Meet Jeremy Corbyn, the newly elected head of Britain’s Labour Party. He will lead the opposition to the Tory government of David Cameron until the next elections, and he’s probably more like Sen. Bernie Sanders than any other American politician of any prominence.
He doesn’t look the part any more than Sanders does, either.
Jeremy Corbyn leaves his home in north London. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
See if he sounds a little different on foreign policy:
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.
Either that’s a recipe for permanent irrelevancy for Labour or the beginning of a very new chapter in Britain’s role in the Middle East.
He’s also completely opposed to austerity measures, which probably explains his stunning upset victory over three mainstream opponents.
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 kind of rhetoric sounds basically like the Democratic Party under Barack Obama, but the Labour Party establishment is reacting to this victory like scalded cats:
This is not about mere differences in political opinion. No-one likes it when their candidate loses, just as others do not when their football team does. But today is about much, much more than that.
My team, and that of thousands of friends and colleagues, has just somehow jumped from the Premier League into the Third Division, with little chance of promotion for at least a decade.
Those of us who backed Liz Kendall for leader would have accepted Yvette Cooper. We would have, perhaps more grudgingly, accepted Andy Burnham, although neither would probably have won in 2020.
But Corbyn? Words fail me.
Today there is a howl of anguish, not just from the party’s centrists but from all those who understand the slow, grinding slog of making a party respectable in order to win power. It takes years to win that respect, but you can lose it in a day.
This is one of those days.
Hyperbole? Well, it’s gets more panicked.
Following the train wreck of this year’s election defeat, today Labour is sucking its collective thumb and rocking catatonically. Like some post-trauma patient, it has retreated into a nice, secure bubble, hermetically sealed off from the views of the public its politicians aspire to serve. YouGov’s recent polling confirmed the vast gulf between the views and attitudes of the Corbynites, and the British public in general. Labour is saying “la la la, I can’t hear you”.
Imagine: we have just chosen a leader considerably less electable than Michael Foot, after whose election it took Labour seventeen more years to regain power. And before that, the last time it elected a peacenik leader, George Lansbury, it had also been crushed and it was another thirteen years before a Labour leader would again be Prime Minister.
But forget the man himself. Corbyn is not a leader; he has not so much as held junior ministerial or Shadow rank in 32 years in Parliament. It is the fellow-travellers we should worry about, who will take advantage of his “collegiate” leadership to push their own, even-harder-left agendas on his behalf. Purges and de-selections of the politically impure are not an exaggeration: they are a likelihood.
We know, because we have been here before, in the 1980s. Right now, the party has little to look forward to but an extended period as a glorified protest movement. As it was then, when Corbyn first entered Parliament, but worse. And that is, frankly, if it survives at all.
How did we ever get here? Put simply, those who voted were either too young to know the 1980s, or too foolish to realise that they were the desperate nadir and not the zenith of the party.
No, Labour has had no darker hour in my lifetime. Or my parents’.
Against that, we have a lot of new people who have been brought into the British political process. Here’s how Corbyn put it:
Labour’s leadership election has been an extraordinary demonstration of grassroots democracy and public participation, which has turned the conventional wisdom about politics on its head. We have drawn in hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds from across the country, far beyond the ranks of longstanding activists and campaigners.
Who can now seriously claim that young people aren’t interested in politics or that there is no appetite for a new kind of politics?
Above all, it has shown that millions of people want a real alternative, not business as usual, either inside or outside the Labour party.
So, which is it? A genuine movement towards peace and economic justice or a political party completely out of touch with the values of the Empire?
Or both?
See if he sounds a little different on foreign policy: ….
He’s not willing to throw Netanyahoo a bone. So he’s actually better than Sanders.
What bone did Sanders throw Netanyahu?
Sanders” “I am not a great fan of President Netanyahu I did not attend the speech that he gave before the joint session of Congress. I think it was opportunistic. I think he was using it as part of his campaign for re-election. I think he was being used or did use the Republicans to go behind the President’s back. And I think in that region sadly on both sides I don’t think we have the kind of leadership that we need.”
Corbyn is undeniably pro-Palestinian rights. Sanders is quiet about Palestinian rights at best, and “Israel has a right to defend itself” at worst.
That’s fair.
They sound like an abusive spouse when the abused spouse finally figures out that going it alone is a healthier, wealthier, and happier option.
Yeah. My immediate reaction was “cry me a river.”
Their comments do have that tone. “You’ll be so SORRY you left me!!”
