In the first episode of the Pimlico Journal Politics Podcast, Managing Editor George Spencer is joined by Pimlico Journal contributor Francis Gaultier to discuss the ongoing political realignment, the emerging political settlement on immigration, and how the left will adapt to this new landscape.
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EDITED TRANSCRIPT BELOW.
GEORGE SPENCER: Here at Pimlico Journal, we’ve heard a lot about the future of the right. Whether it’s John Merrick at The New Statesman, Mary Harrington at UnHerd, or Stella Tsantekidou on her Substack, we often seem to be on people’s minds. But what we’ve heard far less about in the last couple of years, both on the left and on the right, is the future of the left. This is despite the fact that the European left seems to be entering its biggest crisis to date.
In the early 2010s, radical left activists coined the term ‘Pasokification’. This referred to the decline of social democratic parties across the continent in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Implicitly, however, the threat was not necessarily to the left writ large, but that more radical alternatives would overtake them, as the term’s namesake, Pasok, were overtaken by Syriza in Greece. For various reasons, this did not happen on any significant scale. Indeed, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, despite bruising defeats by populists in the form of Brexit and Trump, it appeared that the old social democratic parties were beginning to strengthen again, whether that be Pedro Sánchez in Spain, Joe Biden in the United States, Olaf Scholz in Germany, and of course, Keir Starmer in Britain.
Less than two years on from Starmer’s landslide victory in 2024, the European left seems again to be in a state of collapse. It’s now evident that this was a false dawn for social democracy, born almost solely out of dissatisfaction with the options on the right rather than any genuine enthusiasm for the left. With the notable exception of Scandinavia, the only EU member state in which a left-wing party leads in the polls is Lithuania. Nor is this just a case of voter exhaustion with establishment left-wing parties. No: this crisis is rather more generalised. While there are indeed some new left-wing alternatives, in general these alternatives seem very far from posing a serious electoral challenge to the right, broadly defined.
It now seems likely that the right will be entering a period of dominance in Europe, potentially creating a new settlement on important questions, especially immigration.
How will the left respond to this new landscape? What form might it take in the next one or two decades? I’m George Spencer, Pimlico Journal’s Managing Editor, and I’m joined by Francis Gaultier.
GS: So I think it’s worth beginning this discussion with a quick definition of terms here. Francis, how do you understand the New Right and the forces that are shaping this redefinition of our politics on both sides of the aisle?
FRANCIS GAULTIER: There are lots of ways you can pick apart what the New Right is. I think the fundamental concern is opposition to mass migration, with a particular eye on demographics — which is what distinguishes it from other forms of right-wing immigration restrictionist sentiments. Opposition to demographic change has yet to metastasise into an overall policy platform for the New Right, and you can certainly see differences between British and European right-wing movements in how far they’re willing to go on these questions and in what terms they’re willing to deal with it. But ultimately, the motivating factor behind all of these forces is a concern over the demographic future of their native countries.
GS: I think you’re definitely right to point to immigration as the central orienting feature for the New Right, and it’s obviously the issue which has really propelled the New Right to success, and it’s the issue on which the public are most strongly in agreement with [the New Right]. [But] there have been a number of different issues as well, I think, that have been kind of tied up with the New Right, some of which have popular support, some of which maybe not so much. And there’s obviously lots of different currents and factions battling for control within that.
There are a few things that those factions tend to agree on, at least directionally. And I think the most important of those are a scepticism of multilateral institutions, whether you’re talking about the EU, regional institutions, or global institutions, such as the UN. You’re seeing a big pullback from engagement with institutions like this, and a pullback in general from the notion of global engagement and global governance.
There’s [also] a far more mercantilist approach which prioritises national interest, and doesn’t necessarily have so much care about how extraterritorial people are governed. And [there’s also] a general kind of scepticism both on the military and diplomatic side of international engagement. And then there’s a big turn as well on the economic front from where the right has been over the past forty years with a move away from, let’s say, the ‘dogmatically liberal’ economic framework, obviously on issues of trade. But I think also on domestic issues as well, on issues of inequality, on questions around market structure and the extent to which the way that our economy is currently set up is working for the average person. And so there’s a big shift on that front as well.
FG: No, I agree with all of that. I would just sort of caveat everything you said with that there is no unified position on any of these things. Right-wing parties and movements from place to place differ on their exact position on international engagements, etc., or on economics.
GS: And I think it’s worth saying that just because there’s been a step away from internationalism, and just because there’s been a step away from liberal economics, doesn’t mean that they are isolationist, and it doesn’t mean that they’re kind of fully embracing welfarism or socialism. There’s something of a ‘middle way’ being forged out here.
Now, as we said, it’s obviously primarily immigration that has propelled the right to a position of electoral dominance. And it looks like that’s going to come to fruition over the next few years. And there will be a period of right-wing electoral dominance at least. The left, on the other hand, is kind of exhausted and scattered. It’s being defeated all across the continent. And that’s true both on the centre-left and the hard-left. Both forms, as they have existed over the past thirty years, have been pretty comprehensively rejected, and there’s very little energy left anywhere on the left.
