Will Democrats learn from left-wing revolt in the U.K.?
Does the bolt of eight members of Parliament from the British Labour Party out of frustration with its leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have anything to teach Democrats in the United States?
Corbyn is well to the left of anyone bidding to lead the Democratic Party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist who announced his run for president Tuesday. Though a lefty for sure, the worldview of the independent from Vermont is rooted in less radical forms of socialism than Corbyn’s, and his foreign policy views are somewhat more conventional.
Competing with Sanders for support from the Democratic left is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. She proudly insists she’s a capitalist, a boast Corbyn would never make.
Moreover, a core beef of the center-left British rebels is Corbyn’s handling of Brexit. Most Labour Party moderates, and the vast majority of its members, want to push hard for a second referendum to reverse the country’s narrow 2016 decision to leave the European Union. But Corbyn is ambivalent about membership in the EU and has not made a second referendum central to his strategy.
Corbyn’s critics say he’s had a “bad Brexit,” meaning he hasn’t taken advantage of Prime Minister Theresa May’s chaotic performance that has split her Conservative Party.
Indeed, the revolt of the pro-Europe center broadened on Wednesday when three Conservative MPs quit their own party to join the new Independent Group.
Yet Corbyn-led Labour hasn’t opened the large advantage in the polls an opposition should have in these circumstances.
A particular flashpoint is Corbyn’s lack of clarity in confronting an outbreak of left-wing anti-Semitism. This was the prime motivation behind MP Luciana Berger’s decision to leave the party. Berger, who is Jewish, has been treated barbarously by some on the “Brocialist” left.
On Tuesday, an eighth Labour parliamentarian, Joan Ryan, joined the flight, citing a “culture of anti-Jewish racism” in the party she has belonged to for four decades.
So why should Democrats in the United States care about any of this?
Labour and the Democrats have historically had a lot in common as reformist center-left parties. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were close allies in creating a middle-of-the-road politics that sought to accommodate the left to the market rhythms of the Reagan and Thatcher eras.
But the “neo-liberalism” the left associates with Clinton and Blair came under fierce progressive assault after the 2008 economic implosion for being too financier-friendly, insufficiently attentive to rising inequality, and too confident in the benefits of free trade and deregulation.
Democrats are a long way from embracing Corbynism. But the bitterness of the growing divide between the left and center-left in Britain is a warning of how debilitating intra-progressive strife could become in Congress and in the 2020 primaries.
Since defeating Donald Trump is the absolutely necessary first step toward more humane politics, more moderate and more adventurous Democrats can ill afford to concentrate their fire on each other. The stakes are too high for self-indulgent sectarianism.
And differences in approach over how to guarantee everyone health coverage or how to fight climate change are less important than agreeing that both problems are urgent and need solving. Remembering that your opponents would prefer to do nothing at all on these issues is a good way to put such disagreements into perspective.
Nothing makes the privileged few happier than a left that becomes too maximalist to win, and then tears itself apart.