Editor’s Page

Look left today and you will see intellectual crisis. Look first at the mainstream. Social democrats led governments across Europe in recent years. Their talk of a “third way” often displaced social imagination. They rushed to be the “center” instead of trying to pull the center to the left. Now they are losing power or are in electoral jeopardy across the continent.

The French Socialist Party seemed to be a partial exception. It made a credible effort to balance socialist concerns with market exigencies: it enacted a thirty-five-hour work week, extended health insurance to poorer citizens, reduced unemployment by nine hundred thousand. But it could not link these measures to a larger vision. Lionel Jospin failed to mobilize political support through social legislation and even fled the word “socialist” at election time.

Some “radicals” have a canned explanation of what’s wrong: nobody is “radical enough.” What does this mean? Siphoning off votes, Nader-like, so that governments are delivered into conservative hands? Trotskyists and Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s faction did this in France, and “Refoundation Communists” did the same in Italy. They are part of a left-that-never-learns. If the social democratic left is in deep crisis, and if the growth of right-wing populism in Europe is cause for considerable concern, it doesn’t follow that the left-that-never-learns offers a...