Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Corbyn, Trump, and a New Kind of Politics
The Establishment is undone. The party’s “milquetoast defence of its economic record, its lack of direction … its bland, sputtering lack of passion” opened the door, and an utterly non-traditional politician walked through: outspoken, controversial, occasionally bizarre, willing to rip up long-held assumptions. Radical change has come – with 60 percent of the vote.
“I voted for a new kind of politics,” proclaimed Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters today as they made him leader of the British Labour Party. Corbyn’s appeal is anti-establishment, and leadership’s desperate pleas have gone completely unheeded. After the self-admitted folly of a few put him on the ballot, nearly every Labour MP opposed him. A drove of shadow cabinet members resigned today and say they will not serve under Corbyn. Tony Blair – the only Labour leader since the 1970s to actually win elections – urgently opposed him:
It’s a revolution but within a hermetically sealed bubble – not the Westminster one they despise, but one just as remote from actual reality … They’re making all those “in authority” feel their anger and their power. There is a sense of real change because of course the impact on politics is indeed real …
However, it doesn’t alter the “real” reality. It provides a refuge from it.
The once overwhelmingly popular leader begged the party to step back from the edge: If your “heart” is with Corbyn, Blair suggested, “get a transplant.” This didn’t work.
The far left and the unions are overjoyed. Sinn Fein is congratulatory. One of the few Labour politicians enthusiastic about Corbyn is the new Scottish Labour leader:
Today shows politics has changed. People are calling for radical change and straight talk … I’ve said I want my leadership to be about shaking up the establishment in Scotland, and Jeremy wants to do the same across the UK. What people want is real change – not just in their politics, but in their lives. Today offers the chance for that change.
She is right. People in the UK – and across the Atlantic – are desperate for straight talk and for change that really matters. But she is wrong, because the hope Corbyn is offering is a false promise.
What does this man want to do? He promotes a far-left wish list of socialist policies Labour abandoned years ago. Rent controls, printing money to “invest” in the economy, tax increases, ending what little private enterprise there is in healthcare, re-nationalization of whatever he can, maybe bringing back Clause IV, Labour’s pre-Blair commitment to public ownership of industry, and more. He wants to withdraw from NATO. He has not avoided anti-semitic associations, and has used the word “friends” of Hamas and Hezbollah. He wants unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Corbyn has a few flip-flops in his record and is decidedly fuzzy on EU membership: With a referendum looming, you’d think that would have been an important question in a leadership election, but at a certain fever-pitch of politics even matters of vital national importance are overlooked. He has a few other outside-the-box ideas: let’s consider all-female train cars!
Corbyn’s appeal is easy to see: He is no traditional Establishment politician. And, let it be perfectly clear, he fights.
The disenchantment that produced Corbyn is real, it transcends parties, and it exists on our side of the Atlantic. Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump are very different manifestations of the same phenomenon: a bitter disillusionment with established politics, a passionate rejection of old leadership, an enthusiastic embrace of something that seems new in pursuit of change. Their policies are of course different and their personal styles are not that alike, other than a certain curmudgeonly pleasure in shattering long-held presumptions. But both speak less to specific ideological issues than to a disconnect between the people and the ruling class. The only answer, of course, is true leadership, which Labour cannot provide. We are better off: We have conservatives who can — if they can communicate and will be heard and accepted.
There is nothing new under the sun. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters think they voted for “a new kind of politics.” They did not. They voted for a barely repackaged set of old, dangerous, unpopular ideas.
I remember when Tony Blair was the fresh inspiring figure whose new kind of politics swept the nation before him. Today, Labour voters can see that he was a politician like any other. The bubble is burst; his triumph rings hollow. Someday in retrospect, the excitement swirling around Corbyn today will ring just as false and perhaps worse, the beginning of a greater disaster for party or country. Corbyn’s supporters forgot that any office-seeker, however different his style and promises, is another mere human politician. Very probably, they will face crushing electoral defeat and learn again why the Labour establishment and all those old tired politicians rejected outright socialism and fought Corbyn’s rise. If not – if, as is just possible, the Tories fail to hold their own coalition together – Britain will reap the whirlwind.
