Download or read book Left in the Center written by Daniel Soyer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Soyer's history of the Liberal Party of New York State, Left in the Center, shows the surprising relationship between Democratic Socialism and mainstream American politics. Beginning in 1944 and lasting until 2002, the Liberal Party offered voters an ideological seal of approval and played the role of strategic kingmaker in the electoral politics of New York State. The party helped elect presidents, governors, senators, and mayors, and its platform reflected its founders' social democratic principles. In practical politics, the Liberal Party's power resided in its capacity to steer votes to preferred Democrats or Republicans with a reasonable chance of victory. This uneasy balance between principle and pragmatism, which ultimately proved impossible to maintain, is at the heart of the dramatic political story presented in Left in the Center. The Liberal Party, the longest-lived of New York's small parties, began as a means for anti-Communist social democrats to have an impact on the politics and policy of New York City, Albany, and Washington, DC. It provided a political voice for labor activists, independent liberals, and pragmatic social democrats. Although the party devolved into what some saw as a cynical patronage machine, it remained a model for third-party power and for New York's influential Conservative and, later, the Working Families parties. With an active period ranging from the successful senatorial career of Jacob Javits to the mayoralties of John Lindsay and Rudy Giuliani, the Liberal Party effectively shaped the politics and policy of New York. The practical gains and political cost of that complicated trade-off is at the heart of Left in the Center.
Download or read book Why the Left Loses written by Kennedy, Paul and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world, parties of the left and center-left have been struggling, losing ground to right-wing parties and various forms of reactionary populism. This book brings together a range of leading academics and experts on social democratic politics and policy to offer an international, comparative view of the changing political landscape. Using case studies from the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Australia and New Zealand contributors argue that despite different local and specific contexts, the mainstream center-left is beset by a range of common challenges. Analysis focuses on institutional and structural factors, the role of key individuals, and the atrophy of progressive ideas as interconnected reasons for the current struggles of the center-left.
Download or read book Radical Left Parties in Europe written by Luke March and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has happened to the European radical left after the collapse of the USSR? How has it reacted, reformed, even revived? This new volume is one of the first to provide an overview of the main developments in contemporary European radical left parties (those defining themselves as to the left of, and not merely on the left of social democracy), which are now an increasingly visible phenomenon in European party politics. Unlike many of the existing studies it focuses on communist and non-communist parties, addresses their non-parliamentary and international activity, and takes a pan-European perspective, focusing on both Eastern and Western Europe. March focuses on key contemporary left parties, the nature of their radicalism and their ideological and strategic positions, and overall, addresses their current dynamics and immediate electoral prospects. The book argues that radical left parties are still afflicted by existential crises about the nature of ‘socialism’, and the future of communist parties in particular is under threat. The most successful left parties are no longer extremist, but present themselves as defending values and policies that social democrats have allegedly abandoned, focus on pragmatism rather than ideology and increasingly orientate themselves towards government. Providing a significant contribution to existing literature in the field, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, political parties and radical politics.
Download or read book Left Parties in National Governments written by J. Olsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes why Left Parties enter national government, what they do when they get there and what effect this has on them. Alongside two comparative chapters, this book features detailed case-studies of European Left Parties in government.
Download or read book New Parties in Government written by Kris Deschouwer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-02-08 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Party literature is largely focused on the rise and success of new parties and their effects on party systems and older parties. This book, on the other hand, provides a valuable and original addition to such literature by analyzing what happens to a party when it enters government for the first time. Leading contributors assess how these parties, whether old or new, change when entering government by answering a set of questions: How and why has their role changed? What are the consequences of change? What explains the evolution from principled opposition to loyal opposition and eventually to participation in the executive? Which characteristics of the parties can be held responsible? Which characteristics of the parties’ context should be brought into the picture? What have been the effects of the status change on party organization, party ideology and electoral results? Covering a wide range of European parties such as the Finish Greens, right wing parties (FN, Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale) and new parties in Italy , The Netherlands and Sweden to name a few; this book will be of particular interest to scholars and students concerned with party systems, political parties and comparative politics.
