If 2016 has been a year for anything, it has been a year of turmoil. it has been a year in which the relations between national and international institution have been rewritten forever, and a year in which the established elites of the developed world have suffered from a bloodied nose. But it is interesting to have approached the half way point in this tumultuous period, and realised that it is the parties which have traditionally opposed elites in greater measures which have found themselves in what can gratuitously be described as a pickle and can more realistically be described as crises of identity. However different the UK and the US circumstances are. The cures are the same.
If your eyes can bear to look, gaze first upon the festival of tragicomedy that is the UK Labour Party. This is a party that has had more impact than any other on British political party on discourse in the last century. The achievements that the Labour Party have to their credit in government include implementing the Beveridge Report, the welfare state, universal healthcare, the Open University, greater access to university education more widely, constitutional reform, decriminalisation of homosexuality, a ban on abortions, winding down of media censorship and the removal of Section 28 which stigmatised education regarding LGBTQIA+ issues.. This is a record that many in the Labour movement can be proud of having. Yet this once great party organisation has now been demoted to the rank of a glorified talking shop for quasi-Communists that are thirsty for ideological purity, and an emotional disgust towards those who are supposedly unfortunate enough to have their judgement clouded by the false class consciousness.
In Jeremy Corbyn, the far left has found a figurehead through which their ideological tendencies can be afforded some kind of legitimacy. But the cost of this is massive. The Labour moderates have been marginalised and reviled by Momentum. It is a pretty damning indictment on the affairs of Labour that a leader that claims to be a proponent of the new politics happens to be using the kind of tactics that would not have looked out of place in the political stone age. The intrigue, the shameless self interest, the willingness to put self before party is indicative of the fact that very little has changed in terms of the political climate in which we operate. The only change is a tendency towards factionalism and a neglect of the cooperation that made the Labour Party the positive force that it has been in the past. The big problem is this. The working class in the UK has been dying for the last 40 years, to the point that the purpose of the Labour Party is no longer obvious. What we are seeing is the battle to determine the future direction of Labour. It is one the moderates cannot afford to lose.
By contrast, the problem with the US Democrat Party is not that it is too ideological. It is the fact that large sections of it are not ideological enough. Of course, the short term threat facing the Democrats is more external as opposed to internal. A lot of blue collar workers who one would expect to be voting Democrat in order to have better public services are attracted to the populist sentiment of Donald Trump. This is not helped by the fact that the Democrats have in a leader an individual who is referred to as 'Shillary Clinton' in a number of online locations. The public perception is of her as someone who is far too close to comfort to the kind of big interests that the Democrats ought to be keeping tabs upon. When you hear about the fact that she has had massive support from her Super PAC's or is very friendly with the senior executives of Goldman Sachs, you cannot hope but despair for the future of the party. This is someone who is frankly a woeful orator, lacks a clear and coherent message that people can get behind, partakes in the cheapest appeals towards popular culture which come off as downright embarrassing and was a senior member in some of the worst foreign policy decisions the US has ever made.
When trying to identify what Hilary's support base consists off, it is a lot of people who fear the impact that Donald Trump would have on the US political system. You also have a lot of reluctant supporters who herald from the Bernie Sanders camp who only support Hilary because of the fact that they prefer the devil that they know. Sanders cannot blame anyone but himself for the fact that he was not the Democrat nominee. His assertions that he was a socialist candidate completely miss the mark because his policy set is merely centre left and he has an A rated record on voting in line with what the NRA suggests ought to be followed in the policy sphere. He was merely promising what every other nation in the developed world already has. By portraying himself as a maverick and an anti-establishment candidate, he made it clear to a section of the population that he was too large a gamble. The Republican Party may have given Clinton a path to the presidency. but make no mistake, it is very much a Pyrrhic victory. For the Democrats still need to find an identity which does not merely resemble a moderate version of whatever the Republicans are proposing. A new Brain Trust is going to be necessary, one feels, in order to be competitive against truly broad Republican policy.
Thus the real risk of populism to the left is the problem regarding visions. It is no longer good enough to have a cheap stab at the elite as the right seem far better equipped to do this than the left. The parties as we know it may collapse because of the fact that they were unwilling to have the necessary conversations around what the party ideology is. It is the dream that one day it will be possible to have a pair of parties providing distinctive policy which benefits the people that they choose to represent. This much is plain. The status quo in left wing politics is not sustainable and is looking increasingly likely to result in significant fracturing of the party system due to a kind of forced reallignment. I encourage the people who have been tempted to leave these parties because of their present circumstances to reconsider. it is important to ensure that the more insiduous elements of the left and the right in politics canot be allowed to foster because of petty squabbling.