I can appreciate the despair of the Labour establishment; they deserved their loss. Corbyn and his “new” politics may inspire thousands and be fun to watch if not taken seriously. But he is now Britain’s Leader of the Opposition, and those who put him there will feel the effect, one way or another, of the false promises they believed and the things they did not think mattered.
Published in General
An upstart party with radical ideas upending the political establishment.
Canada, Reform party which set in motion the events which dismantled the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. Which had led to events putting the vaunted and powerful Liberal Party of Canada into enclaves unrepresented in vast area of the country.
The extreme positions on debt and deficit financing, which by the way the Republicans have yet to come close to, provided a safe moderate position for the Liberals to balance the books.
What this will do in England is move the conservatives to the left. Mark my words. And the already divided Conservative house will be torn asunder.
The Perot presidential campaign did something very effectively. It removed tax increases from possible policy prescriptions for Republicans for a decade or more.
A basic understanding of the strength of democracy is helpful here. It is a means of removing from power as opposed to selecting. This Labour leader election has effectively removed from positions of power and influence the Blair Labour remnants. They were as expected from where the most vigorous gnashing of teeth came from.
Now if after the “shake up” we could just find someone to lead us who doesn’t care about himself, but only about the country. Who is that angel in the form of a man, beholden to no one, not interested in reelection, etc.?
You are right that the “shutdown” didn’t lead to chaos in the streets. But it really wasn’t a shut down, was it? A couple of offices had light staffing, and some national parks were closed for a few days.
continued
But I recall a good friend of mine telling me when Obama was elected that it really doesn’t matter who wins these things, our lives go on pretty much as before. And while that was true for me, for many people it was false: for people who live in coal mining regions, for people who had health insurance in the individual market, for businesses subject to EPA regulations, for people who don’t want to live in a state with gay marriage, for people who live on the southern border, for employers who want to hire the best person for the job, for employers who want to avoid unionization, for the military, for people who live in failing cities, for university students who want to be admitted without regard to their race, and for many more.
The government didn’t do much harm during our brief shut down, but there are plenty of places where the government can and has done great harm. California is an example. So is Venezuela. So is Turkey. These elections do matter. And it matters how things settle after a shake up.
I’ll be the last guy to argue that the gov’t isn’t doing any harm – quite the opposite. What I mean is that, in aggregate, its current iteration is doing great harm, so shutting it down for a month isn’t going to do a damn thing in either direction.
Can’t argue with that.
Corbyn is a British Sanders. The dynamics are different, but Sanders has peeled away support from Clinton, and enjoyed the benefits of her self-induced iceberg-ramming campaign (she can’t help herself, she’s a strong, powerful, and intelligent victim here), which is creating some cleavage in the Democrats.
And not the kind that Hillary’s husband seems to delight in.
Leigh, you’ve been doing great work on Ricochet erecting the structure of principled and reasoned opposition to Trump (or more accurately to the apparently populist moment some of the rest of the world is sharing with us). However, #23 and #27 are written 1) as if the Trumpeters wouldn’t have any kind of reasonable response, and 2) in such a way which I think will increase their conviction.
There comes a point in any fever where one must simply defeat one of the symptoms, like a 105 degree temperature, but overall the best way to health is to fight the cause of the infection. That means the political elite need to stop failing. We can curse the sniffles all we want, but the solution is for the antibodies to eliminate the bug. No amount of Kleenex or cool baths will bring us to health if the underlying problem isn’t solved.
Even at that, does Trump really qualify as “at any cost”? How is Trump any more dangerous than Obama, Biden, Sanders, or even our own team who can’t seem to either gain broader cultural support or find effectiveness in advancing ideas and notions that many conservatives care about? Trump may play a buffoon on TV, but is he really a buffoon? Is he really a 105 degree temperature?