That situation is probably not sustainable for very long. It’s not clear exactly how long it can persist. But there will be a left in ten years’ time, which is going to have to adapt to the new political landscape and find new ways for its values to be expressed in the terms of a new settlement. And I think for us on the right, it’s worth thinking now about what that new left is going to look like before our policy platform fully crystallises. And this is obviously especially relevant to us here in Britain where we still have several years to figure out exactly what we want to do in government before we get the opportunity, and, in doing so, avoid handing the left some easy territory that it can use to fight us on when its new form does arise.
FG: Yeah, what I’d compare this change to is something equivalent to the left before and after Thatcherism. You know, it’s not that Blair and New Labour went along with marketisation just out of expediency, but they really did embrace the free markets in a sense. But, at the same time, they were at core egalitarians.
You can point to welfare or the embrace of public-private partnerships, tax redistribution, and the focus on education as indicators of this. They also introduced the strong public services model, which was not understood as antagonistic to the market, that the dividends of the market could be channelled into strong public services, so this is certainly an egalitarian orientation to the new political framework.
GS: There’s obviously variation within the New Labour project even in the extent to which this was accepted, and obviously Blair [himself] being the [most] extreme example. But as you say, it wasn’t kind of a change in messaging. It wasn’t a change in emphasis. There was a genuine shift in what these people believed and in the way that they wanted to deliver their values. And I think you can see a contradiction there with what we’re seeing at the moment as supposed examples of, like, a [so-called] ‘post-woke left’, whether you’re looking at Zohran Mamdani or Zak Polanski. You know, these people haven’t changed their views at all. They still believe in mass migration. They still believe in all of the same kind of social values that the left has believed in. Their platform is [not really] different to what a left-wing platform would have looked like ten years ago [i.e., there is perhaps a difference in rhetoric and of emphasis, but no core change in ideology].
FG: I think a big part of what that transition represents is introduced by the sort of New Labour turn towards an introduction of concerns of global welfare, and I think more generally the sort of social democratic turn of 2000s liberalism was towards, I guess, a rejection of socialism, which was you know, for all its faults, more national than what came after.
GS: So we’re claiming here that the left is going to have to change fundamentally. And someone could easily say, well, you know, the left doesn’t necessarily have to change fundamentally after every election defeat. You know, they come back after a certain period and, you know, they can compete again. Politics goes in these kind of cycles.
So why is the left in a position today where it’s going to have to make a more fundamental change — analogous to the one it did over the 1990s — rather than a change more like what they had to do over the period of Conservative government, which was basically wait for their exhaustion with them to die out and maybe change their messaging slightly?
FG: [It’s because] I don’t think that migration is an issue that the left is currently equipped to deal with. They really don’t have a solid theory of mind as to why voters are so moved by this issue. And I think, by the way, the same thing is true of people on the right and why they are so fixed into the politics of migration [i.e., most right-wingers have a poor understanding of why their own opponents — the left — are so committed to mass migration]. But, of course, more people are on the right on this question than the left [meaning this myopia is of less practical importance].
GS: And I think, you know, there’s still a large faction of the left that isn’t able to embrace conversations around immigration, and fundamentally isn’t able to have those conversations on essentially cultural or demographic terms, right? There’s a lot of conversation on the left that centres around immigration and its impact on public services, on taxation. Obviously there’s some naïvety about the way in which immigration affects those things, but I think it’s perfectly plausible to imagine the left having conversations, on an economic level, about immigration. And you’ve seen this in the past, right? Bernie Sanders was well known to have called Open Borders ‘a Koch brothers proposal’. Now, whether or not he genuinely believes in something like that is another question. But it’s a conversation that can take place on the left.
The problem, I think, with that is it doesn’t grapple with the fundamental concern that motivates scepticism of immigration in 2025, which is not simply about the economics. It’s not simply about issues of taxation. It’s not simply about issues of ‘integration’. It is fundamentally about the fact that our countries are changing before us in a way that has never been seen before and at a speed which is now undeniable. And the reason why scepticism of immigration has risen to the highest levels in the recent past [i.e., at least since the days of Enoch Powell] is precisely because this change has occurred so quickly over the past few years with the Boriswave, and with similar waves of immigration across the rest of the West [i.e., the general rapid increase in net migration across almost all European countries, except France, after 2021]. That change has been far more visible.
And so the left can’t currently engage in a conversation which would result in some kind of policy that accepted that, before we discuss any kind of economic question, and before we discuss issues on either side of that coin — whether you’re talking about labour shortages, or whether you’re talking about impacts on the fiscal system — you have to have, as a baseline, the commitment to a stable demographic future and to maintaining native majorities in European countries. And as a stable majority emerges [in support of] the position, the left is not going to be able to compete on immigration until it is able to accept that fundamental premise.
FG: Yeah, I think a real hardship for the left right now though is that, and certainly has been, is that even the economically redistributive policies that they present to voters are not really believed. There’s a great deal of cynicism around these policies because fundamentally the public does not believe that they will be the beneficiaries of these policies and that this will basically go to people other than themselves, i.e. immigrants.
