Guest Post By Tim Russo: How To Fght Anti-Semitism Smears Against Bernie-- Scorched Earth

I’m probably the only American on earth, quite literally, who’s followed every single deployment of the antisemitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, and the radical left since the day Corbyn decided to run for Labour leader in 2015. All of them-- click around my site. Fight me. As such, I’ve been waiting for the now building tsunami of these same smears against Bernie Sanders like a kitty kat tapping my wee wittle feeties for a few years. Now that this tsunami has begun to arrive, and will never stop, here’s my advice for whenever you hear someone claim, or insinuate, or wonder (just wondering!) that Bernie Sanders, a Jew, is antisemitic. This advice is for anyone, Jew or Gentile. Equally useful.

1. Fuck. You. The only way this smear works is to assume that a Jew must hate themselves so much as to hate all Jews, an assumption which itself is of course antisemitism to its stinking core. Bernie must hate himself, a Jew, because everyone hates Jews, riiiiggghhhtttt?????? Thus, the person confronting you with the smear that Bernie Sanders is somehow antisemitic hates Jews themselves, deeply, whether they know it or not. Thus, you are staring vicious hate straight in the face. What an opportunity, then, to fight the best of fights. If it is a close friend bringing this hideous pile of shit to you, be strong, and be prepared to end that friendship in a blaze of glory, because you should not be friends with antisemites happy to prance around with it in public. Put your dukes up, for the Lord works in mysterious ways, and let them fucking have it. You’ve always wanted to burn a bridge or two, admit it, so, flame on! Channel Sherman marching to the sea through Atlanta. Burn it to dust.

2. No quarter. None. The gravest error the Labour Party made in the face of these endless smears was to take them seriously. Upon becoming Labour leader, Corbyn launched “investigations,” convened “committees,” created a “process” for “discipline,” thereby chaining Labour to the smear like a stone around their neck. MP after MP was hauled before these idiotic collections of brain dead apparatchiks to answer for every single coarse word they ever uttered about anything, but most of all, Israel, (we’ll get to that), and every person they ever so much as shared a bus stop with. It wasn’t just MPs-- random people online, children, grannies-- the whole internet was scoured for sacrificial lambs to tie to the stake, then lather rinse repeat. It remains ongoing and will never end. Never, ever, go down that road-- someone asks you for “proof” or demands anything at all, you tell them you will fuck their ass so hard they’ll shit the proof out their own mouths.

3. Unleash it all. You took notes in 2016, remember? You saw how every single concern troll bait and switch worked against Bernie. You took them all seriously, earnestly debating, playing nice. Remember where that got you? Nowhere. (then President Her lost to an orange billionaire shitting into golden toilets tossing babies in cages. Hear Her Roar!) This smear is your opportunity to stop playing nice, and let it all fly like the wind. Spread your wings, channel your anger into righteousness, and set phaser on blast, comrade. Rejoice in it. Revel in it. Shine on you crazy fucking diamond.

4. Fuck Israel. The paper trail of these smears leads directly to lobbyists literally on the Israeli government’s payroll, every single time (google Luke Akehurst). The point of the smear is to protect western military aid to Israel and perpetuate Palestinian oppression. FACT-- the state of Israel is not Judaism. To boot, for my entire lifetime, the state of Israel has jacked America up in more horseshit than any other nation state on earth, to the point that now they are inserting themselves into our political processes to smear an actual Jew. (election interference! oh bloody hell never mind) Thus, Israel can go fuck themselves. You’ve always wanted to let fly on Israel, now is your chance. Fuck them and the horse they fucking road in on, I am so sick of this piddly ass little country the size of god damned Rhode Fucking Island dragging us around by our short and curlies just so a bunch of Rapture Awaiting Holy Fucks can rub their AR-15 on their pencil dicks to jack off imagining every Jew incinerated by the end of days. Blow me.

5. Keep going. The good news is that deployment of this smear against Bernie Sanders means he’s winning. As the saying goes, you are seeing the whites of their eyes. Ready, aim, fire. At will. Delight in it. If you’re in public, make a scene. Wave your arms around wildly like you’re Groucho Marx or some shit. Leave an indelible warning that if you hear a single utterance of this type one more time, you will crawl up that person’s ass with a microscope and display their entrails across the interwebs for all to see, then put the kettle on, take a rest, and do it again. You’ll enjoy it tremendously. Trust me.

6. Magnify the backfire. Deploying this smear against an actual Jew is so disgusting, the bigger your blowback, the better. It will all benefit Bernie, and already is. Thank whatever god you pray to for this opportunity to be an instrument of his or her will. Then do it again.

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.

Foreign Correspondent: Boris, Brexit, and the British Election

-by Reese Erlich
@ReeseErlich

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Britain’s tousle-haired answer to Donald Trump, came into office promising to leave the European Union by October 31. He declared that he would rather “die in a ditch” than stay in the EU past that date. But by mid-October he had to ask the EU for an extension and, while not dead, Johnson may be lying in a ditch of his own making.