And in the lead up to the vote, the Blairites were repeating everything lefties in this country have been hearing from establishment Democrats since 1972 anytime a weak challenge to their entrenched power surfaced. The year those SOBs sat on their hands or voted for Tricky Dicky.
How New Labour rolls:
Only a few weeks ago the odds against Corbyn were 100 to 1. Possibly better than the odds for Sanders to defeat Clinton, but …
m.huffpost.com/us/entry/55f4b19ce4b042295e369855?cps=gravity_5034_5589475076722466303&kvcommref=
mostpopular
“Bernie Sanders: `I Am Delighted’ By Jeremy Corbyn’s Victory”
I’ve looked at a couple of the YouGov polls (specifically, on re-nationalization of railways, energy, etc.) and I call bullshit. Those who made the New Labour Party and dragged it into Iraq and the endless rent-seeking party are panicking because they know they are finished. It is by no means clear that Corbyn can actually win an election or run a government, but he’s got four and a half years to get ready, and I think it’s just great for the party. (I wrote a moderately enthusiastic piece today.)
i am pleased he won and I think it’s a good thing for Labour. Bliar’s noxious legacy needs healing, not to mention the damage done by the Iron Lady.
Bring back BritRail.
City of London shaking … someone blaming the banks and financial institutions for the crisis of the last 7 years. Europe’s austerity policy adding millions of unemployed … the rich getting richer. Fair taxation is needed, globally. Appreciate Corbyn’s intent of non-intervention and calling our “friends” in the ME for what they are!
Obama’s “friends” in new-Europe are fascists, bigots and warmongers as we have experienced in the wave of refugees coming in from Syria/Lebanon through Turkey. Also the “foreign” policy of NATO vs Russia should be scrubbed … it’s part of the globalization to spread the might of overzized corporate power. Both Sanders and Corbyn are opposed to TTIP.
Corbyn is not alone in Europe … there are strong leftists movements in Spain and Greece. May more nations follow …
○ UK Labour leadership election: Anti-austerity & anti-war MP Jeremy Corbyn wins landslide victory | Russia Today |
HRC must not be sleeping well after Corbyn’s victory – link.
Hopefully Mssrs. Putin and Lavrov’s re-entry into the international news stream vis a vis recent activities Russia is engaged in relative to Syria and Assad are strategically designed to once again thwart a catastrophic effort on the part of the US government and it’s Saudi/GCC/Turkish ‘allies’ to commit an exponentially greater catastrophic atrocity upon the people of Syria than they already have by following through on their rhetoric indicating plans for a far more intense military assault on Syria, a good del of which is already ramping up now. Even the odious Chancellor Merkel, so egergiously wrong in so many ways on so may fronts has come out today on the right side of this, making a public statement urging cooperation with Russia on the Syria issue.
One can hope that the US president and his ‘Humanitarian Interventionist’ ship of fools that is his foreign policy team will be stopped before they can escalate further.
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Germanys-Merkel-sees-need-to-cooperate-with-Russia-on-Syria-41605
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Intervening out of the kindness of Putin heart. They want to make sure Syria’s port stays open for business so that means keeping Assad in power. They don’t give a damn what he does to his people to keep it that way. If they did they would have intervened a few years back when his oppressive policies started filling refugee camps in Jordan an Turkey.
That doesn’t mean I think foolishly supporting rebels who are against both Assad AND ISIS (for now) and hoping that works is the right policy either. Frankly it seems there are going to be refugees either way.
The way I see it is the mess inn Syria is the confluence of several factors, not all of which are the fault of the west. For example Islam needing a reformation into modernity is a big factor and that can’t be blamed on the west. Now what can be blamed on the west is the way the Levant was partioned after WWI. That was always going to fall apart.
I have to marvel at the people who were running against Corbyn and their total lack of self awareness. Labour just lost two elections, both of which should have been winnable, and Scotland, Labour’s backbone is ready leave the U.K. At what point do you no longer have the right to say “shut up, we know how to win elections (even though we keep losing them)”?
“Old Labour” won elections too, if you go back far enough. They beat Winston Churchill in his moment of triumph, after all. Whether Corbyn can win in 2020 or not, he doesn’t seem to be the one stuck in the past; his opponents do. The 1980’s ended 25 years ago. They’re clearly completely out of touch; even if Corbyn’s a dead end, so are they. Corbyn has a vision, whether you agree with it or not; his opponents seem to have none beyond their own personal glorification.
