Recent elections in France and the United Kingdom show that a coalition gathering the left, center, and center-left is how we push back the far-right this election. Past elections show this too: that we succeed together and fail when divided.
In the U.S. election of 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the New Deal Coalition including organized labor, liberals, farmers, ethnic and religious minorities, and intellectuals. [1] That majority empowered Democrats in congress and the presidency to pass progressive policies for decades afterwards including the social security programs and labor protections threatened by Project 2025 today. [2, p.581,605]
In the Weimar Republic elections, before the Nazis took power, the two largest parties KDP (German Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party) failed to work together. KPD considered SPD a greater threat than the Nazi party while SPD failed to make coalitions and keep promises. [3, p.216,219] Historians disagree on if the two parties could have worked together and if that could have stopped Hitler’s rise to power [3, p.217] [4, p.227] but what we do know is that they didn’t and the Nazis came for both of them once they won. 40,000 - 50,000 political opponents including SPD and KPD members were taken to concentration camps in 1933 and in the same year political parties were banned. [5]
The left and center in Weimar Germany failed to unite against fascism as a common enemy and lost, the New Deal Coalition voted together and made lasting progress, Britons united behind the Labour party and rejected Conservatives in record numbers [6], the French Republican Front pushes the far-right back again and again. [7] We can succeed when we unite against the far-right. No more infighting while so much is at stake. The way forward is Together!
Refrences:
- Encyclopædia Britannica. (2024, April 5). Democratic Party. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Democratic-Party#ref308572
- The Heritage Foundation. (2023). Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise
- Winkler, H. A. (1990). Choosing the Lesser Evil: The German Social Democrats and the Fall of the Weimar Republic. Journal of Contemporary History, 25(2/3), 205–227. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260730
- Ticktin, Hillel (1992). Trotsky’s political economy of capitalism. Brotherstone, Terence; Dukes, Paul,(eds). Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-0317-6.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2019, June 18) Nazi Political Violence in 1933. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust.
- Maclellan, K., James, W., & Young, S. (2024, July 5) New PM Starmer pledges to rebuild Britain after years of chaos. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/new-pm-starmer-pledges-action-not-words-fix-britain-2024-07-05.
- Leicester, J. (2024, July 8) The far right seemed to have a lock on France’s legislative elections. Here’s why it didn’t win. https://apnews.com/article/france-elections-le-pen-antisemitism-macron-5c4c8fa261b0fa2f2e35c14c072a60b4.
Looking back at the numbers, I agree. The Labour victory was much more of not voting Conservative than it was uniting against the far-right. The French Republican Front was a much better example. They had one round with far-right gains and voted together in the second round effectively pushed Le Pen’s party out of the majority.
Even worse than that, the far right, as represented by Reform, did better than they have previously done and could yet cause us more problems come the next general election. It’s possible that the centrist government that’s just been elected will manage effectively enough to kill a lot of the sense of grievance that is currently being harnessed by Reform and directed against immigrants but it’s equally possible that another global recession could tank that entire programme.
Still and all I appreciate you coming in here to talk with me about how your thinking has changed. I agree that the French very much did what you say they did. I don’t know if there are still people alive who remember the Vichy government but it could be that amongst the traditionally conservative people in their seventies and eighties there’s still a horror about what the Nazis wrought.