Britain and the EU have extended the deadline for their divorce, known as Brexit, this time to January 31. Parliament, meanwhile, voted for national elections to be held on December 12. Johnson hopes to win a majority, ram Brexit through parliament, and then implement his party’s anti-worker, conservative policies.

Britain’s Labor Party, led by unabashed leftist Jeremy Corbyn, strongly criticizes Johnson’s Brexit plan as hurting working and middle income people. Corbyn promises to negotiate better terms with the EU and then put the agreement up for a popular referendum. While polls show Labor trailing the Conservatives in the upcoming elections, Corbyn could pull out a surprise victory given widespread hatred of the conservatives.

But it will be tough sledding. Brexit has deeply split British society and presents a serious conundrum for left and progressive forces. Leftists who have long opposed EU membership because of its neoliberal policies seem to be in the same camp as ultra-right wingers who advocate leaving the EU based on xenophobia and racism.

Liberals and social democrats, who favor staying in the EU because it provides some worker and environmental protections, find themselves in bed with Britain’s largest capitalist corporations.

Robin Hahnel, an economist and professor emeritus at American University who now lives in Portland, Oregon, puts it in perspective: “Brexit is a clusterfuck for everybody.”

EU and neoliberalism

The European Economic Community, the EU’s predecessor, began in 1957. The EU was formally established in 1993, and it became an economic and political bloc competing with the United States. The EU eliminated tariffs among member states and created common rules for everything from naming cheese to environmental protection. In 1999, Europe issued a common currency, the Euro, which further consolidated EU power.

While paying lip service to helping Europeans improve their quality of life, in reality, the bloc’s biggest powers-- Germany, France and Britain-- imposed neoliberal policies on its weaker members in the interest of greater corporate profits.

Left and progressive forces have opposed EU for good reason. Like NAFTA and similar trade agreements dictated by Washington, the EU has benefited certain corporations to the detriment of workers. Bankers in Berlin and bureaucrats in Brussels made decisions that couldn’t be changed by elected governments.

For many years, as a leftist backbencher, Labor Member of Parliament Corbyn opposed British membership in the EU.

“He knew EU membership prevented democratic control of the British economy,” Hahnel tells me. “The EU was the brainchild of neoliberal corporations.”

During the 2008 world recession, conservative German bankers wouldn’t allow member countries to create significant, budgetary deficits. While the Obama Administration primed the US pump with federal spending-- and not nearly enough of it-- the EU was constrained by fiscally conservative policy.

“The EU institutionalized austerity and draconian budget cuts in countries such as Greece,” Costas Panayotakis, a sociology professor at the New York City University College of Technology, tells me. “That created popular discontent, and contributed to far right and anti- immigrant sentiment. Boris Johnson is part of that wave.”

While the EU has been a disaster for working people, it’s policies aren’t easy to reverse. The EU has created a vast web of trade agreements, regulations and economic interdependencies.

Leftist debate

There’s fierce debate within the European left about how to proceed. The communist parties of Britain and Ireland, for example, see the EU as a capitalist institution that can’t be reformed. They want Britain and Ireland to leave the EU as a first step towards unraveling it altogether.

Social Democrats, including a significant number of Labor Party members, advocate joining with other European leftists to reform the EU by adopting environmentally and worker-friendly policies.

But that’s not the debate that dominates British political discourse.

Brexit has exposed long simmering divisions within the Conservative Party, split between those big capitalists who make money with European trade and those who think they can make more going it alone. Johnson, for example, claims once the UK has left the EU, he will negotiate more favorable trade deals with the EU and the United States.

Getting a favorable trade deal from Donald Trump? Good luck Boris!

Meanwhile, Britain’s ultra-right wing has adopted leftist rhetoric to denounce the EU for increasing unemployment and spending billions of pounds that could have been used to fund the country’s National Health Service. (Yes, the right wing in Britain supports a single payer health system.)




The right wing then demagogically blamed immigrants as the source of the problem, although attitudes have changed since the 2016 Brexit referendum.

As if the debate wasn’t complicated enough, voters in Scotland and Northern Ireland strongly support staying in the EU. People in both areas want closer ties with Europe as part of their resentment of rule by London.

Scotland has a strong nationalist movement, and if the British government pulls out of the EU, it would strengthen calls for independence. Similarly leftist Irish republicans in Northern Ireland favor staying in the EU. If the UK pulls out, that could lead to a reinstatement of a hard border between the north and the Republic of Ireland, something that was abolished years ago.

Boris' plan

In mid-October, Boris Johnson negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the EU. It contained unpopular provisions, such as 39 million pounds ($50 billion) to make up for British revenues that would have been paid to the EU. Additional divorce payments would be due after the end of next year if a final agreement isn’t reached. It also avoided creating a hard border with Ireland, but angered right-wingers in Northern Ireland who called the plan a “betrayal.”

But Boris’ plan, like the one proposed by his predecessor Theresa May, mostly leaves key issues unresolved. Once outside the EU, Britain, and Europe would have to negotiate a new trade agreement, which could take years. Would the UK abide by existing trade rules in the meantime, racking up billions of pounds of new divorce payments along the way?