It just kind of shocks me that Corbyn’s opponents basically based their entire campaigns on their ability to win while arguing that everything Labour did in the last 2 failed elections was all fine and dandy and just needs some tweaks here and there. Who do they think they are, corporate executives who always fail upward? Obviously, they entered the leadership race with the same incompetence with which they executed their general election campaigns…
Sounds not unlike the Democratic Party 2014 losses with their slate of conservadems that all got to the right of the slightly to the left of Republicans Democratic President.
Faired poorly in both the 2010 and 2014 election. Progressives have no more basis for saying we know the path to D victories in off year elections than blue dogs.
What did progressives have to do with the 2010 election? It’s not as if we weren’t speaking out loudly about Obama’s turn to the right in policies and appointments immediately after being elected in 2008 and forewarning that it wasn’t going to play well with the public.
We were also angry enough in 2004 about the pathetic election campaign strategies of the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC had been running since 1994 to demand that a non-Clinton BFF be appointed the next DNC Chair. We didn’t even demand a progressive — just one with some progressive instincts that didn’t cower when Republicans said boo. Dean gets a lot of credit for Democrats regaining the House and Senate in 2006, and increasing the number of DEM Senators and electing a DEM POTUS in 2008. Then after those successes — the DNC was turned back over to the Clinton gang and Obama thanked Dean by telling him to take a hike.
In more conservative districts to regain the house in 2006? Those blue dogs that progressives hate so much and said we were better off not having. The 50 state strategy and having blue dogs in the coalition go hand in hand. Progressives ignoring that reality is why I say they hardly have a claim on what works to get people elected.
You’re seriously dumping on a left wing of the Democratic Party for not delivering electoral wins when they have never in recent history had any power or control of anything in the Party? Sheesh that’s worse than blaming peace advocates for not preventing the Iraq War.
Dean as DNC was merely a demonstration of what can happen if the party actually runs candidates in all those districts and runs to win instead of the strategy of picking only a handful of seats to challenge. For the most part the candidates that were more liberal or progressive that won in those two election cycles haven’t been as vulnerable as the blue dogs in subsequent cycles. However, in those election cycles, we took whoever was available and didn’t even have the power or bucks to recruit what we would have considered to be better candidates.
claims on knowing what electoral strategy works best is not based in reality. Same with the more conservative wing. Working together they knew what worked – challenge every seat (the 50 state strategy) and if that means running blue dogs in some districts so be it. But that also means once those blue dogs get into office progressives proclaiming at every turn they are no better than Republicans and the party is better off without them should stop as well.
Reality requires evidence. Postulating that something can’t work when it hasn’t been tried isn’t reality either. There have been very few progressive Democratic candidates in the past forty years. Of those that were qualified and had adequate funding, their track record seems to beat that of the DINOs. Doesn’t get more progressive in the Senate than Sherrod Brown and he took down a sitting and not widely reviled Republican senator and won his re-election bid.
And in case you didn’t notice, the tea baggers have been quite successful at the local, state, and congressional level.
Have people to run is evidence that they are hardly experts in electoral strategy. Again we agree the 50 state strategy (something progressives support) worked but what progressives need to realize is that it worked because Dean’s DNC recruited blue dogs to run in more conservative districts. In other words you can’t have both – a 50 state strategy and a coalition with no blue dogs. You want the 50 state strategy back? Accept that some blue dogs come with that instead of talking about how awful they are and how the ds are better off without them.
Dean recruited candidates from a very shallow pool of available politicians or wannabe politicians. So did Schumer and Emmanuel.
Dean got stuck with as bunch of blue dogs, but Schumer got stuck with Sherrod Brown.
It was Rahm Emanuel and Steve Israel and the fake progressives, actual Centrists and ‘Third Way’ types, neoliberal, market-based hucksters in service to the monied class) who recruited the Blue Dogs, not Dean, even though they made use of Dean’s brilliant 50 state strategy matrix to maximize their impact, to the catastrophic detriment of the Dem Party.
Most of the antiquated Blue Dogs are gone now, but the pernicious neoliberal centrists, the ‘New Democrats’, remain, and they permeate the party leadership across its entire breadth. And they are ascourge even worse than the Blue Dogs because they have more power and money behind them and that power is focused more tightly, and while they pay lip service loosely to generally so-called progressive ideas, they stand for nothing and ultimately support anti progressive non-practical liberal policies and ideas at virtually every turn, with routinely bad outcomes in almost all instances where the big issues are concerned.
