I'm afraid the British elections are nudging me into the "scared" contingent.

[LAS14]

It looks like the whole world is being taken over by tribalism. I'm becoming afraid for us to nominate either a real progressive (Sanders or Warren) or someone with baggage (Biden... wait for the senate trial!!!), whether justified or not.

I'm depressed about the possibility/likelihood(???) of Trump winning again.

The whole world is full of awfulness!!!

[Botany]

1. Let it go

The vote in the British Elections does not control our elections.

[abqtommy]

10. My opinion that the U.K. election was not fair or secure does make me wonder about who's

Last edited Thu Dec 12, 2019, 10:41 PM - Edit history (1)

in control of our U.S. election. We can't lose in a fair and secure election and that's a fact but some
people are against that, Jack.

[Blue_true]

13. You keep making that claim. Can you show any data at all to back it up?

I normally don't ask such a question, but after following the British race for several weeks, I read nothing that supports your claim. The only constant was that Corbyn was leading Labour off a cliff.

[abqtommy]

16. I edited my post to remove "The fact" and added "My opinion". If you don't like that

maybe you can provide data showing that the U.K. election was indeed "fair and secure". I made a previous statement elsewhere that my opinion here comes from experience with the U.S. election in 2016 and the original Leave Referendum where intelligence agencies in both countries stated that there was ratfuckery. Remember that voter influence is very close to vote tampering. Thanks for asking questions and keeping me honest. I don't really expect anyone who has had success in manipulating
votes like sPUTIN has had would quit using such a successful program, but that's just my opinion.

[Blue_true]

17. Ok. It's your opinion. I have read every Brexit election article that I

could get my hands on over that last approximately month. The big issue was Corbyn and how out of touch he was with key groups that normally back Labour. I hope that after tonight, he is history and Labour can elect a competent leader. Johnson is going to make a bloodbath of the British economy, so the UK will need a competent Labour leader to bring it back from the pits.

[Hortensis]

12. Yes. Or reflect. Despite similarities, situations are also very different.

What matters above all is stability and that their democracy continues.

[highplainsdem]

2. They didn't have anyone like Biden running against Boris Johnson.

And as far as your concern about the Senate impeachment trial -- we're hearing all these stories about the GOP NOT wanting to call witnesses because they know damn well that would hurt them, even if Trump's so dumb he thinks a Senate trial with witnesses would benefit him.

[Doodley]

3. As a Brit, a socialist, and former Labour Party member, I have to say Corbyn is less fit to be PM

than Johnson. Tribalism would be if he had won.

[JoeOtterbein]

4. I'm very worried. nt

[Turbineguy]

5. Putin will have to keep a lid on things

until the U.S. elections. If the U.K economy has a crisis, it will be bad for Trump. So I'm guessing they'll slow-walk Brexit.

[Wawannabe]

7. Agree and here's to a good outcome for all!

(except Russia!)

[empedocles]

8. putin too, can play chess

[Blue_true]

14. The British economy is going to tank fast.

Companies that were were waiting on finalizing move plans in the hope that Brexit would get reversed, will start looking for mainland Europe facilities and backing out of lease agreements in the UK or selling properties there. Tonight was a disaster for Britain.

[Tarc]

6. To be fair, the Brits choice was between either a bigoted, misogynist Trump clone

or a complicit antisemite.

They are going to be screwed for awhile.

Godspeed SNP, hold another independence referendum and get the hell out now while you can,

[Blue_true]

15. Scotland needs to schedule a Leave the UK vote, ASAP. The longer Scotland

waits, the lower it's chances are for a penalty free entry into the EU. My guess is that a chastened Britain will come crawling back to the UK in a couple of decades, but I expect that the EU would have moved on to the point where it won't desire any future linkage to the UK as a member.

[Skya Rhen]

9. What's happening in the UK makes me relieved that we have Biden as the frontrunner. I greatly fear

a Warren/Trump race because it will not end well for us.

[Blue_true]

11. Corbyn is a flipping idiot. Johnson, despite his many warts, is far more appealing than

Trump to a large voter base. 53% of Americans want Trump impeached, that means a majority want him gone from office.

[The Valley Below]

18. It not "tribalism," it is populism.

Populism is toxic. Populism has destroyed every society where populists have gained power.

Populism feeds on anger and irrationality. Liberalism, in contrast, requires a reliance on reason.

Political rage makes cool-headed rationality impossible. Which makes it the most anti-liberal ideology in the planet.