Download or read book Leftism Reinvented written by Stephanie L. Mudge and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market's tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own--albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone. To better understand today's strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge's Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking with an assumption that parties simply respond to forces beyond their control, Mudge argues that left parties' changing promises expressed the worldviews of different kinds of experts. To understand how left parties speak, we have to understand the people who speak for them. Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties' main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters' loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to "spin" party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a representative vacuum in their wake. Leftism Reinvented raises new questions about the roles and responsibilities of left parties--and their experts--in politics today.--
Download or read book New Parties of the Left written by Daniel Bensaïd and published by IMG Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its latest publication "New Parties of the Left: Experiences from Europe," the IIRE, in collaboration with Resistance Books, provides a much needed analysis of the European regroupment of the radical left. With its pan-European focus combined with detailed accounts from France, Denmark, Britain, Germany, Italy and Portugal this book offers a unique and unprecedented insight into contemporary political history of the radical left in Europe. Social democratic and Stalinist parties, including the Labour Party in Britain and the Socialist Party in France, have shifted to the right across the continent and have fully embraced neo-liberalism. This has opened up a political space to the left of social-democracy which has been filled by new formations of the radical left over the last decades. The book starts out with an introductory background chapter which takes an overall look at the developments of the radical left in Europe since 1989 and the collapse of the Left as we knew it. This chapter provides the reader with new statistical information, such as membership figures and election results, about the left parties and discusses similarities, differences and political challenges for these new parties. The late IIRE Fellow Daniel Bensaid puts the discussion on the reorganisation of the European left into a broader historical and ideological perspective in the chapter 'An idea whose time has come'. With the financial crisis, Bensaid writes, a holy alliance between the left and the right is being preached in order to socialise the losses after having privatised the profits. Social democratic parties have, across the continent, actively contributed in the destruction of the tools of social solidarity, and hereby undermined their own social base. At the same time, European communist parties are undergoing a slow agonising death. Against this background, Bensaid argues, there is a need for new anticapitalist parties, as he points out the successful stories across the continent. The following chapters provide valuable and unique first hand insight into the development and discussions within the New Anti-capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste) in France, the Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) in Denmark, Respect in Britain, The Left (Die Linke) in Germany, the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) in Italy and the Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda) in Portugal. Each chapter covers a political party and is written by a long-standing member of the party in question. Contributors: Daniel Bensaid Salvatore Cannavo Jorge Costa Klaus Engert Alain Krivine John Lister Miguel Romero Alda Sousa Alan Thornett Bertil Videt Michael Voss
Download or read book Left in the Center written by Daniel Soyer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Soyer's history of the Liberal Party of New York State, Left in the Center, shows the surprising relationship between Democratic Socialism and mainstream American politics. Beginning in 1944 and lasting until 2002, the Liberal Party offered voters an ideological seal of approval and played the role of strategic kingmaker in the electoral politics of New York State. The party helped elect presidents, governors, senators, and mayors, and its platform reflected its founders' social democratic principles. In practical politics, the Liberal Party's power resided in its capacity to steer votes to preferred Democrats or Republicans with a reasonable chance of victory. This uneasy balance between principle and pragmatism, which ultimately proved impossible to maintain, is at the heart of the dramatic political story presented in Left in the Center. The Liberal Party, the longest-lived of New York's small parties, began as a means for anti-Communist social democrats to have an impact on the politics and policy of New York City, Albany, and Washington, DC. It provided a political voice for labor activists, independent liberals, and pragmatic social democrats. Although the party devolved into what some saw as a cynical patronage machine, it remained a model for third-party power and for New York's influential Conservative and, later, the Working Families parties. With an active period ranging from the successful senatorial career of Jacob Javits to the mayoralties of John Lindsay and Rudy Giuliani, the Liberal Party effectively shaped the politics and policy of New York. The practical gains and political cost of that complicated trade-off is at the heart of Left in the Center.
Download or read book The Left Unraveled written by Thomas A. Koelble and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1980s both the British Labour Party and the West German Social Democrats (SPD), confronted with serious internal challenges from the political left, experienced an erosion of support that resulted in the emergence of new political parties--the British Social Democratic Party and the West German Green Party. Explicitly comparative, this study presents a theoretically innovative analysis while offering a sophisticated understanding of the political confrontations between social democrats, the new left, traditional socialists, and trade unionists in both Britain and West Germany. By focusing on the established parties rather than on external developments, Koelble departs from conventional methodology regarding the fortunes of political parties. In examining the fundamental processes of decision making and coalition building within the SPD and the Labour Party, he argues that it is the organizational structures within parties that shape political results by setting limits, creating opportunities, and determining strategies.