In the above comment, should say ‘…non-practical, anti-liberal policies…’.
Also, the topic of this thread is the win for the UK Labour party leader by a socialist. A man that a few weeks ago was so improbable that bookies were happy to take bets on Corbyn winning at 100 to 1 odds. How is it possible that so many people rejected the New Labour in favor of — egads — a socialist?
Which explains the great progressive Harold Ford running in ’06 in Tennessee (and damn near winning a state virtually unwinnable).
The mythology about Dean and the 50 state strategy is just that: a myth.
We won in ’06 because people hated Bush, not because of some great DNC strategy.
Please read carefully — nobody but you has claimed the the 50 state strategy led to a progressive slate of candidates in 2006 and 2008. Although there may have been a few more than in the past few election cycles, such candidates were in very short supply because such people had been systematically shut out of the DEM party at the local, state, and federal level for a generation in favor of corporate lackeys.
Regardless of how much people hated Bush, if there was no Democrat or only a joke of a Democrat on the ballot, there would not have been Democratic gains in 2006 or 2008.
What you’re saying is that the Democratic Party electoral strategy for six election cycles (’94-’04) varied for Democrats between disastrous losses and barely holding onto to a minority. Then, after a loud call from the progressive base to try something different and not even as different as progressives would have preferred (but that much difference would have been unrealistic due to the prior failures) and getting only a grudging agreement from the party elites, in two years Democrats won both houses of Congress. Being rational, progressives didn’t claim that that success was solely the result of a different strategy, but nobody knows how much credit the new strategy deserved. So, let’s try it again. And again, Democrats made significant gains. But no — it must have been the times and the successes were merely serendipitous. So, let’s go back to the old strategy. The results: disaster – barely held on – disaster.
So now we have evidence from eleven election cycles. Nine from the “DLC/Clinton” way and two with candidates running less like “we suck less.” Maybe those two winning cycles were serendipitous. And maybe the poor widdle Democrats got bad breaks in the other nine cycles. So, let’s go with the loser strategy again to prove it isn’t a loser.
What Marie3 said. The 50-state strategy doesn’t have to be a cure-all to our Congressionial woes, it just needs to be better than the current strategy of retrenchment and blooming out from strongholds. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference, maybe it’s actually worse for some reason or another. But in absence of empirical evidence (because you certainly don’t have commonsense evidence) you may as well try the strategy of unknown efficacy that was used in years of success over the one of known failure in years of failure.
I always find this kind of funny. First, Dean himself would have said he was a DLC friendly Governor in the mid 90’s. Second, the idea of a 50 state strategy requires listening to the local party. In many states those parties will say there is NO WAY a progressive can win.
This is something Dean would have agreed with himself.
McCain carried 22 states in a bad GOP year. Competing in some of those states means running blue dogs. Hell, there were blue dog Senate candidates in ’06.
We’re not talking about Dean in the mid-1990s, but Dean in 2008. Anyone on the left that wasn’t aware that Dean had been fully aligned with the DLC back then wasn’t paying much attention. How many times have lefties acknowledged that they weren’t dumb bunnies in their support of Dean does it take for people like you not to repeat an assertion that we were ignoramuses?
For progressives, Dean had three things going for himself that were in woeful short supply in the DEM party. First he hadn’t adopted the mealy-mouthed wimpy persona of most DEM politicians. As early as 2002 if not sooner, he’d recognized the harm that NAFTA had done and was critical of himself for having supported it. Third, he had been thoughtful and wise enough not to support the Iraq War. Unlike most of the 2004 and 2008 Presidential candidates some of whom not only voted for it but sponsored the legislation. Getting it right on the really BIG stuff is far more important than many flubs on small stuff.
At least according to Dean who made it clear when he took the chairmanship that he would only serve one term. Something, he never wavered on.
Now do I think the DNC was run well after he left? Of course not but I also dont think progressives with their unrelenting drum to get rid of the blue dogs would have fared any better.
Dean was successful precisely because he accepted that winning some districts meant accepting blue dogs.