The Labor Party is split between trade union and traditional leftist opponents of the EU on one side, and centrist members who favor EU membership on the other. So Corbyn has forged a compromise.

Corbyn hopes that with a Labor victory, he could negotiate a better agreement with the EU and then submit the plan for a national referendum. Corbyn says he will remain neutral and allow voters to decide whether to accept the new withdrawal plan or stay in the EU.

But, that’s seriously risky, says sociologist Panayotakis. People are exhausted by all the Brexit delays, he observes, and Johnson may continue to be seen as the champion of people on the right and left who oppose EU membership.

“It may seem wise for Corbyn to move to the center,” Panayotakis says, “but it may be more risky than people realize.”

Will the U.S. National Security State Work to Defeat Jeremy Corbyn?

The implementation of Israel's one-state solution is nearly complete (discussion here)

by Thomas Neuburger

I've been writing both publicly and privately about regime change and the U.S. national security state lately, most recently here. Bottom line: They do it and they like doing it. It seems no country is immune from being targeted — according to Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, even the UK.

This find stems from a leaked recording of a conversation Pompeo had with British Jewish leaders who are worried about Corbyn's supposed "antisemitism" — in reality, Corbyn's even-handedness when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which represents a break from the U.S.-UK position of always siding with Israel and against the Palestinian people, despite stories like this: "Annexation: Israel Already Controls More Than Half of the West Bank."

Here's Telesur's version of Pompeo's leaked remarks:

US Will ‘Do Its Best’ To Stop Corbyn From Being Elected as Prime Minister: Pompeo

In the most recent showcase of United States (U.S.) meddling in foreign governments, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledged, in a leaked conversation with British Jewish leaders, that his country will “push-back” against Labour’s party leader Jeremy Corbyn's bid to get elected as Prime Minister.

“It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected,” Pompeo is heard saying. “It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

The recording was leaked to The Washington Post and revealed on Sunday after sustained accusations of antisemitism within the party. These allegations have mainly being driven by mainstream media and certain pro-Israeli groups against Labour’s leadership.

Corbyn has long been a campaigner against Israeli occupation and supporter of Palestinian rights, which many journalists have labeled as anti-semitic.

Note that Telesur quotes the Washington Post, which broke the story, but which also interpreted the remarks differently. Here's the Post's Pompeo-friendly headline: "Pompeo pledges not to wait for Britain’s elections to ‘push back’ against Corbyn and anti-Semitism." No hint of a threat of regime change or election interference is suggested.

Here's the Post's version of Pompeo's remarks with context:

During his meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Pompeo was asked if Corbyn “is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the U.K.?”

In response, Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best,” he said to fervent applause from attendees.

“It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened,” he said.

Was Mike Pompeo promising to interfere in the coming UK election to make sure Corbyn was defeated? Or promising just to protect "Jews in the UK" if life becomes "difficult" for them (whatever that means) after Corbyn takes office?

Pompeo's quoted comment  contains a tell: "You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back." He, Corbyn, can't "do those things" — make life difficult for Jews in the UK — until after he's Prime Minister. What would "push back" mean prior to Corbyn taking office? What "things" would there be, what actions could Corbyn possibly take prior to his election — that could be pushed back against, except the election itself?

Stay tuned. If Pompeo makes good on his promise and the U.S. security state is caught meddling — Russia-style or worse — in the election of the UK prime minister, the consequences will be varied and great on both sides of the ocean.

At that point, things could get very interesting indeed. Look for UK heads to swivel in outrage and anger, whether Corbyn is elected or not. And look for U.S. heads to divert attention from the obvious and recent contradictions.
 

We Get To Vote Again On Trump Next Year But Poor England May Never Get Another Chance To Vote On Brexit

Thursday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn the the House that "After the last few days of government chaos and some defeats, all of us now have the opportunity and the responsibility to work together to find a solution to the crisis facing this country, where the government has so dramatically failed to do so. We have begun to hold meetings with members across the house to find a consensus and a compromise that meets the needs of our country." However, a vote "enable the House of Commons to find a way forward that can command majority support" was narrowly defeated-- 314 to 312. On the other hand, the vote for a second referendum, which seems the only sane thing to do, was overwhelmingly defeated-- 334-85.

But, a Brexit vote finally went Theresa May's way. 413 members voted to delay Brexit, while 202 voted against. It took support from Labour to pass it and 8 of her own cabinet ministers, including Brexit secretary Steve Barclay, voted against her. The delay is for at least 3 months but it could be a lot longer.

All 27 EU members have to agree to grant the UK an extension. EU Council president Donald Tusk favors an ever longer extension than the 3 months May is asking for. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, isn't as optimist and conciliatory as Tusk. "What’s the point of whining on for months on end while we have been going around in circles for two years?" he asked. "When Theresa May comes asking us for an extension, our response will be: 'For what? To what end?'"

Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, wrote that May has finally got the Brexiters where she wants them. "MPs," he wrote, "had the chance to take back control of Brexit-- wresting this tortured process from a weak, flailing and moribund government-- and they ducked it... losing by just two votes, 312 to 314, but MPs passed up the opportunity to take charge and say, at long last, what kind of Brexit they want. They preferred instead to grant Theresa May yet another lifeline for her own deal-- which, incredibly, will come back for a third meaningful vote on Tuesday.

The lever that was offered to MPs, by which they might have finally got a grip on the Brexit crisis, was a proposal from Hilary Benn [Labour] that would have seen a series of votes allowing MPs to indicate their preferred Brexit plan-- whether that be Norway plus or a second referendum or every shade in between. No longer would May retain the initiative, with the power to confine MPs to a single, binary choice: my way or the highway.

Had it gone through, it would have confirmed what the rest of this week had already suggested: that power is haemorrhaging away from this prime minister, that this government is in office but not in power, that it is parliament rather than Downing Street that now calls the shots. But, by a whisker, May’s administration clung on, the party whip having lost not all of its sting. In fact, it was six Brexiter Labour MPs who saved May from what would have been further humiliation, voting against their colleague Benn and giving her a stay of execution.

It now means the prime minister can stage next Tuesday’s vote the way she wants it: as an ultimatum to the ultras of the European Research Group and the Democratic Unionist party. Thanks to another, much more comfortable vote this evening, approving in principle an extension of article 50, those intransigents will now face a sharp dilemma. The ERG and DUP either swallow their objections and vote for May’s deal, or they face the prospect of a long delay to Brexit-- perhaps for the best part of two years. Given the mayhem on show these past few days, who would bet what might happen to their precious Brexit project between now and 2021? They might lose it altogether.

That is the stark, binary choice May has always wanted to press upon the Brexiters, and the defeat of the Benn amendment allows her to do it. She-- and her plan-- get to live till Tuesday.

Some of her colleagues want to say that something else momentous was decided this evening: the rejection of a second referendum. It’s true that the Commons delivered a crushing rejection of that idea. True too that the margin of defeat will be used to taunt and torment people’s vote campaigners for days, maybe weeks, to come: “Your precious second referendum was rejected even more decisively than May’s plan back in January!” they’ll say.

But that taunt will only have a tenuous relationship to the truth, because this was hardly a real test of the idea. Labour abstained on the proposal, while even the official People’s Vote campaign said now was not the right time to push it. It was tabled by Sarah Wollaston of the Independent Group, perhaps to embarrass Labour and highlight the party’s lukewarm support for the campaign, but it was hardly smart tactics: it now allows opponents to claim there is no support in the Commons for a second vote when, in fact, there’s much more than tonight’s vote suggests. It was a misstep by the remain camp, which has demonstrated that it is far from united, and riven with tensions of its own.

One almost-clear thing does emerge from tonight’s vote. That date you had in your diary, circled in joyful red or in sombre black depending on your point of view-- you can now uncircle it. Whatever else happens, it is all but certain that Britain will not be leaving the European Union on 29 March.

That’s because MPs voted by 413 votes to 202 to request an extension of article 50. I say request, because it’s up to the 27 EU nations that Britain will soon leave behind to give their blessing to a delay. Still, given that they also don’t want a no-deal crash-out in 15 days’ time, it’s a good bet they will say yes. Even if May works a Lazarus miracle on Tuesday, winning approval for her Brexit deal buried twice over by successive Commons defeats, she will still need an extension into the summer to get all the technical stuff through, and that’s even before talks get started on the future relationship. So doomsday-- or day of liberation, if that’s how you see it-- is no longer scheduled for 29 March. This Brexit saga will go on and on.

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.

Bernie Won The Wisconsin Primary, 567,936 to 432,767. Trump Won Wisconsin Too... With Just 531,129 Votes

I spent about an hour or so, spread over a couple of phone calls, with Jon Ossoff right after he declared. I was impressed with his energy and verve, his dedication to oppose Trump and the House Republicans and his eagerness to do what’s necessary to win. He didn’t come across as a Bernie Sanders or a Pramila Jayapal or Elizabeth Warren but he did come across as kind of progressive. Blue America endorsed him, I contributed some money to his campaign and we started raising money for him.

It didn’t take long before I started regretting it. It wasn’t even that he started inching inextricably towards the center really fast, as much as something else I smelled. The DCCC moved in immediately and took over with their crooked money-sucking consultants. Everything I started seeing coming out of the Ossoff campaign started looking bad to me-- the multiple e-mails with no content everyday was an immediate give-away. When I complained, they took me off their mailing list. Every time I asked Jon substantive policy questions for follow-up posts, he wouldn’t respond. By the time he said he opposed single payer, I realized I’d been had by another establishment suck-up. But I generally held my tongue and hoped he’d win just for the message it would send to Republicans wavering in their support for the Ryan-Trump agenda. That was fucked up of me. Because there was another message an Ossoff victory would have sent, one the media would have crowed about endlessly-- how the Democratic Party can only win with centrist candidates who don’t have campaigns based on strong values. Maybe Ossoff can now go off and join Jason Kander in whatever he’s doing to push backward centrism on unsuspecting Democrats.

