The Return of Revolution
By all outward appearances, Christian Democratic parties thrived from the 1970s through the early 2000s. In the European Parliament, the European People’s Party (EPP) has regularly enjoyed a plurality. In Germany, the CDU/CSU remained dominant, with 48.69 percent of the vote in 1976, 48.89 percent in 1983, 40.9 percent in 1998, and 41.5 percent in 2013. In Italy, the DC was still well above 30 percent in the 1980s and just under 30 percent the last time it ran, in 1992. It was thereafter engulfed (along with the entire Italian political class) by the mammoth corruption investigation known as Mani Pulite or Clean Hands. Its members and voters did not vanish into thin air, however. They dispersed among new right and left parties, including two smaller Christian Democratic groups.
In France, Christian-minded groups merged in the 1970s with the classic right, a move that increased their influence. In 1984, this political force masterminded mass demonstrations that forced a Socialist president, François Mitterrand, to withdraw a reform bill that would have imperiled the religious school networks. Similar demonstrations against same-sex marriage in 2013 failed, but they helped conservative Christians to advance an ally, François Fillon, as candidate in the presidential election of 2017, and nearly get him elected.
In the last generation, Christian groups still dominated Belgian and Dutch politics. Other Christian groups emerged in Scandinavia. In Spain, Catholic groups became the backbone of Franco’s regime after 1945, the main agent of its liberalization in the 1950s, and the inspirers of its economic modernization in the 1960s. After the restoration of a parliamentary monarchy in 1975, they lent support to the People’s Party (PP), which was in charge from 1996 to 2004 under José María Aznar, and then again from 2011 to 2018 under Mariano Rajoy. In Portugal, the
CDS – People’s Party acted as the main rampart against a communist takeover in the late 1970s.
But Christian Democratic dominance was becoming increasingly hollow. It required, at the political and administrative level, in the E.U. and in national politics, an intensified cooperation with Social Democrats. Sometimes, the two parties ruled jointly through a “grand coalition” (a common development in Germany and Austria). In other instances, they entered larger coalitions that included more partners, from the old liberals to the new Green militants or regional parties. Sometimes the power-sharing meant that the parties alternated in power but rarely changed the policies of the preceding administration.
Outwardly, the trend toward Christian Democratic–Social Democratic fusion rested on the familiar postwar pillars: Atlanticism, the “social market,” family policy, the rule of law, and ever-greater European integration. But in truth each of these priorities was modified, with the Social Democrats dictating terms. When the Cold War was over, Atlanticism became a commitment to a loosely defined “world order.” “Social” economics drifted toward an unstable combination of globalized capitalism for those who could afford to participate, and an extended welfare state for those who could not. Family policy was no longer understood in the traditional sense, but was reframed to support experimentation under the new sexual mores. The rule of law came to be understood as the rule of court and the implementation of ever expanding “human rights.” And the European project was revised in an even more drastic way.
Why did Social Democrats insist on these changes? And why did Christian Democrats oblige?
In its first phase in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, social democracy sought to improve the worker’s condition incrementally by democratic and peaceful means, while a more radical socialism advocated revolution and violence. This led to the 1917 schism between Social Democrats and socialists on the one hand, and communists on the other. But the schism was never complete. Whereas some communists adhered to Social Democracy in the subsequent decades, many Social Democrats were attracted to communism, or at least to the Popular Front sympathy for communism. Fascism and national socialism—another form of radical politics, which adopted many of the grievances and aims of socialism and mimicked communist terror tactics—also attracted former Social Democrats and communists in many countries.
After 1945, the leaders of Social Democratic parties were a filtered remnant of an earlier, more radical element. Whatever their considerable merits, they still carried an ambivalent political DNA. As they came of age amid the material wealth generated by the postwar boom, the conservatism and pragmatism of the postwar settlement grated on their utopian sensibilities. It was no surprise, then, that the next Social Democratic generation—happy baby boomers, raised in comfortable homes, usually college-educated—relapsed into socialism’s more radical variations (the so-called “New Left”). When the rising generation became active in the supposed “center-left” parties, they increasingly discarded their parents’ hard-won wisdom, deriding it as bourgeois degeneracy and betrayal. They flocked to “pacifism” (the Orwellian euphemism for disarming and only criticizing democratic countries), Trotskyism, Castroism, Maoism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and finally Red terrorism, from the German Red Army Faction to the Italian Red Brigades, from the old-new IRA to the new-old ETA, from the French Action directe to the transnational Carlos network. The children of postwar Social Democrats frequently mingled under such circumstances with the sons and daughters of communists and fascists, who had reasons of their own to cultivate New Left radicalism.
Even the Social Democratic baby boomers who kept their distance from the New Left couldn’t entirely evade utopian dreams. They were interested in a piecemeal, Fabian, “daily life” revolution that would advance the welfare state and affirm the ongoing sexual revolution. Over time, their “Second Left” agenda came to include John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, judicial activism, affirmative action, Jürgen Habermas’s supranationalism, and internationalism. It was social engineering with a human face, but social engineering nonetheless.
Christian Democratic baby boomers might have realized what was at stake and broken the grand alliances with their former associates in order to protect the distinctively modern form of Christian civilization—governed in accord with a fundamentally anti-utopian and thus anti-totalitarian moral order. It was a precious and indispensable mode of political modernity that Christian Democracy had done so much to make possible. But this generation was destabilized by the unraveling of the churches. (Protestant denominations fared little better than Catholicism in the 1960s and after, with the exception of small splinter churches.) The supposed “center-right” element of European society underwent its own sex and family crisis. There was a pervasive sense that the foundations of anything meaningfully “conservative” were eroding. As for the younger Christian Democrats in France who didn’t leave the fold, they were nonetheless in such a confused state of mind that joining the neo-Fabian Social Democrats on most issues and subscribing to most of the Rawls-Habermas dogmas seemed quite natural.
France can serve as a case study. Regions such as Brittany and nearby western provinces had been Catholic strongholds since 1789, but in the last fifty years have shifted left. Régis Debray, the son of prominent conservative Catholic activists, fought with Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The new Socialist party created by Mitterrand in 1971 was said to be a three-tiered affair: one-third Social Democrats of the old school, like Gaston Defferre, the mayor of Marseilles; one-third opportunistic ex-radicals or ex-Trotskyites like Michel Rocard and Lionel Jospin (both later to be prime ministers); and one-third Catholics like Jacques Delors, the former leader of the Christian union CFDT and a future chairman of the European Commission in Brussels. Mitterrand himself was from a right-wing Catholic background and merely masqueraded as a socialist out of political ambition. Ségolène Royal, who was a charismatic socialist candidate in 2007, was revealed to be a practicing Catholic. Emmanuel Macron, the maverick “neither Right nor Left” politician who won the 2017 presidential election against the Catholic-supported Fillon, was baptized as a Catholic as a teenager on his own initiative. He claims to be a disciple of the Protestant philosopher Paul Ricoeur, himself a pupil of the “neither Right nor Left” Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier.