The Sanders, Corbyn, Ardern and Shorten moments were missed chances to renew social democracy through structural reform, leaving genuine economic grievances to be harvested by the populist right.
Every generation offers political moments that, in retrospect, appear as forks in the road. In the past decade, four such moments emerged across the English-speaking democracies: the rise of Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Bill Shorten in Australia. Each was different in ideology, personality and political circumstance. Yet together they represented something larger: opportunities to reverse the long retreat of social democracy from its founding purpose.
For much of the twentieth century, social democracy sought to civilise capitalism. It accepted markets but insisted they should serve society, not dominate it. Progressive taxation, strong trade unions, public housing, universal healthcare, quality education, publicly owned infrastructure and competition policy were not merely welfare measures. They were structural reforms designed to spread power, opportunity and security throughout society.
Beginning in the 1980s, however, many social democratic parties accepted much of the neoliberal settlement. Markets became the primary instrument of public policy. Public ownership gave way to privatisation. Finance and property became increasingly dominant. Governments shifted from shaping markets to managing their consequences. Labour parties became increasingly centrist, managerial and technocratic. Elections were won or lost on competence rather than competing visions of society.
The Sanders, Corbyn, Ardern and Shorten moments each challenged that trajectory in different ways.
Bernie Sanders revived class politics in a country where many had declared class irrelevant. He spoke directly about billionaires, monopoly power, universal healthcare, free education and the dignity of work. Although he never secured the Democratic nomination, he transformed American political debate and made democratic socialism a legitimate part of mainstream political conversation.
Jeremy Corbyn attempted something similar within Britain’s Labour Party. His program challenged austerity, proposed public ownership of key utilities and sought to rebuild an active economic role for the state. While Labour fell short of government, his 2017 campaign demonstrated that an unapologetically social democratic platform could mobilise millions of younger voters.
Jacinda Ardern represented a different possibility. She governed with empathy and restored faith in political leadership during extraordinary crises. Yet despite commanding unprecedented public trust and an outright parliamentary majority, her government stopped short of fundamentally reshaping New Zealand’s political economy. Housing, wealth inequality and productivity remained largely untouched.
Bill Shorten’s 2019 campaign perhaps came closest to proposing structural reform within Australian Labor’s modern history. Changes to negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions and dividend imputation sought to redirect Australia’s economy away from speculative wealth accumulation towards productive investment. His defeat became a cautionary tale that encouraged Labor to become more electorally cautious rather than more economically ambitious.
These moments were not simply missed opportunities for social democracy. They were also missed opportunities to pre-empt the contemporary rise of the populist right.
Across all four countries, voters were expressing remarkably similar concerns: stagnant wages, insecure employment, unaffordable housing, declining public services, regional decline and growing distrust of political elites. These were fundamentally economic and democratic problems.
Where social democracy increasingly offered competent management, the populist right offered emotional explanation. Instead of identifying monopoly power, financialisation and concentrated wealth as the sources of insecurity, it blamed migrants, globalisation, cultural change, environmental regulation and political elites.
The tragedy is that the underlying grievances were often genuine. The diagnosis offered by the right was frequently false.
Had social democracy embraced more ambitious structural reform – tackling housing speculation, monopoly capitalism, declining labour power, tax privilege and regional inequality – it may not have eliminated right-wing populism. But it might have deprived it of much of the social and economic terrain on which it flourished.
This points to a deeper lesson.
The central political divide today is not simply between left and right. It is between those willing to reshape capitalism and those content merely to manage its increasingly unequal outcomes. For too long, many social democratic parties have become administrators of an economic model they once sought to transform.
Their founders understood that democracy itself depended upon widely shared economic security. When inequality becomes extreme, when housing becomes speculative, when wages stagnate while wealth concentrates, democracy weakens. Citizens lose faith that politics can improve their lives. Into that vacuum step those offering easy enemies instead of structural solutions.
The Sanders, Corbyn, Ardern and Shorten moments now look less like isolated episodes than chapters in a common story. Each illuminated the possibility of renewing social democracy for the twenty-first century. Each demonstrated significant public appetite for a politics that challenged concentrated economic power. Yet each, for different reasons, fell short of establishing a durable new settlement.
History rarely offers identical opportunities twice. But it often returns to unresolved questions.
The unresolved question confronting social democracy remains the same as it was a century ago: will it once again seek to civilise capitalism through structural reform, or will it continue managing an increasingly unequal system while others harvest the anger that follows?
That question may determine not only the future of the centre-left, but the future of liberal democracy itself.
Stewart Sweeney
Stewart Sweeney is a writer and public policy advocate with a longstanding interest in the evolution and future of capitalism. He migrated from Scotland to Adelaide in 1975 to work with Premier Don Dunstan on industrial democracy. A former academic and trade unionist, he continues to contribute to public debate on economic justice, democratic reform, and sustainable development. His work reflects a deep commitment to the common good and the role of public purpose in shaping Australia’s future.