Protest against Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, 2017. Image: Erik McGregor/SIPA USA/PA Images.
OpenDemocracy asks who is responsible for the global rise of the far right? In his recent diagnosis of modern capitalism and escalating threats to liberal democracy Michael Sandel has offered an elegant answer.
He observes that for many of our fellow citizens capitalism has failed to deliver, and yet across the planet progressive politics remains in crisis: it lacks an animating purpose or energy. This is expressed politically in electoral defeats and ideologically in the absence of a conception of the good life. For Sandel, progressive politics must rediscover its essential moral purpose. This challenge goes far beyond questions of material justice: it is one of historic proportions, nothing less than the need to build a new public philosophy for progressive politics. How do we in the UK respond to such a challenge? Not least because Jeremy Corbyn and the current Labour Party appear to be exceptions to this overall story of defeat and decline.
