Sun, Feb 1, 2026
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From the SFIO to the PS, from Lincoln's party to Trump's GOP, from the New Deal to the Third Way: how political parties drift rightward and their elites converge.
Transparency note
This column is the result of a collaboration between a human (Pépé) and an artificial intelligence (Claude, Anthropic). The guiding ideas, editorial direction, and final approval are human. Research and drafting are AI-assisted.
Because AI can produce inaccuracies, every factual claim is sourced from verifiable academic, encyclopedic, or journalistic documents. Sources are listed at the end of the article.
This text reflects only the views of its human editor, who takes full responsibility.
This week, I opened two history books side by side. One about France, the other about the United States. And I saw the same film, with different actors but an identical script: parties born on the left that end up on the right, parties already on the right that drift further still, and elites from both camps who end up looking strangely alike.
This is not a coincidence. It is a structural pattern. And it deserves to be unearthed.
The story begins in 1905. The SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International) is born from the unification of France’s socialist families, under the impetus of Jean Jaurès. The programme is Marxist: abolition of capitalism, collective ownership of the means of production, internationalism1.
Fast forward. In 1981, François Mitterrand is elected on a platform of rupture: nationalisations, retirement at 60, a fifth week of paid leave. Two years later, the tournant de la rigueur (austerity turn) of 1983 marks the abandonment of economic voluntarism in favour of budgetary discipline and European integration1. The left in power chooses monetary stability over stimulus.
Under Lionel Jospin (1997–2002), the “plural left” government privatises more than the right-wing governments that preceded it: France Télécom, Thomson, Eramet, the motorways. Then comes François Hollande (2012–2017): the CICE — a €40 billion tax credit for businesses — and the Labour Law, carried by a socialist government against its own voters2.
The word “socialist” remained on the poster. The content changed entirely.
On the other side, social Gaullism fared no better. De Gaulle was a planner: employee participation, regional development, national independence. Chaban-Delmas proposed in 1969 a “New Society” that looked like unabashed social democracy3. But from 1986 onward, Jacques Chirac embraced neoliberalism (privatisations, deregulation), and Nicolas Sarkozy completed the transformation by combining economic liberalism with identity politics4.
Meanwhile, the French Communist Party — 28% of the vote in 1946, over 800,000 members — collapsed. The orphaned working-class vote migrated to the Front National5. This is what Badinter, then Tévanian and Tissot, called the “lepenisation of minds”: the FN’s themes (immigration, security, national identity) contaminated the discourse of the entire political class, left and right alike6.
The Republican Party is founded in 1854 on a single watchword: opposition to the expansion of slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, wages the Civil War to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. Teddy Roosevelt (1901–1909) busts the trusts and creates national parks. Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961) applies a 91% marginal tax rate on the highest incomes and launches the national highway system. Richard Nixon creates the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)7.
Then comes the Southern Strategy. Kevin Phillips, a Nixon strategist, theorises in 1969 that Republicans can conquer the Deep South by capturing the racial resentment of white voters disillusioned by civil rights legislation4. The calculation works. Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) transforms the party: massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, a culture war against “Big Government”8. The Tea Party further radicalises the movement in the 2010s. Donald Trump is its logical culmination.
The party that freed the slaves became the party that refuses to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism.
On the Democratic side, the path is a mirror image. The party of nineteenth-century slaveholders reinvents itself under Franklin Roosevelt with the New Deal (1933–1938): social security, public works, financial regulation. Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Acts in 1964–1965, reportedly confiding to an aide: “We have just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation”9.
Then comes Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and “triangulation”: the Third Way. Clinton reforms welfare, signs NAFTA, repeals the Glass-Steagall Act (which had separated commercial and investment banking since 1933), and deregulates the derivatives markets1011. The party of the New Deal becomes the party of Wall Street.
And the Overton window shifts. Eisenhower’s positions — high tax rates, massive public investment, suspicion of the military-industrial complex — would be labelled “far left” in today’s American debate12.