The government shut down affected the Federal Government, not exactly state governments which the federal government gives billions of dollars to act as surrogates of federal law. Even then the state governments can also borrow cash just like the federal government can so that even if the federal government went bankrupt the state government can carry on.
Conservatives need to see the entirety of the battlefield (every level of government) rather than just seeing the federal government (even though it is the source of all big government, but you have to fight on all fronts) as the only front.
In the case of this “need for change” we need to understand that we are witnessing just the regular combat of vying political groups in the Republican Party. Donald Trump is simply an old fashion progressive businessman that relies on old fashion impulses like nativism and protectionism. This is why he has across aisle pull, he advocates for policies that both native unskilled and organized labor like (gaining left groups like unions and blacks).
He also “challenges” the lack of law and order on the border among conservatives by complaining about the need for a wall on the border (which almost every candidate prior to his entering had already advocated, so I fail to see why its that distinguishing). He also makes an infinite number of vague statements that are supposed to win over everyone.
The truth is that he’s not a classical liberal and people need to see that.
Neither can we suspend the things we think are important because the conditions aren’t just perfect to be able to implement what we want without any opposition. Things will never be perfect. Even when things were as perfect as they could get (R’s controlled all branches) we both failed to implement a conservative agenda (a sunsetted tax reform package was the best we could do) and we succeeded in losing all branches and much general respect. Now that we have both houses, we can’t even manage to what we did in the 90’s – force the president through our equal and opposite power to compromises in which our side and the country actually gains something.
How will Trump help? I’m not confident that he will which is why I’m not a supporter. However, I think I get his game. He seems to have some core goals: border security, immigration reform, economic health (free trade is good, but unilateral free trade isn’t obviously so), and at least strong opposition to the Iran deal. Everything else seems to be posturing and chips he’s accumulating with which to wheel and deal later. Like you, I’m very much skeptical of Trump but I’m not skeptical of his dealing skills or of his PR skills. To my mind those have been the central weaknesses on our side (along with doubt of what goals our side has really been shooting for). Is getting 25% of my agenda better than getting 0%? I vote yes, but I’m really hoping one of the other R candidates comes on strong enough to both beat Trump and win the general. Whoever it is, though, won’t do it by being Trump’s enemy or by being bland and timid: like it or not the road to victory is to coopt the Trump people and energy by redirecting it into more more productive means and a more appealing flair. But make no mistake, flair is required nowadays.
Two points: 1) the elitist condescension came first – fixing that will go a long way, and 2) it isn’t just an emotional reaction – it’s also a pragmatic reaction to the reality that she isn’t being served anyway, so the mixed bag is obviously preferable to the current bag of all crap all the time.
I hear a lot about how people are unreasonably seeking to apply some purity test or about how people are being misled by the promise of “fighting”. I understand where these criticisms are coming from, but all too often it doesn’t seem as if the critics understand where the other side is coming from. All too often these are snees and mockery instead of substantive criticism. Instead of sneering at and mocking these impulses, why not acknowledge the underlying truths and address them head on? The fact is that there is real skepticism that leaders on our side are in touch with the principles and goals of their constituents. There is real and reasonable frustration that the leaders on our side have no idea how to be effective advocates for our goals or even that they’re willing to enter the fray for them rather than do their best to skate by. So instead of knocking Trump (or Corbyn) for grasping these things too well, the answer is to do it better and more appealingly than they do. Yes, part of that is posture, but the other part is taking the impulse seriously and acknowledging that it can’t be put off forever.
So Blair’s electoral success under the Labor banner is evidence of understanding the political realities and the country as a whole while Trump’s and Corbyn’s success so far is evidence of rushing headlong into danger? What’s the difference? Wouldn’t Bill Clinton be in the same category as Blair?
I understand that taking advantage of the political realities is not the same as leading us in the “right” direction, but nor is it evidence that we’re going in the wrong direction.
