% of Americans born in 1984 would be earning more than their parents. The second factor the researchers found is growing inequality. After the war, economic growth was more evenly distributed among all social classes. Beginning in the 1970s, growth slowed and income inequality widened. Federal Reserve data show the bottom 50% of US households hold 4% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10% hold over two-thirds. Current levels of inequality have not been seen since the “Roaring Twenties” a century ago.  

Ypi responded to McTague by suggesting that the question contains an inherent flaw. “It isn’t that the Left has forgotten how to dream, it’s that the Left is now dreaming somebody else’s dream,” she countered. Since the 1990s the Left has believed that the answer to society’s ills could be found in the right policy solutions. Our problems did not stem from our politics, but from an inability to find the right technocratic solution. Ypi’s concern with this way of thinking is that the technocratic solutions only benefited some while ignoring others. “When we say the future is going to be worse for us, what we mean by that is that it will not be worse for everyone,” said Ypi. “There is a ‘we’ in politics, and we’ve lost that capacity to understand ‘we’ in collective terms. There is an elite that makes money from exploitation.”  

She argued that until the Left is able to understand there is no policy solution without understanding the political framework permitting winners and losers, it will always be playing a game of catch up with the Right. “I call this the Michelle Obama view of the world, that we just kind of need to empower people. I don’t buy any of that,” said Ypi, “There is a more complicated operation here.”  

Returning to the question of how to define the Left, McTague asked if the Left is defined in terms of class, or more transnationally on a global scale. Patel responded that the question of who is included in Left wing politics is one asked regularly within the halls of Westminster. In his view, too many people fall into a trap of zero-sum logic where their group can only succeed if another fails. “We’ve lost the ability to form universalist politics,” he lamented. 

The consequence is a politics that fragments rather than unites. But despite this failure, Patel still believes the Left is capable of expanding the ambitions and imaginations of ordinary people. For instance, he cited going to a protest against rent hikes as a way of empowering people’s imagination: “That expands your idea of freedom. People begin to think differently, and the politics follows.”  

McTague instantly called out a snag in Patel’s logic. If you’re going to a protest landlords, you want the renters to win and the landlords to lose. “The Left can’t be there for everybody. I don’t think the Labour government has an idea of deciding who should be benefitting from their policies.” By contrast, he contested the Right knows exactly who it is for. Going as far back as Margret Thatcher’s premiership, Conservatives have been very clear defining who they represent and have been willing to make sacrifices to benefit their base. “I don’t see that level of raw politics from this Labour party,” McTague stated, “If you don’t define the ‘we’ you end up in a technocratic space.”   

Towards the end of the conversation McTague suggested that the Labour Party appears to want a different voting base than the one they have of mostly college educated, urban living elites. Expanding their base will mean redefining what constitutes as working class in Britain. Is it the traditional red wall of rural voters, or should it be expanded to include anybody who sells their labour for money? The latter definition would include graduates working high status jobs in cities who can’t afford to get on the housing ladder. This group is not likely to share many political beliefs with those working blue collar jobs in left-behind rural areas, but finding common ground between the two could provide a path forward for expanding and uniting the Left.  

Ypi believes the problem isn’t so much finding common ground between different groups, but a rigid belief that Labour can win elections if only they find the right policy solutions. This is a misdiagnosis of the problem.  For her, global capitalism has created a system of winners and losers, with the winners funding the political apparatus that protects its best interests. The result is centrist governments that no longer respond to the wider needs of the electorate. “What the Left has been doing for the last 20 years hasn’t been working. If you were to come up with policies that responded to the structural crisis, they’d be so radical and involve pushing back against the system and the elites that fund it,” she argued. Civil society has eroded to such an extent that Ypi remains deeply pessimistic that the Left can enact real change.

Patel offered a more optimistic view: “You can bring passenger rail into national ownership, you can create nationally owned energy companies, abolish gig economy. It signals a direction we are going,” he countered. The right big policy fixes can address the widening inequality that has sparked a lot of the populist backlash.  

Set against one another, these perspectives reveal a Left caught between diagnosis and direction, unsure whether its failures stem from timid policy making or a deeper misunderstanding of structural problems allowing inequality to flourish. What both views make clear, however, is that countering the Right will demand more than critique or caution. It will require a renewed political imagination, one capable of defining who “we” are, what future is worth striving for, and how to persuade people that it is still possible to build it.