It isn't who we are.

[Recursion]

19. Populists on the left always think they can tame that dragon

From Bryan to Coughlin to Wallace to today. But always, always, always populism turns out to be white resentment dressed up as class consciousness.

[BeyondGeography]

24. Wow, that's profound

Guess I'll have to put my white resentment decoder on to process this:

Link to tweet

@ewarren is exposing how the government and big banks trampled over homeowners of color for decades.

[Recursion]

25. Notice the populists are now calling her "an elite"

It's going to be an ugly primary. And, yes, you should pull the wool off your eyes regarding populism. It's a toxic force.

[BeyondGeography]

26. The term is used as a cudgel and as such it has become as meaningless as "fascist"

Anyone who departs from neoliberal gospel runs the risk of being labelled a populist and tossed into the big anti-elitist stew kettle along with some patently rancid ingredients. Just as perfectly reasonable social liberals get called all sorts of nasty names by ideologues on the left.

[appalachiablue]

43. +1

[Gothmog]

20. trump will win if the Democrats move too far left

Link to tweet

[NurseJackie]

35. That's absolutely correct!

Good to see you back!

[Gothmog]

36. Thank you

[Gothmog]

42. Blowback from U.K. election burns Warren, Sanders

Link to tweet

“It’s a lesson for all Democrats who are eager to replace Trump,” said former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “There was no skimping on the progressive agenda and it was the worst performance in two decades. It’s not just economics. You have to have a candidate and a message that’s close to the zeitgeist of the moment — not just a grab bag of giveaways.”

The thoroughness of Corbyn‘s thrashing revived the longstanding debate within the party over just how ambitious the Democratic agenda should be, and provided fresh ammunition for the arguments of moderates who contend that if the party backs Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, the primary’s leading progressives, they’ll lose the Rust Belt and perhaps even elsewhere.....

"Corbyn was basically a satellite project for Bernie world. If there is one lesson to be gleaned from the devastating loss across the pond, it's that we need more than just soaring rhetoric backed up by bravado of organizing,” said Murshed Zaheed, a Megaphone Strategies partner and former Harry Reid aide backing Warren. “We need to have leaders who have crystal-clear analysis of how to solve problems and leverage power to achieve those solutions. Corbyn never appeared to be a candidate with any sound plans on how to move U.K. forward.”

Before the polls closed on Thursday, Sanders’ national organizing director, Claire Sandberg, had tweeted that the “Bernie team says #VoteLabour” with a picture attached of campaign staff. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a top congressional ally who has campaigned with Sanders in Iowa, also tweeted in support of Labour. Two 2016 aides to Sanders, Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, had traveled to London earlier this year to help the pro-Corbyn group Momentum as well.

[NurseJackie]

46. I'm sure this sticks in the craw of the BS campaign and his followers.

Oh well.

[Cha]

38. Mahalo, Goth!

:

[Gothmog]

39. Hey Cha

[sheshe2]

40. Bravo, Gothmog.

[Gothmog]

41. Washington Post-Britain's Jeremy Corbyn: I got my ideas from Bernie Sanders

Last edited Sat Dec 14, 2019, 03:19 PM - Edit history (1)

Link to tweet

The leader of Britain’s Labour Party credited U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with some of his social democratic campaign planks, telling the writer Naomi Klein that he embraced comparisons with the Vermont senator.

“Bernie called me the day after our election here,” Jeremy Corbyn said in an interview published Thursday by the Intercept. “I was half-asleep watching something on television. And Bernie comes on to say, well done on the campaign, and I was interested in your campaigning ideas. Where did you get them from? And I said, well, you, actually.”

Corbyn, who won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 and held it after a 2016 challenge, has frequently been cited by Sanders as an example of how left politics can win. This year, a snap election that began with predictions about Corbyn driving Labour into the wilderness ended with a series of surprise gains, and Prime Minister Theresa May clinging to power in a controversial deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. According to a post-election analysis by Ipsos Mori, over half of eligible British voters under age 30 turned out — double the youth turnout rate in some American elections. That led to surprising Labour gains in cities with large universities, with student turnout overturning large Conservative majorities.

“There’s a lesson to be learned from what Corbyn did in the U.K.,” said Sanders in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “The remarkable thing about his election — and he did better than I did — was that among younger people, the voter turnout was as high as it was among the general population. That was unprecedented.”