@Ed — I simply don’t have time right now to respond to all this in detail, and I’m not in this post trying to really build a case against Trump. Just to show a larger context I think we all need to see. If someone reads that caution and says “well, I think Trump is the leader we need anyway” — I disagree, but it’s not my primary point here. But I do think we need to realize that this moment can be dangerous.
Did you read it? Blair raises some historical comparisons which she basically ridicules without truly answering. Saying Blair’s victory was a long time ago is irrelevant.
Blair is right — Corbyn is almost certain to lose, badly. I don’t have time to make that case right now (James of England could probably do it in five seconds), but I’m happy to leave it to events to prove.
This party just elected a full-blown red socialist, and I don’t mean in the sense that Obama is left-wing. It’s not a “mixed bag.” It’s sheer madness.
Corbyn has an Achilles Heel – coal. Forty years on he’s still fighting Margaret Thatcher on the miner’s strike while promoting a fantasy of a “green” economy. He can’t reopen the mines in South Wales without seriously splintering his party and pushing the more radical environmentalists to take to the Greens.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Blair and Clinton were a lot alike. I’m not holding Blair up as any sort of hero here. I’ve felt myself in sympathy with Tony Blair about twice in my lifetime. Once fourteen years ago when he stood “shoulder to shoulder” with us unequivocally when we were attacked, and once again — to some extent — this year when he called out sheer madness for what it is. To some extent. He never found the way to do so convincingly, though the lines I quoted above were his most out-of-touch, if you will.
(Corbyn, by the way, is as anti-American as one would expect from his strain of leftism. He would not have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us.)
Blair was a political genius. Like most, he eventually lost his touch, and the governance could not match the hype. As I said in my main post, the bubble burst and his victories now seem hollow, just as Corbyn’s eventually will. Blair understood the country well enough to win, though, and he still does. Corbyn does not.
(cont.)
I don’t know how familiar you are with British politics, so forgive me if I restate obvious facts here. But Blair was the only Labour leader since the 1970s to actually win an election — and he won three. Blair won elections by leading his party away from the kinds of policies and politics Corbyn’s promoting. And the broader politics haven’t changed. Britain is not conservative in American terms, but the country as a whole (especially now that Scotland has abandoned Labour) is just not attracted to this level of full socialism. They gave Cameron a majority rather than risk a Labour-SNP coalition; Corbyn’s socialism is even worse.
Corbyn is proudly reasserting the role the unions play in Labour politics — that doesn’t play well with the broader public. He wants Britain to open its doors fully in the current refugee crisis (as I said, there’s limited policy similarity between left-wing and right-wing populism). Tony Blair took out Clause VI, in which Labour committed to public ownership of industry. Corbyn has talked about restoring it. There’s more. So yes, he’s taking Labour to the electoral cliff. And if somehow he makes his way into power instead, surely I don’t have to argue here what the consequences could be.
You said “The promise of radical “new” politics is ultimately a false promise, whoever the politician.” I was pointing out that the history of politics of this sort is that they do bring radical new politics; most of the time when the US or UK have fundamentally changed direction, it’s been because one side of the political tug of war has decided to think outside the box and go purist. This means that the other gets the field to themselves and starts scoring big time. It sounded as if you were saying that a policy of throwing a Hail Mary on every play wouldn’t result in a radically different score.
If we get Trump, for instance, we could be assured that the country would radically change course. We’d certainly lose Congress and it’s possible that they’d get a supermajority: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota all have candidates who would struggle to campaign alongside Trump, meaning that whereas usually the Senate and Presidential campaigns can share a ground game, in this instance they’d need to duplicate. The advertising would not be on a shared footing, etc. Activists within the same party would be overtly hostile. Illinois and Wisconsin are already challenging races. Florida and Indiana are open seats that would feature even more brutal primaries than usual. Candidates would constantly be asked whether they agreed with the latest Trump statement, and would lose support either way.
