The parallels between Britain and the U.S. are inexact. But the similarities are undeniable.
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Version 0 of 1. British election analysts will be pondering the meaning of Labour’s historic loss for years to come. But so should American lefties who had been hoping Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would show us how to bring unapologetic socialism to our own shores. Many of those people are now busy explaining that British politics are simply too different from ours to usefully draw any lessons. The parallels between our two nations are inexact, of course, as such parallels always are. But the similarities are undeniable: a right-turning populist, hoovering up the white working class even as it sheds the educated and affluent, while its opposition is driven ever leftward by cadres of young activists. Brexit presaged Donald Trump’s election by five months, and it seems all too possible that Britain is once again serving as the canary in the coal mine. (One closed by Maggie Thatcher, destroying the economy of a constituency that is now nonetheless voting for her party, as though God really wanted to drive home just how shocking all this is.) If the American left does want to understand what happened last Thursday, I suggest they read Tim Adams’s account of his post-election visit to a working man’s club in Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old seat. Those clubs once formed the heart of the Labour organization, and mining districts such as this constituency were the heart of the party’s support. In 1997, Blair won it by 25,000 votes. Last week, Labour got only 15,000 votes total. Adams credits this not to Corbyn’s hard-left economic agenda, nor to the charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged him, but to a patriotism deficit. This stuck out for me because the night before, a friend had told me the same thing, pointing out that the great heroes of British Leftism, like Bevin and Attlee, were all fiercely patriotic, as were, and are, the working-class voters they represented. The activist core of the modern British left, he argued, is anti-patriotic, and Corbyn — a leader historically soft on the IRA who also would not sing the national anthem during a 2015 ceremony to commemorate the Battle of Britain — embodies that. Even Corbyn was aware that this was a problem. On Dec. 1, he tweeted that patriotism is “about loving your country enough to make it a place where nobody is homeless or hungry, held back or left behind.” That’s a common rejoinder from left-wingers who have been accused of being unpatriotic. The problem is that it’s a bit too generic to be, well, patriotic. That is, presumably, Corbyn wants everywhere in the world to be somewhere where “nobody is homeless or hungry, held back or left behind”; it has little to do with Britain in particular, except that he happens to live there and speak English pretty well. Contrast that with right-wing patriots: When a defense hawk calls for a military buildup, they are very definitely hoping that rivals won’t follow suit. That sort of particularism is anathema to the modern left — and quite properly so, they’d argue; an “us vs. them” mentality is responsible for most of the evils of the world. The question is whether the left can advance its agenda under the flag of the universal brotherhood of man rather than parochial nationalism. Corbyn’s loss suggests the answer might be no. A welfare state is, after all, a fundamentally national enterprise. Consider Sweden, the world leader in foreign aid. Sweden is the 17th-richest country in the world, meaning that 176 countries, containing most of the world’s population, are poorer than Sweden. The Swedes generously give 1.4 percent of their national product to help people in those countries — and give 26 percent of gross domestic product to the government to take care of their fellow Swedes. That pattern is even more stark in the rest of the rich world. We may think of these programs as altruistic, but in practice, they look like a combination of patriotism and personal insurance. Yet in the United States, welfare-state expansion has increasingly become associated with a very online, very cosmopolitan sort of politics that finds rah-rah patriotism somewhere between hokey and dangerous, and seeks, like Corbyn, to rebrand “true” patriotism as internationalist altruism. That didn’t work for Corbyn. In fact, that kind of leftism is struggling to win elections anywhere in Europe. One way Democrats might avoid Corbyn’s fate is to cater to moderate #NeverTrumpers, marrying cosmopolitan stances on defense, immigration and trade with a moderation on economic issues that will please their recent influx of educated suburbanites. As a #NeverTrumper myself, I’d rather like that. But honesty compels me to admit that they might fare equally well, and perhaps better, by keeping the economic radicalism, but pitching it harder toward Americans, instead of citizens of the world. Read more from Megan McArdle’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook. Read more: Ian Birrell: Labour has a choice: The center or the abyss Max Boot: Populist nationalism is on the march. No one seems to know how to stop it. Henry Olsen: The British election is about more than just Brexit. It’s about tribalism. Sebastian Mallaby: Now that he’s won, maybe we’ll finally learn what Boris Johnson stands for Megan McArdle: It’s time for Remainers to admit it: They lost |