GS: That connects into a broader problem that the left has, which is that the economic vision that they’re putting forward and the range of economic visions that they have to put forward have effectively all been defeated over a series of attempts at implementation in government and a series of electoral cycles.
Whether you’re talking about more radical left proposals, questions of nationalisation, questions of social ownership, things like worker participation and democratisation of the workplace. These concepts are completely outmoded in a world in which you no longer have [such] a clear divide between employees and owners, where the labour market is far more stratified , where there’s so many people in the middle [i.e., the growing class of employees who are not capitalists nor senior executives, but are also not proletarians in any meaningful sense] and where the concept of a ‘party of workers’ no longer really holds any coherency. And, you know, this is shown in the fact that union participation has dropped so low. It doesn’t make any sense in the twenty-first century to have a party which is rooted in the interest of ‘working people’. And you can see that in the way that Labour’s voting patterns in Britain have changed and similar patterns across the rest of the world. You effectively have a party which is a union for public sector employees and [for] those who depend on the government for their income through some form of welfare.
And that gets at another fundamental problem with the idea of representing ‘working people’s interests’, which is that the interests of different working people are completely at odds with each other. Public sector workers are interested in having higher taxation so that their pay can rise. Whereas private sector workers, as you said, fundamentally don’t view the social system as something that they are primary beneficiaries of. They see it as something that takes their money in taxes and gives them very little back. And so, as these divides emerge and as in [government], the models of social democracy and more radical forms of leftism show themselves to be unworkable they lose the power they have to motivate voters.
I think there is one more point which is worth adding, which is that this doesn’t mean that these policies won’t have any constituency. Obviously, there are still a lot of what you could effectively call ‘client voters’…
FG: …well, I mean there is a massive public sector in Britain, of course, so that we’re talking about a very large number of people…
GS: But that’s not enough to win elections. You need to have on top of your client voters, voters who are, let’s say, ideologically committed to the cause. And there’s a difference between being able to bring clients to the polls and being able to bring people in who believe in what you’re saying, and who genuinely regard it as not just the right policy, but a policy which will make a positive difference for the country and for the general standard of living.
FG: Which, of course, in Britain over the last fifteen years or so, certainly after the student fees changes, has been graduates and young people.
I don’t think the left can necessarily rely on graduates and young people as a permanent sort of base that is ideologically interested in their ends, because I think a lot of the volatility we’re seeing right now in how young people vote comes out of the fact that they have received very, very few material dividends from left and right, and they are looking for new answers that are also ideological — but [nonetheless] fundamentally different — to anything we’ve had before.
GS: Yeah, I mean the right has a problem there with attracting young people because it relies so heavily on the votes of the elderly and of pensioners, but of course the left doesn’t have a much easier challenge there — it’s very difficult for the left to question the settlement on pensions and spending on the elderly, which is the fundamental thing that’s going to be required in order to reduce the burden on young, productive people. And so whilst they may continue to vote leftwards, at least for the time being, I agree [the left] can’t necessarily rely on [graduates and young people as a] core voter base.
Obviously, there’s other issues as well that have motivated buy-in to the left-wing cause. They range from global international issues, and support for certain kinds of international cooperation. I think in a world where international organisations are weakening more and more, that becomes harder and harder to justify. And public sentiment continues to turn against them as they seem to be ineffective ways of securing their interests. But more importantly, in a world where China, Russia, even the United States are not interested in these kind of modes of doing business, it’s not going to be possible for Europe alone to stand in favour of the ‘rules-based international order’ when nobody else wants to live by it. And so it kind of doesn’t really matter whether the left continue to believe that that’s how things should be done.
FG: And what I would add is if you ask people on the left about what they think about this, it tends to be a sort of retreat to, oh, well, we need to have a sort of muscular European liberalism that can, you know, we can do rearmament and we can talk about these hard power concerns that we might have […] and so on and so on, but in its own way that is already conceding the rightist frame of the primacy of domestic power.
GS: Two [other] big causes outside of these things which have really been motors for left-wing support have been environmentalism and, let’s say, social issues, cultural manifestations of what people might call ‘Woke’, especially among the young. I think these things as well have waned in the extent to which they can really motivate ideological support.
Obviously, on the social side, the idea of a ‘vibe shift’ has been discussed to death. I don’t think it’s necessarily clear that that has happened quite to the extent that people say it has.
FG: The ‘vibe shift’ seems to be pretty obviously self-imploding right now, actually.
GS: Yeah, and there’s already a pretty high degree of exhaustion with … (FG: ‘Chud.’) … the performative cruelty… But either way, what is clearly true is that these issues don’t motivate the left as they once did. And I think fundamentally the reason for that is that nobody now is under the illusion that there is any genuine social problem holding back the various different causes and groups supported by those causes that have [previously] motivated people out onto the left. And what motivates [the left] is fundamentally the feeling that they are saving people who need saving.