Download or read book The New Left in France written by Charles Hauss and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1978-10-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Leviathan written by David Horowitz and published by Three Rivers Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the influence of rich and powerful left-wing organizations and politicians, drawing connections between the Obama administration and progressive groups to explore what the authors believe to be socialist agendas behind hot-button issues.
Download or read book The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics written by Dan Hough and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in either English or German to analyse the development of Germany's newest political party, the Left Party. It compares and contrasts the party's development with that of Germany's most well-known outsider party - the Greens. It also analyses the party's performance in office in two eastern German Länder. Finally, the book also puts the merger between the PDS and the WASG under the microscope before speculating on the party's future prospects.
Download or read book Movement Parties Against Austerity written by Donatella della Porta and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ascendance of austerity policies and the protests they have generated have had a deep impact on the shape of contemporary politics. The stunning electoral successes of SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Italy, alongside the quest for a more radical left in countries such as the UK and the US, bear witness to a new wave of parties that draws inspiration and strength from social movements. The rise of movement parties challenges simplistic expectations of a growing separation between institutional and contentious politics and the decline of the left. Their return demands attention as a way of understanding both contemporary socio-political dynamics and the fundamentals of political parties and representation. Bridging social movement and party politics studies, within a broad concern with democratic theories, this volume presents new empirical evidence and conceptual insight into these topical socio-political phenomena, within a cross-national comparative perspective.
Download or read book Searching for Socialism written by Leo Panitch and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and essential history of the Labour new left from Tony Benn to Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn’s rapid ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party, driven by a groundswell of popular support particularly among the young, was met at the time by a baffled media. Just where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? In Searching for Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys argue that it is only by understanding Corbyn’s roots in the Bennite Labour New Left’s long struggle to transcend the limits of “parliamentary socialism” and democratise the party, as a precondition for democratising the state, can you understand his surge to become leader of the party. Closely analyzing the forces inside the party aligned against Corbyn’s leadership, Panitch and Leys explain what happened between the validation of the Corbyn project in the 2017 election, while advancing an ambitious programme of democratic socialist measures unmatched anywhere since the 1970s, and the electoral defeat amidst the Brexit conjuncture of 2019. They argue that while this defeat marked the farthest point to which the generation formed in the 1970s was able to carry the Labour new left project, it seems unlikely that the new generation of activists will quickly see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party, so as to fundamentally change it. In the face of the contradictions being generated by twenty-first-century capitalism, and the need for discovering and developing new political forms adequate to addressing them, this book is required reading for democratic socialists, not just in Britain but everywhere.
Download or read book A Changing World a New Response written by New Left Party and published by . This book was released on 1990* with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rethinking the New Left written by V. Gosse and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gosse, one of the foremost historians of the American postwar left, has crafted an engaging and concise synthetic history of the varied movements and organizations that have been placed under the broad umbrella known as the New Left. As one reader notes, gosse 'has accomplished something difficult and rare, if not altogether unique, in providing a studied and moving account of the full array of protest movements - from civil rights and Black Power, to student and antiwar protest, to women's and gay liberation, to Native American, Asian American, and Puerto Rican activism - that defined the American sixties as an era of powerfully transformative rebellions...His is a 'big-tent' view that shows just how rich and varied 1960s protest was.' In contrast to most other accounts of this subject, the SDS and white male radicals are taken out of the center of the story and placed more toward its margins. A prestigious project from a highly respected historian, The New Left in the United States, 1955-1975 will be a must-read for anyone interested in American politics of the postwar era.
Download or read book Responsible Parties written by Frances Rosenbluth and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How popular democracy has paradoxically eroded trust in political systems worldwide, and how to restore confidence in democratic politics In recent decades, democracies across the world have adopted measures to increase popular involvement in political decisions. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates; ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly; many places now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more specific parties rather than two dominant ones.Yet voters keep getting angrier.There is a steady erosion of trust in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions, culminating most recently in major populist victories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue that devolving power to the grass roots is part of the problem. Efforts to decentralize political decision-making have made governments and especially political parties less effective and less able to address constituents’ long-term interests. They argue that to restore confidence in governance, we must restructure our political systems to restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.