Right after the votes were countered and people started asking themselves what happened down in Georgia, Matthew Yglesias took the opportunity to propose that this might be a good time for the Democrats to stop trying to expand their Big Tent to accommodate every Republican who isn’t a neo-Nazi and instead come up with a coherent and substantive agenda. Imagine that!

Ossoff falling short-- while coming closer than Rob Quist-- and Jeremy Corbyn’s surprisingly strong showing in the recent UK election suggest a possible synthesis of these views.

Corbyn’s electoral map, in the end, turns out to look a lot like Hillary Clinton’s. He did well in the most diverse and most educated parts of the United Kingdom and worst among older voters. Whites with college degrees, in short, weren’t secretly dreaming of socialism. At the same time, running on a bold progressive policy agenda didn’t stop him from picking up support in exactly the kind of upscale precincts that the Democratic establishment has been trying to target. And it did succeed in doing what post-Obama Democrats have failed to do-- engage young voters and encourage them to come to the polls.

But perhaps most of all, running on a bold policy agenda helped focus voters’ minds on policy rather than on the (extremely long) list of controversial Corbyn statements and associations from past years. Pundits had long expected Corbyn to get crushed at the polls, and had Theresa May succeeded in running an election focused on the Falklands War, the Irish Republican Army, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, she would have won. But instead, the UK ended up with a campaign about promises to nationalize utilities, eliminate university tuition, and raise taxes.

Ossoff’s effort to stay bland and inoffensive let hazy personal and culture war issues dominate the campaign-- and even in a relatively weak Trump district, that was still a winning formula for Republicans.

A chief of staff on Capitol Hill observed to me Tuesday morning that absolutely every faction in the Democratic Party-- from Third Way to the Berniecrats-- thinks Democrats “need a positive economic vision,” and not just to talk about Trump. The DCCC’s analysts agree.

“But when the rubber hit the road,” the chief of staff said, “we didn't produce a positive alternative on health care.”

Not exactly because Democrats don’t have any ideas of how to make the American health care system better. But because in some respects they have too many ideas-- ranging from small tweaks to improve the functioning of the Affordable Care Act to the idea of radically transforming the entire health care system by having taxpayers foot the bill for everyone’s insurance. The easiest way to maintain party unity was to stick with what Democrats could agree on-- that financing an enormous tax cut for the rich with stark cuts to Medicaid and deregulation of the insurance industry was a terrible idea.

Still, it should be sobering to Democrats that a CBS News poll released Tuesday morning filled with devastatingly bad approval numbers for the Trump administration found that only 31 percent of voters thought a Democratic takeover of Congress would make their lives better.

If your opponents are unpopular enough, it’s certainly possible to win elections this way. But especially for the party that has a more difficult time inspiring its supporters to turn out to vote, that’s an ominous sign. Right now on health care and many other issues, Democrats suffer from a cacophony of white papers and a paucity of unity around any kind of vision or story they want to paint of what is wrong with America today and what is the better country they want to build for the future. And until they do, they’re going to struggle to mobilize supporters in the way they need to win tough races.

And that brings us right to the candidates who are very much not Jon Ossoff-- not children of privilege, not bland, not malleable, not puppets. Wednesday, Will Bunch asked if a mustachioed ironworker from Wisconsin save the Democratic Party from itself. “I used to think,” he wrote, “the pain of being a Philadelphia sports fan was something unique to Philly-- until I started mulling the current state of the national Democratic Party. I mean, the Phillies have only been in rebuilding mode since 2013 or so. What can you say about a political party that’s been trying to retool, in one form or another, since 1981…if not longer? In fact, I’m starting to get confused between the agonizing rebuild of my beloved Phillies (feel free to substitute the Eagles/76ers/Flyers/Union) and the muddled state of a political party that-- for all its myriad flaws-- is the last remaining bulwark against totala-Trumpism. Why didn’t they call up Scott Kingery to run in South Carolina-05? When will Jon Ossoff learn to hit the curve ball? Why did they just reward Nancy Pelosi with a long-term contract?”

The glass is not empty for the Democrats. Their candidates in the four special elections over-performed the party’s expected norm by about 8 percentage points, and a similar showing in 2018 would-- according to the pundits-- probably be good enough to re-take the House. Districts that aren’t blood red but reddish purple-- like the seats held by GOPers Pat Meehan, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ryan Costello in the Philadelphia suburbs-- would be prime candidates for flippage 17 months from now. But the glass isn’t even really half-full… maybe closer to 40 percent full, at best. After all, partisans have been shouting from the mountaintop that Trump is an epically bad president of historical proportions-- either inept or a proto-dictator or both--and that the GOP on Capitol Hill will kill you with climate change if losing your health insurance doesn’t strike you dead first. Shouldn’t that produce a political tidal wave? So where is it?