[myohmy2]

21. "It looks like the whole world is being taken over by tribalism."

...true, but be cautious, not scared...

...it's a different country, different place, different set of issues and circumstances...

...as I understands it, Brexit was the main issue not so much social concerns...

...if you were for Brexit, then Johnson and the Tory's were the only place to put your vote...

...if you were against Brexit, you had Labor (wanting a new Brexit vote) and two smaller Party's to take your vote...

...not only was the Left's vote split there was also a sense of, "...get this Brexit shit over with..." and at the same time, "...the people have already spoken on Brexit...", honor the results...

...I'm not saying MFA and other social programs will be an easy sell over here, it never is...

...but given a strong, smart, aggressive and appealing candidate, capable of smacking trump with his own bullshit, should win the White House...

...for me, that's Bernie...

[Demsrule86]

44. Corbyn has a laundry list of economic old type liberal plans....and it was an abject failure...run

on M4A and we lose.

[Baclava]

22. The media was calling it "too close to call" all day, then, the landslide, early polls were wrong

Leads me to believe ALL polls are garbage, don't trust them for one minute

[LAS14]

23. Yeah, I was just thinking the other day how silly it was to take comfort...

... in single point Biden vs Trump leads in swing states. Remember 2016? There was a long article in either the Globe or the Times about what went wrong with polling in 2016. I wish I'd kept it. One thing was people are sometimes reluctant to say out loud to a pollster that they favor the less reputable candidate. I THINK another was that the right sometimes want to stick it to the establishment, in the form of polling organizations. But that may just me remembering my own favorite theory.

[MineralMan]

27. Well, they certainly demonstrate that "conventional wisdom" is often

neither wise nor necessarily conventional. Donald J. Trump is sitting in the White House. He could win again if we, for any reason, fail to turn out voters in large enough numbers to overcome voter manipulation and other shenanigans. Anyone who says otherwise is someone not to listen to.

The UK is not the USA, but people are still people. People often fall for populist leaders who lie to them. It happened here. It can happen again.

We need to focus on ensuring a high turnout of people who will vote sensibly, and not out of bigotry and fear. Unless we do that, we are always in danger to losing to the tyrannical right.

[Mike 03]

29. I admit I'm worried.

It's not just what happened in the UK, but a string of noteworthy occurrences over the past several months. Polls don't look as sunny as they looked last spring and summer. It makes me nervous to see people dismissing what happened last night. Until the day before Trump was elected, I was "highly confident" Hillary would win. So much for that.

[MineralMan]

30. You have every right to be worried.

I am, as well. Unfortunately, I see way to many parallels in this primary season to another such season. I'm seeing similar divisions among Democrats and others on the leftward end of the political bell curve. So, I'm beginning to worry about turnout next November, assuming, as I do, that Biden will end up as the nominee.

Its not that I think DUers won't vote for whomever becomes the nominee. What worries me is that the enthusiasm needed to drag lazy voters to the polls will not be there, once again, as it so often is not there. If that happens, we could drop right back into the mess we're in now.

So, I post here.

[Mike 03]

31. Thanks. Appreciate your response.

[Hav]

28. "Biden baggage"

It's not surprising or disappointing that the right is pursuing every conspiracy bs angle. It's disheartening that the same manufactured bs is gaining traction on the left again after we just went through it in 2016.

Yes, tribalism is a thing. It's why people vote against their best interests like losing their healthcare. But I wouldn't draw too many direct conclusions from Johnson winning in a landslide. Leaving aside the election system that gives the winners a clearer majority, from afar, I'd say that Corbyn wasn't only a spectacularly bad candidate who just wasn't liked at all. From what I heard, I also think that Labour didn't present themselves as having a clear stance for those who opposed Brexit and by that they didn't offer an alternative to the Tories on that subject.
Although I'm not a fan of Sanders, he isn't close to how negatively Corbyn has been perceived for years.

[Awsi Dooger]

32. I fully expect to lose in 2020

Trump is in the most favorable situational scenario in American politics...an incumbent whose party has been in power only one term. Only Jimmy Carter has lost in that situation in more than a century. The reason is obvious: The public is not tired of you or your party. Consequently the incumbent owns enormous benefit of a doubt.

Trump basically has to give it away to lose. The good news is that he is capable of that. The very bad news is we do not have an ideal candidate. If we had a charismatic midlife moderate male like Clinton or Obama then I'd give us a huge chance. Instead it's one partial candidate after another.

