Spot the difference...

Sean Fear in typical form at Political Betting earlier today, gloating about the supposed death of Social Democracy 'across the western world' -

"Put simply, globalisation has overturned the assumptions on which Social Democracy is based...How should Social Democracy respond to this. One option is simply to become a kind of lost cause society, insisting that its philosophy is correct, and the rest of the World is wrong. More likely, Social Democratic parties will have to adapt to a new World order, and accept that they can only win elections by proposing policies that they would have considered appallingly right wing, a few years previously."

But what's this? Here's a typically paranoid view from the North American right, claiming that communism, no less, has been sweeping the board across the western world since the collapse of the Soviet bloc -

"Arbatov understood, given his experience sitting in the privileged seat of the party in Moscow during the Brezhnev period, how the existence of Communist Russia checked the forces of the left in the West, keeping them from gaining influence and power. Now, as Arbatov reflected, since the Soviet Union as a military superpower had collapsed and the threat of Soviet Communism was discarded in the so-called dustbin of history, the spoiled children and beneficiaries of the West’s longest and strongest economic expansion and technological achievements, unparalleled in history, would set forth to do what the Soviet Union could not do — to advance the aim of Communism to wreck liberal capitalism from the inside."

Well, one thing's for sure - they can't both be right. Whisper it gently, but perhaps neither of them are?