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The Democratic Party lost large segments of the working-class vote to Trump not because they were too aggressive in defending class interests, but because they were not aggressive enough.
Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and innumerable media commentators have used Tory Boris Johnson’s blowout defeat of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn to warn Democrats not to nominate a progressive like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. “Look what happens,” said the former vice president, when the Labor Party moves so, so far to the left.”
But the comparison, as the Brits would say, is like chalk and cheese.
For starters, the election was about Brexit, and Corbyn had neither a clear stance nor a clear strategy. He was torn between his long-standing opposition to the EU as a neoliberal plot and the reality that a majority of British public opinion was prepared to remain in the EU if better terms could be negotiated.
Corbyn’s position was one soggy waffle. He never made clear whether he wanted Britain to stay or remain, much less his terms as a condition of staying. The closest he came to taking a position was calling for a second referendum without indicating how he’d vote—the opposite of leadership.
Boris Johnson, for all his flaws, at least had a clear position: Let’s get Brexit done and get it over with. Now, ironically, with Johnson having won a resounding mandate, Britain may actually be able to negotiate less-onerous terms. (It’s also possible that both Scotland and Northern Ireland will try to secede.)
But I digress. There is simply no counterpart to Brexit in the American presidential race, and it was Corbyn’s failure to come to terms with the defining issue of the British campaign that did him in.
The second problem is Corbyn personally. He is a dour old lefty, with a genius for alienating people who’d like to be his allies. His principled position against the illegal Israeli occupation of much of Palestine mutated into a failure to distinguish between anti-Zionism and old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Though Britain’s Jewish community is small, that failure to condemn anti-Semitism alienated countless other voters. Once again, there is no U.S. parallel.
Another idiosyncratic aspect of the British system has no American counterpart. That’s the bizarre way the Labour Party chooses its leader.
Under the leadership of Ed Miliband, the party changed its procedure in 2014 so that anyone who joined the party could vote for leader. Miliband hoped this process would re-energize Labour as a social movement. But the reform backfired—resulting in a leader who never would have been selected by a majority of Labour MPs. This is a complete anomaly in a parliamentary system and a source of further intraparty division.
As for Corbyn’s other positions as a kind of left social democrat, most of them are popular with the British electorate. British voters are disgusted with failed privatizations that resulted in worsened service and left taxpayers to bear the costs of bailouts. As John Cassidy reported in The New Yorker, 56 percent of those polled reported that they backed Corbyn’s proposal to re-nationalize Britain’s railways, and 54 percent supported his plan to require corporations to have one third of their board comprised of worker representatives.
That plan is a close copy of Elizabeth Warren’s. And that’s the larger reason why Biden’s comparison of Corbyn with Sanders and Warren fails. Most of the substantive progressive positions embraced by Sanders and Warren also enjoy broad support. The Democratic Party lost large segments of the working-class vote to Trump not because they were too aggressive in defending class interests, but because they were not aggressive enough and too in bed with Wall Street.
Biden’s comparison invites one other observation, but it’s the opposite from the conclusion that Biden draws. Boris Johnson won because he seemed to be defending Britain against the dislocations of trade. Trump, similarly, made gains on the trade issue as successions of Democratic presidents and presidential candidates failed to appreciate the harm done to working people by corporate “free trade.”
If Biden were to be the Democratic nominee, Republicans would continue to eat the Democrats’ lunch on trade, just as Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers have displaced Labour. That’s the only useful comparison, and one that Democrats should take to heart.
