| ID | 139957 |
| Title Proper | What’s left? |
| Other Title Information | social democrats in disarray |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Johnson , Alan |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | Why has the right, including the populist right, rather than the left, been the main political beneficiary of the anger and bitterness that has roiled Europe since the 2008 financial crash, the eurozone crisis, and the resulting deep recession and brutal austerity? After all, these events surely proved the relevance of the left’s critique of capitalism. The crisis has been so deep and prolonged that a kind of social disintegration has been taking place, at least in the Southern cone, without precedent in postwar Europe. (In Spain, youth unemployment is more than 55 percent.) More: the crisis has been managed largely to the benefit of the already well-off, in a spectacularly brazen fashion. The trillions that were handed over to banks too big to fail are now being gouged out of citizens too weak to resist. (This intensely political class strategy is called “austerity.”) The recovery, such as it is, is benefitting almost exclusively the already affluent, as catalogued in Danny Dorling’s cry of moral outrage, Inequality and the 1%. It is a recovery of McJobs, zero-hour contracts, and food banks. One UK charity alone, the Trussell Trust, has handed out 913,000 food parcels in the last year, up from 347,000 the year before. |
| `In' analytical Note | World Affairs US Vol. 178, No.2; Summer 2015: p.56-65
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| Journal Source | World Affairs US 2015-08 178, 2 |
| Key Words | Social Democrats ; Neoliberal Economic ; Disarray ; Political Beneficiary ; European Social Democrats |