Just like the other times that someone ended business as usual in Washington, business as usual would be ended. Trump would get the single payer he wanted, the sorts of judges he’d like on the Court (probably even his sister), he would be personally enriched by the massive increase in unionization, since buying off unions is a core competency of his, and such. There would also be changes he wouldn’t like, like amnesty, which he is now against, cap and trade, and all the rest.
While I don’t think Cruz is a better person, he would be a vastly better candidate. We’d still have a downticket impact from his losses, and there’d be a few Bollings, there probably wouldn’t be as many moderate recusals as there were rebel recusals last cycle. Cruz is pretty good at schmoozing, and his substantive platform is basically the same as other Republicans.
Corbyn is more Trump than Cruz (although he’s obviously more polite and decent in his personal actions, while dramatically less so in his beliefs). Corbyn’s victory speech started out by calling out media criticisms of him; I think we can all imagine Trump’s name checking Kelly. We can only hope that his inaugural address would not.
If Corbyn is still on top come the next election, something which is more likely if substantial numbers of Corbyn opponents leave for the Lib Dems or a new party (third partyism is wrong headed always and everywhere), we should see the next Prime Minister being a Thatcher level revolutionary (not on Ricochet, of course, where I imagine they’d be a “Contributor”).
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are working from the same script.
It is frightening to me how possible I think it is that Sanders could win the next presidential election.
There is always a haze of emotion surrounding every election.
Sanders is tapping into the frustration of the millennials, a quarter of whom (and some say a third) will be living in their parents’ home until they are 34 years old. The millennials nearly outnumber the boomers now, so that is a significant number of voters.
There is a combination of factors involved in this trend, all of which are cited in these articles, but the one that few people mention is the paucity of truly affordable housing–that is, housing that is available for a third of a person’s starting-salary income. It is the Democrats with their endless zoning and permitting and environmental regulations who are depressing the housing market. Only those businesses with extensive legal departments can afford to work through the regulatory processes. That gives big real estate businesses a nice advantage over the guy next door who wants to add a small income-generating apartment to his house.
The costs of everything are inflated by layers of taxation built into prices. But rather than address that insidious government-caused inflation–and they cannot do that since their profit-seeking business is getting more tax revenues–they attack businesses for the low wages they are paying.
[continued]
[continued from comment 50]
That we are overregulated and undercapitalized is the direct result of the Democratic Party’s policies. I blame the Democrats specifically because they have controlled the functional bureaucracy of our government at all levels since soon after World War II, but most acutely after the unionization in 1978 of 650,000 government employees. They have also controlled our education system and the messages it promulgates. The kids for forty years have been taught that Big Business is taking all their money, that it is rich, and that its riches are impoverishing the middle and working classes. The Government is Us. Big Business is Them.
This isn’t Alinsky. It’s Marx all the way.
Bernie Sanders is right about how difficult it is for a sizable proportion of the American people to get ahead. He has grabbed the debate on the economy from the hands of the Republicans before we have had a chance to frame our own. He has put the Republicans on the defensive already.
This is how all dictators operate. It works.
OK, I get it. I think you may have misread me. In saying the promise is false I do not mean it will change nothing. I mean that the hopes will not be fulfilled. Barack Obama delivered “change,” but his promise of “hope and change” was a false promises as well.
I am not trying to argue that Corbyn will not change anything — he already has — or that Trump or Sanders don’t have the potential to do so. Just that the politics they offer is not really all that new in global historical perspective, and that ultimately they are no better able to deliver utopia than any other politician.
Someday — ten, twenty, thirty years from now — that will be obvious. Whether because he wins and his policies actually don’t end war or poverty or any other evil, or because as is far more likely he loses badly, and sticks Labour voters with their worst nightmares, his supporters’ hopes will fail.
I’ll pray that it’s a more conservative nightmare than Cameron.
