There may be some alternatives

“There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher was fond of saying in the 1980s, as the Tory dream detonated the old British economy and replaced it with another. For Thatcher and her descendants across the world, there was no alternative to the then-new agenda of privatisation and a permanently shrinking public sector, and there never can be. Any attempts to provide an alternative, should they be mounted, can only prove the impossibility of alternatives in the first place. To this day, centre-right political parties don’t just want economic and social victories, but moral affirmation. Which brings us to the building waves of frothy media reaction to the “socialists” Jeremy Corbyn, running for the leadership of the UK Labour Party, and Bernie Sanders, aiming for the Democratic presidential nomination in the US.

As Noah Daponte-Smith at Forbes declared in a spectacular semantic rug-pull, “Sanders and Corbyn are not so much protest candidates as they are registers of discontent, non-participation, conscientious objection.” You can pack out stadiums and civic centres that outstrip your nearest opponent by a factor of four, as Sanders has done, but you represent non-participation. You can double the official membership of your party in a matter of months, like Corbyn, but canny observers recognise it as a sign of discontent. This theme repeats in much of the commentary around both candidates: we’re told they’re powered by upper-middle class leftism, with occasional mentions of something called “an organised left”. 

The struggle is, of course, very real. The parliamentary wing of the UK Labour Party is enjoying its open-heart surgery moment, as shadow cabinet members happily leak to the Daily Telegraph about how they’d execute Corbyn if he got the leadership job. Grandee after Labour grandee has emerged to warn of coming electoral defeat. Tony Blair, the ghost of Christmas past, has helpfully stepped in three times to haunt Corbyn and demand that he repent. Corbyn’s real crime isn’t that he threatens the centre-right orthodoxy of Labour’s parliamentary bloc, but that he might not want to win at all. 

In multiple interviews, he shifts the subject away from his own popularity and reflects back on the process which is giving him the electoral lead: “This is about hope. It is not just here. There are equivalent movements across Europe, the USA and elsewhere. It’s been bubbling for a long time”, he told the Guardian. “There has to be an open debate in the party and so I have suggested we do a number of open conventions on the economy, the environment, the constitution, social and foreign policies,” he continued. 

If this sounds familiar, it should. The transparent goal is to ask questions of the parliamentary Labour Party machine with its own base watching. Does the party want to continue to print anti-immigration slogans on mugs while shows such as Gypsies on Benefits and Proud play on Channel 5? Is it happy to dismiss the massive Scottish National Party vote at the last election as an anti-centralisation blip? But most of all, can it elect a leader who still marches for causes he cares about? 

Those causes are in fact what parliamentary Labour increasingly tries to delegitimise and isolate: the anti-austerity marches, protests and organised resistance to the Tory program of which Corbyn is a symbol. The party doesn’t see those issues as a base on which to draw; they’re the competition. When Corbyn says “[PM David] Cameron and [Chancellor of the Exchequer George] Osborne want to squeeze the poor til the pips squeak”, he is expressing the simple popular anger at a failed Tory economic program. I think both the ebullient flag-raising of Owen Jones and the tone-deaf gloating of Boris Johnson both miss the point completely – people are excited about Corbyn not because Ed Miliband wasn’t left enough, but because English political life as a whole is a disaster area. Bad government and bad alternatives lead people to make the next logical step in their self-interest, and right now for a lot of people, that means the immediate defenestration of the soft Tory equilibrium. It isn’t about the resurgence of old-style socialism, but people coming to political speeches for the first time who are unable to take another day of UKIP apologia, disability pension cuts and £200 train fares.

For his part, Bernie Sanders in the US has been quickly transforming his campaign speeches from broad diatribes just a few months ago to full campaign stumps, cataloguing a list of demands. Rooms of 8000 have grown to stadiums of 26,000 in just over six weeks. 

