Sympathies and commiseration, British friends. The U.K.’s general election last week was a historic collapse for British progressives and, ugh, a big majority in Parliament for the racist clown Boris Johnson. I can only imagine that you’re feeling the same way I felt when the U.S. elected Donald Trump.
How did this happen, especially when the Conservatives lost their majority in the last election just two years previously?
I’m not an expert on UK politics, but it’s obvious that Brexit was the burning issue of this election. And the Conservatives, like them or hate them, had a clear position on it. Meanwhile, Labour failed to come out strongly for either Leave or Remain. Jeremy Corbyn suggested there should be a second referendum, but refused to say which side he’d endorse.
Tom Kibasi argues in the Guardian that this tortured triangulation pleased no one:
By attempting to triangulate, Labour convinced leavers it was for remain and remainers that it was for leave. The party looked cynical and opportunistic, as if it were playing games on Brexit to secure electoral advantage, rather than sticking to its principles or standing up for the national interest. (source)
From my vantage point across the pond, if Labour had backed Leave, they could have neutralized Brexit as a wedge issue and potentially shifted the campaign onto turf where they had an advantage. If Labour had come out for Remain, they could have turned the campaign into a proxy second referendum, and hopefully pro-EU voters wouldn’t have been asleep at the switch this time. Instead, they tried to do both things at once and ended up doing neither.
It seems that some form of Brexit is inevitable now. Other than that, I wouldn’t dare to predict what will happen to the UK. It could be that this election will be the one that shatters the United Kingdom. Liberal, pro-Europe Scotland is already renewing its push for independence. And if the Scots secede, could Irish reunification be far behind?
In the aftermath of a loss like this one, American and British progressives are in the same boat. Right-wing demagogues pushing proto-fascism or just plain fascism are on the ascendant throughout the Western world. Democracy, multiculturalism, international cooperation – even the simple idea that we have moral obligations to each other – these cherished liberal values are all under siege. What happened? How do we rebuild, and where do we go from here?
My Patheos colleague James Croft has an elegiac essay that puts into words many of the same thoughts I’ve been having:
Perhaps the greatest irony of the political realignment we are struggling through is that, consistently in many countries across the world, the right has seemed better at empathizing with a certain segment of society than has the left. I am not saying this in any way to endorse any of the policies these successful right wing populist movements have promoted, nor the way they have campaigned: I have long been outspoken regarding just how racist, dishonest, and wicked much right wing politicking has become…. But we cannot deny that these messages are striking a chord with large numbers of people, and we progressives have to think of ways of reaching these people. It is clearly not possible to win elections without them, and in any case we need to develop an emotionally resonant narrative which counters the fear, hatred, and division which is being stoked by demagogues across the world. We cannot ignore that the Dark Side is rising in our societies: we have to fight back with the Light Side.
Some would argue that this trend is already irreversible, like an essay by Umair Haque with the gloomy title “This Is How a Society Dies“. He argues that the US and UK are dying of the same disease, a downward spiral of distrust that shreds the web of mutuality and sows seeds of bigotry and hate towards our neighbors:
There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust โ every single social indicator you can imagine โ are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time.
I don’t think, as this author does, that our decline is inevitable and there’s nothing we can do about it. Societal trends don’t have a momentum of their own; they’re the sum total of choices that individuals make, and we can always choose to reverse course. But it’s plain to see that we’re walking down a dark road, and if we continue down this path for much longer, it may not be possible to reverse the damage.