Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party suffered a humiliating defeat yesterday as high unpopular Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party gained seats instead of losing them, as many had predicted. The spin game is in full swing in the United States as mainstream media pushes the story further back in the news cycle as quickly as possible while stifling any insinuation that comparisons should continue to be drawn between Corbyn and the American left, particularly Senator Bernie Sanders.
This is an idiotic move by the Democrat-friendly media, but I won’t stop them. Let them try to salvage and rework the narrative. The funny part is they finally had a narrative that was rooted in truth, that Corbyn and Sanders are extremely similar in the scope and style of their support. But that narrative could prove harmful to the Democratic Party is Sanders is nominated, so they’re pulling back the reins and heading in a different direction. In reality, this should be their moment to ask, “Wait a minute, you mean radical progressive ideas aren’t popular enough to win elections?”
But they won’t. They’ll deflect. The misdirect. They’ll find every reason possible to distance Sanders (and to some extent Elizabeth Warren) from any connection to Corbyn or the far-left turn down which he led his party. Perhaps it’s because they don’t have a moderate they’re confident in to take up the slack and defeat President Trump.
Now, let’s imagine how different the narrative would be if Corbyn DID win in the United Kingdom. We can speculate with a high degree of confidence that the narrative being spread on mainstream media today would be to draw as many comparisons between Corbyn and Sanders (and Warren) as possible. They would equate the win to a prelude to what Democrats are going to do in 2020. They’d even be saying the defeat of Brexit after its 2016 victory is perfectly aligned with what America will do in 2020 after President Trump’s 2016 victory. Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine pointed out evidence of this.
American Leftists Saw Corbyn’s Inevitable Victory As a Model
Many writers, not only on the left, detected parallels between the rise of Corbyn and the movement around Bernie Sanders. The latter is considerably more moderate and pragmatic than the former, and also not laden with the political baggage of Corbyn’s widely-derided openness to anti-Semitic allies. And yet many leftists have emphasized the similarities between the two, which are indeed evident. Both built youth-oriented movements led by cadres of radical activists who openly set out to destroy and remake their parties. Both lost in somewhat close fashion, Sanders in 2016 and Corbyn the next year. And fervent supporters of both men treated their narrow defeats as quasi-victories, proof of victory just around the corner.
But neither Brexit nor Johnson lost the election as the left had hoped. Now American media’s next mission is to pretend like Corbyn and Labour are completely different from Sanders and the Democrats. They’ll also try to pretend the UK is heading in the wrong direction while America seems to be heading in the right (which, in their view, is to the left) direction ideologically.
A Labour victory in the UK would have been heralded as a precursor to a Democratic victory here. But a Labour loss is being pushed by the media as completely unrelated to our 2020 elections. Thankfully, we know the truth.
We are currently forming the American Conservative Movement. If you are interested in learning more, we will be sending out information in a few weeks.
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