But I think there’s a secondary element as well, which is that this has always had a pretty high degree of cultural cachet, but that is now shifting. And you look at the statistics now, for example, on the trans issue, which has been the most recent instantiation of this kind of energisation on the left. The areas of Britain, for example, where transgenderism is most common are areas like Boston and Blackpool. Not to criticise these kind of places, of course, they’re the kind of places that are going to be voting most heavily for the right as well. But fundamentally, these concerns have become provincial concerns and no longer hold the same kind of cultural cachet.
FG: Yeah, I’d add on the environmentalism [point], though, that it does seem to be ailing as a political cause because whilst, you know, man-made climate change is not in [serious] dispute, there are no visible costs of the climate catastrophe to voters. You know, the Maldives has not sunk. And [yet] the costs of the energy transition and Net Zero, etc., are ever-climbing. So there is ever more scepticism, at least towards the chosen route of the energy transition.
GS: One of the ways in which the left has tried to recycle these concerns and reinvigorates public interest in the ‘green transition’ is to describe this not as a cost that needs to be paid in order to prevent certain outcomes, but as an opportunity for growth. Which, you know, they’re talking about ‘green industrialisation’ and ‘green growth’. I think these visions have been rendered clearly ridiculous.
FG: Yeah, so I think with Biden, you did see an attempt to foster this ‘green industrialism’ via the Inflation Reduction Act, which folded in many aspects of the Green New Deal. And similarly, you’ve seen in Labour with Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plan, an attempt to do the same thing. Both are widely seen to have failed.
GS: And I think the association with the Biden [Administration] is, and also with the Labour Government here, is pretty toxic for this whole agenda because both of these governments have seen to basically be failures on the economy. And so if they’ve tied their entire economic strategy around green reindustrialisation and have failed to achieve anything, then the policy is not going to have buy-in from the population.
[MID-POINT TRANSITION MUSIC]
GS: So we’ve explored why the left is going to have to change, why its current ideas are not going to be sufficient in the future.
What are the terms of the upcoming settlement going to be and how might the left reconceptualise itself and its ideas under those new terms?
FG: So, we know that there is going to be some level of mass deportation of recent arrivals under reform. They’re talking about the deportation of the Boris wave. And in European countries, there is increasing levels of ‘remigratory’ talk.
GS: …and it’s not quite clear how far that’s going to go, but there’s going to be some movement in that direction.
FG: Yeah, yeah. So there will very likely in those years be a process of negotiation on the right as to how far this should go — and I think it will probably go much further than people even now currently expect.
GS: But I think there will be a big difference between different countries in Europe. There may be different conceptions of where these limits arrive.
FG: So, of course, in Britain, we’ve had a longer history of migration into this country than our European neighbours. So we are likely to see a proportionately larger section of the population that are settled minorities that will have been here for a fairly significant period of time. They will be second- or third-generation immigrants, perhaps, or even long-term settled people that have been here for decades, say.
GS: And I think that whilst the left will have to accept the fundamental terms of the settlement that is put in place by the right, which will be a stable demographic future, i.e., closed borders and an end to marginal demographic replacement, what will be contested is the place of those national minorities within the national community.
And so long as the right continues to go down a more nativist line, which prioritises the interests of the native population politically and the cultural position of the native population nationally, within the country, where the left will have opportunity to redefine its own principles is to take up the mantle of those people and to say these are an integral part of the national community which should be regarded as equally legitimate parts of the nation as any other. And there’s a clear separation there between saying that and saying that we should therefore allow people from other countries to come in. It’s almost a notion of kind of ethnogenesis, where these settled communities are being fundamentally cleaved from populations in their homelands.
And that’s not necessarily super surprising and it won’t necessarily be an incredibly difficult thing to do. I think anybody who’s had a lot of experience with second and third generation immigrants will know that there is often not a lot of love lost between them and populations that have more recently come [to Britain] from the same countries. You can especially see this among British Indians and Indians from the subcontinent [who have arrived] recently. There’s a degree of antagonism there and there’s definitely a view that there is a certain separateness.
Of course, that’s not necessarily the case with other communities. But then, a lot of those communities where that’s less the case are communities that maybe have not been here that long. And, you know, then there’s an open question as to the extent to which they will persist after whatever kind of ‘remigratory’ moment reform ushers in.
FG: Yeah, so the left could accept zero-immigration terms while being an integrationist force against right-wing nativism, and conceive national identity in sort of federal terms.
Where I see a big difference coming out here, though, is in America, where I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass repatriation of settled immigrants in a way that you will see in Europe.
GS: Or even necessarily a full deportation of illegal immigrants, even those who have come recently. It doesn’t look like the Trump Administration is going to succeed in that, and it becomes more and more difficult as time goes on.
FG: Right, absolutely. So where the American right is certainly going, though, just as the European right is, is in this nativist direction. And so there’s going to be this sort of radicalisation that comes out of the fact that they are not going to be able to achieve their goals whilst also being ever more hamstrung politically. And I think where this ultimately will end up is something akin to maybe even the position of someone like Richard Spencer circa 2017, which was less interested in this language of remigration but put a particular emphasis on emphasising the primacy of what they would call the white heritage American, that within a sort of existing — for lack of a better word — ‘DEI infrastructure’, that whites would be given the leading role within a wider system of racial carve-outs.
