From UK to Canada to the USA, the political center is getting crushed

I'm sure it was Dean Martin, or somebody, who said once, "Every day is the anniversary of something." Or at least it's come to seem that way, after more than a half-century of media-drenched post-war culture, all celebrated now on the 5th, 10th, 25th, 40th and 50th anniversary, and sometimes more often than that. That said, I personally don't mind anniversary stories, especially in an era of limitless pixels. It helps to understand where you are sometimes -- by reconsidering where you used to be.

Thursday marks the 4th anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which started in Lower Manhattan on a balmy Saturday, eventually spread to Philadelphia and several hundred cities and towns, across the country and around the world -- and was all but gone by the chilling winds of Thanksgiving.

First they ignored it, as NYC cops ringed the famous Charging Bull near the Battery and blockaded Wall Street itself, thwarting a mid-sized band of rebels in their scheme to protest income inequality and other grievances by occupying the main thoroughfare of American usury. Then, after a brief period of euphoria -- finding a home in Zuccotti Park and drawing thousands of like-minded souls to their communal, if somewhat vague, cause -- they ridiculed it, as a lynch mob of talk-radio hosts and other pundits fell back on the old "dirty smelly hippie" canard (the same tired schtick that turned Ronald Reagan from a 'B' actor to a governor and then a president). Then, finally, they fought it -- driving out the last of the Occupy protesters in midnight raids, police arresting some on bogus pretenses.

Then, according to the famous dictum, Occupy won, right?

Well...no and yes, but -- four years out -- the answer is definitely more "yes" than "no." To be sure, the movement looked like more of a failure in the frigid winter of 2011 -- its aims still unfocused, its camps overwhelmed by the needs of America's permanent homeless, its members seemingly scattered to the bitter winds at the end. But fast forward four years, and things look a lot different. Real solutions to income inequality -- most notably, the $15 living wage -- are gaining in some cities and states and will take center stage in the 2016 race for the White House. Just as important, the derided-as-clueless Occupy movement actually created a template for mass protest in the 21st Century. Activists who ringed the White House have helped to stall the noxious Keystone XL pipeline and the #BlackLivesMatter movement has flooded streets and brought real reform from Ferguson to New York, where a liberal mayor has ended stop-and-frisk.

Now, flash forward to this weekend. In Canada, a left-wing party that barely registered at the dawn of the 21st Century, the New Democratic Party, or NDP, is holding to its lead in the polls as our friendly neighbor to the north elects a new government next month. Under the current scenario, the NDP and its leader Thomas Mulcair have an outstanding chance of ousting long-time incumbent Conservative PM Stephen Harper (probably in a coalition with the centrist Liberal Party, under Canada's parliamentary system). And if Mulcair takes office, he will surely kill the Keystone XL project at the source, throw a monkey wrench into the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and raise taxes on corporations to fund social programs.

Look at what's happening right here at home, where "democratic socialist" Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to draw surprisingly large crowds, even in bastions of the old Confederacy, and is actually widening his lead over "liberalism lite" Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and Iowa, as a growing number of Democrats grasp for the real thing, a candidate they know will zealously attack the power of large corporations and the political influence of the top 1 Percent.

Most importantly, look across the pond to the biggest story of the weekend, the ascension of far-left, longtime gadfly Jeremy Corbyn to become the leader of the United Kingdom's Labour Party, which puts Corbyn in line to challenge their Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, when the next election is held in the spring of 2020. Corbyn's takeover of the party that not long ago gave the world Iraq War hawk Tony Blair went from improbable to inevitable, and it brought a lot of Chicken Little sky-is-falling clucking from Cameron, Blair and from well-fed armchair pundits everywhere.

Here's what the "wild-eyed radical" Corbyn published in the Guardian newspaper after his selection on Saturday:

It is clear, too, that the prime minister will soon again be asking us to bomb Syria. That won't help refugees, it will create more.

Isis is utterly abhorrent and President Assad's regime has committed appalling crimes. But we must also oppose Saudi bombs falling on Yemen and the Bahraini dictatorship murdering its democracy movement, armed by us.

Our role is to campaign for peace and disarmament around the world.

For the Conservatives, the deficit is just an excuse to railroad through the same old Tory agenda: driving down wages, cutting taxes for the wealthiest, allowing house prices to spiral out of reach, selling off our national assets and attacking trade unions. You can't cut your way to prosperity, you have to build it: investing in modern infrastructure, investing in people and their skills, harnessing innovative ideas and new ways of working to tackle climate change to protect our environment and our future.

That is what the punditocracy calls "crazy talk"? If that's the case, I'll happily live out the rest of my life in the insane asylum with Corbyn in charge. But then, the glass is still only half full for the left. Of the three, only Canada's Mulcair has a better than 50 percent chance to actually lead at this point. In the case of Sanders, while he continues to astonish, his real feat may end up as pushing the eventual Democratic nominee towards a purer shade of liberalism. Corbyn sure seems like a longshot to ever lead England. What these men (yes, they're men...I saw someone call them "bro-cialists"..haha) share is that the've moved the entire political discussion toward the left side of the highway, so that things like a liveable wage for the working poor, an end to mass incarceration or over-dependence on fossil fuels now seem possible in a way that was unimaginable in the 2000s.

But there's also a flip side. Voters all over the world are on the move -- but not always to the left. Across Western society, from the ends of Eastern Europe to the Iowa caucuses, xenophobic anti-immigrant candidates are gaining strength. Across the Atlantic, right-wing parties railing against immigration are plucking voters from the dead and decaying center, in some places more rapidly than the rival left-wing parties are growing. The prime minister of Hungary who wants to keep out refugees who aren't Christian is just a stone's throw, politically and morally, from Donald Trump calling Mexican arrivals "rapists" and promising an unprecedented Diaspora of 11 million undocumented immigrant families -- and becoming the de facto voice of modern Republicanism.

What's odd is that the parties on the far left and the parties on the far right are, in one sense, reacting to the same thing: The utter failures of 20th Century-style capitalism. The difference is simply a matter of whom to blame for harsh austerity policies in Europe, for stagnant wages and middle-aged, middle-class folks forced from the job market here in the U.S. The center-right and center-left politicians -- the Bush and Clinton families, the Blairs and Camerons and Harpers of the world -- have been given every opportunity to make things work, and voters are exhausted and exasperated. Liberals see the centrists as too cozy with the billionaire class, doling out tax breaks at the expense of the middle, while folks on the right think the politicians have allowed runaway immigration to lower labor costs for big business (or give more votes to the Democrats). Liberals want to blame the billionaires, while conservatives want to blame the folks who were forced to become migrants by economic inequality or military adventurism. One of those things makes more sense to me.

But one thing it's hard to disagree with: 2015 will be remembered as the year the political center died. Which means that 2016 may be the most interesting year -- and the most fraught with peril -- of any political season we've seen in our lifetimes.

Blogger's note: I'm on special assignment today (no, really). For better or worse, regular blogging resumes Tuesday.