The Tory Tidal Wave: A Warning to Democrats

He’s a right-wing populist who came to power spewing lies, bluster, and bravado. His ideas are dangerous; his rhetoric is nativist and bigoted. He has contempt for the law, governance norms, and simple dignity. He has very strange hair. His name, of course, is Boris Johnson, and he has just won a landslide reelection as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And if Democrats are not careful in who they choose to lead their ticket in November, the US could suffer the same fate.

To be sure, Labour and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have some deep flaws that leading Democrats and their party do not. Most egregiously, Corbyn has failed to address the blatant anti-Semitism that has infected his party at every level. And his incoherent response to Brexit satisfied neither Leavers nor Remainers. But most salient for American politics is that Corbyn and his ideas – a far-left vision of the economy – proved to be wildly unpopular.

It is now clear that the Brexit vote in the spring of 2016 was a harbinger of things to come in the United States. The coalition backing the close vote to the leave the EU looked a lot like the one that narrowly elected Donald Trump. These latest British elections could also be a portent if the Democratic Party and its leader take a hard turn to the left.

Democrats can and must do better. In 2020, they must have a nominee running on a mainstream message and agenda that can win.

Unloved Labour’s Loss

In their pre-election cover story, the Economist lamented Britain’s “nightmare before Christmas.” As they noted, Labour and the Conservatives, “once the parties of the centre-left and centre-right,” have drifted so far to their two extremes that voters faced an impossible choice. The editors threw up their hands, endorsing a third party, the Liberal Democrats, which had no chance of winning.

Similarly, on the week of the vote, the Washington Post wrote that “voters in the (British) middle dislike top candidates.” Former Prime Ministers Tony Blair (Labour) and John Major (Conservatives) even co-hosted an event urging voters to reject their respective parties.

We know how the Tories went off the rails. They had been taken over by a right-wing populist vowing – hatless, but loudly – to Make (Great) Britain Great Again. Johnson’s wall, about as real and as plausible as Trump’s, would be sited somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea. His bizarre determination to crash out of the European Union – and his abandonment of decency and restraint – echo Trump’s own brand of chaos and division.

What then, can Labour’s crushing defeat teach Democrats? Well, as the Economist wrote, in just the last two years Labour has moved from “the left of Europe’s mainstream” to the far-far-left, proposing things like seizing 10% of large firms’ equity and imposing a four-day work-week (with no loss of pay). So, while the lyrics may vary – the British already have single-payer health care – the tune sounds familiar. As the AP reported, Corbyn was “promising the nationalization of some rail and energy services, and to provide free broadband internet, child care and university tuition.”

Corbyn’s party was tapping into real discontent with the direction of capitalism in the global and digital age. British middle-class voters, like their American counterparts, are deeply unhappy about how the opportunity to earn a decent life seems to have become highly concentrated in certain places and for certain people.

This unhappiness, however, was not a call to end capitalism – it was a call to mend it.

Both middle classes want a different deal. They want a 21^st century economy that offers the prospect that hard work will be rewarded with a good, comfortable life, not running in place. They want economic growth that is widespread, not confined to prosperous cities and fortunate demographic groups.

But they do NOT trust the government to nationalize big industries. They do not want to be told the hoary old story that everything will be provided for free. In short, they do not want a British version of Democratic Socialism.

Indeed, Labour’s loss to a dangerous charlatan like Boris Johnson cannot be attributed solely to Corbyn’s handling of bigotry or Brexit. The public opinion data and the size of the wipeout make it clear: his call for a radical transformation of the economy clanged badly with the British electorate.

Britons on Corbyn’s Economic Plan: A Load of Codswallop

The public was telling pollsters before the election that they did not like the far-left economic ideas that they were hearing from Corbyn. The respected British public opinion firm YouGov ran a tracking poll. In the week before they went to the polls, voters favored Johnson and the Conservatives over Corbyn and Labour on most economic issues:

Which government do you think would be better for:

And this preference for the Tories on the economy came even though the same respondents viewed Johnson as an “incompetent” leader by six points, and they found him to be “untrustworthy” by a whopping 32 points.

And this was contempt for Labour based on familiarity. In another survey, YouGov found that voters were more aware of Labour’s economic “manifesto” (agenda) than they were of the Conservative plan, and six in ten said that Labour had “a lot of policies.” But voters didn’t like them. Only 20% said Labour’s policies were “well thought through.”

History Rhymes

British and American politics often move in tandem. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both shifted their nations sharply to the right in the 1980s, with Thatcherism preceding Reaganism by a year. In the following decade, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats heralded Blair’s New Labour, moving both nations back to the center-left (ok, centre-left) with a shared “Third Way” philosophy.

That synchronicity returned in 2016. The Brexit referendum was a harbinger of the terrible outcome in the US elections later that year.

Yet in a feat of impressively bad political analysis, a host of liberal commentators in the United States thereupon concluded that what the Democrats needed was an American version of Jeremy Corbyn. As Jonathan Chait points out, “that theory holds that Corbyn’s populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right. Corbyn’s crushing defeat is a decisive refutation.”

Chait goes on to quote from commentators in The Nation, the Washington Post, The Intercept, and elsewhere who applauded the “parallels between the rise of Corbyn and the movement around Bernie Sanders.” He concludes that, in the UK, the left’s “moralistic fervor made any sober political calculation impossible.”

We cannot allow that to happen here.

As the Economist put it, Labour’s economic agenda was “an attempt to deal with 21st century problems using policies that failed in the 20th.” Democrats must pay attention. They must not nominate someone with a tired old vision for the economy that is out of touch with the mainstream. If they do, they could force voters in the middle back into the arms of Donald Trump, and our own shambolic demagogue could follow Johnson to a second term in power.