Too few of the many
Too few of the many Dan Kitwood / Staff

Exit polls have the UK's Conservative Party commanding a stunning 368 seats of the parliament's 650 seats. This is a world-historical defeat for the left. Indeed, it will take decades of soul-searching for Labour to recover, and this long rebuilding process will be directed by the fact that the left can't win simply by exciting its base. This was indeed the hope after Labour centrists lost badly to the Conservative Party in 2015. The then-head of Labour, Ed Miliband, who is a bit like Pete Buttigieg (check out their fathers), experienced the biggest loss for Labour in two decades. And the party turned to the far left, turned to Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist.

At first, it seemed like things were heading in the right direction. Under his leadership, the party stunned the Conservatives in a 2017 snap general election called by the conservative prime minister Theresa May. (Labour gained 30 seats, Conservatives lost 13.) This result spelled the end of May, and stirred the hope that it was just a matter of time before socialism made its return in the UK. Now we know that was a dream within a dream.


Corbyn and the far left will exit the national stage tomorrow, and Brexit will send the island in a direction that will not break it from Europe or German banks but will certainly reverse much of the gains its unions and leftist politics made in the second half of the 20th century.

Now, what kind of message does this defeat send to the US?

It is this. Socialists and progressives are condemned to local and regional politics, not the national arena. If you are going to beat a far-right conservative running for the top office, you have to be a moderate. Expect Biden to make this point to voters on the left. Do you want another Corbyn (Bernie Sanders) catastrophe in the US? We are told the radical types excite young voters and workers who really want something done in Washington. But can we be certain of this? Let's look at what happened in the UK.


Even an ad pointing out Boris Johnson's unconcealed racism, xenophobia, and homophobia had no impact. It's just chilling. The fact that these important leftist issues did not matter to a large number of white voters in the UK will not be lost on many voters on the left in the US. Expect them to be open to the advice of political analysts like Chris Truax, who is a Republican and does not like Trump. He just wants Dems to get real.

Truax wrote in USA Today in July:

...don’t treat this like a base election. Democrats are already guaranteed a nominee that will excite their base and drive a big turnout. His name is Donald Trump. Getting activists “excited” by bold policy positions is a waste of time. You could get every Democrat in California so excited that they all voted twice and it would make not the slightest difference to the outcome of the election.

His point is that issues that matter to the Dems' base mean little to those who will decide crucial swing states. If the left wants to win in 2020, it must not run on policies that have the appearance of "[burning] down the system." As a socialist, I find Truax's argument, in the light of the results in the UK, sobering and depressing. In France, in the UK, and the US, we really have come down to two choices for national leaders: moderates or the far right. After all, if we in the US had a democracy as democratic as the one in the UK, Clinton would be in power now. In short, expect the Dems (and the far left) to be more than spooked by Corbyn's fall and Boris's world-historical success.

All that's left for us on the left: "that filthy piece of toe rag."