GS: I think the crucial point to make here is not that the American right won’t be able to achieve ‘remigration’ simply because of some kind of fundamental flaw with them, but that the demographic situation in America is simply so much worse. If the problem is not addressed in the next four years, and if it’s not addressed immediately after that, [and especially] if there’s a [Democrat president] in 2028, which is looking increasingly likely, there will be a demographic tipping point where an explicitly ‘remigratory’ politics becomes very difficult to sustain.
So you almost see basically a kind of millet system emerging, where the two factions will be different coalitions of groups from various heritages oriented around whether they support the elevated position of ‘Heritage Americans’ within that structure or whether they want to bring down ‘Heritage Americans’, and utilise that structure as it has been used to elevate other groups.
FG: Well, you can see [this] system being incredibly dysfunctional in America, and that this would almost certainly inform both European right-wing and left-wing responses to it. And I think that is why the left in Europe is more likely to be assimilationist, integratory, than wherever the US left will go, and that will just be, as a result of it, sort of hard demographic forces [i.e., in America there will be a perpetuation of explicitly anti-white racial politics on the left, just as we have seen over the last decade or so].
GS: And I think there’s a kind of slightly subtle difference between what we’re describing about the future of the European left and what we’re describing about the future of politics in general in America, which is that because of the fact that there will be stable demographic majorities in Europe, there will be a national centre. And the suggestion that set of minorities constitute national minorities within that doesn’t necessarily equate to the idea — [something] that we’ll probably see a rise in America — that no [single] group has any particular claim to primacy, at least on the left; whereas, the right will be fighting almost for the same kind of model that the left is fighting for in Europe, because that’ll be the only model that makes sense [for the American right] given their demographic circumstances.
FG: Yeah, in some ways... It’s not quite the same in that, of course, the American right is — and will be — more and more explicitly racialised, but there is a parallel, I guess, just in the sort of position.
GS: So immigration will be the [main] issue which sets the terms of the new settlement. I think it’s also worth looking at some of the other issues that are going to be contested within that settlement and where the real kind of differentiation points between the left and the right will emerge, what the left will be fighting on and how the right will be able to respond to that.
Where do you think the key issues in the next two decades of politics are going to come from?
FG: So I think the biggest problem is that the right doesn’t have any answers presently to the structural problems in the economy. And that is partly because of the free market framing of their policies. There is a massive, massive oversupply of graduate labour for far too few jobs that would afford a middle-class, sort of white-collar, professional standard of living. And I don’t think even in two terms of a Reform government, there will be a compelling line for what will be a massive cohort of people who at that point won’t even be that young, and they will be incredibly embittered towards the economic settlement that they live in.
GS: I think it’s worth saying that it’s not just that the right is committed to free markets, and that this is [potentially] a problem for them in solving the structural issues in the economy. Obviously, a number of those issues are caused by the fact that we don’t have a free market, that we have over-regulation, over-taxation, which is causing a great deal of stress on a lot of the middle class industries.
The issue is that the default to free market thinking, and often the assumption that we do live in more of a free market than we do [i.e., there are broader structural points beyond over-regulation and taxes which distort ‘normal’ market outcomes], has made the right somewhat lazy in terms of thinking about the economy in a deep way and proposing different kinds of solutions which address real challenges. And sometimes those solutions aren’t economic, right? So when we talk about free markets and efficiency, we’re talking purely in terms of specifically economic matters, the production of of goods and services at the most efficient rate. [But] some of these questions around things like family formation, things like the lifestyle that people are afforded, are not strictly economic questions. We’re not talking about efficiency here. We are potentially talking about social goals that we might want to see achieved even if that creates a sacrifice for economic efficiency, purely understood.
FG: And, for better or worse, the people that bought into the university system were expecting something akin to this [standard of living].
GS: Yeah, I think it’s an analogous situation to the return of soldiers from the First World War, right? You can say whatever you want about the establishment of the welfare state, but the reality is that there was this generation, this cohort of people, who expected society to deliver them certain things following their acquiescence to a path, a set of sacrifices that they had been asked to make. And there is going to be a large block of voters who will have a great deal of say about the political future of the country who have followed a path that they were told to follow.
And, importantly, it doesn’t really matter whether that path was always mistaken. They are now where they are, right? If you’ve done a humanities degree, let’s say English Literature at a good university, it doesn’t really matter that that might not have been the right path. That was what you were told was the way to success and you’ve now followed that path you’re down, you’re down that road and when someone in that position is nearing the end of their twenties, you can’t exactly tell them well you should have gone and done an apprenticeship and become a plumber at the age of eighteen. You’re going to need to come up with solutions that actually allow that person to get onto a track which is meaningful for them. And these people also have very real grievances in, let’s say, the experience of COVID, in which they very much did lose years of their life. (FG: Absolutely.)
