WEB ONLY / VIEWS » DECEMBER
13, 2019
Liberal pundits say the lesson
is that Democrats shouldn’t move left. They’re wrong.
BY DAVID ADLER
The similarities are
impossible to ignore. Both are aging Boomers with long resumes in the struggle
for social justice. Both have campaigned on platforms of left populism that
take aim at the rich and powerful. And both have helped spark social movements
led by activists 50 years their junior. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders
share much in common.
So, as we survey the rubble of
the Labour Party’s epic defeat, which saw the largest Conservative landslide
since Margaret Thatcher, it’s not unfair to ask: What went wrong? What can the
the U.S. Left—and the Sanders campaign more specifically—learn from Corbyn’s
loss? And, as the hot takes flood in from American pundits with little
understanding of the British political system, it is equally important to ask:
What should we not learn from this defeat, as well?
There are three key areas
where learning will be essential, and contested:
Staving off character
assassination
I knew from my time canvassing
for Labour in the UK as well as from reading the polls: Jeremy Corbyn was the
most unpopular opposition leader in British history.
Pundits will point to
individual traits to explain his unpopularity, ranging from his personality (a
hippie! with no charisma!) to his policies (he’s a Commie!) to his political
allies (he cavorts with terrorists!) to his base of supporters (they’re
anti-Semites, the lot of them).
But speak with many of the
Labour supporters who hit the doors in this election, and they will tell you
that hatred of Corbyn was far more amorphous, more ineffable, more atmospheric than
this. If you were to ask a given voter why they hated Jeremy Corbyn—and I had
the opportunity to ask many such voters—they were liable to say: “I just do.”
The electoral costs of such
unpopularity were extreme. According to one
post-election poll, 43% of respondents voted against Labour because of the
party’s leadership, compared to just 17% for its stance on Brexit and 12% for
its economic policies.
What could have produced such
an atmosphere of contempt? The short answer: a sustained campaign of character
assassination in near every UK tabloid, mainstream newspaper and otherwise
respectable publication against Jeremy Corbyn.
The case of anti-Semitism is
an instructive one. Most British voters now believe that Corbyn is an
anti-Semite, but few can point to an example of his anti-Semitism. Why, then,
do they believe it? Because the claim was asserted, over and over, in the
papers. If Corbyn weren’t anti-Semitic, voters were right to ask, why would so
many stories get written about it so many months in a row? The prophecy was
self-fulfilling.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders
complain about his absence from mainstream reporting. CNN and MSNBC are liable
to throw Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and even Elizabeth Warren onto their chyron,
but ignore Sanders, despite his consistent polling near the top of the
Democratic field.
But Sanders supporters appear
unprepared for the next phase of this process, when he moves back into frame
but straight into the crosshairs. It’s been said before but bears repeating: We
have seen only a fraction of the stories that the press will use to bring down
Bernie Sanders.
The U.S. Left needs to prepare
for this, diligently and creatively. The Corbyn camp was far too quick to the
bunker: “It’s a conspiracy by the billionaire media.” That may have been
true. But the U.S. Left will need a much more proactive strategy for combatting
such destructive stories and presenting an alternative vision of Sanders’
progressive personality.
Sunlight is indeed the best
disinfectant—only a full-throated challenge to mounting controversy can kill it
off. And that challenge may require progressive candidates to go on all
available media outlets—including Fox News—and do it themselves.
Maintaining the coalition
The Labour Party electoral
coalition is strikingly similar to that of the Democratic Party, in both its
general composition and its direction of travel: working-class communities with
low levels of education and, increasingly, wealthier city-dwellers with high
levels of education.
It’s a coalition that fell to
pieces in Thursday’s election. The Tory landslide was a working
class wave: the Conservative Party broke through traditional Labour-voting
working-class regions, formerly known as the ‘Red Wall,’ to win scores of new
seats.
How did Boris Johnson—an
Eton-educated, silver-spooned, elite-obsessed Tory—manage to make such gains
against a Labour Party explicitly committed to the cause of the working class?
The short answer is Brexit.
The question of European Union membership—or more accurately, of whether or not
the British government would go ahead with the referendum decision to leave the
EU—cut straight through the Labour coalition.
If the Labour Party had
embraced Brexit and served as its parliamentary handmaiden, the Liberal
Democrats were waiting in the wings to claim the urban middle classes as their
own.
If the Labour Party moved to
stymie Brexit, however, they would risk losing their Leave constituencies to a
Conservative Party that promised to deliver Brexit faithfully. The Labour Party
ultimately took the latter risk, and lost predictably as a result.
The good news for Democrats
is, of course, that the United States has no Brexit. Nor is the Democratic
Party threatened by an adjacent challenger like the Liberal Democrats.
But Americans do have an issue
that closely resembles Brexit: the election of Donald Trump.
Many pundits will compare
Boris Johnson and Trump, in style as in haircut. But the Brexit-Trump
comparison is by far the more relevant. A vote for Trump, like a vote for
Brexit, was meant to send a shock to the system and a middle finger to its
political establishment. That is why Trump voters, like Brexit ones, rarely
care for the immediate consequences of their vote choice: the vote was all that
mattered.
If progressives are searching
for lessons, then, impeachment may be a good place to start: a political
strategy that could ultimately turn out to be both myopic and fruitless.
Like calling for a People’s
Vote, impeaching President Trump could be seen as disrespectful to the
rebel vote of the 2016 election, and could deepen the sense of discontent that
gave rise to Trump in the first place. To keep its coalition together,
Democrats will need to find a path to détente between its competing
demographics. Impeachment alone is unlikely to be the answer.
Spin, not socialism
Finally, the S-word.
The commentariat is already
swarming with takes about the peril of far-left policies. Socialism, the
argument goes, was Corbyn’s Achilles heel. And it is likely to be much worse in
the United States, where the S-word is wielded with much greater psychological
power and historical weight.
The problem with this argument
is that it’s wrong. Labour’s policies were their strongest pull—even, or
especially, their most socialist ones: the nationalization of industry. A recent
poll found 84% of respondents supported nationalizing the water
industry. In another, 77% supported the same for energy and 76% for rail.
The issue was that, in the
end, it didn’t really matter. The raft of policies that the Labour Party
ushered into its manifesto—the stuff of a progressive wonk’s dreams, and the
hard work of so many brilliant and creative young policy thinkers in the
UK—simply did not bring people to the polls in their favor.
Simply put, socialism was not
too strong an ideology, but too weak an electoral strategy.
No, spin still seems to
dominate our politics: dirty, rotten spin. Johnson ran an outright corrupt
campaign, disseminating lies, shirking accountability and banking on the
likelihood that people wouldn’t care. It turns out that 43.6% of them
didn’t—choosing to support the Tories anyway.
The lessons from this
particular electoral injustice are vexed. But one is clear: Plans and policies
do not deliver majorities—even if their details determine how you then govern.
To win, then, progressive Democrats must get off of the page and into the
street, with a message that is as simple as it is emotionally powerful.
Liberal pundits are going to
stop at nothing to swing the Democratic Party back toward the center—and
Corbyn’s loss will be powerful ammunition. Progressives cannot sweep it under
the rug. The lessons are there, if we are willing to learn them. But in this
moment of despair, those of us on the Left must keep repeating to ourselves,
over and over: We can win, and we must.
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