Progressives need to learn these lessons from the national populists in order to defeat them.
“The victory of ideas needs organising”. These are the wise words of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Some might, with some justification, argue that Lenin and the Bolsheviks took their own dictum too much to heart. But it’s obviously the case that while ideas are necessary, they are insufficient on their own – they need to be battled for and fought for and that requires organisation. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”.
Let’s assume that progressives have some good ideas: wealth taxes, media reform, proportional representation, a four-day week, universal basic income and services, social ownership of water, investment in good public services and mass social home building, would be top of most people’s wish lists of the politically desirable. So why does it feel like everything is going backwards?
A big answer is that we’re not very good at organisation. And until we are the national populists are going to keep winning. Here are seven problems progressive face when it comes to effective organisation, and by implication how we might start to address them.
A Lack of Vision
First, a lack of vision: progressives have lost their way. In the absence of a unifying theory of change, which Marxism offered, and in the evidential crisis of social democracy, there is no ideological loadstar for progressives, no clear idea of what the good society or the good life might be, just rather bloodless and technocratic small scale reforms to alleviate the screaming reality of another famous dictum, this time from Mrs. Thatcher that “there is no alternative” or TINA as it became known.
If you don’t know what you’re organising for when you start, well that’s a bit of a problem to say the least. Meanwhile the national populists offer rough and ready answers around culture and geography that may lack coherence but speak powerfully to people’s sense of loss, grievance and resentment. Neither the opportunities of the 2008 global crash nor COVID created a sufficient opportunity for progressives to reassert a different vision of how the world should be – to build back better. This is by far and away the biggest problem progressive organisation faces.
Lack of Long Term Thinking
Second, playing the long game: without a vision it’s impossible to play the long game. Instead, we just go for short term managerial reforms which might be good in their own right but don’t add up to anything transformative or long term. The new right meanwhile are not just both bold and ambitious but farsighted, seeking to challenge and change the big institutions which once favoured progressives but are now in play, such as universities, the public media and the judiciary. This then chimes with the third problem.
Lack of Resilience
Persistence: “great deeds are not done by brute strength but by perseverance”. Samuel Johnson told us. In this I’m reminded of the dogged determination and tenacity of the new right who in the midst with the triumph of the New Deal and the high point Keynesian welfarism in the mid 1940s, committed themselves to winning the battle of ideas for their free market nostrums. It must have felt like an impossible task, but they persisted. It took them three decades to get there but they never once gave up and never stop shooting for the moon. Progressives can learn much from this tenacity.
A Distaste for Popularity
Fourth, the need to be right, not popular: progressives struggle to have impact because they’re just too ‘good’. We want to be right, and we want to be truthful. We don’t want to sell simplistic answers when we know the world is complex. All of this is commendable, but it limits our impact. How can we balance being right with being popular and successful? The desire to be right and understand freezes us into inaction. Famously according to one right wing US activist in the White House, progressives analyse what the right do and while they analyse, the right act again and the progressives then analyse that move. And so, it goes.
Purity Over Purpose
Fifth we come to purity over purpose: this desire to be pure isn’t just about what we want, it also impacts on how we try to make change happen. Here we hit up against the joint tyrannies of horizontalism and structurelessness. If you want to be truly representative and inclusive, then you must reach out to the most marginalised groups to ensure their voices are heard and central to creation of solutions to the problems they face. In addition, we demand perfect internal democracy. While this is entirely laudable, it stretches progressive organisations to at best ineffectiveness and at worst to breaking point. The problem being we can never ever be flat enough nor inclusive enough. The impact is paralysing. The right never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Infighting
Sixth, and bizarrely, progressives lack solidarity: all these problems combine to mean that progressives find it hard to work together effectively. In particular the lack of shared vision and the questioning of others’ purity combine to make long term strategic alliances hard to form. Meanwhile the new right achieve solidarity with seeming ease. For them there are no silos, no logos, no egos and no halos, just a ruthless focus on what issues will promote the right and sink the left, what is in their interests and what isn’t.
Money
And seventh, there is the issue of money: it might be at the root of all evil but the victory of ideas needs cash. Yes, a lot can and is done by volunteers but to have real impact requires money to invest in research, communication and organisation. Of course, progressives suffer from not having the equivalent resources to the already corporate rich, but even the resources that are available are overly focused on addressing symptoms and not causes of economic and societal failure. In short, too many progressive funders are unprepared to be political with even a small ‘p’. It puts us at a huge disadvantage. Just look at the mismatch in resource is when it comes to right wing versus progressive media. Byline Times does a terrific job, what more could it do if it had a fraction of the resources of GB News?
I’m busy reading Marco D’eramo’s book from last year Masters: the invisible war of the powerful against their subjects published by Polity. It sets out clearly just how ruthless and ambitious the new right have been and still are. In particular in investing long term in people, big ideas and big thinking not just to tweak the system but to transform it. Investment made decades ago in the 1950s are paying off today in terms of the intellectual and organisational foundations of Trumpism.
Of course we can’t be what we’re not. We’re not going to lie or cheat or inflame debate by othering people. We know that means always shape ends, and that you can’t build a good society by being bad. We are by nature sceptical, questioning, difficult people.
But my word we’re going to have to find our way round the dilemmas, contradictions and limitations of at least the seven points made above, if not more. If we don’t, we are going to keep losing and that isn’t an option for our society or our planet.
This article was originally published in the Byline Times on 29th May 2025.