Sometimes everything is wrong
The pain underneath everyone's anger. Plus, a quick look at the UK's General Election.
…well, this sucks.
As I write this, it’s still a bit unclear just how badly Labour have been beaten. But: it’s bad. I’m writing this around 10.30 pm; 281 of the 650 seats in Britain’s Parliament have been declared, and the Conservatives (popularly known as the Tories) have gained 30 seats thus far. Labour have lost 22. Seats that have been Labour-held for nearly a century have fallen.
Update, 8.09 a.m: the final tally — Conservatives 364 seats (+66), Labour 203 seats (-42), Scots Nats 48, Lib Dems 11, Others 22. Labour just barely edged 200 seats.
We can’t mince words: this is a crushing defeat.
It’s made all the more so because Labour ran an unabashedly leftist campaign, with a radical manifesto (what British political parties call their platforms) that would’ve rolled back so much of the Tory-imposed austerity program of the last nine years. Those policies meant the Conservatives weren’t popular; their ineffectual bumbling around Brexit further impacted their standing, and was probably a proximate cause for why they didn’t win the outright majority two years ago that they won tonight.
So: what the fuck happened?
There needs to be, as the departing deputy leader Tom Watson said tonight, a ruthless “root-and-branch” analysis of how Labour lost an eminently winnable election, and face their worst result since 1935. But even as I see the returns come in, three things are pretty apparent to me:
First, Labour’s program is popular. People like it, by really broad margins. People are going to use tonight’s defeat as a cudgel to say that better things aren’t possible, that we can’t be too bold or too left or whatever. That’s poppycock, as Ken Gude notes here:
Second, Jeremy Corbyn was catastrophically unpopular and unlikable, and should never have led Labour into a second election. Full disclosure: I fully expected tonight’s result to have happened two years ago, at the 2017 General Election. I wasn’t the only one; a ton of people were predicting disaster then, and then Labour shocked everyone.
They ran an excellent campaign, then-Tory PM Theresa May ran an utterly insipid campaign, and it paid off marvelously. The difference now is that the Tories ran a more competent campaign. To be clear: it was an utterly mendacious campaign, fully devoid of integrity or truth. But it was competent, and that was a critical difference.
This back-and-forth by Richard Yeselson is terrific. Buzzfeed’s Hannah al-Othman did a fantastic deep dive into Corbyn’s unpopularity with voters on the doorstep that you should read. The fact remains: when your favorability ratings stand at negative 41 percent, (21% favorable/61% unfavorable, per YouGov), that’s unfixable. That’s not the result of a media campaign, or being maligned by smears, or anything else.
That just means voters plain don’t like you.
As Rich put it:
I mean, let’s be real, shall we? I guarantee you that if Labour had run a centrist with Corbyn’s levels of unpopularity and lost, you’d never hear the end of it from people like us, and rightly so. Hell, for the last three years, a recurrent theme on the American left has been that if we’d nominated Bernie Sanders in 2016, he’d have won, because he was more popular than Hillary Rodham Clinton.
So if we have any integrity to ourselves, we need to sit with this reality and really grapple with it. We can’t just wave it away, and blame exogenous factors, and ignore the colossal mammoth in the room, simply because it’s inconvenient to our analysis.
Ignoring it, hand-waving it away - as I’ve already seen folks like Jon Lansman and others do - isn’t just the exact same kind of politically-convenient hack work we condemn when we see it from the centre and the right; it’s also a profound breach of faith with those whose cares are our concern.
We fight elections — like tonight’s, and the one we’ll fight this coming year in America — because we care for those who are in the shadows of life, the twilight of life, and the dawn of life. We owe it to them to wage the best election campaigns we can, because when we lose — like we did tonight — we effectively condemn them to the brutal mercilessness of a government whose only care will be the perpetuation of its power, in service to those who see nothing wrong with economic, racial, and social inequality.
That demands a forensic examination of our defeat, and we cannot have that unless we accept that Jeremy Corbyn simply wasn’t fit for purpose as a national leader, regardless of how that makes us feel.
Third, the combination of Corbyn’s unpopularity and a desire to “get Brexit done” was fatal. I will leave this to others, but the simple fact is that Britons are just fed up with it. They want Brexit done and dusted, and as they saw it, a vote for Labour meant more muddling - a second referendum, more negotiating, you name it.
