Which for me always raises the question: why? Why does the left in country after country keep doing this? What on earth makes left-wingers in places like Brazil think that it's a model that will succeed there when it's toxic even in the societies for which it was designed?
You know the saying “all Chiefs and no Indians?” Sometimes I think that aptly describes a lot of what passes for the Left: all intellectuals/highly motivated activists and no (or rather, not nearly enough of a) working class base. Of course, this has always been a major issue with the
Hard Left in advanced, politically stable industrial democracies; in those countries, extremism under most circumstances is by definition a fringe position.
Really though, it’s the failures and/or political defeat of the center left and a loss of historical memory, I suspect, that alienates (heh) a lot of disillusioned, often highly educated but also economically and socially precarious young people from the political center. You can see this in the US where the one politician who seemed to “get it” from the perspective of many younger people was born in 1941 and has been committed to left-wing politics for over half a century. That goes back to what you said about the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Greenspan consensus which, needless to say, Obama and Biden subscribe to (even though the latter has turned out better than expected on that front as President, to some extent). This is a lost generation in terms of left politics—and in the US (I can’t speak to other countries) robust center-left politics, and I haven’t even touched on deindustrialization and the evisceration of organized labor…
Finally, as far as a lot of more progressive and left-leaning younger people are concerned, the feeling of being burned by Barack Obama’s Presidency and the Democratic Party broadly, in the face of endless wars, the Great Recession, and an increasingly mask-off far-right Republican Party, has had a radicalizing effect—radicalized by events. “Scratch a cynic, find a disappointed idealist.”
