This has given us inadequate public services and infrastructure run by globalist, woke, green corporates – via the once lauded wave of privatisations and outsourcings – without the fiscal continence, personal freedom and small government that was promised.

But now we have a new “neo”, as it were. And I am not just talking about the now passe 1980s-style neo-Marxism, with all of its overtones of post-modernism and cultural orientation.

BEAST

In the 2020s, neo-Marxism is now not the main Leftist game. Today’s Leftism is an entirely different beast. A beast that no one ever saw coming.

It has completely new preoccupations. And it is devouring those whose interests the old Left used to champion.

Surely, a generation ago, no one but no one would have anticipated the abandonment by the Left of the working class whose interests, since the days of Karl Marx, it had claimed faithfully to represent.

Who could have predicted that the Leftist media that once challenged the capitalist class would cheer on greedy multinationals (aka Big Pharma) bent on injecting experimental drugs into workers’ arms and having those workers sacked if they didn’t get the jab?

And that they – think the BBC and The Guardian – would have accepted funding from former tech oligarchs (specifically Bill Gates) who would then insist on those media outlets publishing his Party line.

The neo-Left loves the rich. Oddly. Many of them are rich themselves.

Like the Chinese, Leftists have embraced wealth and capitalism. The uber-rich have embraced socialism, though not for themselves. It is a crazy ideological world.

Who could have anticipated that modern day “Leftist” Parties would happily see workers’ power bills become so unaffordable that people would have to choose between eating and heating?

Who’da thought that the modern-day Leftist would be on the same page, in relation to the unilaterally and baselessly declared “climate emergency”, as tech billionaires who, like the Stalinists of yore, make dissidents simply disappear?

What about the rich Leftists’ support for mass migration, the result of which is an influx – no, let us call it what it is, a tsunami – of post-colonial refugees landing in Western countries, resulting in the crushing (in the United States, certainly) of native workers’ opportunities for escaping the poverty-opioid cycle.

The brand new US Senator from Ohio, JD Vance, has had something to say about this. (Of course, the unskilled workers who land in their new countries end up doing all the unpleasant service jobs that natives won’t do. The neo-Leftists, don’t seem to give a toss about this. So long as they don’t move to Martha’s Vineyard!)

Then there is the twenty-first century neo-Left’s astonishing abandonment of civil liberties in the face of the corporatist State. Vaccine mandates? No problem. De-platforming by rich-kid tech types? Oh, we love that. Shut those deplorables up.

Err, weren’t the deplorables the people we used to love? Not any more. Let them cling to their religion and their guns. We don’t like religion any more. Unless it is the religion of Gaia and the church of woke.

Two key questions arise. First, how did all this come about? And second, is neo-Leftism socialism, or is it something else, an entirely new ideological form? If so, what are its core elements?

DECAY

Kim Beazley Sr, a Whitlam era minister (ironically), once described the process of decay on the Left as the cream of the working class being replaced by the dregs of the bourgeoisie.

Most members of the low information millennial generation would probably have to us a search engine to find out what these two terms even mean.

Other observers of the re-invention of the old Left have pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in the early 1990s as a dividing line whereby those that had actually cheered for socialist regimes, despite those vicious, utopian regimes utterly letting down the working class, had to find a new approach and a new angle in order to find a new base of support.

Hence, the Left went green and so, in a single stroke, said goodbye to any meaningful sense of representation of its former working-class base.

Still others speak of cultural Marxism adopting the Antonio Gramsci playbook and replacing the original recipe of a working-class revolution.

One thing is clear, getting rich and staying rich is no longer a problem for the twenty-first century socialist.

The new ideology is thoroughly embedded in both major political Parties.

Back in the 1970s, the term “tweedledum and tweedledee” was coined (by political scientists Bob Catley and Bruce McFarlane) to describe the wafer-thin difference between the major political Parties of the day.

Following the ritual execution of yet another British Prime Minister just recently, one commentator over there (Leilani Dowding) colourfully termed the choice facing voters as “two cheeks of the same bottom”.

