THESE ARE, it would seem, moderately heady days for left-of-centre politicians and their cause. In the US, George W. Bush’s once unsinkable Republican man o’war is listing badly. Angry waves of popular discontent about Iraq and a bungled push for pension privatisation are pouring over the gunwhales.

Conservative members of congress are fighting strange ideological battles on the main deck. Lashed to the mizzen mast is the sacrificial John Bolton, the faltering candidate for UN Ambassador, swinging this way and that at the mercy of the President’s flagging fortunes.

Mr Bush’s approval rating is in the low 40s. If he were eligible for re-election, there would be mutinous talk now about a potential republican challenge. Term-limited, however, he is now the subject of political obsequies three years and seven months before the end of his presidency.

The Democrats suddenly have the salty scent of victory in their nostrils. Contenders for 2008 are jostling to lead the fight. Joe Biden, the senator from Delaware still mainly famous for ending a previous presidential run after he had unwisely modelled himself on Neil Kinnock, established some sort of record at the weekend for the earliest declaration of an interest in the Democratic nomination in 2008.

Behind him of course is a thickening field that includes John Edwards, Mark Warner, Governor of Virginia, Evan Bayh, the Indiana senator, John Kerry, last year’s loser, and, of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It’s not just in Washington, however, where the Democrats are suddenly looking buoyant. In California, where I have spent this week, what seemed unthinkable a few months ago is now a looming reality. The Terminator is facing possible Termination. Voters have fallen very quickly out of love with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his poll ratings are even lower than the President’s, at 35 per cent this week.

Most encouraging for his opponents, in and out of California, is that the cause of Arnie’s decline seems to be an unpopular fight he picked with the state’s public sector unions; teachers, firefighters, nurses. Could it be that the state that pioneered the Reagan-era tax cuts is discovering a fondness for public services? Look beyond the US and, while the picture is mixed, there are strong signs that the political winds are blowing in the left’s favour.

In France, the left wing of the socialist party and their communist allies have just scored their largest political victory since François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981. Riding popular fears of globalisation and international capital, it was principally the Left that won last month’s EU referendum with an angry denunciation of the iniquities of free markets.

In Germany, the Social Democrats are on the run, it’s true. But the popular pressures that are buffeting Chancellor Schröder are complex. Here, too, animus towards Anglo-Saxon capitalist “locusts” is a powerful force.

In Britain, Labour just trounced the Conservatives again last month. All right, I know Tony Blair is nobody’s idea of a left-wing hero, but if the election campaign taught us anything it was that the crafty centrism he has pursued for the past eight years is steadily coming undone. The balance of power is shifting within his own party; before long it will be led by a man who is seen by the bulk of his party as truer to the eternal flame of socialism.

What does this surprising, tentative resurgence for the Left signify in global politics? Not a triumph for progressive policies, that’s for sure. On the contrary, if you look hard at what unites the left across Europe and the US, it is decidedly reactionary.

In continental Europe, emboldened by the French vote, the Left proudly proclaims a bold objective: Back to the Future. The French Left, and its allies in the rest of Europe, stands not for some progressive dream of international solidarity for the dispossessed, but four-square behind the protection of the continent’s own illusory privileges.

The Left’s new rallying cry is to build a protective system that would impoverish Bulgarians, Romanians, Turks, Indians and Chinese and would, of course, as do all attempts to retreat from the realities of the global market, ill serve its own workers.

And it is not just the European Left. In America, too, anti-globalisation is the turf that many Democrats are eager to defend. As Governor Schwarzenegger has discovered — and as Europeans have long known — the Left is also reactionary in defending the interests of public-sector trade unions against genuine reform and progress.

Besides anti-globalisation, the other main current in the current stream of leftish theory and practice is visceral anti-Americanism, again on both aides of the Atlantic.

Nothing new there, of course. Except that what really rouses the animus today is not America’s supposed global mission to exploit the downtrodden worker, but its ambitious objective of spreading democracy.

In the Middle East the left finds it much easier to side with the mullahs and the jihadists, the persecutors of women and the torturers of dissidents. America’s flaws at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are viewed by the Left’s political and intellectual leaders as morally indistinguishable from (or perhaps worse than) anything the Islamists and Arab despots have got up to.

To be fair, not all on the Left have taken their stand on the side of reaction. But the trends in political debate in the West are strikingly clear. We are well on the way to an inversion of the classic Left-Right divide.

These days if you’re in favour of policies designed to promote global economic integration, policies that have led hundreds of millions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa out of the misery of grinding poverty, and have significantly lifted the standard of living of workers in the West too; if you support change to topple tyrannical regimes and give some hope to people who have suffered in fledgling democracies, you’re now more likely to be considered a conservative. What, exactly, is Left?

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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