…[T]here’s a lot of talk today that the Democrats can’t win if all the party stands for is being against Trump. That’s true-- but it’s even worse than that. In Georgia-06, the Dems didn’t even try to do much with the president’s rising disapproval numbers.

Jon Ossoff was a very sincere candidate, and he seems like a nice young man. Running for office in today’s climate is a brave thing. But I listened to an interview that he did with NPR on Tuesday morning, and by the end I practically wanted to gouge my eyes out. It was the some of the most insipid, focus-group-tested-and-consultant-approved meaningless happy talk I’ve ever heard from a Democrat, which is saying a lot. He wanted to bring tech jobs to Atlanta, and cut wasteful spending. Health care needs to be-- somehow-- “affordable.” Ossoff and the Democrats couldn’t have run a more effective “show about nothing” if Seinfeld’s Larry David had been their show-runner. No wonder voters curbed their enthusiasm.

The Democrats won’t truly emerge from rebuilding mode until they have the courage to stand for something. One role model-- sort of-- for this emerged from across the pond, in the UK’s recent national election. True, Labour’s fiery leader Jeremy Corbyn-- somewhere to the right of Che Guevara (barely) and to the left of Bernie Sanders-- didn’t win, but no one expected him and his party to do nearly as well as they did, and, given the shaky status of Tory Theresa May’s government, Corbyn may yet become prime minister sooner rather than later. They achieved this by doing something that would terrify America’s Democrats. They published a manifesto of bold, uncompromising measures that the Labour Party stood for. The party called for eliminating university tuition, raising the minimum wage, boosting spending on infrastructure, and undoing school budget cuts. Britain’s political pundits pontificated that the platform spelled doom for the left-leaning party, but the document instead energized young voters, who turned in droves for Corbyn earlier this month. And I believe a similar-style Democratic Party manifesto here in the U.S. could have the same type of electrifying effect.

I don’t think Corbyn clone would do well here-- but America doesn’t need one. We have Randy Bryce. A longtime ironworker with a solid 6-2 frame, an Army vet, with Mexican and Polish ancestry (with a mustache that looks like what you’d see if you stumbled into the wrong 1970s movie house, if you know what I mean), Bryce sent shockwaves this week by announcing his plan to challenge House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose congressional district in southern Wisconsin is not nearly as solid red as one might expect. In comparison to many mealy-mouthed Democrats, listen to what Bryce-- @IronStache on his Twitter feed that is exploding with new members-- told the Payday Report:

“Being an ironworker, I have seen some things that, unless I have seen them with my own eyes and been part of it, I would say you can’t do that-- that’s impossible,” says Bryce. “You know, you are gonna walk up on a two and half inch piece of metal, you are gonna be up three hundred feet in the air and walk across and carry something to get to a place to wield– that’s impossible…When ironworkers hear somebody say, ‘We can’t, it means ‘I won’t.’”

“Let’s trade places,” Bryce quips. “Paul Ryan can come work the iron and I’ll go to D.C.”

Now, watch his ad (and compare it to Ossoff’s spot). This is truly one of the best political commercials that I’ve ever seen-- and it casts Bryce as someone who will fight for health care and the rights of workers:



Look, I know what people will say-- that Bryce’s challenge is a political death trap, a suicide rap. If the polls show an even remotely close race, the powerful House speaker Ryan will call in every chit with every hedge-fund guru and insurance company CEO that he knows, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save his job. (And, yes, Bryce has run for office before, and lost… but not with a killer ad like this). Maybe that’s not the point. The spirit of what this man called @IronStache is doing here-- taking a stand on the high ledge of politics, with no fear-- is that spirit that the Democratic Party will need in all 435 House districts and a 33 Senate races if Trumpism is to be stopped now rather than later. There’s a reason that voters in suburban Georgia fell for something-- and it’s because the Democratic Party didn’t stand for anything.

American Elites Need To Feel The Fear The British Elites Feel Today

It’s nice-- very nice-- that Macron pulverized Le Pen and her fascist party. In Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Macron’s party won 350 seats, an absolute-- and unassailable-- majority in the 577 member National Assembly. Le Pen’s fascists won just 8 seats. That, though, is different from having reason to celebrate a great progressive victory. Ultimately, the fact that Macron detests and reviles Señor Trumpanzee is just funny and admirable, not governance. Neither Macron, a centrist former banker, nor his prime minister, conservative Édouard Philippe, is remotely progressive. They literally define conservatism: preservation of the status quo. The turnout, its worth noting, was the lowest in living memory. I was in France for the election. People seemed motivated primarily to stamp out fascism, not to embrace Macron and Philippe. As the French used to say-- or at least the French Jews-- “feh!”

