Yesterday, a few hours after the Republicans declared themselves the “blue jeans and beer party”, Britain’s version of traditional liberals, the Labour Party, was torched in an election few thought would be as damning as it was. By this morning the pundit class was warning America’s Democrats that a Labour-like smackdown was in their future if they didn’t apply a few British lessons to 2020 and the fight with Donald Trump.
The basic admonishment is as usual not to “go all crazy socialist” and follow the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren off the cliff.
The landslide victory lead by Boris Johnson — a kind of Donald Trump with a shelf of books he’s actually read — was, if we follow British exit polling, due to — wait for it — rural and blue collar voters, i.e. ale and blue jeans, turning against dull, snoozy, give-away-the-farm liberals. Particular animus was directed at Labour’s astonishingly off-putting leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a guy who seems destined for historical infamy for his fecklessness and incompetence over the past couple years. (Corbyn immediately resigned as Labour leader, and may well have already slipped out of the country in disguise. (Joke!)
I won’t pretend to be an expert on British politics and Brexit, but I have tried to keep up, and have devoted hours of car travel listening to the London Review of Books podcast, “Talking Politics”, with it’s collection of Oxford-Cambridge intellectuals straight out of a Kingsley Amis novel. The fact that the hosts and their learned guests have never been able to make sense of all the political maneuvers possible in the context of Brexit made it easier for me to follow, in an odd way. Hell, everyone’s guessing! (But mainly, the show is just so damned British.)
What I have taken away is that yesterday’s crushing Labour defeat had at least as much to do with Jeremy Corbyn as it did with any wholesale rejection of “wild, Socialist agendas.” (The Brits may not be as sane and stable as we give them credit for, but they like most of the “socialism” they’ve got and don’t regard it as a dirty word.)
What the smarter observers of British politics also recognize though is the virulence of anti-immigrant thinking that produced the Brexit vote in 2016 certainly contributed to the Conservatives’ epic win last night. This understanding comes with constant reminders of how Russian meddling via social media in 2016 (and possibly since) has, as here in the colonies, fired-up and sustained anti-immigrant sentiments, mainly among the less-educated and rural folks.
One line of thought is that if Corbyn had turned the Labour party into an emphatic “Remain” party, devoted to killing off Brexit once and for all, he might have rallied a coalition of all those who think of Boris Johnson as, well, Britain’s blonde, vulgar buffoon and national embarrassment.
But Corbyn had spent most of his career railing against Europe and a variety of other hopelessly out of touch ideas and therefore had no credibility on the issue foremost in everyone’s mind. Put another way, the guy was an absolute putz. A soon to be legendary example of precisely the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The kernel of truth though for American liberals is that the immigrant issue — the “others” taking over the America we are entitled to — an issue regularly re-inflamed by a reckless bigot in the White House with 63 million Twitter followers and supported — enthusiastically or not, it doesn’t matter — by the entire Republican eco-system, is a very big problem sitting on the tracks ahead.
Combined with the inevitable hysterical cries of “Socialism!” any Democratic candidate is going to have a tough time breaking the fever of … less well-educated, blue collar and rural voters, mainly of the male persuasion. As in Britain, those folks are more comfortable with rolling the country back to the way it was 30-40-50 years ago than “browning things up” with an welcoming influx of “others.”
This scenario suggests that the Democrats 2020 are going to have to play that careful middle ground old school Republicans always see as best for them, and not go crazy with someone like Sanders or Warren.
I’d like to disagree with that. But it gnaws at me. The hyper-liberal “Twitter-verse” (e.g. Jon Favreau and his “Pod Save America” buddies) make passionate and convincing arguments for large-scale reforms of American courts, immigration policies, climate change action and on and on. But I constantly ask myself if they see and hear the same confusion and indifference that I hear from possible voters every day, the “blue jeans and beer” crowd now supposedly so infatuated with good old boys like Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell?
The electoral trick may lie in stealth. In the candidate smart enough, skillful energetic enough to hold and strategically articulate ideas about significant reform — like, you know, restoring ethics and Constitutional primacy post-Trump — without allowing “mass immigration!” and “Socialism Now!” to become his/her message and therefore identity.
By the time that happens though the “United Kingdom” under Boris Johnson may already have lost Scotland and Northern Ireland to conservative incompetence British-style.
The Democrats despite the impeachment gesture, don’t seem to be on the attack. Except at one another.
