Language and the selectorate problem for the left

Paul Krugman is worried about a Sanders candidacy. Not because of what a Sanders presidency might mean in policy terms, but because he bandies around terms like 'socialist' in a way that provides easy lines of attack for his opponent in a presidential campaign, when a term like 'social democrat' may be both more apt and less open to mischaracterisation. What I think is going on here is part of a broader problem for the opposition parties in both the UK and the USA. For both the Labour Party and the Democrats portions of the selectorate are providing incentives which damage the parties' prospects with the wider electorate. This is partly a question of style and partly about different meanings and idiolects that exist within the contemporary left.

Forget for a moment what the true meaning of terms like 'socialism' is and whether they can include what is essentially a program for a more robust welfare state, greater income redistribution and improved workers' bargaining power in the context of a market economy. Yes, it's true that many European social democratic parties have the word 'socialist' in the name, but historical nomenclature can be misleading. Once upon a time the Bolsheviks were the a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The real question here is what associations people actually have with the term. To many on the left in the UK, 'socialism' might mean buying a coffee from a vendor on a living wage, on the way to a better run train service taking you to a job with proper protection as an employee. But like it or lump it, to many older voters it still refers to an economic and political system based on state ownership of the means of production and distribution, and carries with it the legacy of the iron curtain. Words can mean whatever we want them to mean, but effective communication requires a common understanding of this meaning. Maybe associations can change, but that takes time, and time is not on our side.

The problem is using terms with this kind of ideological baggage has big payoffs in leadership races. To portions of the selectorate, it signals a clear break with the worst aspects third way centrism and the perceived timidity of the centre left after the financial crisis. In the UK this is partly a response to Milliband's attempts to triangulate on austerity, and in the USA the inadequacy of the Obama fiscal stimulus and piecemeal nature of healthcare reform, both of the latter largely being a result of political impediments to anything more comprehensive. This kind of signalling is not limited to the use of the term 'socialist': in the Labour leadership elections it has become something of a necessity to describe anything and everything as 'radical' and to fetishise outdated markers of social class as a means of establishing authenticity.

The tragedy of this is it distracts from the fundamentally conservative character of much of the program of the modern left. It is about preserving the welfare state and saving it from starvation through underfunding. It is about defending the tremendous social progress of the last 40 years, of societies that have become more inclusive of minorities, in the case of the UK much more multicultural, imperfect and incomplete as that progress may be. It is about defending the rule of law and upholding liberal democratic norms in the face of their assault from authoritarian populism. And it is about protecting the environment for ourselves and future generations. This kind of conservatism is harder to paint as radical and threatening, but the left finds itself in a kind of trap. The signals you need to send to win over substantial portions of the selectorate may be major hinderances with the wider electorate.