Ed Luce: belief

Transcript context

…We’ve talked about the illiberalism on the right, I think, Brexit, President Trump, and all those sorts of things, UKIP, but what about the illiberalism on the left? I think that the final nail in the coffin of Blairism came last Thursday when Jeremy Corbyn ‑‑ who is an unrepentant Marxist ‑‑ picked up 30 seats in that election, and MÈlenchon in France, and Bernie Sanders here in the United States. The far left is really on a roll, something of a roll, in the Western world. Could you speak to the far left’s illiberalism? Yep, and I think it’s a very good question, and I think it’s an often overlooked one. I think the left, if you’re a Democrat, looking at a candidate for 2020, there is essentially a debate going on in the party between the sort of Macron wing, and a Corbynista wing. These are the two, sort of left responses we’re seeing in Europe. Left illiberalism, and anti‑Americanism, to which European illiberalism is very closely aligned, is a very serious, very real. MÈlenchon might have lost, but he got almost a fifth of the vote, as you mentioned. I think that the further away we get from 2008 ‑‑ which is very much associated with the new left, the Third Way left, of Blair, Gordon Brown, and others ‑‑ the further away we get from that, the more we’e going to see populists left wing movements marshaling everywhere. I would consider, this isn’t just a right‑wing populist moment, although that’s been the principal manifestation of populism, and I agree with your identification of that. Next question.…

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