Progressives Need a Global Movement
It's a strange irony that in recent years the nationalist right has gotten much better at international organizing than the ostensibly cosmopolitan left. The Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, went global during Donald Trump's first term; it's held gatherings in Israel, South Korea, Hungary and Argentina, among other countries. American conservatives have a growing pantheon of international leaders they take inspiration from, including Hungary's Viktor Orban, El Salvador's Nayib Bukele and Argentina's Javier Milei.
This right-wing internationale trades ideas and memes. Its members support one another across borders. A steady stream of American conservative operatives, including the influential strategist Chris Rufo, has passed through Hungary's government-aligned Danube Institute, learning from the country's successful record of using the state to crush liberal institutions. Earlier this year members of the MAGA movement from Alex Jones all the way up to Vice President JD Vance rallied around an ultranationalist Romanian presidential candidate who'd been disqualified due to charges of Russian interference. This week, the nationalist group Patriots for Europe Foundation held a conference at the European Parliament with members of India's right-wing government, aimed at building an alliance based on 'civilizational sovereignty' — as opposed to universal human rights — and the fight against Islamism.
There is nothing comparable to this global network among progressives, which is one sign of the left's deep crisis.
Partly, progressives' problem is one of inertia. For decades now, when people on the left have coordinated across borders, they've often done it through liberal institutions: international bodies like the United Nations, international NGOs, academic conferences. These institutions tend to favor styles of communication that are highly specialized and bureaucratic. (To be part of the U.N.'s orbit, for example, grass-roots feminist groups often must learn its jargon: 'gender mainstreaming,' 'S.H.R.H.,' 'duty-bearers.') 'The progressive forces, the left and socialist forces, lost the way of communication with the people,' Alexis Tsipras, a leftist former prime minister of Greece, told me. They became, he said, 'more systemic.'
And now the systems that sustained the left — particularly academia and nonprofits — are under concerted attack. 'The left basically depended on a fantasy view of the stability of institutions,' said Subir Sinha, a scholar at the University of London who has studied the links between far-right movements in India and Europe. Progressives, he said, neither anticipated nor planned for how they might answer a central question of our time: 'How would you do politics when the ground has shifted so dramatically from under your feet?'
Some of that planning has now begun, however belatedly. This week, Tsipras convened a conference in Athens of progressives from Europe, Turkey, Latin America and the United States to discuss the global crisis of liberal democracy. It was the second such gathering he's organized, and the first since Trump was re-elected. Among the speakers was Senator Bernie Sanders, joining remotely. 'Right-wing extremists all over the world have been organizing effectively, and I think that it's time that we built an international progressive socialist movement, and this is a step forward,' he said.
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