Moving from retreat to re-tweet, US progressives have linked the personal and political to create a sense of shared purpose
In Europe the city's aflame, but America's Athens, Philadelphia, city of the founding fathers, has lit a very different touchpaper: its Occupy movement is the first in the country to announce it's running for Congress. Whether or not 29-year-old Nathan Kleinman beats the moderate incumbent, it says something about a new spirit of opportunism on the American left.
In December, a poll by the Pew Research Center found support for socialism now outweighs support for capitalism among a younger generation of Americans. In 2012 so far, in a spectacular series of victories, American progressives have taken on big oil, Hollywood and (some people's version of) God, winning every time.
The European left, meanwhile, is in freefall: the social democrats, once synonymous with Scandinavia, got just over 6% in last month's election for the Finnish presidency. In fact the only socialists governing alone in Europe today are Carwyn Jones in Wales and the Moscow-trained president of Cyprus. What has gone so badly wrong for the Euroleft, and what can they learn from the US?
The most recent progressive home-run – the high-profile reversal by the cancer charity Susan G Komen of its decision to de-fund the abortion advice charity Planned Parenthood (imagine Marie Curie doing battle with Marie Stopes) – has followed a familiar pattern of Twitter-enabled people power. In what politico.com has predicted will become the "textbook case on the political power of social media", Komen executives were clearly overwhelmed by a half-a-million-a-day tweet tsunami, 80 to 1 against the decision, that engulfed them.
The killing off of the internet censorship bills Sopa and Pipa in January, despite big-battalion backing by the entertainment industry, and Bank of America's binning of a proposal to charge for debit-card usage at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, were similarly internet-fuelled successes. The US left, it seems, has gone from retreat to re-tweet in just a few short years.
The progressive revival may be tech-enabled, but it's far from tech-driven. The real social web these movements have created is a web of values, a vision that somehow connects with people at an emotional level, joining the dots between the personal and the political to create a sense of shared purpose – though often using new digital tools. It wasn't a thinktank report – that staple tactic of the European left – that won the battle for Planned Parenthood but people like Linda from Las Vegas, a breast cancer survivor, who became an overnight YouTube sensation, when she literally bared her scars to demonstrate her anger at Komen's small-mindedness(telling them to kiss another part of her anatomy in the process).
The American left learned their emotional intelligence the hard way in the culture wars of the 70s and 80s, when good arguments seemed powerless against ignorance and prejudice. During the Bush era, Democratic thinkers like George Lakoff and Drew Westen started the push-back by teaching progressives the importance of "framing". Yet Karl Rove and the Republicans already had that playbook and used it with devastating efficiency.
The real secret to progressive success is a 68-year-old professor called Marshall Ganz, the Mark Zuckerberg of activism, who dropped out of Harvard to organise migrant workers in 1965 only to return almost 30 years later to finish his degree and teach a new generation what he'd learned in the field.
Ganz's work has inspired a myriad movements, from Obama's grassroots campaign in 2008 to the world's first trade union for models. At the core of his teaching is the idea that leaders must build a public narrative explaining their calling, a sort of progressive elevator pitch in three parts: why they feel called to act (story of self), how this act relates to the audience (story of us) and what urgent challenge this action seeks to address (the story of now).
It sounds simple (which is part of its success), but if you doubt its power take a look at a then little-known Senatorial candidate's speech in the Boston Democratic convention in 2004. You'll hear how a son of a Kenyan goat-herder running for Senate (self) was a symbol of American meritocracy (us) threatened by the policies of the Bush White House (now).
Flash forward to Ed Miliband and we see the source of his difficulty. Miliband has a plausibly good story of now ("responsible capitalism"), a so-so story of us ("squeezed middle") but hardly any story of self – so we fill in the blanks with our own version: David's brother, Gordon's spad, or the son of England's greatest Marxist theorist (my favourite).
Political therapy for Ed though will never solve the wider problem: a European left that is tired, dull, top-down and moribund. The American left, historically weak, is by necessity decentralised and diverse. This once meant disorganisation and division. But it's managed to find a new coherence across geography and generation.
Technology allowed the anti-Keystone Pipeline campaign to connect Nebraska farmers with DC environmentalists. But connecting people across time is just as important. A phalanx of institutes funded by philanthropists and the remarkable breakaway SEIU union have built a repository of knowledge of how movements win, creating what Forbes writer Giovanni Rodriguez calls "fast history", accelerating the pace of change.
Today's American left is where the old world of community organising and the new world of social media meet. The dismal official European left, by contrast, has neither invested in their past, nor in their future, discarding their history, ignoring new technology. Our only hope, if Obama, as looks likely, is re-elected, is that he might perhaps consider a new Marshall plan, to rebuild a left in Europe that's everywhere in ruins.