Against the cynicism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, skating along any feel-good centrism it can find, Sanders’ platform – especially his declarations against the infamous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, which opened the floodgates to a massive increase in secret corporate campaign funding – seems relatively scholarly. Like a lot of people, I initially mistook Sanders’ sometimes-unpolished speeches for the purest populism. All his talk about “injecting morality into politics” sounded familiar and disappointing. But, like Corbyn, Sanders isn’t providing the hope of a return to power by a mythic resurgent left, but rather a strong criticism of the entire system in which he’s participating. 

What details fit in Sanders’ stump speeches suggest that he is deeply invested in medium- and long-term policy planning. This is the simplest explanation for his success so far: as Jason Wilson found when interviewing Sanders’ supporters, his long and consistent record (and age) are working in his favour. Sure, he makes promises of unrealistic new social programs, but they are ones which address the unrealistic conditions of being in America in 2015. 

Sanders is asking questions about the process of selecting a presidential candidate with new and old registered Democrats watching. If you ask the Washington press, the process is about positioning for money, more than ever. As Matt Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone in April, “the press has trained all of us to worry about these questions of financing on behalf of candidates even at such an early stage”. On those terms, a Sanders who raises money from unions can never compete against a Goldman Sachs–backed Hillary Clinton or a Trump-backed Donald Trump. 

Taibbi adds that all Sanders’ alleged socialism means is that “an elected government should occasionally step in and offer an objection or two toward our progress to undisguised oligarchy”, but that’s completely secondary to his disconnection from high finance. Money is regarded as seriousness, and Sanders won’t have the seriousness, even if he somehow finds the money. With that as the backdrop, Sanders’ earnest outrage at the corruption of presidential politics has drawn in the disillusioned for another look. 

Local progressives and organized left networks in Australia have been buoyed by the sight of standing-room only events in Hackney and stadium-filling redistribution eisteddfods in Iowa, but most commentary takes roughly the same view of history as has the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan. That Australia is five years behind the UK and the US, that greater taxation isn’t yet popular and appealing, that our political right hasn’t completely fractured yet – though perhaps on that last count we should give it another week. 

While the local press hasn’t yet decided to demonise Sanders, Sheridan has been quick to attack Corbyn from the moment he appeared, though as he says “there is no Corbyn on our horizon”. However, if the ALP had anything like the direct voting system adopted by UK Labour, we’d be talking about Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, who at the very least promised to be more pugnacious than the elusive Shorten. But if the ALP appears adrift and rudderless, perhaps it is because it hasn’t yet needed to take a position on how to reform an economy that still seems more or less functional to most Australians, and, given that our politics at present is defined by deep Liberal incompetence, perhaps it won’t need to for a while. Sanders and Corbyn are emerging from the remains of deeply failed governance to articulate alternatives. As bad as the Abbott government has been so far, our situation is different, our problems more subtle.

Australia’s moment is defined by the failure to get any significant structural or long-term economic return from the depletion of our resources, which is not quite the same as the wholesale destruction of communities that the Tories have overseen in the UK. Our version of conservative austerity was a disorganised last-minute facsimile of the real thing. If there is no Corbyn or Sanders in Australia, perhaps it’s because neither party has properly wrecked the economy yet, rather than a lack of would-be messiahs waiting in the wings. Watching the ALP respond to the considerable opportunities offered by a government less competent than anybody predicted has been instructive, but it hardly has the show-stopping power of the American and British “resurgent socialist nightmare” narratives. 

In political commentary, we can be tempted to peg personalities and figures to each other throughout political history as if they’re the lynchpins that make history coherent. This is especially tempting for leaders emulating and mirroring each other, the easy analysis of rhythm and coincidence that says Clinton was this, Blair was that, Rudd was this, Obama was that. We’re happy to assert that left-wing parties historically had to respond to economics, as if we were still living in Francis Fukuyama’s End of History fait-accompli fairy tale. But if all we take away from what’s happening today in Greece, in Spain, from the stadium-filling crowds following Sanders and the supposedly centrist UK Labour party dematerialising before our eyes, is still that “there is no alternative”, then we will continue to be surprised when the alternatives arrive.