Western social discourse has turned a dark corner, what is going wrong and what can be done to remedy it?

Source - Andy Feliciotti

I write this on the same weekend as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, for better or more likely worse, one of the most socially influential figures of the 21st century, has symbolically bent the knee to the violent social conservatism that has recently come to the forefront of right-wing politics across Europe and North America. This is pretty bad news. While the relevance of Facebook and Instagram to political discourse in 2025 is debatable, especially in comparison to a site like X, formally Twitter, the Muskian, laissez-faire approach to moderation Zuckerberg has adopted will undoubtedly serve to further pollute the area of online interaction with deliberately incendiary rhetoric.  

While one may take heart in the fact that it is doubtful that Zuckerberg’s policy changes are based on any ideological foundation, given this represents a fairly drastic departure from any of his previous posturing, this represents a small example of a wider problem, the socio-political zeitgeist appears to have abandoned the progressive left wing.

This shift is most clearly recognisable in the candidates put forward by the largest left-wing parties in the US and the UK. As recently as eight years ago, progressivism appeared energised and coordinated, popular populists Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who, while controversial and whose viability in winning any sort of democratic mandate I may discuss at some other time, are very clearly a far cry from the milquetoast centrism touted by figures like Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer. In short, left-wing politics has neutered itself to the point where many voters have lost any hope that it can offer any meaningful improvement to their lives.  

This aversion to any ostensibly left-wing ideological foundation comes at a time where the average consumer finds themselves in an historically bad position, caught between stagnant wages and souring prices, conditions which should be fertile ground for left-wing support. In practice, however, the left’s championing of the economic status quo, fuelled by paranoia of scaring away an increasingly small constituency of swing voters has left the general malaise of disenfranchisement to be fully exploited by the populist right, an opportunity they have grabbed with both hands. 

The best real-world example of this is evident in the failure of the 2024 democratic presidential campaign. Despite the prevailing journalistic narrative of the campaign’s failure being one of over-eager leftism scaring the proverbial horses, the opposite is true. The latter months of the campaign were characterised almost exclusively by stunts and messaging seemingly geared entirely to alienate the party’s progressive base. For instance the wheeling out of the McCain and Cheney families as political props, a truly baffling decision given that even among the increasingly slim proportion of the population identifying as ‘swing voters’ the name Cheney has almost nothing but negative connotations, it should go without saying that by the time he left the office of Vice President in 2008, Dick Cheney was one of the most unpopular politicians in modern US history.  

The platforming of historic right-wing political figures, while not single-handedly losing Harris the election is symptomatic of the wider issues which did. The spending power of the average America voter is at an a post-war low, the people feel disenfranchised and unempowered, promising a continuation of the socio-economic status quo was not going to win majority support. Voter’s support for Trump’s promise of massive tariffs on imported goods, however misguided, is representative of a real desire for dramatic change to the economic institutions which have so far failed them, the lesson left-wing parties can learn from this is that people are not necessarily scared of dramatic change to a system they already feel is dysfunctional and there is appetite for fairly radical transformation, provided it can be packaged behind a speaker with enough charisma. 

So, now that the failures of the left, from a policy perspective, have been established, what is the danger, really, of the alternative aside from a deeper entrenchment of neoliberal economic values? The answer is simply that fiscal and social conservatism rarely arrive separately. Symptomatic of economic disenfranchisement, there appears to be a growing appetite for increasingly rabid and, I would argue, borderline fascistic social conservatism, a phenomenon which is already bearing fruit in increasingly fervent attacks against progressive legal rulings, most obviously Roe vs Wade, and as of this week Obergefell vs Hodges which federally protects gay marriage. While the actual manifestation of socially conservative talking points has thus far broadly remained contained in the US, post-war history has shown that where the US goes, western Europe will generally follow, it would be of no surprise if by the end of the decade, similar phenomena were to infect the EU and Britian. All this is to say that the western liberal tradition is increasingly threatened, especially in the context of an increasingly multipolar world order, without liberalism to differentiate western governments to the authoritarian, but more economically promising regimes of the east, an accelerated shift in international influence away from post-soviet liberal international order is likely.  

Despite the admittedly bleak outlook, there remains one key fact that offers some hope: progressive policies, for the most part, remain unambiguously popular. To evidence this, I will again refer to the US elections of November 2024. Apart from electing congressmen and a president, American voters in a number of states were also offered referenda on state-level policy and in almost every instance, support for individual social issues, especially abortion rights, overperformed the democratic ballot significantly. For instance, amendment 4 in Florida which aimed to extend the window for abortion access from 6 weeks, despite failing to reach the 60% threshold required for its passage won majority support with 57% of voters supporting the resolution. This in comparison to the puny 43% support for Kamala Harris shows that despite apparent rejection of liberally minded politicians in the state, there remains popular appetite for liberal policy (This, as an example, perhaps speaks to wider problems with the western conception of the party-political system but I digress). 

 A further point of hope for the future of the liberal tradition is that, with a republican back in the white house, leftists can once again position themselves as a counterculture. This is by no means a long-term solution and may appear a wholly superficial factor in shaping a societies social outlook, but I am of the opinion that the dominance of progressive liberalism in the social sphere for the last decade has allowed right-wing figureheads to position themselves as rebellious, almost punk, public figures. In short, the prolonged liberal dominance of the social sphere had the unintentional side effect of making it ‘cool’ to be a right-wing reactionary, especially among young men (e.g. Andrew Tate et al). Now that ‘their man’, so to speak, is back in office, the Right is deprived of this leverage in discourse and as inevitably becomes apparent that fiscally conservative policy is more continuous than disruptive to the status quo of neoliberal economic policy, I hope that the wind will leave the sails of the social conservatism discourse machine.  

Is this to say that the problem will solve itself? Of course not, to avoid the perpetuation of this cycle of reactionary social discourse, the underlying economic qualms underpinning it must be resolved. It has become evident that the neoliberal approach to economics must be reevaluated, new ideas must be offered. I, not being an economist, am hesitant to suggest what these might be, but I am certain that a new path must be paved.