And not only is it the case that the right is not used to thinking in deeper terms about the economy, and is not currently able to produce solutions to this. It’s also the case that the right is going to struggle a great deal on a political level because, of course, part of the equation here that has to be brought in is that in order to address these issues, you’re going to have to accept that there are going to be winners and losers. And part of that means that there’s going to have to be a revision of the deal for the elderly in regards to pensions, in regards to social care, etc., etc. Obviously, this is a major voting bloc for the right, which will be very difficult for them to move past.
FG: On the back of that, where the left will have, I guess as we were saying earlier, a set of core believers, an ideological core, is most likely to find expression in this demographic [of underemployed graduates, etc.].
GS: And that’s not to say that they necessarily have a solution which is going to be workable. Of course, we would expect that any solution they come up with is not going to be the right one. But it can still produce motivation for people to support effectively a redistributive politics.
FG: When a big part of what is identifiable in producing these problems will have been the entry of AI, and the removal of these entry-level jobs into the professions that these people might have sought, there will be a real economic target and a class target in the tech executive, for example, that the left will be able to tap into.
GS: And that’s obviously going to be more and more potent as the tech executives themselves and as the industry becomes more and more aligned with the right of politics, especially in the United States, where, of course, everyone from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen has become very involved with the Trump administration. It looks like JD Vance, who is the likely successor to Trump, is even more involved in that world than Trump himself has been. And the Democrats have already begun to pivot towards a focus on those individuals and their involvement in the way that they’re [now] attacking the Republicans.
FG: Yeah, and it does [also] look more and more likely that there will be an AI crash and subsequent recession. And even if AI — and it probably will — does end up coming through this bubble like the internet did after the dot-com bubble [i.e., proving economically transformative despite short-term overvaluation and financial troubles], just having an economic class enemy, an identifiable class enemy, responsible for a recession on the back of what will already have been an incredibly difficult economic environment, will give the left a lot to work with.
GS: …I mean, ultimately, this is sort of a repeat of the politics of the kind of immediate post-2008 moment where you had a class enemy in the bankers, and this motivated a sort of turn towards a more redistributive style of politics. This will be strengthened further by the fact that you will have this much larger class of people who have not just suffered through the momentary difficulties of a recession in the here and now, but for whom the entire economic structure has not been working for at this point a period of five years, ten years and…
FG: Well, for a lot of these people, it will be all of their working lives.
GS: Exactly. I think that kind of gets us to a slightly broader point about technological transformation. We’re entering into a period where it looks like once again, technology is going to be shaping and reshaping people’s lives in a fundamental way at a rapid pace in a way that it hasn’t really over the past, let’s say, forty years. There’s been advances in certain kinds of consumer technologies which have increased wealth, but it hasn’t necessarily reshaped the labour market, reshaped the fundamental economic circumstances in quite the same way as physical technologies, let’s say, in the hundred years prior to the Second World War really did. Obviously, there’s been a major social impact because of things like social media and the Internet. But what’s coming down the pipeline with artificial intelligence, with robotics, potentially with genetic engineering slightly further down the line, is something which is going to change very radically large aspects of what life looks like and what people’s role in the economic structure looks like.
FG: I think as we’ve already touched on by political association, and by commitment to economic liberalism, at least the first round of right-wing governments — as we’re seeing in with Trump right now, and we will almost certainly see with Reform — will be technologically accelerationist on AI. There are of course going to be more ‘populist’, dissenting factions that we also see manifesting in the US, like with someone like Tucker Carlson, that will take a much more Luddite position. But I don’t think this will be the [main] thrust, and this is certainly not going to be what the left are [primarily] responding to.
And on the back of that, the left could position itself quite comfortably as economically Luddite, or seeking to regulate the impact of AI in the labour force. Or, alternatively, they might take a quite different line, which could look, as we’ve heard from people like Novara Media already, a synthesis of UBI and, you know, what they call ‘fully-automated luxury communism’.
GS: Yeah, I think there’s those two different distinct lines along which you could imagine them going. I think there’ll be a lot of internal political pressure to fight against the people leading this technological change because of their political associations. And so there’ll be a pretty strong pressure from within the left towards that more Luddite frame of reference. [And] depending on the extent to which the environmental movement maintains sway on the left, that’s obviously also a big part of that equation. Certainly with regards to AI, there’s a huge environmental and energy consideration around those industries.
I think robotics is a slightly more interesting one that’s an industry that’s kind of not yet matured quite so much as AI, but looks likely to experience major advances in the near-future, primarily because of the advances in AI which make it far more useful and obviously has the potential to radically transform the role of human beings in the economy.
FG: I think the third thing you touched on, [namely] on biotechnology and gene editing, though, is possibly where we see a sort of different set, different relationship to technology on left and right, which is that if the sort of Christian nationalist tendency on the right continues to take hold in the leadership and activist base of the right…
GS: …which probably looks unlikely in Britain, but in America is far more prominent…
FG: Yeah, yeah. But even in Britain, we can see this in sort of tangential conversations about abortion and assisted dying. It would not be a huge step for someone of this persuasion to also take very strong moral objections to gene editing. And the left could be technologically accelerationist in this sense, framing their liberal policy on this in egalitarian terms. You can imagine a world in which […] they do gene editing on the NHS [in order to advance egalitarianism, this time biological, via statist and technological means].
