As leftist parties reorientated themselves toward gaining political support and power…they naturally selected as leaders technocrats and managers rather than intellectuals and activists - people comfortable with, and good at, the ordinary politics of ordinary times. These new leaders often presided over unprecedented power and political success, but they lacked the old-timers’ hunger, creative spark, and theoretical sophistication. As a result, by the last decades of the twentieth century, the democratic left had largely become estranged from social democracy’s original rationale and goals, clinging only to the specific policy measures that their predecessors had advocated decades before. Few recognised that these policies, while crucial achievements in their day, had originally been viewed as only a means to a larger ends, and fewer still tended enough of the movement’s original fires to be able to forge innovative responses to contemporary challenges. This left them vulnerable to other political forces offering seemingly better solutions to pressing problems.
— Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s 20th Century, p.188 (via redrabbleroz)
(via monkeytypist)
