U.K. election: What are the lessons for the U.S.?
British voters last week delivered a thumping victory for
Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, finally guaranteeing
Britain’s long-delayed exit from the European Union. But Johnson’s triumph also delivered a powerful “warning to America’s Democrats,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Behind the unreconstructed socialist Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s Labour Party offered a radical left-wing agenda of “taxes, spending, and identity politics” to win back the white working class that flocked to Johnson’s nationalistic Brexit movement in 2016. But this proved to be a colossal miscalculation, with Labour last week even losing some working-class seats it had held since before World War II. Heading into 2020, U.S. Democrats are poised to make exactly the same mistake, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. The party’s young, progressive thought leaders insist the best way to win back the white Rust Belt voters who elected Donald Trump is with far-left candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and radical policies such as Medicare for All, free college, and the Green New Deal—a strategy that will backfire here as spectacularly as it just did in Britain. For Democrats to oppose Trump in 2020 “with Corbynite candidates and progressive primal screams is to ensure his re-election.”
The U.S. is not the U.K., said Eric Levitz in NYMag.com, and “Bernie Sanders is not Jeremy Corbyn.” A humorless oddball dogged by persistent charges of anti-Semitism, Corbyn is personally unpopular, and exit polls found that voters were rejecting him rather than Labour’s “left-wing platform.” Corbyn “is sui generis,” said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com, and “so is the Brexit morass.” Corbyn bizarrely declined to take a position on the biggest issue in British politics, while Johnson’s brilliantly simple promise—“Get Brexit done”—promised relief to a nation exhausted by three years of Brexit uncertainty. His winning formula was tied to a “situation that is unique to Britain, and which won’t have any bearing on the U.S. election.”
You could have made the same argument about the original Brexit vote in 2016, said Roger Cohen in The New York Times. Five months later though, Donald Trump was elected by white working-class voters determined to “take back their country” from immigrants and urban elites, just like the Britons who backed Brexit. Three years later, the divided forces of the global left are still searching for a message that can compete with the populist right’s “fanatical singleness of purpose.” One glimmer of hope, said Dan Balz in WashingtonPost.com, is that “the exhaustion factor could cut differently” in the U.S. than in the U.K. British voters were desperate for an end to the uncertainty of Brexit, whereas many Americans are longing for an end to the “volatility and chaos sown constantly by Trump.”
Democrats could learn a lot from Johnson, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. The key to his huge victory was pairing a Trumpian message of national greatness with a leftist promise of a massive investment in Britain’s welfare state and a higher minimum wage. This “combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state” could be very popular in the U.S. too, said Andrew Sullivan in NYMag.com. To adopt it, Democrats would need to “ignore the woke,” stop portraying America as rotten with racism, and adopt realistic immigration policies. A party that finds that patriotic “sweet spot,” as Johnson did last week, can “harness the populist tide, rather than be drowned by it.”