Brexit Bullet Points for the American Left in 2020

-by Tim Russo

Bernie Sanders in 2020 will face much the same headwinds in the Democratic Primary as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has faced since spring, 2015. As an American Clintonista who worked on all three of Tony Blair’s Labour victories, I found my radical lefty zeal of the recently converted during Corbyn’s rise. As I converted, I wrote about my Saul Off His Horse moment a lot, here, and here. So pick up a chair.

Like most Americans, I myself had been reflexively Remain. The dying embers of the Third Way yet glowed in my heart as the Brexit referendum approached in Corbyn’s first year as Labour leader. For some strange reason, the “EU” still seemed a comforting blanket of the status quo I used to thrive in. I’ve stayed in touch with a few British friends, and without fail, the Blairite dead ender Corbyn haters were for Remain. As were the Hillary 2016 people.

I became Brexit Curious.

Corbyn has personally opposed the EU his whole life, as a manifestation of neoliberal wealth extraction for capital, among many other such socialist reasons. Corbyn’s 1992 quote on the Maastricht Treaty, which created the EU, is remarkably prescient. “It's the establishment of a central bank which is staffed by bankers, independent of national Governments & national economic policies. That will undermine any social objective that any Labour Government-- or any other government-- would wish to carry out.” There is indeed a strong, sound, socialist argument for Brexit (Lexit-- Learn it here).

Yet, Corbyn instead campaigned in 2016 for Remain as leader of a Labour Party deeply split over the issue. Core Labour voters outside London largely delivered Brexit, who had first fled Labour to UKIP (read-- Reagan Democrats, now Obama-Obama-Trump voters). But London Labour voters (read-- US coastal elites), those most likely to somehow benefit financially from EU membership, went heavily Remain. Remainers were just as shocked by Brexit as Hillary was by Trump; neoliberalism’s transatlantic blind spots are predictable.

Labour’s position today is a compromise, as it must certainly be-- to respect the result of the 2016 referendum, vote down Theresa May’s deal, then fight for a general election to win government and negotiate a good Brexit, then if all else fails all options are on the table, including a second referendum. But Corbyn’s own position is to respect the result of the referendum if at all possible, rather than try to reverse it. As recently as Dec. 21, Corbyn emphasized respect for the Brexit result to The Guardian, creating howls of horror among his Blairite enemies.

No, Virginia, Brexit won't be reversed

A second referendum is total folly, and the push for it is no doubt part of the Third Way’s death throes desperation to destroy Corbyn. First, a second referendum would inevitably be more Brexity, not less, largely due to an entirely predictable backlash against ignoring a referendum result. No campaign on earth will stop a Brexit repeat, and one run by the likes of Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, and Jim Messina will merely throw fire on the backlash flame. Personally, I think Corbyn should campaign for Brexit if there is a second referendum, solely on the basis of respecting the result of the first one. Socialism means nothing if the people can’t decide a question by referendum unless the “correct” result occurs.

Second, and more importantly, for at least the last 30 years, any fool should have known that if the EU went to referendum in the UK, it would lose. It's why David Cameron had to be forced into promising a referendum, and this still holds. Long forgotten is Peter Mandelson’s “Britain in Europe,” Labour's "non-partisan" campaign with Thatcherite Tories for joining the single currency. Launched early on in the Cool Britannia heights of late 90’s New Labour, Blair’s promise to hold a referendum on the single currency never happened, largely because other EU countries who put an EU constitution to a referendum rejected the EU (France and the Netherlands in 2005 in particular). The EU does not have a winning streak in national referenda, quite the opposite.

Like so many transatlantic woes of the early 21st century, centrist neoliberal policy of the late 20th spawned it. Blair’s single currency referendum promise not only went nowhere, it gave rise to Nigel Farage’s UKIP (the UK Independence Party), which is why UKIP’s logo is the pound. Mandelson & Blair's stupidity over the single currency birthed UKIP just as the collapse of generational security was given rocket fuel by Bill Clinton’s dismantling of the New Deal. Brexit’s forces are quite historical, complex, and with centrist fingerprints all over them, just as with Trump; fascism doesn’t just fall off the turnip truck, folks.