GS: Yeah, you can certainly imagine a world in which when forced to confront biological realities, and this has been something that people have said for a long time, right? There’s people like Nathan Cofnas, who have always pushed this line of promoting [to the general public] certain realities of how genetics influences human behaviour and human attributes. They have suggested that this will force the left out of an egalitarian frame, because they’ll have to recognise the fundamental reality of [these] differences. But actually, as has long been said, recognising that those differences are rooted in [a biological] reality doesn’t change the fact that the left is committed to ameliorating the impact of those differences and in fact could be used as justification for a left-wing frame…
FG: …it would actually produce, or has the potential to produce, a greater reality of egalitarianism and therefore it’s not taking you out of the left-wing frame.
GS: Yeah, in some ways an egalitarianism which recognises that there are differences between people, but that says at a moral level we have to adjust for those differences... [this] can be more compelling than an egalitarianism which which simply denies that they exist, because it doesn’t have to base itself upon contradictions.
FG: In fact, a right-wing morality becomes much harder to maintain in a world in which you can appeal to a sort of lofty, utopian aspiration of everyone having ‘equal opportunities’ in a real sense, rather than a rhetorical one.
GS: And I think certain questions around... personal character which the right has always emphasised become far more difficult when they’re framed not necessarily as a moral choice, but as biological realities. If your conscientiousness is a result, at least in large part, of your genetic inheritance, it’s not necessarily so clear — at least in the traditional sort of conservative, libertarian framework — that we can place such moral emphasis on this as a grounds for [just] desert. And that is not necessarily to say that there aren’t alternative frameworks that one could use to justify similar kinds of ideas. And I think we would certainly go down that line. But it will present problems for the way in which the right has thought about these things, historically, at least.
So we kind of touched on some of the issues of social politics there. These have obviously been big issues over the past fifteen years and a long time before that, too.
There is a new set of social issues emerging with regards to things like birth rates, family formation, marriage, partnerships, etc. This has already led to the growth of a politics oriented to some extent around this. [We can see this in] East Asian countries like Japan or, in particular, South Korea, where questions of [relations] between the sexes have become more and more prominent [in politics]. We’re facing similar kinds of demographic challenges with things like birth rates here — although not quite as acute. Where do you see those kind of issues developing, and how do you see the left and right responding to them?
FG: So I don’t see the left abandoning any commitment to women’s liberation, of course, and women will continue to be a serious demographic weight for the left. But what has become very visible on the right, which has not had a sort of mainstream manifestation is a new social conservatism, particularly with regards to gender and sexual relations, through this conversation about fertility and family formation.
And this is becoming very loaded very fast because of, I don’t know, unwelcome, ‘loud characters’ online who think it’s a great political act to reply to a woman posting a selfie with a dissertation or something. And I think where this is going, what this is, is a flirtation in some ways ideologically with a restriction of women’s rights in response to this question about fertility.
GS: And I think that is potentially a very risky route for the right to go down, at least in the way that is being flirted with at the moment, because what you basically have is this pushback, as you say, against women’s role in the economy, whether it’s education or employment and their engagement with society as it is today. But without any kind of suggestion about how that might be different, which would appeal, obviously crucially, both to men and to women. And so when you have people pushing back on current norms around women’s position in society without any kind of alternative suggestion you end up with basically the worst of all worlds: where you don’t have any kind of solution which would address any of these issues, but nevertheless you’re spending a great deal of time talking about them and that quite easily comes to sound like effectively the laundering of personal resentments and failures which… I mean let me be clear, I don’t want to attack anybody on that front. It’s perfectly legitimate to find yourself left by the side because of the ways in which society is dysfunctional and have some kind of resentment against that. But that is still not a basis for politics which is going to be attractive to the majority of people.
Having said all of that, it’s not as if these ideas and trends on the right are entirely baseless. It’s a very complicated question to answer why there are falling fertility rates across the world. But clearly one major aspect of this, even just thinking about it from a rationalistic point of view, is effectively the bringing in of women into the economy and the creation of alternative possible pathways of life for women outside of having children and raising a family, and it’s no surprise that when you increase basically the cost of the ‘reserve option’ by enabling women to have careers […] many will choose to pursue those, and there’s a simple reality that you only have so much time in your life, and if you choose to spend many years in education and then many years in the early stages of a career, that’s going to delay [you] having children and reduce total fertility as well.
FG: And you see very low fertility in even very conservative, culturally conservative societies like Iran, because women do [still] have those options, but despite existing in this very patriarchal... sets of gender relations.