WRT Dean didn’t mean to imply that he should have been asked to serve a second term as DNC chair (it was well known and accepted that he would only do the one), but that he had earned a spot in the new administration. Who better than him for Secretary of HHS? Sebelius? GMAFB — and I have nothing against her nor would have opposed her appointment to anything.
the right choice for the Secretary of HHS who was going to push through health reform. The right choice, despite how much progressives don’t like him and were glad he got sacrificed because of a “scandal” was Daschle. The HHS who pushed through healthcare reform needed two distinct knowledge sets – they had to know about healthcare and they had to know the Senate. That was Daschle. I still think, had he been in charge, he would have known July 2009 that even a weak public option was not going to make it through so he would have told the President it was time to buy off Lincoln, Baucus, etc with sweeteners to get the dang thing out of committee.
If that had happened I think a lot of the damage of the August recess could have been avoided as there would have been an actual bill our representatives could talk about. Because there wasn’t a bill but instead something that was still being hammered out in committee the tea party was left with plenty of room to scare monger about what might be.
Where I have always blamed the Obama administration was overlearning the lessons of the Clintons attempt at healthcare reform. Where as they wrote the entire thing from the White House and had very little congressional involvement which resulted in their bill dying in committee, the Obama administration let congress, specifically the Senate, take the lead to the point of not stepping in when they were taking too long. That is where Daschle’s encyclopedic knowledge of Senate procedure and relationship with sitting senators would have been invaluable. Seibulus nor Dean had that so no Dean wouldn’t have been a better choice than Seibulus.
Dean failed badly in his own attempt at health care reform in Vermont.
He was my Governor, and I liked him, but I would not want him near HHS.
Don’t know what “failed badly” at a state level health care reform means. And least he made the attempt which few others governors can claim — and maybe he learned a few things in the process.
Since this past summer Vermont had to pull the plug on its attempt at instituting a single payer system. If Dean had learned so much I would think he would have used that knowledge to be an adviser for that effort and got it done.
For that matter where was Bernie when Vermont was pushing for single payer? Obviously it was a state issue but as a sitting Senator for the state why wasn’t he at the forefront in the state pushing for it? After all, had Vermont succeeded, it would have been a huge victory for his push for national single payer (see the path Canada took to single payer).
Fifteen years after leaving office Dean is responsible for the legislature and governor failing to enact a sweeping single payer health care system? Do you have any idea how nuts that sounds?
I do part company with the left that claims single payer is a quick and easy solution. It’s neither because at the provider level, the US health care system ranges from meager to luxurious. It would be analogous to confronting an existing education system that provided K-12 Sidwell Friends type schools for the very wealthy, less expensive but still out of reach for most families, religious affiliated schools for another twenty percent, somewhat okay schools mostly subsidized by the employers of parents for another 40%, and public K-10 rundown, overcrowded, 3-R schools for the remainder and saying let’s close the public schools and send all the kids to one of the other three. As all parent would prefer to send their kids to “Sidwell Friends,” who decides who gets to go there? Public dollars for religious schools?
Bernie insisted that the PPACA include increased funding for community health care centers. One of the rational components of it that recognized the shortage of affordable primary care in low income communities — both rural and urban. It’s not enough; just as the funding for PP isn’t enough. Non-discriminatory, cost effective and rational. Rare qualities in the US health care “system.”
A measurable “disaster.”
At least Sebelius hadn’t been a lobbyist for large health industry corporations. Nor was Senate minority (briefly majority) leader for two election cycles that were disastrous for Senate Democrats — including his inability to retain his own Senate seat. Yeah, that’s just the guy to take on a reform of national health care.
(His wife is also a corporate lobbyist.)
Here’s a novel idea — how about people with demonstrated expertise in whatever area they will serve in a public official role AND demonstrated managerial skills with no ties to corporations that make them beholden to those corporations?
I recall this episode:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/07/howard-dean-sells-out-monday-health-care-lobbyist-smackdown-we
blogging.html
“…Howard Dean claiming that “the ACA’s rate-setting won’t work”, thereby telling his readers that the creation of IPAB introduces rate-setting into some equilibrium of free-market prices for Medicare, is Howard Dean being mendacious to try to protect the profits of the clients of McKenna, Long, & Aldridge. It is not Howard Dean weighing in on public policy trying to make America a better place.“
I also wonder, given your views of Dean, what you make of his support for Hillary’s campaign and how it interacts with your views of Hillary and Howard.
My opinion of the public Howard Dean post 2008? Not good.
Do I understand why that is? Yes. Not getting an appointment in the Obama administration had to have been deeply disappointing for him and that disappointment is understandable to those that once supported him. Also understandable that he’d be a good little party soldier to have any political relevance. That’s a bit dismissive of him because I don’t think it’s in his nature to hold grudges or try to get even with those that dumped him.