The estimable Lyle Shelton as termed the big four new-Left parties in Australia – the Liberal/Nationals, Labor, the Greens and the Teals – “the quad”.

Clearly, there is a lot of shared territory, despite what each of these Parties says about the others. The differences among them are merely matters of degree. Of whether you are rushing towards the cliff at the speed limit, or substantially exceeding it.

The point is, that each of the major Parties both in the UK and in Australia (at least) has absorbed the core policies of the other side and the differences between them have shrunk to zero.

FOSSIL

The Right’s willingness to accept big government, high taxes, green energy and the defenestration of fossil fuels, the woke social agenda and middle-class welfare has been matched by the neo-Left’s embrace of capitalism (especially crony capitalism of the crony variety).

As to the second question, whether the new form of Leftist ideology is really socialism, this is where it gets rather complicated.

Klaus Schwab calls it “stakeholder capitalism”, a beast that he himself has plausible claims to have invented. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called it “communist capitalism”.

Michael Rectenwald – whose forthcoming book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unravelling the Globalist Agenda, should be a must-read – has a number of names for neo-Leftism. One is “corporate socialism”.

Here is Rectenwald, revealing the extent to which the core philosophies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have found common cause with the new Western ideological hybrid: “Another way of describing the goal of the Great Reset is ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’—a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the State on top and socialism for the majority below.”

With apologies to Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, you might wish to think of this model as poverty and misery for the rest of us. Or, for-profit economics combined with totalitarian politics. As close as it gets to real fascism, incidentally.

What has been the political response to these developments?

The ascendancy, on the Right, of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the emergence on the Left of globalisation, has led to a backlash and the emergence of Right-of-centre alternatives, such as the now defunct Australian Conservatives, the United Australia Party, the Liberal Democrats and One Nation.

They don’t agree on everything, but there is a shared perspective on the vile excesses of the COVID State, the horror pursuit of climate madness and the dangers to traditional thought and lifestyles posed by the woke revolution.

They now harvest over a million votes between them, but with the preferential electoral system in Australia, they remain largely voiceless. Reform UK faces the same electoral Everest in Britain, with its first-past-the-post voting.

On the Left, there has been no pushback against the recent developments whatsoever in Australia.

Many of those who leave the Labor Party for ideological reasons tend to go even further “Left”, in the new sense of that term.

These folks are rich, entitled, metropolitan, green (of course) and extreme social liberals. For many, the word “family” now means “two gays and a cocker spaniel” (to reprise one of Paul Keating’s more colourful lines).

SILENT

Those in the old Labor heartland merely stick with the ALP and otherwise remain silent.

And yes, some old-style Labor voters have no doubt joined Mark Latham in his own journey to One Nation. After the same sex marriage debate of 2017, some might also have found a temporary home with Cory Bernardi. It didn’t last.

By and large, even right-to-life stalwarts like Greg Donnelly in NSW, stay with Labor.

But we have nothing that, for example, resembles Paul Embery’s “blue dog Labour” crusade in the United Kingdom and his spirited attempt to recapture traditional values.

He is a proud unionist who has pushed back against gender extremism (as one example) in the Left.

His book was titled Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. The book’s sales pitch and its core argument state: “The typical contemporary Labour MP is almost certain to be a university-educated Europhile who is more comfortable in the leafy enclaves of north London than the Party’s historic heartlands. As a result, Labour has become radically out of step with the culture and values of working-class Britain.

“Drawing on his background as a firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham, Paul Embery argues that this disconnect has been inevitable since the Left political establishment swallowed a poisonous brew of economic and social liberalism. They have come to despise traditional working-class values of patriotism, family and faith and instead embraced globalisation, rapid demographic change and a toxic, divisive brand of identity politics. Embery contends that the Left can only revive if it speaks once again to the priorities of working-class people by combining socialist economics with the cultural politics of belonging, place and community.”