Latham's vision: climate change can save the ALP

MARK Latham is furious. With the ALP for turning its back on the legacy of economic reform. With Labor's opponents, accused of every possible malfeasance. And perhaps especially with himself, for coming to the leadership "too young" and "with too little life experience".

But there is more to his recent Quarterly Essay than a loner's visceral anger. His analysis of what he calls "the Keating settlement", which used competition to enhance economic growth and social mobility, is outstanding. And having examined its outcomes, he rightly asks: "How can any of Labor's true believers campaign against such a stunning record of success?" "Yet," he answers, "that is what large sections of the Labor movement have been doing," with Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard leading the charge.

That they have reflects the disintegration of a party whose "innermost layer is a cadre of trade union officials" that controls "MPs much like Britain's 18th-century system of rotten boroughs". Their interests lie less in electoral success than in grabbing shares of the party's shrinking pie. Severing the ALP's union connection would be "the most effective" response; but having "already lost so much in terms of workforce coverage", "the union/faction chiefs will not commit political hara-kiri".

Given that constraint, Latham's alternative lies in a poorly defined strategy of "community engagement" and reliance on primaries for preselection.

But the ALP is not alone. Although Latham neglects the international dimension, Labor's woes are merely the local manifestation of a global crisis of the social democratic parties. They were the first mass parties, building election-winning machines that depended on combining entrenchment in the industrial working class with broad public appeal. Their roots in tight-knit, socially homogenous communities provided them with carefully screened candidates, guarding against flakes and opportunists; the need to secure wider support drove them to the middle ground.

Those social foundations have now crumbled, and former glories with them. In northern Europe, the social democrats' share of the vote has fallen from 50 per cent or more 40 years ago to 30 per cent or less. The GFC might have restored their dominance; it hasn't, with social democracy's most prominent brands each losing about a third of the national electorate from its post-war peaks.

Moreover, the ageing and decline of party membership have been even starker than the electoral haemorrhage. Sweden's SAP has lost 60 per cent of its members since the early 1990s; the party's youth wing is smaller than the Swedish Pirates Party. As for the Austrian SPO, whose membership once covered nearly 10 per cent of the national population, an official recently suggested, facetiously but plausibly, that its last member could die as early as 2018.

To add to the problems, as membership has collapsed and quality control with it, the parties, historically pillars of everyday Calvinism, have become increasingly vulnerable to scandals and misjudgments, contributing to leadership instability. For much of the 20th century, Sweden's SAP changed leaders every 20 years; this century, its leaders are lucky to last four, with questionable expense claims causing the most recent upset.

Little wonder social democratic parties have experimented with any number of organisational innovations, including exactly those Latham advocates. Unfortunately, Latham ignores the invariably disappointing results. Far from closing the gap between parties and their electorates, primaries have widened it by empowering activists whose views are far more extreme than those of ordinary voters.

As for membership drives, their main success has been in attracting professionals interested in a career in politics: as a recent survey by the research foundation of the German SPD puts it, those recruits have proven "a political caste woefully short of life experience" that is capable of little more than being "fickle consumers of opinion polls".

And to make matters worse, mutual weakness has only accentuated the co-dependency between the social democratic parties and the unions, which are themselves in free fall. Despite efforts at separation, the effect has been to lock unions and social democrats in a fatal embrace.

In Sweden, for instance, where formal disaffiliation occurred in 1991, the industrial union federation, LO, still underwrites the SAP's election campaigns, contributing an estimated $100 million to the party's disastrous 2010 effort. No surprise then that the new Swedish party leader comes from the metalworkers union. And no surprise that social democratic parties, having often spearheaded reform in the 80s, are everywhere retreating from it.

But it is illusory to think that great leap backward will lift social democracy from its quagmire. As the SPD study argues, the social democrats' "sudden about-turn to a more traditionalist line will serve only to deepen their crisis of credibility". Nor, it concludes, will organisational tinkering do much good; for voters have come to view social democratic parties as "untrustworthy as well as incompetent". Even more importantly, they no longer believe "it is worth supporting the parties' aims".

To that fundamental challenge, Latham proposes a solution: climate change, which he casts as the rock on which social democracy's renewal will be built. But that is implausible to the point of being incomprehensible. It collapses the socialist promise of a world to win into an apocalyptic vision of a world to save, with Labor as its unlikely saviour. An ALP that endorsed that approach would not merely have lost its way but lost its mind.

Great parties rarely die. Instead, they shrivel away, taking when they can while giving less and less. Norman Mailer's admonition comes to mind: "There is a law of life, so cruel and so just: that one must grow or pay more for staying the same." With Labor facing that ever rising price, Latham's essay, perceptive though it at times is, offers no hope of resurrection.