Dean was never any more than half (possibly less) the man progressives could support. And he was only that good when liberals/progressives had his back because the impulses of his head are conservative (and rational liberals/progressives knew that). With Obama in the WH, few liberal/progressives had the time or interest in doing anything other than cheering for Obama. Far too caught up in the euphoria of electing a black man POTUS (still a good thing IMHO) to notice that his administration would be a synthesis of Clinton-Bush. As that was what satisfied liberals/progressives, why wouldn’t Dean go along with that?
In some ways Dean is like Gore. Both had the potential to be “better Democrats,” but didn’t have strong enough traditional Democratic principles to follow that path when told that the party’s path was the “middle way,” and after their defeats, there was no conventional political opening for either of them to pursue. And both guys are fairly conventional. Yet, both guys have talents and interests that would have been useful for more progressive policies than most of those in DC. So, more our loss than theirs.
This analysis seems quite a bit flawed, given that the Blue Dog caucus of the House Dems suffered much greater representational electoral losses in 2010 than the more progressive Dems, and most of the rest of the Blue Dogs lost in 2014.
Good news: the conservaDem caucus in the House is now a fraction of its former size. Bad news: loss of the House majority and control of the House calendar.
To paraphrase a line from a favorite author, (Walter Mosely), writing in a line for a character in one of his novels making an observation about those in society’s ‘entitled class’:
“They live and die in their own ether”.
This applies just as much and just as often to the permanent political class, people typically full of themselves, their own biggest fans, and for whom ambition leaves no real room for principle or conscience and hence no recognition of ethical dimensions or responsibilities for their decisions or their actions or the consequences of those actions as long as the delusion that they are secure in their positions of power remains intact.
Not progressive enough — no promise to restore Clause IV.
LINO.
Clause 49 committed Labour to nationalizing industry. It was a heritage of their socialist past.
Its repeal constituted a rejection of socialism. The link is well worth reading.
He is in favor of nationalizing the trains, but it is interesting how unpopular what was the central project of the European left is now.
in search of a constituency. It’s been a long time since railroading needed a large pool of low skill labor, and the riding public doesn’t much care who runs the trains.
White collar leftists need to offer up something beyond sepia toned steampunk fantasies.
I don’t think you know much about how badly privatization has screwed up rail service in the UK, and how badly the taxpayers have been reamed.
Grousing about the rail system isn’t some new dynamic. This goes way back into UK history, including the glory days of BritRail.
The point is, was, and will continue to be the riding public doesn’t vote it.
Anytime you comment on another country’s politics you are on shaky ground since they are almost certainly layers of complexity that are simply not detectable from a reading a few newspaper accounts of an election.
But:
Labour is pretty screwed. The last election was lost because the SNP sweep of Scotland became apparent, and as a result Labour collapsed in England, where a coalition Labour/SNP government was viewed as a nonstarter.
A UK without Scotland is a Tory country. It became clear after the debate that the SNP became the anti-austerity voice, which left Labour vulnerable on the left. But they were also vulnerable on the right in England. Exit polls showed the 2010 austerity was VERY popular. About 75% said it was necessary, though there was a split about whether it should continue.
There are 5 years before the next election. Labour has to hope the SNP burns itself out (as the PQ did in Quebec) and they are able to win enough seats in Scotland to be able to form a government without the SNP. Moving left may make that easier.
The Labour problem in England is far tougher. If Corbyn resurrects the LibDems the way Michael Foot did 30 years ago you could be looking at a three way split returning in England that enables Conservative governments as far as you can see.
The LibDems lost big in the last election. Almost all of Labour’s losses were to the more progressive/socialist SNP.
In England the Lib Dem collapse benefited the Tories, not Labour as was hoped before the election was called. Labour did not improve much over a disastrous showing in England in 2010.
I don’t agree with you at all – Labour should have been able to capitalize over the LibDem collapse in England. They did not.
The SNP vote was as much nationalist as it was ideological.
I’ve read stuff from younger labour centrists supporting Corbyn that don’t agree with all he does but want a break with the recent past.
Be interesting to see what happened if a Corbyn led Britain dumped trident or left NATO. But right now there’s so much hysteria I have no idea what his plans would be.
I merely pointed out if he had learned some lessons/gained some experience that it would follow that expertise would have been useful in the single payer fight in Vermont, a state he has deep political ties in.