For the American left, Brexit is thus a window into the political, ideological, and historical forces that will gather against Bernie 2020. In that spirit, I leave you with some quick bullet points of commonality between Bernie and Corbyn which Brexit illuminates.

• Russia didn’t do Brexit.  Please. Just, don't. Brexit has been brewing for decades. The EU is not popular guys! Just because Putin can read the tea leaves of neoliberal collapse better than brainless capitalists doesn’t mean he can turn up the day it all predictably comes to naught, toss some memes around, and take the credit. If you think Britain will change its mind, just ask the French gillets jaunes how they’d vote on EU membership. You know how it pisses you off when someone claims Bernie is a Russian op? That’s how much it pisses off Brexit voters. Doesn’t work, backfires, and wastes time. Enough.

• Know the rules. The most delicious irony of Corbyn’s rise is that New Labour reforms of party leadership elections opened the door for hundreds of thousands of brand new members to join and elect Corbyn over the hoots and howls of centrists. Instead of MPs, electoral colleges, and other assorted smoke filled rooms, Ed Miliband as Labour leader instituted the “one member one vote” (OMOV) system of membership voting for the Labour leader. In this same way, Bernie Sanders can take over the Democratic Party one state at a time during the 2020 primary. To repeat Corbyn’s takeover of Labour stateside, Bernie will need to blast the doors wide open to nonvoters, infrequent voters, new voters, just as Corbyn did, in a massive campaign of voter registration, state by state.

• The smears will never stop. Any socialist as close to power as Corbyn is today will get the kitchen sink emptied at them in perpetuity. Bernie Sanders will be no different. In particular, Corbyn’s enemies love to smear him, and Labour, as hopelessly anti-semitic, based almost solely in conflating anti-Zionism and support for Palestinians with the ovens of Auschwitz. Centrists in America will do the same to Bernie and his movement, even though Bernie himself is Jewish. Since these attacks are always baseless and ugly, they always backfire, but also always repeat, despite their ineffectiveness.

• Media isn't your friend. Corbyn's Brexit position illustrates British media's Pavlovian dog hatred very well. He is uniformly reviled by every single mainstream media outlet in British politics, especially the BBC. Even The Guardian, once seen as a bastion of the left, has been in constant Corbyn meltdown mode since 2015, which Brexit is aggravating. Stateside, this manifests on MSNBC daily, hourly. MSNBC has been teeing itself up to kneecap Bernie Sanders in 2020 ever since he nearly won Iowa in 2016. Online, this dymamic is far worse, with the likes of DailyKos and its assorted DNC loyalist grifters joining every anti-Bernie paid troll op Peter Daou and David Brock will ever dream up to pay their mortgages. Once Bernie wins Iowa in January 2020, just as when Corbyn won leadership in 2015, the attacks will explode into a viciousness previously unimagined. They will all backfire.

• Finally-- stop shying away from Marx. Both Brexit and Trump are symptoms of the collapse of neoliberal capitalism, as its failures continue piling up, unaddressed and ignored. You are hopelessly ill equipped to understand those forces if you haven’t at least become familiar with a Marxist interpretation of capital. The good news is, you don’t need to read Marx’s work on any other country. Just read what Marx wrote about us. Oh? You didn’t know Marx wrote about our Civil War? Now ya do. Read it. Spoiler-- the Confederacy isn't dead yet.

That’s enough homework. Now get to it! Brexit is a helpful lens through which to see all these forces at work. In early 21st century America, there is so much room to run left, and it’s just growing. A movement has been rising to seize that political ground since the Greens in Iran, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and now, Corbyn and Bernie are the vessels. Be a part of that movement. Don’t be such a fool to stand in its way.






UPDATE: From Wales

Novara Media Co-Founder Aaron Bastani's twitter feed alerted me to a growing phenomenon-- Labour members who voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum and who are turning to voting Leave if there is a second referendum, largely based on who is arguing for a second referendum most-- Blairites. Bastani retweeted the lament of a Welsh Labour member, which clearly makes the argument for Lexit-- a left Brexit.