Here is the phenomenon that political scientists have been documenting for years: the leaders of left-wing and right-wing parties, despite their opposing rhetoric, converge sociologically.
Thomas Piketty, Amory Gethin, and Clara Martínez-Toledano have shown that Western democracies are now governed by a “dual elite” system: the “Brahmin Left” (educated, urban, culturally progressive) and the “Merchant Right” (wealthy, economically liberal)7. The working classes are represented by neither camp.
Robert Michels predicted this as early as 1911 with his “iron law of oligarchy”: every democratic organisation, whatever its starting ideology, inevitably tends toward the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling minority9.
Peter Mair, in Ruling the Void (2013), goes further: parties are no longer transmission belts between society and the state, but quasi-state agencies that manage power for themselves. The “void” between citizens and leaders grows wider10.
Chantal Mouffe completes the picture: by suppressing the left-right conflict in the name of “consensus” and “good governance,” political elites do not make antagonisms disappear — they repress them. And that repression feeds populism11.
In Episode 01, I identified five stages in the life of political movements:
Today’s episode reveals two additional stages:
Elite convergence — the leaders of opposing camps end up sharing the same class interests, the same networks, the same lifestyles. Political conflict becomes a spectacle that masks class solidarity at the top1314.
The vacuum effect — the people, abandoned by their natural representatives, turn toward populisms that promise to “give the people their voice back.” The loop closes: a new movement is born from genuine suffering, and the cycle begins again15.
Some of these changes are legitimate adaptations. Jaurès’s world is not the world of 2026. Governing requires compromises. Social democracy lifted millions out of poverty before running out of steam.
But the factual observation remains: the words “progressive,” “freedom,” “social justice” no longer mean what they once meant. And when political language loses its anchor in reality, democracy itself erodes12.
Colin Crouch calls this “post-democracy”: a system where democratic institutions still function formally, but real decisions are made elsewhere — in boardrooms, lobbying firms, and dinners among elites12.
Is this drift reversible? Can we refill words with their original meaning, or do we need to invent new ones?
Episode 01 posed the question for Belgium. This one extends it to France and the United States. The pattern holds: it crosses borders.
Write to me. The garden is vast, and the roots reach further than we think.
Pépé
Jonah Levy, “The Neoliberal Turn that Never Was,” in Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, Oxford University Press, 2017; Gilles Morin, “De la SFIO au nouveau Parti socialiste,” Vingtième Siècle, 2003. ↩︎ ↩︎
Patrick Music & Henri Sterdyniak, “CICE: un bilan économique,” OFCE, 2018; Laurent Mauduit, L’Étrange Capitulation, Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2016. ↩︎
Boris Manenti & Pascal Perrin, “Histoire du gaullisme social,” Cairn.info, 2021; Jérôme Pozzi, Les Mouvements gaullistes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011. ↩︎
Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, Arlington House, 1969; Gaël Brustier, Voyage au bout de la droite, Mille et une nuits, 2011. ↩︎ ↩︎
Florent Gougou, “Les mutations du vote ouvrier sous la Ve République,” Fondation Jean-Jaurès, 2015; “Comprendre le vote FN,” Slate.fr, 2017. ↩︎
Sylvain Crépon, Alexandre Dézé & Nonna Mayer (eds.), Les Faux-semblants du Front national, Presses de Sciences Po, 2015; Pierre-André Taguieff, “La rhétorique du national-populisme,” Mots, 1984. ↩︎
Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano & Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(1), 2022. ↩︎ ↩︎
Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer, Simon & Schuster, 2010. ↩︎
Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, translated by Eden & Cedar Paul, Hearst’s International Library, 1915 (German original 1911). ↩︎ ↩︎
Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso, 2013. ↩︎ ↩︎
Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, Polity Press, 2004; Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Princeton University Press, 2008. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, 2004. ↩︎
Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 2014. ↩︎
Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton University Press, 2012. ↩︎