In this week's readings, Hall laments that the left/Labour Party have provided few ideological or sense-making alternatives to the Right's ideology. Contented with the fiction that a worsening economy would "sharpen contradictions" and push people left, they fell into the trap of economic determinism and underestimated the force of ideology.
This argument, however, assumes that the people making up the Labour Party or the Democratic Party are honest about what they say their goals are. Thinking of the history of US healthcare, Hall's narrative would frame the lack of single payer healthcare here (unique among other rich, colonizer countries) as a gradual dampening of the Progressive initiative for national healthcare of the 20th century, where several bills were proposed but killed by conservatives. But some historians read this history very differently, arguing instead that US Progressives (largely middle or upper-middle class white people) acquiesced to the American (settler-colonial-racist) ideology from the very beginning. For example, what is usually championed as the first universal healthcare proposal was limited to men working in certain industries, and subsequent proposals also excluded unemployed people or people in certain (racialized non-white) industries and unmarried women.
What do you think of Hall's argument that Labour failed bowed down to the Right? What other examples and counter-examples can you think of?
(I think also of Nancy Pelosi saying that we need a strong Republican Party.)
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