Now across the Channel, on the other had, there really is a reason for progressives to celebrate. Though Jeremy Corbyn isn’t Prime Minister yet, he smashed the Conservatives and sent waves of fear through the British elites. Last week, The Nation carried an interview with veteran British journalist Paul Mason, which you can listen to here:



The point that Mason wanted to get across though, is that Corbyn’s moral victory was something of beauty and something that shouldn’t be underestimated-- and something that can be imported into America. “What happened,” he explained, “has no parallel in modern British politics since 1945. Labour didn’t win a majority, but they won a moral victory because the government had called the election to get a bigger majority of its own. It was predicted on the night before that it would get a majority of 100 seats. In the end it got no majority. There is now what we call in Britain a hung Parliament, which would be as if Congress was controlled by nobody. Theresa May, the Conservative prime minister, is clinging on, but what happened was that really massive numbers of young people voted for Labour-- not just under-24-year-olds, but under-35-year-olds. Something like half of all under-35-year-olds voted for a party that was vilified by the media as a kind of terrorist-supporting threat to national security… [Corbyn] started out far behind, polling 25 percent. The first thing he did was claw back to about 35 percent by publishing the most left-wing manifesto of any Social Democratic Party in the world. It called for renationalization of the railroads, the postal service, and some energy firms. It called for what we call ‘Robin Hood taxes,’ taxing not just the incomes of companies and rich people, but also taxing the wealth of rich people. Taxing the unearned wealth, the property speculation, the stock-market speculation. This would bring in billions, which he said we would spend on free college education for everybody who wants it. That is revolutionary-- and it’s not surprising so many students came out to campaign for the Labour Party in the last few nights of the election. On some urban streets, people were opening their windows and saying, What’s going on? Is there some kind of disturbance? Why are 100 young people coming down my street and knocking on my door? It felt like a sort of velvet revolution in parts of Britain.”

Key figures on the right of British politics are now saying that, to stop Jeremy Corbyn, they have to be prepared to ditch everything. They have to be prepared to ditch what is called “hard Brexit,” which is walking away from Europe without a deal. They have to be prepared to ditch austerity. We’ve had seven years of spending cuts and attacks on the welfare state, and they’ve got to be prepared to ditch that. They’re in full panic mode. As a reporter on British politics and economics, I haven’t seen the ruling class of England in a panic like this for a long time. They realize that their defense lines are falling away. The normal defense lines for British capitalism run not just through the Conservative Party, but also through the Labour Party. But once Corbyn took control of Labour and decisively moved its political programs to the left, the only thing standing between the working class and young people on one side, and the minority and the elite on the other, is the Conservative government. And that just effectively fell apart. It’s a minority government, with no power to legislate.

…[I]t’s not enough to have the combination of a strong leader and a well-worked-out program. The left also needs a ground game. We have this movement called Momentum, a movement to get support within the party. That movement was able to have a million conversations with voters in the space of six weeks, talking to people on their doorsteps, just the way the Sanders people did. Then Jeremy Corbyn in the last days of the election campaign stepped out of the role of party leader and started to speak on behalf of the nation. He’d absorbed so much pressure, so much vitriol, and so many attacks—he assured people that it was possible to go beyond the pain barrier. I think the Sanders movement, or whatever comes after it, has to do popular politics. It’s not the same as populism. It’s like gaming. You go into the dungeon and you kill the boss. You need someone who can do that. And Corbyn proved he could do it.

Help Randy Bryce battle the elites of both wretchedly corrupt DC parties and get down into that basement and end the political career of Paul Ryan next year. No DCCC handler is going to talk Randy into "going centrist," the way they did with Ossoff in the final stages of the GA-06 campaign. Randy stands for deeply held values and beliefs, rooted in his life's experiences. After he wins in 2018, by campaigning on those beliefs-- not on a DCCC-dictated GOP-lite platform-- we’ll see if progressives have the strength to smash the conservative Dems and their donors and beat Trump with a Corbyn, not with a Macron.

Yes, The Democratic Party Can And Will Survive The Scourge Of Corrupted Centrism

It was impossible to log on to DWT yesterday without knowing that woke iron worker and union activist Randy Bryce had announced his candidacy to bring new representation to southeast Wisconsin and oust the radical Republican Speaker of the House from Congress. The Democrats now have the ideal candidate to run against Paul Ryan. If you know anything of the history of the DCCC and this district, you’ll know they will not just do nothing to help, they are likely to work behind the curtains at their regular sabotage. Picture Pelosi and Hoyer, Crowley, Lujan and Wassermann Schultz, Bustos, Denny Heck and Rahm Emanuel calling their contacts and hissing into the phone that they will consider contributions to Randy’s campaign an unfriendly act. Do you want to be considered unfriend by these assholes? Here! Randy isn part of a long, proud tradition of Wisconsin progressivism. It’s tragic that powers within the Democratic Party fear that instead of embracing it.

Over the weekend, Conor Lynch, writing for Salon blasted the “third way” centrists for standing in the way of progressive policies both in the U.S. and in the U.K. Is was talking about Tony Blair’s Conservative wing of the Labour Party (New Labour) and the Clintonian Republican wing of the Democratic Party (the New Dems and the Blue Dogs). This month Corbyn, an “old-school socialist, triumphed because he ran an effective grassroots campaign with a compelling message that offered principled leadership and a progressive platform to galvanize the working-class and young people of Britain. Though Labour clearly benefited from May’s poorly run campaign, there is little doubt that Labour’s progressive manifesto was essential to its parliamentary gains.”