GS: And it’s very hard to see how you get any move beyond this, because the move into this system was somewhat gradual. It was economically entirely possible for effectively one woman at a time to enter into the labour force. But going backwards, it’s not really possible to do it in the same way. We now have a labour force, and therefore labour prices, and therefore wages, which reflect the fact that the labour force has [effectively] doubled with the inclusion of women. And so one family making the decision to have the wife stay at home is more difficult than the reverse would have been, as women were coming into the labour force. It’s hard to imagine a world in which women become less economised over time as a serious proposal.
That, of course, brings you towards more radical proposals, and you see a lot of flirtation with this sort of thing in the Online Right — especially where there does seem to be some kind of impulse towards some kind of state regulatory action to try and affect these outcomes. But the revealed preference, as much as people cite various different studies about women’s happiness in different kinds of positions, the revealed preference when they’re making choices is not to have children. So on a purely electoral level, it’s going to be almost impossible to stand on any kind of platform like that. Not that I think it’s actually likely that the right gets into that kind of position in the near future, but it’s obviously something that there is discussion about in certain circles.
FG: I mean, you certainly have seen in the past, sort of going back to the immediate aftermath of the First World War, an institutional privileging of men and the real attempts to de-economise women after that. And it had some limited success. It was possible to a degree. But you’re talking about the 1920s, and we’re now over one hundred years into this.
But independently of that entire conversation, I think we don’t come to any satisfying answer about this without fundamentally reconsidering what family formation should look like. I think there is no turning back the economisation of women. As a result, the correct approach of [the modern state] should be something like a lowering of the costs to individuals, to parents, to have children in all the ways that this is possible. I don’t think that’s a conversation that anyone is presently having [in the non-economic sense, i.e., beyond mere subsidies].
GS: And I think we’re still quite far away from either the left or the right really heading down that line of inquiry in any productive way. And therefore, it’s pretty difficult to say how these conversations will play out. If I had to make a bet, I would say that they will broadly continue along the same lines that they are now, which is basically no real conversation […] on anything that would actually move the dial, but a large amount of cultural signalling from both the left and the right about where their concerns lie.
FG: …and this conversation will become ever more partisan as a result.
GS: The one thing that might change that is witnessing the impact of some of these questions, especially for example in East Asia, as you really start to see the population crunch hitting hard in some of these Pacific Rim countries, it may provoke some kind of response. But, strangely, even though there is more international political connection than before — because of the rise of the Internet, and because of the transformation of politics into a fundamentally virtual phenomenon, where the political dialogue across countries is more unified than it’s ever been — nevertheless, there’s a deep myopia. And so it’s not necessarily the case that people will even really pay much attention to what’s happening in these other countries.
FG: Yeah, and of course it will be possible, or it could well be possible, to sustain lower fertility rates if we do see some of these other major technological changes producing significant productivity gains.
GS: There’s one final element of, let’s say, the political landscape outside of these specific issues which is worth addressing, and which could potentially change with the upcoming reorganisations. For the past eighty years the right has been positioned entirely as a ‘conservative’ force, trying to defend what exists in society that it feels is worth defending and trying to prevent the left from achieving its own goals — [left-wing goals] which not only the left defines internally, but which are understood by the right itself as fundamentally definitive of the future. The label of ‘progressive’ is [now almost] universally accepted [as left-wing]. It’s understood that if the future is different — it is different in a broadly left-wing way.
Now, part of this has been structural. The left has control over government in a way that the right never has because of the left’s influence across all levels of the permanent bureaucracy, across the media, across academic and intellectual institutions. And the right therefore never has quite had the power to implement the continuous shift directionally that it might want to see. But it’s also an issue of self-perception. As long as the right frames itself as fundamentally conservative — or even reactionary, restorationist — it is not going to be perceived by others as a force which has its own vision of the future.
There is a chance in this moment as new forms and currents within the right that don’t see themselves as conservative — or ‘restorationist’ — emerge for those currents to seize that mantle of the future, and define their own ideas as the definition of ‘progress’.
FG: Yeah, and that seems to be especially true in the way the left could become a fundamentally ‘conservative’ force in response to these changes that we’ve described on the economy and technology and so on.
GS: Nick Land used to describe this sort of ‘hyper-conservative’ instantiation of the left as the ‘human security system’, which was effectively the kind of political control rods that tried to prevent the disruptive force of capitalism from reshaping people’s lives. And it seems like the left is heading into an even more exaggerated version of this.
I think it’s by no means a given that anything like this actually does occur, at least in the immediate phase of this transition. It’s quite likely that it would require some sort of structural change to fundamentally change that dynamic where the left is always on the front foot. And of course, there’s still large factions of the right that are very explicitly positioning themselves as restorationists — whether that is understood to be a restoration to the 1990s, or the 1960s, or any point before. And so it’s absolutely possible that that opportunity could be squandered. But I think it is certainly a possibility that’s on the table.
FG: Yeah, I think so.
GS: Well, it will certainly be interesting to see how these dynamics play out over the next five to ten years. It’s definitely worth considering these kind of questions as our own political movement crystallises and we understand our positions on all of the various issues discussed more clearly.
I’ve been George Spencer, I’ve been joined by Francis Gaultier, and this has been the Pimlico Journal Politics Podcast.
