The Death of the Left

Why We Must Begin from the Beginning Again

By: Simon Winlow, Steve Hall

Narrated by: Jane Holman

The left is dead. Its ailments cannot be cured. The only way to resurrect what was once valuable in leftist politics is to declare the left dead and begin from the beginning again. Winlow and Hall identify the root causes of its maladies, describe how new cultural obsessions displaced core unifying principles and explore the yawning chasm that now separates the left from the working class. Drawing upon a wealth of historical evidence to structure their story of entryism, corruption, fragmentation and decline, they close the book by outlining how a new reincarnation of the left can win in the 21st century.

©2023 Bristol University Press (P)2023 Professor Steve Hall

Interesting take on the left drifting off course

This book explores what many have wondered for decades. Why doesn't the left seem to care about the economic conditions of median working families and how did cultural issues come to dominate instead? In the United States, people struggle to understand the rise of Trump, a man of questionable moral character at best. The rise of Trump is easier to understand in terms of what voters are choosing NOT to embrace, what the left has to offer instead. This book explores the left's turn away from economic issues (wages, unions, putting guard rails on the worst exploitative tendencies of the free market system) and towards individual freedom and accompanying cultural issues. This turn led the left to embrace the same neoliberalism as the right. Both left and right now offer only free market capitalism, globalization, exploitative wages, and a belief that the market functions as the only higher power. In addition, the left offers unending cultural conflict that has no end in sight because there is no end to oppressed and oppressor. It's a lovely dead end street that solves no economic problems whatsoever.
The authors suggest a turn toward more socialism than many readers may be comfortable with as a remedy. That solution is not the power of this book. It's power is in understanding how or why the left abandoned the very issue that made it meaningful in the first place, the economic well being of average people. The authors suggest that the existing left must be abandoned and a new start established with a return to economic issues that led to general prosperity after WWII and into the 1960's. The book is written from a British point of view, but its message applies to the United States equally well.
I recommend Yascha Mounk and The Identity Trap along with this one as both books together tell a more compelling story. I didn't love the narration of this book, but it was adequate. Grover Gardner can't narrate all the books...