Aftershocks from UK election earthquake should rattle US Democrats

[Geee]

American Thinker

Socialists, globalists, and Jew-haters were soundly rejected by British voters yesterday, and that has got to worry United States Democrats, many of whom have embraced these political positions.  Pollsters who had warned that the race was tightening were repudiated by voters who handed a historic landslide outcome to Boris Johnson’s Conservative party, which is now reckoned to end up with an 86 seat majority when all the results are tabulated.  Even more pointed for the Democrats is the fact that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has dipped below 200 seats for the first time in almost a century and has lost seats in the industrial Midlands and North that have been secure for it for over a century.

To be sure, the United Kingdom and the United States are not identical, so there are limits to the parallels that can be drawn, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that similar tectonic forces are at work in both nations. If you think this is mistaken conservative triumphalism, don’t take it from me, take it from lefty Jonathan Chait, writing in the New Yorker that “American Leftists Believed Corbyn’s Inevitable Victory Would Be Their Model.”

The British election results, like any election result, is the result of unique circumstances and multiple factors. It is also, however, a test of a widely articulated political theory that has important implications for American politics. That theory holds that Corbyn’s populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right. Corbyn’s crushing defeat is a decisive refutation.