Another Point Of View: Lessons for Bernie from Britain 2019

-by Tim Russo

Yesterday, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party couldn't wait to declare that Corbyn's loss in the U.K. meant that only a right-wing Democrat could beat Trump here. Bloomberg-- an actual Republican calling himself a Democrat and trying to buy the Democratic nomination-- called the election results in the U.K. a "catastrophic warning" to Americans. In a swipe at Bernie, he asserted that "Americans want change but I don’t think they want revolutionary change." Status Quo Joe also tried pinning Labor's loss on Bernie and Elizabeth, arguing that Boris Johnson’s resounding victory should warn Democrats against veering too far left in their fight to defeat Trump. Biden, at a fat cat fundraiser in San Francisco, gloated "Boris Johnson is winning in a walk... Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not able to be contained within a rational basis quickly." So let's turn to our old friend Tim Russo to get a broader understanding of this than Status Quo Joe or Little Michael will ever have. Tim worked for both the successful Bill Clinton campaigns and in the U.K. for Tony Blair's 1997, 2001 and 2005 campaigns. He knows something about U.K. electoral politics.
-DWT

Trying to reverse an election result is suicidal. The good news from yesterday’s election is we will never again hear anyone claim #RussiaDidBrexit. British voters wanted Brexit in 2016, and they will damn well have it, even if they have to get it by giving a landslide to Boris bloody Johnson, mate. In the US, voters wanted Trump, and no amount of “impeachment” performance art smearing of Laurie Anderson’s shit into her own hair (Hillz) while Yoko Ono screeches in the corner scratching at the strings of a cello with her teeth (Pelosi) will reverse that. The opportunity for Bernie Sanders here is abundantly clear-- he should oppose impeachment. Should have done so some time ago, but there’s still plenty of time to step away from the cliff Labour has spent 3 years hurtling itself over.

It’s suicidal to compromise with centrists, which is why centrists propose it. Since becoming leader in 2015, and accelerating since the 2017 election which saw Labour nearly win, Corbyn bent over backwards to reach out to the Blairite rump of centrist New Labour dead enders, who refused the Brexit result, demanding another referendum. It was folly. On Brexit, Corbyn thus contorted himself and Labour into a caricature. Everyone knows Corbyn’s been at best an EU skeptic his entire life. Corbyn’s (and historically, Labour’s) natural position is to argue Lexit-- a left Brexit-- that the EU is a capitalist vampire squid feeding upon us (conveniently, also true). But by this 2019 election, Remoaners hell bent on a second EU referendum had forced Corbyn to not just put a second referendum into the Labour manifesto by last September’s party conference, reversing the 2017 promise to respect the 2016 Brexit result. They even forced Corbyn, on national television no less, to the point of promising himself in a debate last month to not even take a position in that promised second EU referendum, a plainly seen cowardice Corbyn claimed as some sort of “leadership”. Idiocy.

Winning the nomination is only the opening bell. It’s a common Yankee mistake to assume the smear that Labour under Corbyn became a Nazi antisemitism hive comes from the Tories. Third Way Blairite dead enders launched that smear in spring 2015 before Corbyn even became leader, and have only accelerated it. Not a day has passed since Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015 without knives of this nature plunged into his back, deeper every single day, by his own party. Centrist petty bourgeoisie will not just go away-- they are in an existential fight for their existence as capitalism slowly collapses around them, thus will only get more desperate, foul, and dangerous.

Go for broke. When Corbyn became leader, my only policy concern stateside was whether or not Labour under Corbyn would promise in an election manifesto, as it had before World War II, to abolish the medieval relic of the City of London Corporation, the world’s largest tax haven black hole. Never happened, in both Corbyn manifestos. Since the City is a thousand years old, has no constitution, and is nothing but a set of fangs sucking on the world, if history remembers Corbyn for anything for very long, that failure will be what sticks. Corbyn regularly pre-compromised in this manner, for example, promising that re-nationalization of British rail would be somehow “funded”, as if “shareholders” needed “compensation” for their trouble. Why? That’s like having to pay someone who stole your house then destroyed it to get your house back. Complete madness.

A movement must become a machine. Corbyn’s Obama like tendency to pre-compromise reached full flower in the 2018 conference fight over whether or not to subject Labour MPs to mandatory re-selection every election (like a US primary), rather than as now, automatically. This was how the movement within Labour wanted to get rid of the recalcitrant coup plotters-- just toss em out. Alas, Corbyn again compromised with the snakes whose sole purpose was to poison him, creating a strange “trigger process” requiring massive organization merely to put selection on the agenda of a local constituency Labour Party. Unless institutionalized, movements fizzle into moments, which is what happened to Corbyn’s moment. Like Occupy and the Arab Spring before it, or Bernie Sanders 2016 after it, when a movement is slowed to a stop, it scatters to the four winds in a thousand directions, becoming disillusioned and despaired, incapable of being reborn. Movements are not bottomless wells of energy to be tapped on demand. They must be capitalized on, immediately, to become machines which operate independently of any leader, or moment, or idea. A movement must become power, or it is wasted and lost.

There’s always a bright side. There is simply no point in taking seriously any of the people who wish to destroy you. You must defeat them, then build power on top of their dead carcass. The forces of capital know this very well-- they don’t need to rely on the ephemeral moments movements create; they already have power, bottomless billions of it, and will never stop using it. Likely proving this deliciously will be McKinsey Pete Buttigieg in the next 2020 debate. Even Liz Warren, capitalist who loves markets to her bones, will preach at us to #BeCareful! about moving too leftward! To a fundraiser of ghoulish rich rattling their jewelry at him, of course, the slowly bleeding out Joe Biden gasped for breath with this same ‘warning’ as if Brexit never occurred, as if he hadn’t crafted capital’s incarceration police state end stage with his own hands still dripping with the oil blood of Iraq, whose greenhouse gases burn the planet to a cinder for profit as Joe sucks on his wife’s fingers. No wonder Uncle Joe has trouble breathing-- he’s choking on what he himself has wrought. I had hoped a Labour victory this month would show the world a socialist party could win in half of the transatlantic “special relationship” that is the foundation of neoliberal capitalism. I guess we’ll have to settle for a few hard lessons that really need to be internalized before the Iowa caucuses on February 3, 2020, to show a socialist can win in the more important half of that transatlantic relationship. Timing is everything, as the saying goes.