Official 2020 US Election: Democratic Party Discussion

[Bofferbrauer2]

Jaicee said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

The Situation in the UK was not comparable. Corbin made himself unelectable with his alternate Brexit proposition and his past and the Leader of the LibDems  seemingly made everything possible to get hated by everyone. Under these circumstances, I'd say that Johnson's win was actually smaller than expected, as the opposition killed itself beforehand.

Coming with UBI just before the election would be double-edged for him, as it's also easy to attack as trying to bribe the people into voting him instead of an actual policy idea.

I don't know, events in the UK have served, to at least some extent, as harbingers of developments to come here in the U.S. of late. Corbyn's selection as Labour Party leader in 2015 did seem to in a sense preview the surprisingly close 2016 Democratic nominating contest involving another so-called socialist candidate. The narrow Brexit vote the following year served to preview Trump's narrow electoral victory here in the fall. Labour's gains in the 2017 elections served to preview an era of subsequent Democratic ascendancy here in the United States. By these metrics, what does the (technical) landslide victory of Boris Johnson's Conservatives in December suggest to be possible here this year? Especially when most U.S. presidents do, in fact, win re-election (e.g. all three of the most recent ones preceding Trump)?

I've been surprised by the lack of movement in Trump's job approval rating as a result of recent events so far. I assumed there would be some before. Who knows though, maybe $2,000 checks can help Trump thrive politically in an economy with a 20% unemployment rate. Normally that would hurt a sitting president, but it seems that conservatives are succeeding in spinning this as a plot against him by the news media. Will they still be able to do so in November when tens of millions of Americans have covid-19 and there have been hundreds of thousands of American deaths from it? I wouldn't think so, but...ya never know these days.

Anyway, you know, I really liked Jeremy Corbyn when he first won the Labour Party leadership back in 2015. Many of the top voices in the party worried aloud that Corbyn's left wing, socialistic positions (e.g. his stances in favor of re-nationalizing the railways and utilities and phasing out nuclear weapons and so forth), and the fact that he called himself a democratic socialist, would lead Labour to even starker defeats than the one they had just endured. It was contended that centrist economic positions were required to draw in the support of the suburban middle class that was broadly supporting the Liberal Democrats at the time (thus allowing the Conservatives to win vote pluralities). The subsequent 2017 elections proved THAT to be utterly wrong! Support for the Liberal Democrats fell from 23% to 7% in 2017, with Labour picking up most of their disaffected voters and gaining 30 seats in the parliament as a result in their biggest turnaround since 1945! The Conservatives' insistence on specifically a hard Brexit in that election seemed to persuade the suburban population that they couldn't be allowed to pick up more seats. That illustrates why I simply haven't feared the prospect of say Bernie Sanders alienating suburban middle close voters "because the S word" in a general election. I don't think that the more conventional Democrats understand the priorities of those voters as well as they think they do.

Fast-forward to now though and look at December's election in the UK. Under Jeremy Corbyn's more recent leadership, Labour has now managed to alienate the rural working class (in the north of England as well as the south), the suburban middle class, the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh, as well as basically everyone over the age of 35, losing 60 seats in the House of Commons and thus falling to their lowest level of representation therein since 1935. "I don't trust him" became the dominant refrain one heard from working class voters describing Corbyn in 2019. How? What changed between early 2017 and late 2019? I think the core problem lies in that subsequent YouGov poll finding that Labour Party members considered Corbyn their best leader ever. How could Labour members possibly reach that conclusion based on the aforementioned results? The answer is: a turn to more insular thinking during the intervening period.

If one paid attention to the details, one could sense that Labour was losing support in the intervening period between early 2017 and late 2019. For example...

...You know how I'm part of the radical feminist community and that that's based primarily in the UK (or at least the English-speaking section of the movement is anyway)? Well, the radical feminists had mostly supported Corbyn's selection as the new party leader in 2015 and Labour in the 2017 election, but began to visibly protest Labour's subsequent alignment with Theresa May's Conservative government on a proposed liberalization of the Gender Recognition Act by early the following year. The liberalization, supported by the transgender movement, was extremely unpopular, supported by just 18% of the UK's population (see the responses to the second question here), and opposed with particular ferocity by Scottish women as it proposed to essentially nullify the 2010 Equalities Act that guaranteed protection of women-only spaces. I noticed that.

...You remember that People's Vote demonstration against Brexit (more specifically in demand of a new referendum thereon) in early September of last year that over a million people participated in? Jo Swinson, the new (incidentally Scottish) leader of the Liberal Democratic Party was among the featured speakers at that event. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, was nowhere to be found. Another, even bigger, sign of problems! Corbyn got on board with the proposal for a new referendum only after that event, and spent the subsequent election campaign stressing neutrality on Brexit itself; the defining political issue of the election! Supporters of Brexit have often pointed out that it was supported by the English working class, to which end I would remind them of the key word "English" in that phrase because there was never a class divide on the matter among the Scots, the Irish, or the Welsh.

I could on here, but I think you get the idea: Labour and the left spent the intervening period between early 2017 and late 2019 fighting each other, while the political right wing remained aligned with a single party. (Nope, Nigel Farage's asinine Brexit Party didn't get anywhere. Boris Johnson's simple "Get Brexit Done" mantra proved infinitely less divisive and more effective.) The Liberal Democrats and Scottish, Irish, and Welsh separatist parties all gained votes at Labour's expense while the Conservatives gained support in the rural parts of northern England against Labour.

What has been the response on the part of Labour's Corbynite faction to last year's election results? Well, to highlight one example, their new candidate for the party leadership is Rebecca Long-Bailey, who has, among other things, recently signed a pledge to expel members and supporters of such organizations a Woman's Place UK and LGB Alliance from the party if she should becomes Labour's new leader in the post-Corbyn era. Among those who would be expelled from the party in such a case would be one of her early rivals, Jess Phillips, who was my favorite of the candidates during her brief run. So much has been learned!

Among the new Labour leadership contenders, Phillips was the staunchest Brexit opponent, a supporter of re-nationalizing the railways, and the sole defender of women-only spaces. She summed up Labour's current problem the best, I think, in two expressions: "I truly believe that if we don’t speak to the country on their terms, and not just ours, then we won't be able to make the gains we need to win an election." And..."The Labour Party will need a candidate that can unite all parts of our movement: the union movement, the members, the elected representatives... and at this time, that person isn't me."

If Labour hopes to get anywhere, it has to get out of navel-gazing mode and listen both to each other and to others outside the party and to what they want and need, especially at a time like this. The same can be said of the left more broadly than just the UK, frankly. Being a leftist, or even a socialist, isn't the problem. The problem is the embrace of a closed-minded attitude that we've seen on much of the global left in recent years.

Absolutely. And the same goes for the LibDems. That's why I said that Johnson's opponents shot themselves in the foot beforehand.