Tonight Was A Long Time Coming
This isn’t a failure of leftist policies. This is the climax of a ten-year storm wrought by centrism and a great recession.
I expected it, somehow. I expected that Britain, having careened all over the place since a June 2016 Brexit vote that was both stunning in its outcome and entirely too close to declare consensus, would find a way to spite itself once more. Denied a second Brexit referendum after the sordid details of Russian interference and illegal expenditures came out, and then watching Theresa May fumble her way through having three deals rejected by Parliament in resounding fashion, voters threw up their hands and said the hell with it. Let Boris have his Brexit.
The NHS is going to be gutted by this, short on doctors, nurses, and physician assistants all about, with a Tory Party in charge that has always loathed Labour’s greatest achievement. Trade is going to drop drastically, because Brexit means throwing away an easy market with automatic entry. Scotland and Northern Ireland are going to race each other to secession from the United Kingdom — if you don’t believe me, Belfast North elected a Sinn Fein MP tonight, which is akin to 1955 Alabama electing Martin Luther King, Jr. as governor. Northern Ireland has enjoyed twenty years of peace and relative prosperity as a soft border with free movement and trade kept the question of Irish reunion minimized. That’s all in jeopardy. You think they want the Troubles to make a rousing comeback in Londonderry, Belfast, and South Down? Scotland, meanwhile, is virtually all SNP now — 55 of 59 seats belong to a party that wants secession and wants it yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Tories, despite being more diverse than the Republican Party here in America, are still home to far too many racists, including their polished Trump knockoff of a Prime Minister, Alexandre Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. They’re going to rule hamhandedly, squelching democracy with the gleeful acquiescence of the Murdochs and the other billionaires of Fleet Street, who are too shortsighted to see what they’ve done and how it will ruin them all one day. Little Britain was once merely a television show — now the Tories will ensure it becomes the reality.
I said in my headline that this was ten years coming.
In 2009, the world was reeling. Venture capitalists, hedge funds, and the large investment banks had all conspired to destroy the economy unwittingly through their avarice and greed. While America elected Barack Obama on a platform of hope and progressivism, the UK had a Labour government in power. Gordon Brown, the angry Scotsman, the more left-wing of the Blair-Brown duo, was the Prime Minister, and he’d inherited a catastrophe(Blair sure knows when to hit an exit, that’s for sure). Brown’s government was besieged in the press and by voters while trying to dig out of a hole that the investment class of London had placed there. Obama came to office with the triple-whammy of Afghanistan (backsliding after the benign neglect of the George Dubya Bush administration), Iraq (the disastrous quicksand for both lives and money), and a destroyed economy thanks to the laze-faire centrist economic policies that took the sensible regulations from the Great Depression’s aftermath and decreed they weren’t needed any longer.
Both nations took the same tack, guided by the principle of prudence and compromise. Car trade-in rebates. Tax cuts. Bank bailouts. Meanwhile, the people were in the streets, howling for blood, desperate to not be evicted from their homes, lose their vehicles, and end up destitute. There was agreement across the spectrum, left and right, that it wasn’t the banks that needed help, it was the people. It was a ready made moment for bold progressive leadership, and instead, Obama and Brown shrank from it. The bankers who conspired to defraud investors and insurers through schemes with fancy titles like credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities did not go to jail; in fact, Obama brought them to the White House, said he was their only protection against the pitchforks and so they’d better agree to some mild reforms.
As foreclosures skyrocketed, and the number of people receiving federal aid also skyrocketed, the anger was directed just as much at Obama as it was the bankers. Those bankers then began to fuel the nascent Tea Party, a ragtag bunch of angry old white racists who were furious at America being led by a black man. They put the propaganda in the heads of these people through fascist propaganda outlet Fox News that the black guy was the reason you lost your house and your job, and they should support the Republicans who’d cut taxes on the rich, and those rich people would then hire them back to work. It was a scam, of course, just as was the following scam that persuaded millions that they didn’t really want healthcare, that government run healthcare would have death panels and free abortions. It sabotaged healthcare reform to where all we got was an old, warmed-over Republican plan from 1996. Obama and congressional Democrats failed to respond to this new, insidious challenge of blatant lies and racism. They acted as if it were business as usual, and got trounced the next year, setting into motion the rise of Donald Trump, the ultimate racist con man.
If Obama’s first act had been to go after the bankers, to indict and convict those who robbed us blind in 2008, he would’ve been a national hero, eighty percent approval ratings, political capital to push for a more aggressive stimulus, banking reforms, etc. It would have been the right political move; it would have been justice. Instead, that pragmatic centrism that has bedeviled politics whenever the Left is in power (a reminder that the Right has no such qualms about ramming through their agenda ever) took root again, and Obama protected the bankers while moving slowly to protect people who, through no fault of their own, were rapidly becoming jobless and homeless.
