Rational Rebellion
Western elites give young voters plenty of reasons to depose them
FOR the third time in less than a year, voters have made a supposedly radical choice when it comes to national leadership in the West. They’ve proven themselves not to be sexist, racist or dumb, though — but acting rationally in their own interests.
Even as the global elite dismiss them as “populist,” or as contributing to more electoral dysfunction that threatens democracy.
This time, the “unthinkable” — unthinkable if you live in a bubble — happened in Britain. Last Thursday, Labor, led by Jeremy Corbyn, nearly toppled Theresa May’s Conservative government, with 40 percent of the vote to the Tories’ 42.4 percent.
And though Tony Blair leftovers in Labor have been warning for two years that Corbyn is unelectable, he got nearly the same share of votes that Blair got in his reelection triumph 16 years ago.
Plus: When you consider that smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and Scottish nationalists have more in common with Labor than with the Conservatives, Corbyn demolished the incumbents.
That’s especially true when you also consider that May only called an optional election because she thought she’d win a landslide.
One last thing: Young people came out for Corbyn, increasing their turnout by as much as twothirds since 2015, when Cameron was last elected. Young people aren’t going anywhere.
May called the election because she assumed that surrogates calling Corbyn out as a socialist whose party has been trafficking in antiSemitism and radicalism, including Corbyn’s own sympathy for terrorists, would be enough to coast. Then, May showed her disrespect for Corbyn (and undecided voters) by refusing to debate him.
But she was wrong. Corbyn ran on re-nationalizing Britain’s railways, which isn’t so crazy to the majority of voters who support it. The country’s monopoly-run private railways are expensive and unreliable.
He also ran on eliminating tu- ition for college students — without saying how he’d pay for it. But it was just as irresponsible for May’s Conservative predecessor to try to balance Britain’s budgets by hiking fees on students who are already struggling in a slow-growth economy.
Under Cameron, May, as home secretary, also slashed the ranks of the police by 20,000. The alternative would be to deal seriously with the impossible pension and other costs that are hobbling the public sector, just like in America.
As for the terrorists? Corbyn never should have called Hamas his “friends” in 2009. In a normal world, that would have killed his national prospects.
Yet voters might have thought it was awfully “friendly” for Blair, once out of office, to cozy up to Libya’s Khadafy family as part of his paid lobbying for a major bank, the Pan Am plane bombing just before Christmas 1988 notwithstanding.
Corbyn’s performance last week is the third major “surprise” in the West in a year.
The first was President Trump.