As always, I rely on big picture generalities above specifics. People who hold the opposite perspective and follow every development every day cannot fathom that Trump can win. That same type won't be able to comprehend that Hispanics will shift more toward Trump. Rachel Maddow will describe one issue after another in which Trump is devastating to Hispanics. That's lovely, Rachel. Meanwhile Hispanics always drift toward the presidential incumbent in unusual percentage, regardless of issues.

I made the mistake of paying attention in 2004. It was my first presidential cycle on this site. Bush owned the same situational advantage as Trump in 2020. I had a mathematical model that went back and forth between Bush and Kerry. My Las Vegas friends crucified me for that approach, saying it went against everything I had always emphasized. They were exactly correct. Kerry is incorrectly criticized for anything he did that cycle. The slant was simply against him.

This time I am going to approach 2020 identical to 1984. Basically not paying any attention at all, due to the situational tide. If we win I'll be astonished. The economy is showing no signs of cooperating. That is our best chance.

Far left has no shot whatsoever. It doesn't matter what I think of Elizabeth Warren. It doesn't require 2 seconds to grasp what the nation will think. Just remember 46% of Floridians rejecting Andrew Gillum as too liberal for the state and likewise 42% of Georgians doing the same with Stacey Abrams.

We'd be buying that again with Warren. Her supporters are well meaning but simply don't understand the real world dynamic of white America. Fear, fear and more fear. More scared of job loss and the unknown, than turned off by an atrocity like Donald Trump.

[LAS14]

33. I've been supporting Warren in case this was the time when the revolution...

... would happen. Someday it will. But watching the reaction to the impeachment (or non reaction) tells me this isn't her year. I'm not yet ready to switch my DU vote, but I've got a strong hunch that Klobuchar may be the one left standing. That would be fine with me.

[Demsrule86]

45. Biden will be the nominee.

[rockfordfile]

48. BS I think Trump is going lose. Americans are tired of his corruption and lies.

[scheming daemons]

34. If you're scared.... move away from Warren or Sanders in the primaries

Because either one will get trounced in the general.

[Gothmog]

37. Biden warns that Boris Johnson's victory shows dangers of parties leaning too far left

Link to tweet

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday sought to draw parallels between the results of the United Kingdom’s general election and the 2020 White House race — arguing that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resounding victory should warn Democrats against veering too far left in their fight to defeat President Donald Trump.

“Boris Johnson is winning in a walk,” Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, told attendees of a campaign fundraiser in San Francisco. The prime minister’s Conservative Party captured an overwhelming parliamentary majority in Thursday’s election, taking dozens of seats in Britain’s House of Commons from opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Predicting news headlines reporting the thumping by Johnson’s Tories, Biden said: “Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not able to be contained within a rational basis quickly.”

Biden has advanced a more moderate political ideology throughout the Democratic primary, criticizing sweeping policy proposals from the field’s leading progressive contenders, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

[Politicub]

47. Different country. Different circumstances. Different candidates.

While there may be some parallels, there are too many differences to use to make any kind of accurate prediction. Plus, our election is 11 months out.

But I do think it's short sighted of the UK to remove themselves from the European Union. I always thought it would be a great perk of EU citizenship to live your life in one country and retire in another with the full rights and benefits of every other citizen. The majority of voters in the UK feel differently, though.

There may be a breakout candidate that isn't Warren, Sanders or Biden. There is a long way to go to get to the convention.

[mvd]

49. True. The whole right wing movement is very disturbing, but,.

hopefully just a fad. I too support Warren and Sanders and feel it is misguided to say Labour lost due to going too far left. Corbyn lacked a good response to Brexit and didn’t handle the anti-Semitic accusations well. Left there is also different than left here. We have lurched far to the right and need a big correction.

[NYMinute]

50. Stop being scared ... support Biden nt

[Fiendish Thingy]

51. Only Republicans vote with their amygdala's nt

[delisen]

52. Why should we think a magic "centrist" would have done better?

Both the UK and the US are now in a world where we must lay out what the real issues are. Candidates can't bob and weave, and hope the electorate will just vote for the nicer candidate or someone "charismatic."

The UK may break up. Scotland may secede.

Our election coming up is not about personalities--it is about war or peace, about whether we will l be able to live decent lives or get crushed.

Those voters who are looking for a strong man authoritarian ruler are not going to suddenly decide that they will vote for a nice guy version whom they would like to have beer with. We are way past that.