This is disgusting. “Labour Gets Their Sanders”. Then the unfair equivalence “…and he’s probably more like Sen. Bernie Sanders than any other American politician of any prominence”, followed by the dig, “He doesn’t look the part any more than Sanders does, either. ” We then continue to compare his foreign policy to Bernie, but we don’t. That’s the last time Bernie is mentioned in the post.
Just what is a prominent American politician supposed to look like or is that just a repeated right wing cheap shot about Bernie’s hair and age?
I remember here at the Frog Pond just after we lost the Senate, we asked what policies we would like to implement if all the Republicans vanished and left us progressives boss. What an outpour that became! Now we have a real Democratic progressive candidate, Bernie, who just pulled ahead in the first two primaries against Hillary and all we can talk about in post after post is Trump and Republican psychology as if any of it matters.
Bernie says he is a Democratic Socialist. He did not say Socialist and there is a difference:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121680/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialist-not-just-socialist
There is however another group that does use the single term Socialist. This group is Marxist and they don’t like Bernie one bit:
http://www.marxist.com/usa-bernie-sanders-and-the-2016-presidential-election.htm
Bernie wants and should get the nomination before Hillary runs against Trump and probably loses. But if he wins that is only the beginning because Bernie tells us that nothing is going to change short of a political revolution. He’s talking about a political revolution from inside the Democratic Party. Given the surge that has sent Bernie ahead in the first two primaries, is something so very wrong with the Democratic Party that it needs a political revolution? A progressive blog should be more concerned about that question and about why Hillary is losing with the support of not only the Democratic establishment but this blog as well. How about we for a change concentrate on Democratic psychology and why we Democrats seem to need a political revolution?
Bernie’s far closer to Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown than he is to Corbyn. Bernie’s platform is very liberal but the only thing people seem to point to as being extreme is that he identifies as a “socialist”. He’s also avoided making any truly controversial stands on foreign policy issues, unlike Corbyn.
The biggest similarity is that there are plenty of Democrats who will publicly crap all over Sanders if he keeps gaining momentum. See McCaskill. I think Obama would side with Clinton over Sanders if it came down to that in the primaries.
Yes, I agree with you. Those Democrats taking the public crap are why we need a revolution; they know it and are afraid of it. In fact, they would rather lose with Hillary than win with Bernie same as the DNC has done so many times in the past and is still doing. Maybe we should continue to study how crazy the Republicans are some more after all so we can figure out how to deal with Trump as President and a larger Republican congress.
The Independent: 1980s photos of future Tory and Labour leaders:
Jeremy Corbyn win: Conservative Party warning that new Labour leader is ‘threat to national security’ mocked on Twitter
Whatever with the Tories, Blairites, Republicans, and Clintionites do if their fear mongering stops working with the hoi polloi?
I don’t really buy into that motivation. My number one rule for appraising the behavior of politicians is that they’d rather win while compromising their principles (whatever those principles might be) than lose while keeping them. And the sliver of politicians who feel the latter way don’t last long when the tides shift against them. Politics self-selects for victory disease.
My other rule for appraising the behavior of people is that they by-and-large put disproportionate importance on what happened to them between the ages of 16-30 than the rest of their lives and it takes a huge exogenous shock to get them out of that groove.
In that light, I think that the reason why most of the establishment Dems don’t want to take a risk with Sanders or more broadly unbowed progressivism is that they literally grew up in a different world. They made their bones during the 70s to early 90s, when liberalism was genuinely in retreat thanks to the aftershocks of the Southern Strategy. They grew up in a world where neither the Rainbow Coalition, the New Left, nor paleoliberals could hold a majority on their own merits and had to accumulate a pile of tricks and black swans (money, winning news cycles, charisma and youth, triangulation, judicial retrenchment, gerrymandering, economic tailwinds, etc.) to wield a majority.
Judis and Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority and Nate Silver’s more data-driven analyses, in which the Democratic Party must abandon the conventional wisdom and lessons learned through the ascendancy of the Nixon-Reagan coalition, is alien and incorrigible to them. It goes against their natural instincts to think that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is an ideologically coherent natural majority (at least at the Presidential level) that doesn’t need the tricks and schemes of the post-Nixon Dems to wield a majority.
And what’s even more alienating to them is the idea that not only are their current instincts wrong, but that it’s high time to rerun the McGovern playbook. That really runs counter to their thinking, because to the current Democratic establishment 1972 was the New Deal Coalition’s Battle of Nicopolis. That is, a battle that was not only a crushing defeat but an undeniable repudiation of their way of life. The battle that conclusively proved that their polity was diseased and unsustainable and that if they ever went down that structural path again they would be completely destroyed. Seriously, listen to some of the Democrats on this site. If you press them even a little bit on the viability of the Sanders campaign, undiluted snark about 1972 is not far behind.
