What Happened to the Left?

When It Worked

There is a tendency, on the left, to treat its history as a long story of defeat. That's wrong, and getting it wrong matters. Because if the left has only ever lost, then losing feels inevitable, feels natural — and that feeling is exactly what the people who dismantled it wanted.

The actual history is more complicated and more interesting. There was a period — roughly from the late 19th century through the mid-20th — when the labor movement in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Western Europe achieved things that had seemed impossible:

The 8-hour work day. The weekend. Child labor laws. Workplace safety regulations. Unemployment insurance. Social Security. The 91% top marginal income tax rate under Eisenhower. The National Health Service. Universal suffrage. The Civil Rights Act.

None of these were given. All were fought for. Each required decades of organizing, striking, marching, dying, and sustained political pressure. The weekend you might be reading this on was won by people who went on strike in the 1890s and were beaten by police and Pinkertons for it. The 8-hour day, which had seemed an absurd demand to factory owners in 1880, was federal law by 1938.

The left, in other words, has not only ever lost. It has won things that the people who owned the economy said were economically impossible. And the current attack on those gains is what we're really talking about when we ask what happened.

The Postwar Peak

The left reached its historical peak of power in the years immediately following World War II. The reasons were specific and worth understanding, because they explain both why it was possible and what had to be dismantled to end it.

The war had destroyed an enormous amount of inherited wealth — the capital that normally ensures that r consistently exceeds g (Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2013). The ruling class was weakened. The working class, which had fought and died in disproportionate numbers, emerged from the war with political demands and the organizational capacity to press them.

In the United States, the CIO had organized the mass production industries (steel, auto, rubber) in the 1930s. By the 1950s, around 35% of American workers were union members. That's not a fringe. That's enough to win elections, enough to sustain strikes, enough to set the terms of the broader political economy.

1945: Labour Wins and Builds the NHS

The 1945 British general election is one of the most dramatic in democratic history. Winston Churchill, who had just led Britain through World War II as its wartime prime minister, was expected to win easily. He lost by one of the largest landslides in British electoral history.

Labour won 393 seats to the Conservatives' 213. The British people, who had just spent five years being told their collective sacrifice was necessary for the national good, decided they wanted the national good to be distributed more collectively. They weren't interested in going back to the 1930s — mass unemployment, means-tested poverty relief, a healthcare system where you paid or you didn't see a doctor.

What followed: the National Health Service, free at point of use, funded through taxation. Nationalization of coal, steel, electricity, gas, railways, the Bank of England. The Beveridge welfare state — universal unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, family allowances. Council housing built at scale.

The Aneurin Bevan, the Health Secretary who built the NHS, came from a Welsh mining family. His father had died of pneumoconiosis — a lung disease from coal dust — because working miners in Wales couldn't afford adequate medical care. He built the NHS specifically so that would never happen again. The programme was financed partly through Marshall Plan money from the United States. The richest country in the world helped pay for Britain's socialist programme.

The New Deal Coalition

In the United States, the equivalent moment came a decade earlier. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, from 1933, created Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Wagner Act (protecting the right to unionize), and massive public employment programs. The top marginal income tax rate reached 94% in 1944.

Roosevelt was not a socialist. He was a wealthy patrician from a prominent New York family who believed that capitalism needed to be saved from its own worst tendencies. In a famous phrase, he told the American business community that he was their best friend — that by accepting some regulation and redistribution, they could prevent the kind of revolutionary upheaval that had happened in Russia and was threatening in Europe.

They hated him for it anyway. The American Liberty League, funded by DuPont, General Motors, and other industrial concerns, ran sustained propaganda campaigns accusing Roosevelt of socialism, communism, and tyranny. The business community never accepted the New Deal as legitimate, even as it presided over the most sustained economic growth and broadly-shared prosperity in American history.

This matters: the postwar compromise wasn't won through persuading the ruling class. It was won by having enough political and economic power that the ruling class had to accept it temporarily. And as soon as circumstances shifted, the effort to dismantle it began.