Brown was slightly more aggressive than Obama, but the involvement of Barclay’s, the Bank of England, and other London power seats in the global disaster meant that, in Britain, the public was in meltdown. Owning your own home was a relatively new part of British culture, having really only begun during the 1950s and 60s, as council houses were still the norm for many Brits, and because it was still relatively new and important to Britons, the thought of losing them because of the nouveau riche in The City behaving recklessly did not go over well. Tack on how long Labour had been in power by the time the 2010 general election was held, and the results were predictable. Brown fell from the PM chair, and the Lib Dems, enjoying their appearance as a power broker that seemed to appear about every thirty years, chose to align with David Cameron and the Tories.
If you want to know how Britain got to this point tonight, where it elected a Tory landslide that is about to destroy the country at the behest of racists and empire- nostalgists, well, this is it. Clegg handed power to a government that repeatedly screwed him and the Lib Dems over on every last piece of important legislation they wanted, from changing the first-past-the-post electoral system to education funding. Cameron and the Tories instituted austerity budgets that hurt those already hurting. Cameron’s only decent achievement was legalizing gay marriage — outside of that, he was a wrecker, a posh Tory who would never feel the sting of his budget cuts. Cameron held the Scottish independence referendum to release the pressure having built at Stormont, and managed to hold the UK together, largely by promising that the NHS would stay intact.
When Cameron got his majority due to the smashing of the Lib Dems in the next election along with Ed Miliband’s futile resistance running Labour, Cameron gave in to Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dominic Raab, and the rest of the radical right who wanted to leave the EU for reasons that any Trump MAGA fan could identify with. Cameron, foolishly thinking Britain would never do such a thing, that he was too smart and skilled to lose, gave them their referendum while promising he would steer the course whatever the result would be. Brexit won and Cameron quit — an act of political cowardice that can never be forgiven. The NHS, as I noted above, will suffer greatly, and Scotland is growing angrier at being disrespected so blatantly. The Lib Dems paid the price for enabling the Tories, making themselves nothing more than bitter spoilers in the last two elections, spurning Labour entreaties so they could tilt at windmills instead, a shell of the party that Paddy Ashdown had skillfully revived in 1997. They were centrism embodied, and they are as irrelevant and dead as centrism itself. This, of course, is cold comfort to the Scottish, who were lied to repeatedly and will now usher in an ugly court battle to leave the United Kingdom, since they wish to stay in the EU and maintain freedom of movement. Northern Ireland, so dependent on EU trade and their soft border with Ireland proper, may not be far behind. Better to reunite with the rest of their brothers and work out the religious issues than have the Troubles return in all their violent, bloody glory.
Tonight, when I saw the exit polls, I suspected (and a fair amount of Tory wins bore this out) that the Lib Dems did nothing more than take seats Labour could have won and pushed them into Tory hands. They decried a Boris Johnson premiership and did nothing of use to stop it. Centrism brought empty words to this election, and their leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat to a Scottish Nationalist, fittingly so, since it was the Lib Dems who empowered a Tory government that brought the United Kingdom to this point. Centrism is an idea that had its day, but against a Right so determined to destroy constitutional democracy, behavioral norms, and the very foundation of society (shared truth), one cannot compromise. The decision of centrism to act as if it were business as usual after a cataclysmic economic event (instead of following the much more radical template of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) enabled the extremists to gain power — power they show no desire to cede, and power which they’ve used any tactic to keep, irrespective of its legality or morality.
America and Great Britain are now ruled by wild-eyed nationalists with governing philosophies devised somewhere in Dante’s fifth circle of Hell. Progressives, socialists, we all tried to warn that centrism was not adequate to deal with the crisis at the end of the last decade. We were ignored, and events subsequently proved us right, but without structural power, it is difficult, no matter how popular the ideas or the leader, to take control from the left. The system is designed to keep the powerful and wealthy on top as they have been for centuries. Having now squeezed nearly every drop of lifeblood from the poor and the working classes, these billionaires are now seeking to destroy democracy, and with it, the ability of the rest of us to peacefully, legally, ever hold power again.
All this is happening because of centrism. All of this is happening because the left was ignored and the populist, violent right gained a foothold instead. Tonight showed that the centrists haven’t learned a thing, so the best we can hope for is to banish them to the fringes and continue the fight against the Racist Right in the halls of power, on the streets, and everywhere in between. It is a fight for our souls. The last chance is coming against Donald Trump. If we fail the test, if centrists cling to their outdated beliefs one more time, we are in for a very dark decade ahead.
