Who's to say after at least 30 years of centrism and trying to be Republican/conservative lite not being successful that if we do it *this time* it won't result in decades of electoral and policy success? Surely not us leftists', whose vision is an obvious failure despite never have been tried.
Labour did try leftism under Jeremy Corbyn, but in 2017 it wasn't quite enough, and two years later it went down in flames once the Conservative press had fully exposed Corbyn's third-worldist views.
I think you're underestimating the role of geography in Labour's mistakes: specifically the "Red Wall" of villages and towns in England's former coal mining country, that Labour feels sentimentally attached to and also believes that it must win in order to have a chance of power.
Most such areas are very socially conservative (as dangerous work like coal mining fuelled patriarchy) and flocked to Farage's Reform UK, once such a right-wing but not Tory (as the Tories were blamed for closing the mines) alternative existed to vote for.
December 2019 will have convinced many Labour politicians that Labour had no future if it wrote off the Red Wall and becomes a purely metropolitan-focused party. Labour under Starmer likely leaned into anti-immigration as it was clearly popular in the Red Wall (as shown by the strong Faragist showings even prior to their local election triumphs), and because they didn't see any strong economic offer they could make to such places.
Rising global interest rates (due to Trump's profligacy) meant they weren't in a position where they could bribe them with higher welfare benefits (they lost a huge amount of support from trying to balance the books by means-testing winter fuel payments for retirees), while villages and small towns established purely to extract coal (and that were poorly educated due to brain drain) were of little appeal to employers.
“Left-behind” communities have long been breeding grounds for fascism.
In early 20th-century Europe that mostly meant rural agricultural communities, that were struggling to compete with a New World far more favourably endowed with land. It was the sense of loss in monolithically Christian rural villages that fuelled the rise of Horthy, Mussolini, Salazar, Dollfuss, Hitler, Franco and Pétain.
The most fascism-resistant democracies in this era were the constitutional monarchies around the North Sea: all were privileged by the US’s explicitly racist post-1924 immigration policy, and the UK and Belgium were Europe’s most urbanized countries while the remainder had been spared the trauma of World War I. They also had more non-agricultural rural employment in forestry, fishing or mining.
Today however the UK is far more vulnerable, as it has lot of former mining villages as well as industrial towns designed around the needs of the Age of Steam (located on coalfields, and with obsolete multi-floor “mills” rather than the more efficient single-floor sprawling factories that electrification made possible) and ill-suited to the needs of a 21st-century economy.
And many of these mill towns now have large Pakistani populations (which led to them being dubbed “mill and mosque towns”) who were (foolishly in retrospect) encouraged to migrate there in the post-WWII era: a disproportionate number were from the Mirpur region of Pakistan and had lost their lands to a hydroelectric dam project.
These Pakistanis in northern England are the nearest UK analogue to the horribly crime-prone black populations of Midwestern America, who had similarly been left marooned by deindustrialization after moving to those cities during the Great Migration.
To be successful, Democrats have to do a two-step on trans rights. First, make it clear that trans rights are human rights and nobody is getting thrown under the bus. But there must be a quick pivot to how trans people are used to distract voters from the economic oppression of the ruling oligarchs. Trans rights are important, but any time spent talking about trans rights is time not spent talking about a rigged economy and outright corruption.
so, I think that the obsession with focusing on oligarchy rather than on fascism is not a great way to defeat fascism.
A lot of people think racism and prejudice is wrong. You can point out that the oligarchs and the fascists are the same people. You can also point out that fascism is wrong even if oligarchs aren’t the ones pushing it. the kkk isn’t popular. I think we need to stop running from our own values, personally.
Good point. I do tend to lump the fascists and oligarchs together. My focus is that defending trans rights is still playing defense, and a good politician needs to pivot to offense as much as they can.
Pointing out that Republicans are a bunch of weirdos who think ten year old girls should submit to genital inspections in order to join a soccer team is a winning strategy imo
Thanks for keeping it real about people's motivations. Sure there's room for empty-headedness, but there's also room for Democrats to just be fascist-lite.
Who's to say after at least 30 years of centrism and trying to be Republican/conservative lite not being successful that if we do it *this time* it won't result in decades of electoral and policy success? Surely not us leftists', whose vision is an obvious failure despite never have been tried.