The Counter-Revolution That Was Planned

What produced Reagan and Thatcher was not a spontaneous reaction to economic crisis. It was a deliberate long-term project, begun in the 1940s, funded by business interests, and intellectually developed in networks that spent thirty years waiting for their opening.

The Mont Pelerin Society

In April 1947, Friedrich Hayek convened a gathering of 36 economists, philosophers, and intellectuals at the Hotel du Parc on Mont Pelerin, Switzerland. Among those present: Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper. They founded the Mont Pelerin Society.

The society's explicit purpose: to counter what its founders saw as the drift toward socialism and state planning in the postwar world. To develop and propagate free-market ideas. To build an international network of economists and intellectuals who shared those ideas and could promote them across institutions.

For thirty years, they operated at the margins of mainstream economics. Keynes was dominant. Planning was respectable. The idea that markets should be left to themselves seemed, after the Great Depression, like the kind of thing that caused catastrophes.

Then came the 1970s. Stagflation — simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment — appeared to contradict the Keynesian framework, which predicted the two couldn't coexist. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 created economic instability that governments seemed unable to manage. The postwar consensus was struggling.

The Mont Pelerin network had their opening. Their ideas — deregulate, privatize, cut taxes, break unions, remove capital controls — were suddenly on offer as the alternative to a model that appeared to be failing. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. Friedman in 1976. The intellectual tide had turned.

The Powell Memo

In August 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the US Chamber of Commerce. It was titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”

Powell's argument: the business community had been too passive in the face of attacks from the left — from Ralph Nader's consumer movement, from labor unions, from liberal academics, from media. He called for organized, coordinated, long-term counter-action:

“The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these are often the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.”

He recommended: funding business-friendly academics and endowing business school chairs, attacking hostile textbooks, funding a business presence in the courts, monitoring media and demanding equal time, mobilizing shareholder power, and building political influence.

Two months after writing the memo, Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon.

The memo became a blueprint. In the years following, the Heritage Foundation (founded 1973), Cato Institute (founded 1977), American Enterprise Institute (expanded under business funding), and dozens of other think tanks were funded by corporate and wealthy individual money to do exactly what Powell described: produce research, popularize ideas, lobby politicians, and shift the Overton window of what was considered economically serious.

Reagan and Thatcher: Dismantling Labor Power

When Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power — Reagan in 1981, Thatcher in 1979 — the ideological work was done. The Mont Pelerin network had spent thirty years making free-market ideas intellectually respectable. The business community had spent a decade building the institutional infrastructure to amplify those ideas. The economic crises of the 1970s had discredited the alternatives.

What followed was not primarily an intellectual revolution. It was a political one, focused specifically on breaking the institutional power of the labor movement.

PATCO: The Strike That Changed Everything

On August 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike. Their demands were not especially radical: a 32-hour work week (down from 40), a $10,000 pay raise, better retirement benefits, and relief from what they described as an increasingly stressful and dangerous work environment.

Reagan declared the strike illegal — federal employees are prohibited from striking by law. He gave the strikers 48 hours to return to work. 11,359 did not.

He fired them all. Permanently. They were banned from federal employment for life.

The message to American employers was unambiguous: if the President of the United States would not protect workers who went on strike, private employers certainly didn't have to. The implicit protection that the labor movement had enjoyed — that strikes, however disruptive, would eventually be resolved through negotiation rather than mass firing — evaporated.

US union membership at the time of the PATCO strike was around 20%. Today it is around 10%. The decline is not entirely attributable to the PATCO firing, but the PATCO firing marked the moment the rules changed. Employers learned they could break strikes. Unions learned they were not protected. Organizing became harder and more dangerous.

Thatcher and the Miners' Strike

The UK equivalent — larger in scale, longer in duration, more visceral in its imagery — was the miners' strike of 1984–85.

