MEANWHILE, IN GERMANY: Germany’s Die Linke (Left) party is in crisis.

Born in 2005 from the merger of an East-German left faction and a smaller West-German one, Die Linke’s support skyrocketed to 12 percent of the vote in 2009’s elections to the Bundestag, a level of support the party maintained for nearly a decade—to the alarm of the political establishment. More recently, however, the party’s electoral support and labor-union base have shrunk. In last year’s elections, Die Linke garnered less than 5 percent of ballots and lost nearly half its seats—its worst result ever. Its share of the union vote slid to 6 percent, down from 17 percent in 2009.

Until recently, Sahra Wagenknecht was one of Die Linke’s most prominent members. Catapulted to the Bundestag in 2009, she was a deputy leader of the party from 2010 to 2014. In the Bundestag, she served as parliamentary co-chairwoman of her party from 2015 to 2019 and as leader of the opposition (against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition) until 2017.

Wagenknecht announced her resignation as parliamentary leader in November 2019, citing burnout. Yet many believe her decision was at least partly motivated by the party becoming increasingly captured by the kind of “progressive neoliberalism” (to borrow Nancy Fraser’s term) that seems to have infected, to one degree or another, all Western left-wing parties, precipitating their decline.

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It’s no wonder, she argues, that “the left today no longer stands for justice in the eyes of many people, but above all for self-righteousness.” The instinctive repulsion many ordinary people feel for the left nowadays is, of course, one of the main reasons for its electoral decline. However, the truth is even more uncomfortable, Wagenknecht suggests: Lower-middle working classes today tend to overwhelmingly vote for right-wing figures and parties, such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Law and Justice in Poland, because the latter tend to offer more redistributive and pro-labor—that is, more “left-wing”—economic platforms than nominally left parties.

To reverse this decline, Wagenknecht makes the case for what she calls “left conservatism”: a left that returns to its original mission of improving the lives of the working and middle classes but also understands that doing so means rejecting globalism—turning, instead, to the democratic nation-state as the only terrain on which it is possible to collectively challenge capitalism. Such a left appreciates that states should take care of the well-being of their own citizens, especially the most underprivileged, before they can for newcomers from far-flung places. Such a left, finally, recognizes people’s need for “recognition, belonging, and community.”

So a more nationalist-oriented socialism for Germany, then. What could possibly go wrong?