Irish Examiner View: Same fight on three fronts: Left battles to recover plausibility

Today is Super Tuesday in America’s presidential election process. The list of Democrats trying to win a nomination to challenge the president, Donald Trump, in just nine months, may be reduced further, as it was on Sunday, when Pete Buttigieg threw in the towel after four primaries. Buttigieg’s withdrawal was not expected, but it meant conservative Democrats unnerved by the prospect that Bernie Sanders might win the nomination circled the wagons. It is as if they learned little or nothing about candidate selection in 2016. Ironically, Sanders’ strong performances have revived Joe Biden’s campaign, giving him a back-from-the-grave win in South Carolina.

Sanders achieved this prominence over decades by relentless grassroots campaigning and an impressive flow of small, private campaign contributions. He presents himself as an authentic voice for blue-collar America, while his main rivals — a former vice-president and a billionaire — suggest the Democratic Party has been taken over by a business-and-urban elite. Much the same arguments, in two very distinct settings, are playing out on this side of the Atlantic.

The British Labour Party is struggling to cope with all-too-apparent differences between the soft left, radical left, and the orthodox left, as it moves towards the final stages of the process to identify Jeremy Corbyn’s successor. A good section of that party understands that Corbyn’s leadership was a disastrous boon for the Conservatives. That reality stands no matter how you view Corbyn. They, like America’s Democrats, have lessons to absorb about choosing leaders or candidates, while their natural constituency must rely on the mercies of an increasingly right-wing Conservative party.

The Irish Labour Party advanced the process of electing a successor to Brendan Howlin, in Cork last night, when two candidates, Alan Kelly and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, went head-to-head. Whomever prevails faces a daunting challenge. In less than a decade, Labour has fallen from the 37 Dáil seats it won in 2011 to the six it holds today. It is no longer even the half it was in our old, informal, two-and-a-half party system. The party stood 31 candidates last month and got just 95.582 votes, or 4.38% if you express it differently.

Some Labour voices suggest the party is paying a price for its commendable commitment to the liberal agenda, which might not have been matched by an interest in the ground-floor issues defining workers’ lives. The party would struggle, also, to shake off the argument that it all too often seemed an adjunct to public sector unions, rather than a political entity determined to represent all workers — as Sanders hopes to represent all blue-collar Americans.

These three campaigns provoke an obvious question: Is there a future for slightly left or left-of-centre political parties, or are the Modis, the Orbáns, and the Johnsons the future? Which, in turn, provokes a response: How quickly we forget what life was like before workers had rights and before the idea of social fairness was alive in at least one wing of our politics. Even at this low ebb, the Labour Party, the oldest political party in Ireland, is still worth fighting for.