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill, went on strike in March 1984 against the closure of collieries. It lasted twelve months. At its peak, 142,000 miners were on strike. The British government had specifically prepared for this: stockpiled coal at power stations, trained police in riot tactics, restricted miners' movements using road traffic laws. Cabinet documents released under the 30-year rule showed Thatcher had planned to confront and defeat the NUM specifically, as the most powerful union in the country, in order to break the broader labor movement.

The strike was defeated in March 1985. Miners returned to work without agreement. Within a decade, most of the pits they had been striking to save were closed anyway.

Scargill had called Thatcher and her government “the enemy within.” She had called the miners' leadership “the enemy within.” Both meant it. This was a political confrontation, not a labor dispute. And the ruling class won it.

COINTELPRO: The Suppression of the Radical Left

The defeat of the organized labor movement was one side of the picture. On the other side: the more systematic suppression of the radical left — specifically the organizations that might have provided a revolutionary rather than merely reformist challenge to the existing order.

COINTELPRO — the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program — ran from 1956 to 1971. Its targets: the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, feminist organizations, and essentially any left-wing group deemed a threat to “national security.”

The methods: physical surveillance, informants, forged letters designed to create conflict between organizations, anonymous letters to family members and employers to destroy individuals' lives, false evidence planted to justify prosecutions, and coordination with local police for direct violence.

Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was killed in a raid by Chicago police and FBI agents on December 4, 1969. He was 21 years old. He was shot in his bed. Evidence later showed that an FBI informant had provided the floor plan of his apartment and that police fired approximately 90 shots while Hampton fired one (which may have been fired by someone else). An independent investigation found the raid was a planned assassination. The federal government paid $1.85 million to the Hampton family in settlement — without admitting liability.

COINTELPRO was not exposed by investigative journalism. It was exposed because a group called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and stole documents. The documents revealed the program. J. Edgar Hoover had run it for fifteen years without congressional knowledge or approval.

The program was officially discontinued in 1971. Scholars who have studied the FBI since have documented the continuation of similar tactics under different names.

The point is not that COINTELPRO alone explains what happened to the left. It's that the left was facing: organized intellectual opposition (Mont Pelerin), organized institutional opposition (think tanks, business associations), political dismantling of its economic base (PATCO, miners), media opposition (Murdoch's outlets consistently attacked union power), and active intelligence suppression of its most radical elements. All simultaneously. The surprise, from this perspective, is not that the left lost ground. The surprise is that it kept anything at all.

What the Left Lost — and What It Didn't

Between 1979 and 2000, the gains of the postwar period were substantially eroded:

Top marginal income tax rates in the US fell from 70% (1980) to 28% (1988) under Reagan. UK top rates fell from 83% (1979) to 40% (1988) under Thatcher. Capital gains tax rates were cut. Estate taxes were reduced. Union membership halved. Public utilities were privatized. Social housing was sold off (Right to Buy in the UK, and not replaced). Financial markets were deregulated — the 1986 Big Bang in the UK was a direct product of Thatcher's deregulation agenda.

The political constraint is real: people protect what they have. The left's surviving institutional achievements are the most popular policies in most Western countries. The right has spent forty years trying to privatize or defund them and has only partially succeeded.

What did survive: the NHS, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public education. Not because they were economically untouchable — the ruling class had ideological objections to all of them — but because they were too politically embedded to remove. Thatcher tried to privatize the NHS and was stopped. Reagan tried to cut Social Security and was stopped. The left built those fortresses when it was strong. They survived because they were built to last.

The conditions that generated the labor movement — inequality, poverty, precarity — have not been resolved. They have gotten worse since the 1980s. But the conditions that made the labor movement powerful have been systematically dismantled: 35% union density is now 10%, the industrial sectors that sustained organizing are gutted, the political parties that represented workers have largely stopped doing so. The Amazon union and the Starbucks baristas are real. They are also what starting over from 10% looks like. That is not the same thing as recovery. It is the beginning of a longer question.

Common Questions