Given that psychoanalysis, I think that the current Democratic establishment are not so much elitist sellouts so much as traumatized refugees. McGovern’s campaign is the folk devil of their worldview, their internal voice of Squealer going ‘surely you don’t want Jones to come back?’. And no matter how much progressives or political scientists show evidence or results to the contrary, for Democrats like Obama and Clinton and DWS, that little voice just won’t shut up.
We suck less is going down to defeat no matter what their instincts tell them. This is not a replay of the McGovern playbook either. Back then we had a middle class with jobs when race/hippies were a central issue. Those jobs are gone and if our present campaign can remain about inequality instead of race we have a new day.
This is the first time we have had the option of an issues oriented campaign where the argument is about top versus down instead of left versus right. Bernie is attempting to unite the working class of all races against the people who have managed to take everything for themselves destroying the middle class. Those Democrats and their `little voices’ need to STFU and help us get the message out to the working class in spite of a hostile corporate media. Obama is not running, Clinton will lose to either Bernie in the primary or in the general to Trump. DWS needs a true progressive challenger in her next primary plus DWS and the DNC needs some active protests now.
The country has changed immensely since 1972. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment (and even most liberals) don’t seem to have grasped this.
Listening to either group, you get the impression that the battles are between an embattled and underdog coalition of centrists, liberals, and a small amount of socialists and communists versus an all-powerful plutocracy with the technowizardry and propaganda ministries of upper-middle class whites as officers and masses of working/middle class whites animated primarily by race and religion who are uniform in motivation and thought. The latter group has money,
Soviet supersciencepropaganda, and above-all else brute demographic advantage. So the Democratic Party has to fight like a honey badger against a lion — ambushing, going for the weak points, and waiting for their opponent to slowly bleed out. Because a direct confrontation would be foolhardy.That may have been true back in 1972, but the tides have shifted. Aside from the obvious growth of racial minorities and Millenials, there are subtler shifts noticed by few activists in either party.
For one, the technocrats have defected wholesale to the Democratic Party. Urban professional whites are almost in the tank for Democrats as blacks. This is very helpful, as 2008 Obama can tell you — and this voting block will be key to cracking open the South.
For two, the right-wing Christians have lost an amazing amount of power even in their own organization. After their last gasp in 2004, they barely even hold veto power anymore. Not only are they losing raw demographic and ideological power, but they are also becoming more regionally concentrate. They can still do an enormous amount of damage at the state and municipal level (see the fights over abortion and gay rights), but the days of them wielding power openly Ralph Reed/Pat Buchanan style are over.
For three, American exceptionalism has lost a lot of clout with the under-40 group. The Democratic Party no longer has to soothe Traditional America’s ego with futile and self-defeating overseas gestures of strength in order to maintain electoral clout. I want you to internalize something here: AIPAC just picked a fight with the United States over Iran and lost. Would anyone in the country have predicted this outcome 20 or even 5 years ago?
Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of ways for the Democratic Party to fuck things up. If they decide to coast on the economy or get into an ugly foreign policy, that will create an ‘in’ for the Republican Party — a Party that is mortally wounded but currently surging with rage and adrenaline. And if the Democratic Party fails to provide a multicultural vision for the United States and instead finds Latinos buying into the ‘superior whites vs. inferior blacks’ frame, we’ll be back to square one. And if they don’t find some way to do better with the white working class, they will be facing gridlock every Congressional Election which increases the chances of the above scenarios happening. And as always, climate change remains a wildcard. Though I’d like to propose another wildcard, too: robotics and the growth of AI. The Democratic Party will need to come up with a way to deal with increasingly intelligent machines displacing workers. And the paleoliberal ideal of ‘put ’em in the plants, warehouses, and factories; if the factories are inefficient, it’s protectionism time!’ is not going to cut it. To speak nothing of what will happen if the AI revolution gives us fully-fledged citizens that will need to be cared for. Or even more existentially troubling, if they create intelligences who are superior to humans and demand a say or even the lion’s share of decisions in society.
But right now, the Democratic Party holds the advantage. And the biggest way for the Democratic Party to squander its advantage is to act like it’s still 1972 and to thus ignore the massive changes on the political battlefield.