The snap election that was supposed to have crushed Corbyn-- and the Labour Party-- once and for all has instead re-energized the British left, while throwing serious doubt on the Conservative Party’s future. When Theresa May arrogantly called the election in April, polls indicated that her Conservative Party would win by a historic landslide, and the British press-- which has been fiercely against Corbyn since he was elected as leader of the Labour Party two years ago-- ran giddy headlines predicting the death of his party. There was no doubt whether May and the Tories would win a majority; it was only a matter of how massive that majority would be.

But if we have learned anything over the past year, with the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and the “Brexit” referendum result last summer, it is that absolutely nothing is certain in this populist age. May was expected to “Crush the Saboteurs,” as the Daily Mail’s front page read after her announcement in April, but instead she ended up crushing her own party, which lost its majority in the House of Commons after leading by more than 20 points just a month earlier.

Meanwhile, the unconventional and “unelectable” Corbyn, who has been smeared and misrepresented by the British media for the past two years-- and who has faced repeated mutinies within his own party-- generated the highest turnout for a U.K. election since 1997 and won a larger share of the popular vote than Tony Blair did in 2005. It was an even bigger upset than last year’s Brexit shocker.

Even Labour Party members and Corbynites had been resigned to the Tories winning back their majority; their goal had been simply to keep that majority as slim as possible and to not be completely humiliated. But Theresa May was the only one humiliated on election day, while the leftist Labour leader was clearly vindicated after years of abuse.

…Like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders was seen by the commentariat as a fringe socialist kook who was completely unelectable-- and like Corbyn, he created a mass movement that appealed to working people and young voters in particular. Sanders was by far the most popular candidate among millennials in the 2016 election, while Corbyn’s Labour Party won 63 percent of aged 18 to 34 and increased voter turnout for 18- to 25-year-olds from 45 percent in 2015 to about 72 percent last week, according to exit polls from Sky data. Similar to the scenario in the U.K., the majority of Americans tend to support Sanders’ social democratic policies, including his support for Medicare for all and raising taxes on the rich.

Of course, there’s at least one obvious difference between the two progressive politicians: While Corbyn has been personally unpopular in his country, Sanders continues to rank as the most popular politician in the United States. Moreover, Sanders consistently outperformed Hillary Clinton in the polls against Donald Trump last year and would have likely defeated the Republican billionaire handily-- barring a major spoiler candidate like Michael Bloomberg.

This reality continues to infuriate many establishment Democrats, who have inevitably tried to dismiss and downplay Corbyn’s success in Britain, noting that Labour still didn’t win a majority of its own. If a centrist Blairite were leading the party, they insist (with no empirical basis whatsoever), then he or she would have been elected prime minister, say centrist Democrats. The same people who were gloating about Labour’s anticipated ruin just a month ago-- and using it as evidence that a populist shift to the left would be disastrous for the Democratic Party-- are now spinning Labour’s historic accomplishment to fit their narrative. Clearly there is a lot of denial going on here. The Blairites and Clintonites cannot bring themselves to admit that “third way” centrism is a relic of the neoliberal 1990s. They refuse to see the writing on the wall, even as it stares at them directly.

In a column for the New York Times on Tuesday, Sen. Sanders wrote that the British election “should be a lesson for the Democratic Party” to stop clinging to an “overly cautious, centrist ideology.”

He wrote, “There is never one reason elections are won or lost,” adding, “but there is widespread agreement that momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers… The  [Democratic] party’s main thrust must be to make politics relevant to those who have given up on democracy and bring millions of new voters into the political process.”

A few days earlier at the People’s Summit in Chicago, Sanders discussed the U.K. election during aspeech, noting that Labour “won those seats not by moving to the right” but by “standing up to the ruling class of the U.K.” He also reiterated that “Trump didn’t win the election, the Democratic Party lost the election.” It seems clear that if the Democratic Party wants to start winning elections again, it should pay careful attention to what is currently happening in Britain.

It isn’t a lesson a brittle Pelosi DCCC, in which perennial failure has been baked into the cake for over a decade, is capable of ever learning. Progressives who still believe in using the Democratic Party as a vehicle for the legitimate aspirations of working families have to work around an always hostile and corrupt DCCC. If you haven’t contributed to genuine progressive candidates like Randy Bryce (WI), Matt Coffay (NC), Jenny Marshall (NC), Tom Guild (OK), Katie Hill (CA), Doug Applegate (CA) and the other Blue America candidates, please consider doing so by tapping on the ActBlue thermometer on the right. The Democratic Party Establishment is no more likely to bring any tip-of-the-spear progressive policies to the fore than Paul Ryan or Donald Trump are. Values-free careerism has taken root at the top of the Democratic Party. Only by electing independent-minded progressives will we manage to save the party from its own worst instincts.