Labour did try leftism under Jeremy Corbyn, but in 2017 it wasn't quite enough, and two years later it went down in flames once the Conservative press had fully exposed Corbyn's third-worldist views.
I think you're underestimating the role of geography in Labour's mistakes: specifically the "Red Wall" of villages and towns in England's former coal mining country, that Labour feels sentimentally attached to and also believes that it must win in order to have a chance of power.
Most such areas are very socially conservative (as dangerous work like coal mining fuelled patriarchy) and flocked to Farage's Reform UK, once such a right-wing but not Tory (as the Tories were blamed for closing the mines) alternative existed to vote for.
December 2019 will have convinced many Labour politicians that Labour had no future if it wrote off the Red Wall and becomes a purely metropolitan-focused party. Labour under Starmer likely leaned into anti-immigration as it was clearly popular in the Red Wall (as shown by the strong Faragist showings even prior to their local election triumphs), and because they didn't see any strong economic offer they could make to such places.
Rising global interest rates (due to Trump's profligacy) meant they weren't in a position where they could bribe them with higher welfare benefits (they lost a huge amount of support from trying to balance the books by means-testing winter fuel payments for retirees), while villages and small towns established purely to extract coal (and that were poorly educated due to brain drain) were of little appeal to employers.
thanks; this is helpful to know.
“Left-behind” communities have long been breeding grounds for fascism.
In early 20th-century Europe that mostly meant rural agricultural communities, that were struggling to compete with a New World far more favourably endowed with land. It was the sense of loss in monolithically Christian rural villages that fuelled the rise of Horthy, Mussolini, Salazar, Dollfuss, Hitler, Franco and Pétain.
The most fascism-resistant democracies in this era were the constitutional monarchies around the North Sea: all were privileged by the US’s explicitly racist post-1924 immigration policy, and the UK and Belgium were Europe’s most urbanized countries while the remainder had been spared the trauma of World War I. They also had more non-agricultural rural employment in forestry, fishing or mining.
Today however the UK is far more vulnerable, as it has lot of former mining villages as well as industrial towns designed around the needs of the Age of Steam (located on coalfields, and with obsolete multi-floor “mills” rather than the more efficient single-floor sprawling factories that electrification made possible) and ill-suited to the needs of a 21st-century economy.
And many of these mill towns now have large Pakistani populations (which led to them being dubbed “mill and mosque towns”) who were (foolishly in retrospect) encouraged to migrate there in the post-WWII era: a disproportionate number were from the Mirpur region of Pakistan and had lost their lands to a hydroelectric dam project.
These Pakistanis in northern England are the nearest UK analogue to the horribly crime-prone black populations of Midwestern America, who had similarly been left marooned by deindustrialization after moving to those cities during the Great Migration.
To be successful, Democrats have to do a two-step on trans rights. First, make it clear that trans rights are human rights and nobody is getting thrown under the bus. But there must be a quick pivot to how trans people are used to distract voters from the economic oppression of the ruling oligarchs. Trans rights are important, but any time spent talking about trans rights is time not spent talking about a rigged economy and outright corruption.
so, I think that the obsession with focusing on oligarchy rather than on fascism is not a great way to defeat fascism.
A lot of people think racism and prejudice is wrong. You can point out that the oligarchs and the fascists are the same people. You can also point out that fascism is wrong even if oligarchs aren’t the ones pushing it. the kkk isn’t popular. I think we need to stop running from our own values, personally.
Good point. I do tend to lump the fascists and oligarchs together. My focus is that defending trans rights is still playing defense, and a good politician needs to pivot to offense as much as they can.
I don’t think it is! Fighting for lgbt rigtt he s is a positive program! I want people to fight for my daughter!
Pointing out that Republicans are a bunch of weirdos who think ten year old girls should submit to genital inspections in order to join a soccer team is a winning strategy imo
Thanks for keeping it real about people's motivations. Sure there's room for empty-headedness, but there's also room for Democrats to just be fascist-lite.
Is this going to be the new national anthem of the UK?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB-ca8bzlg0
Great song! Jaded to the max.