The reality is that muddling is going to happen, no matter what. But Johnson’s genius laid in making the stakes clear: a vote for the Conservatives was a vote to do Brexit, and be done with it, once and for all. Labour was riven between folks who supported Brexit (in the seats they lost tonight) and folks who wanted to remain in the European Union. In a country as divided as the UK, keeping that coalition together was a herculean task.
I don’t know what comes next. But if you’re a believer in the possibility of building a world for the many, not the few, tonight wasn’t a good night.
Everybody hurts
This tweet thread by Vox’s David Roberts deeply resonated with me:
I can’t tell you just how many times since November of 2016 I’ve just been overwhelmed with sadness and grief. This isn’t just about losing an election; I’ve lost plenty, will certainly lose plenty more. It goes deeper than that.
It’s watching a country I bled for put families and young children in concentration camps. It’s watching the people administering and guarding those camps deny life-saving medicines to their inmates. It’s watching people actually argue about whether it was proper to even call the camps “concentration camps”, even though that’s precisely what they are: concentration camps.
It’s watching a White House Press Secretary lie on a daily basis, and suffer absolutely no penalty for that; instead, we see him feted on a prime-time celebrity dance show as a contestant. It’s watching his successor amplify his deceptive techniques, and see political reporters — the people to whom she’s lying — actually come to her defense, simply because doing otherwise might prove socially uncomfortable. It’s then watching her successor take the technique to its logical, Orwellian conclusion, and have the response essentially be: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
In fact, that’s the worst part: that, by and large, the response has been precisely that.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, day after day.
Even as the Democrats move to impeach a criminally corrupt President, the fact that they’re rushing through the process, and at the same time rushing approval of Trump’s Space Force (what?!) and spending nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars (the fuck?!) and signing off on his trade deal all just serve to hammer our failure to be better than this.
And we can snark about it and mock it and performatively cynical, but underneath it all: it hurts.
Sce-sce-sce-narios!
This is a fun thought experiment:
I think if he wins Iowa (which a lot of people are underestimating), he’ll probably win New Hampshire. Unlike 2016, Sanders’ campaign is much more polished. His base of support is extremely committed; in a fluid race like the one we have now, it’s highly probable that he could go from 15%-17% to anywhere between 21%-25%.
Remember, Sanders is the second choice for both supporters of Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. The way the Iowa caucuses work, second- and third-choice support matter almost as much, because they determine who makes the 15% cut for delegates. It’s customary for campaigns to cut deals in the run-up to the caucuses to ensure making the cut-off, too; if Candidate A isn’t viable in a precinct, supporters will be instructed to caucus with another candidate’s supporters so that Candidate B can be viable.
If Sanders pulls off the victory in Iowa, that sets him up nicely for New Hampshire; if he scores a win there, then Nevada is absolutely in play. A Sanders win there isn’t outlandish. He came close four years ago, and it was only the last-second intervention by Harry Reid and the Culinary Workers Union that ensured Hillary Clinton won there.
What about him? I think there’s a few things here:
No, we don’t know what Obama’s said privately. We know what “people” “around” him are claiming, which is entirely different. One of the perils of being powerful and famous is that people in your orbit desperately want others to “know” or at least, be aware of that fact, because it marks them as Very Important People™. Even if they aren’t, really.
That means those “people” constantly leak things you say “privately” to gossip rags like POLITICO or HOTLINE. Those leaks mark them as someone “in the know”.
There’s a certain art and skill here, because if you do this competently, you can actually lock the person in whose circle you’re in into a preferred set of decisions.
The reality is way more prosaic.
First, Barack Obama is a famously reticent person when it comes to post-presidential politics. He’s consistently resisted getting drawn into fights against President Trump, for starters. I’m almost certain he hasn’t said anything that’s going to lock him into a course of action in the Democratic primaries, especially around other people.
Second, the primary ends at some point. Let’s say that you go after Sanders; he wins the nomination. At which point, you’ve basically hamstrung yourself.
Obama and Bernie aren’t BFFs. But they’re both interested in seeing a Democrat win. My hunch is that if it looks like Sanders will win the nomination, Obama will simply dedicate himself to pushing for a general Democratic victory.
This is a sweater you should pick up:
Available at Uniqlo, $39.90.
OK, it’s late, it’s been a rough night. I love all of you; let’s be kind to one another, and take care of each other. If any of you need anything, simply reply to this email.