Political parties are not forever. Even ones that used to be powerful like, let’s say, the French Socialist Party or the German SPD, have seen their fortunes crumble. Something similar is happening in Canada.
The New Democratic Party of Canada stands on the verge of electoral collapse. Current polling places it at a historic low, anywhere between 6 percent and 10 percent. Meanwhile, roughly 10 percent of its 2021 voters have drifted to the Liberals in a pre-emptive attempt to block a Conservative victory under Pierre Poilievre. But this familiar pattern of progressive vote-siphoning is not the real story. The real story is ontological: the NDP has lost its reason for being.
For decades, the party saw itself as the political expression of Canada’s industrial labour movement. While never Marxist, in the Communist sense of the word, the NDP, in the hey days of David Lewis and Stephen Lewis in the ‘60s and ‘70s, took for granted that ongoing class struggle would always have room for a party that speaks on behalf of the collective interest of the Canadian working class in a more generous welfare state.
Today, a progressive labour movement no longer exists, and the NDP that once was its voice finds itself ideologically unmoored, emotionally at a loss, and culturally transformed. Socialism doesn’t work without resentment. The NDP has become a party that can no longer convincingly simulate the class anger that once powered it. And a Rolex-wearing leader hasn’t helped.
Post-revolutionary drift
The reasons for the NDP’s decline are not complicated: the goals that animated its founding have been achieved. The welfare state is here. It doesn’t function as efficiently as it should, but Canada has universal health care, unemployment insurance, public pensions, and subsidized education. The idea has been fleshed out and realized, and it assists all citizens regardless of means and status. That’s the “social” in socialism that up until recently animated NDP militants. But like so many radicals, NDP militants just hate the idea of an ideological success that robs them of a narrative of a much better (utopian) future.
David Moscrop, the Ottawa-based writer and the ever-hopeful socialist, said recently on a CBC podcast:
…it’s a period during which I would have expected the NDP to be poised to grow. Because people were angry. They were frustrated about affordability. They were feeling like they were getting screwed. There was an opportunity to raise class consciousness, to say, “Yeah, there’s two classes. There’s the working class, and then there’s the people screwing the working class: the capitalist class.” Why not seize this moment and try to raise that class consciousness, to plug it into this growing anger and frustration, and to cash it out electorally?
Moscrop wants the NDP to embrace class struggle now. Even though he seems to accept that it’ll come without revolution and without resolution.
It’s not about some distant future outcomes anymore.
Moscrop wants class struggle because, as Marx and Engels famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” That history is still with us and will remain so. Class inequality is baked into the cake of human nature.
Political theorist Francis Fukuyama told us in 1989 that the path towards a world without class struggle is blocked. There will be no socialist revolution on offer.
What’s left is harnessing new anger and resentment without promises of a brilliant classless future. And culturally conservative populism is a much more convincing vehicle for these emotions.
The world we find ourselves in today is a politics of incremental improvements—a managerial concern for cost-of-living pressures, pharmacare expansions, and housing programs, which lack the moral voltage of earlier struggles.
The NDP, once a party of contestation, has become a party of elite urban dwellers with academic degrees and bad consciences.
Without a transcendent goal, the NDP cannot inspire. And so now the New Democrats, just like Liberals and Conservatives, are a party of the “here and now.”
The class shift: from industrial anger to professional advocacy
More decisive than ideology, however, has been a gradual class and gender transformation within the party’s union base. Once anchored in the gritty solidarity of industrial unions—mining, manufacturing, construction—the NDP has in recent decades become increasingly dependent on public-sector unions, especially in health care, education, and social services. These unions, unlike their industrial predecessors, are majority-female.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh outside the NDP campaign bus, before the start of the federal election campaign, in Ottawa on Saturday, March 22, 2025. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
According to 2022 data from Statistics Canada, women made up 71 percent of Canada’s public-sector workforce, and 82 percent of workers in the health care and social assistance sector. These public-sector unions are the dominant organizational force behind today’s NDP.
This demographic shift has had significant cultural and psychological consequences.
Beyond class anger, the masculine anger that once fueled labour militancy has been culturally marginalized. That anger, once a resource, is now something the party is uncomfortable with. Instead of mobilizing it, the NDP attempts to moralize the toxicity out of it. But collective anger cannot be therapized. It must be accepted, channeled, or it will turn against you.
The new public-sector orientation has undeniably brought progress: pay equity, parental leave, anti-harassment protocols, and increased representation of women in leadership. But it has also ushered in a shift in tone and vocabulary. The NDP now speaks the language of safety, care, and intersectionality, a language suited to professionalized environments, but alien to the emotional grammar of people unlettered in the linguistic fruits of postmodernism.
When the Left refuses resentment, the Right weaponizes it
With the collapse of revolutionary ideals in the ‘70s across the Western world, what remained is not vision, but resentment—the resentment of those who feel humiliated by a system that proclaims fairness but doesn’t deliver it. That resentment once found an outlet in class-conscious, Left-aligned labour movements. But when that outlet dried up—when the Left retreated into therapeutic language and institutional gradualism—that same resentment turned elsewhere.
We’ve seen this story before.
In the final years of Weimar Germany, huge swathes of industrial workers peeled away from the Socialist and even Communist parties to support Hitler. The Left ceased to be a vessel for class revenge. And resentment always seeks a vessel.
This is also what happened in the former Communist bastions of northern France. Starting sometime in the ‘80s, the working class voters started to switch their vote to the right-wing Front Nationale.
It’s about resentment, anger, fear, and disappointment, stupid. Not ideology.
By shedding its capacity to speak in the idiom of grievance, the NDP has surrendered the emotional ground on which populism thrives. And you know it by the leaders they have been choosing of late.
The result is a party that exists in a kind of moral half-light. It would like to be radical, but not too much. It’s a party in a state of depression because it knows that it cannot be anything more than the third party. And where it succeeds provincially (B.C., Alberta), it’s because the national Liberal brand is weak.
Meanwhile, the federal NDP is left floating—a party that once had a class, a story, and a goal is now locked out of the halls of power with so many other social-democratic parties (except the Danish one!) in a bind between their professed universalism and the nationalist/populist backlash among their, by now, former voters.
Promise of an expanded dental health plan—of which I would be a grateful recipient—is not a persuasive response to those who feel that the world has gone bonkers and somebody should be punished for it.
