[WS:] That is true of 99.9% of what people say and write, no? We think we are so fucking "innovative" but most of the time we say what others before us said many times, albeit in a slightly different words. We keep reinventing the wheel for a number of reasons, chief of them being is that we are all human with more or less similar intellectual capacities and we are also social animals so our thinking is heavily dependent on the socially constructed "stock knowledge." So in the end, so what the "geniuses" of today say has been most likely said by someone, nay, many someones in the so-called "dark ages" albeit in a somewhat different form. Alas, enough of the sociological digressions.
RE : > It's dismaying that opposition to the left-centre governments didn't move to the left.
[WS:] Dimsaying - yes, but hardly surprising. I believe there are significant sociological reasons for that - tectonic shifts in the social structure, so to speak. JCH quoting Emanuel Todd "political consciousness" is some sort of faith and that when society as a whole has less need for faith (because the material comfort level is more equally spread) then both sides of the faith spectrum loose their support base." is up to something on this - those Frenchies make darn good sociologists ;) .
More specifically, the last hundred or so years saw the rapid growth of the new social class - the "technostructure" (engineers, lawyers, doctors, managers, economists, etc.) as Veblen and Galbraith called them or the "intelligentsia" as they are known in Eastern Europe. This new social class - neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie as understood in the 19th century have different 'elective affinities" (to use Weber's term) as far as ideologies are concerned. They have little use for eschatology (a belief in redemption in the future) either religious or secular. BTW, that Marxism was a form of a secular eschatology was observed by Leszek Kolakowski. They are meritocrats who manage and make thing happen here an now, they have no use for heaven in the afterlife or socialism in some distant future. They need an ideology that legitimizes their role as managers and makers of things happen - and there is an elective affinity between this and the ideology of the free market aka neoliberalism.
I wrote a bit more about it here if anyone is interested http://wsokol.blogspot.com/2012/01/day-after-neoliberalism.html .
It thus follows that both traditional faith and "old" left ideologies tend to lose their appeal in tandem, as Todd noted, since they have the same social cause - the rise of the new social class aka the technostructure. It therefore comes as no surprise that the "old left" parties - socialists, social democrats, communists and even labour - shifted their ideological weltanschauung to neoliberalism - they correctly sensed the tectonic shift in the social structure and the ideological landscape it produced, and adjusted accordingly. They might have left behind a few proles in the process but they correctly sensed that catering to the prole ideological preferences is like investing in typewriters in the age of computers. Some people still use them, to be sure, but most of the users are aspiring to computers (except a few old coots who cannot adapt and soon be dead anyway.)
Ditto for the working class. We have plenty of proles to be sure, but nobody wants to be one or, for that matter adopt an ideology that identifiers them as such. They all aspire to the "professional" status that will make them a part of the technostructure. So if the class to which these "wannabe professionals" aspire have elective affinity to neoliberal ideology of free market, this means that this ideology will be accepted by a very large people who have nothing to gain from this ideology but their upwardly mobile social status.
So if the left wants to be politically relevant again - by which I mean attracting some 40-60% of the voters - they must come with something different than old left ideologies glorifying the proletariat, an equivalent of a typewriter in the computer age, or direct action appealing mainly to a few young punks, an equivalent of the open source software. In other words, the 'new left" must come up with an ideological equivalent of Windows, or at least a Mac OS.
Wojtek