Of course, no one gets far in politics without an inflated ego. So to wish that the presidential contenders would exercise exemplary courtesy and civility towards one another–realizing the imperative need for unity behind whoever becomes the nominee–is not a realistic wish.
Nor is it realistic to wish that they would listen to me. My advice to the Democrats, especially the ones in Congress having to endure the Thug Party vitriol and madness, is to get out in front. Insist that Donald Trump PROVE that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and 1. Retain the support of his zombie followers; 2. get the Supreme Court (“my judges”) to shield him from any legal accountability.
Also, let’s get back to that “civil war” and “second amendment” and “I’ll accept results of the election only if I win” type of remarks. Hammer away at that. Does he or doesn’t he want the military, the police, and the NRA’s millions of armed votaries to prepare to decide the 2020 contest with bullets if they lose with the ballots?
And, critically, these questions should be the challenge, not so much to sopciopath Donald, but to every single Republican candidate for federal and state office. None of them want any light between themselves and their Fuehrer, so the Dems ought to focus on these obscenities, and not let anyone shrug them off as “that’s just Trump, he doesn’t mean what he says.” Just the opposite. It’s undeniable now that he does mean exactly what he says. So are you with him? Will you load his pistol when he “stands his ground” on Fifth Avenue? Will you invite or incite the police, military, and armed white citizens to keep Trump in power and the Democrats out? Answer yes or no.
It’s time for every Democratic candidate to suit vocabulary to reality. Speak not of the Republican party. Call it the Trumpery Party. More in sorrow than in anger, speak of opponents as Trumpery candidates, not Republican candidates. Voters are Trumpery voters, not Republican voters. The Republican Party (like the republic itself) is only a historical memeory now.
This is a serious suggestion, and what’s more there is an instructive precedent.
Joe McCarthy refused to employ the correct designation, snarkily calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party.” After Joe’s downfall, the discourteously disparaging expression was forgotten, until Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater dredged it up. Then Fox News relentlessly rode it every day in every story, until pretty soon the mass of the corporate media also began to adopt it: “the Democrat Party” showed up in hitherto respectable papers like the Star Tribune, in television news and radio reporting, and became ubiquitous. Top national politicians–Senators, Governors, Presidents–with deliberate, derogatory intent to insult–used “Democrat” instead of “Democratic” as an adjective . . . a triple play: Purposely NOT using the preferred and indeed the proper name of the party, a gesture which was meant to be deliberately rude and disrespectful [as when so many pissed-off sportswriters insisted on calling Muhammad Ali by his discarded name of Cassius Clay]; also, subtly altering the meaning of the party’s name, by differentiating it from the sense of what’s called “small d”-democracy with its positive connotation of a popular-based philosophy and system of government; and finally, as Joe McCarthy originally schemed, to strain enough at the final syllable so as to evoke a phonetic suggestion of the word “rat,” albeit that part of the insult was more subliminal than otherwise.
I can almost hear Ailes chortling, “See how easy that was!”
Compared to that mischief, re-labeling the Republicans as belonging to the Trumpery Party is innocuous. And it’s truthful, you’ve got to admit.
Along with that, the Dems in my opinion should wage a scorched earth campaign against Fox News. Perhaps hire each and every one of the women who were victimized there to be the official spokepersons for Pelosi, Schumer, and all the contending Presidential campaigns. Tackling Hannity and other villains with the old boycott-their-sponsors approach likely wouldn’t succeed due to the imbalance of prevailing economic forces and resources. But those jerks must have vulnerabilities as yet not properly analyzed and targeted.
Speaking of vulnerability, there are millions of Americans clad in blue jeans or other proletarian garb who simply don’t vote. Far and away, these are people who are poor in income and poorly educated besides. They’re people who could benefit most from voting, and who are least interested in voting and least informed about civic and political issues. When you talk to the kind of persons I’m discussing, they are either afraid of or contemptuous of elections and voting. A large percentage of such people have now latched on to Trump, and are beginning to augment his base. At the same time, a generation of old liberals is dying off, literally.
As for the advice for Democrats to either huddle in the mythical middle or revert to the “Republican lite” approach of the 1990’s, it seems unlikely to me to reduce the tawdry appeal of Trumpery for the brainwashed bums who deify him. The psychological grip of Fascism is fearfully resistant to deprogramming. And to the fuehrers, every attempt at appeasement just looks like weakness to them, so that approach leads to disaster.
How very astute. Thanks for helping me understand this a little better.