You are, though, trying to lump Trump in with Corbyn and both of them in with an unreasoning populist tantrum. I agree that for a great many people this is unreasoned, but I think those people don’t employ much reasoning even in “normal ” years. There are others, though, who are reasoning their way through this whether you or I agree with the reasoning or not.
Otherwise, all political moments can be dangerous. Each election seems to be the most important of our lifetimes. But here’s a question: how dangerous can Trump be? Is he more or less dangerous than Obama, Hillary, Sanders, or Biden?
I don’t know anything about UK politics, but for a lefty who’s had to endure the triangulation of Blair and now the conservative government of Cameron, could going for a true blue socialist be any worse than what they’ve been getting (from their perspective)? They’ve been losing anyway, so a loss wouldn’t be any different, and going for broke has some chance. There seems to be nothing to lose in a strategic sense by going that route.
I am repeatedly struck by how much you really don’t like Cruz.
Marci, this isn’t dictator tactics, it’s smart tactics. Grab, frame, and own the debate before the other guys even gets a chance to get his bearings is something I’ve been wanting our guys to do for decades. Gingrich did it with the Republican revolution in the 90’s. Clinton did it against Bush in 92. The Democrats did it to Bush on the Iraq War in the 00’s.
Sanders isn’t the American equivalent. Trump is. Our populations are reacting to corrupt dysfunctional government. Dysfunctional, corrupt inept government is a product of the modern administrative state. It attempts to do things it can’t, believes it knows things that aren’t knowable, promises things that government is incapable of providing. We know this from history and from 20th century Latin America. All of Latin America, because of the Napoleonic code, are administrative states, and as such are often corrupt, dysfunctional and periodically seek men on horseback to fix things. They never find the right man and often get exactly the wrong one, because the administrative state can be dismantled but not fixed. This is new to us so we’re just starting to look for our man on horseback and Trump is he. For the left it was Obama. The difference between a strong conservative leader and Trump is that Trump believes he can make government perform well because he’s smarter than the clowns that currently run it. Conservatives know the limits of government and the value of clear laws that assure freedom and the rule of law and not of men. This is what makes Trump a progressive, a real threat, and a man on horseback. He can make the trains run on time.
I don’t know about Corbyn or Sanders supporters, but I don’t get the sense that the Trump supporters are looking for Utopia. I think they’re looking for a border wall, mainly.
Ed, I’m not “trying” to lump anything in. The comparisons, if one is familiar with British politics and (more importantly) with British people and likewise with Americans, are glaring.
You said above that you thought a couple of my points were counterproductive. But they’re true.
Trump is polling at about 4% on Ricochet. I didn’t write this post to talk that 4% out of it — if they’re OK with his praise for socialized medicine I don’t expect some sudden realization that his movement parallels a British socialist movement to turn the tide. I wrote it for anyone who might be interested, to try to provide a little global perspective I think is important. I can’t do it fully, I can’t convey well how strikingly similar these movements are, and I can’t in a few words convey what Corbyn really means in the British context. But I do want us to understand that there is something going on beyond the Republican primary.
Pardon me, but the only thing that has happened so far is that Donald Trump has had a few rallies, issued a thin immigration plan, and scared the GOP establishment into a blind stinkin’ panic.
I see no “danger.” I see politics. The elite has failed, miserably and repeatedly, yet apparently no one is supposed to notice. We’re all supposed to keep hoping the usual suspects suddenly have a fit of competence and get things right. Sure.
I note that some fraction of the same people now panicking because of the boogieman with bad hair were quite happy to welcome Obama into office and remain not only willing but eager to work with him. For example, ponder how the the Iran deal came to treated as if it required a veto override. Plus, the worst thing Romney was willing to say about him was that he was a nice guy in over his head.
So- the lawless shadowy guy who openly promised to fundamentally transform the United States, has plentiful connections with anti-American radicals and terrorists- no danger, in the eyes of the elite.
Donald Trump, real estate magnate and TV star, says he wants to make America great again and enforce US law- now that’s dangerous.
Something doesn’t add up with all that, in my opinion.