A really interesting article in Democracy Digest titled “‘Left for Dead’? Why the coalitions that sustained social democracy collapsed”, highlights a scholarly perspective over the future of the current left versus right struggle in what many may qualify as today’s waning democratic momentum. According to the piece,

It is—as it has so often been in the past—once again fashionable to project, in the words of the Financial Times, that “the future belongs to the left,” notes Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and the author of The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.

At first sight, there are strong reasons for this conclusion, he writes for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas:

In most Western democracies, left-leaning parties enjoy comfortable majorities among the youngest cohorts of voters. Demographic groups that tend to support the left, from ethnic and religious minorities to the residents of large cities, are continuing to grow. Finally, a new set of left-of-center parties is rapidly rising, and seems poised to take on the reins of government within the next years or decades.

Even so, a closer analysis of recent transformations on the left suggests a far more skeptical conclusion. Social democratic and far-left parties are failing to attract a large or cohesive share of the electorate. The rise of green and liberal parties cannot compensate for their weakness. For now, no left-wing movement seems capable of—or even especially intent on—appealing to some of the voting block who had once been their most loyal supporters.

See full story here.