It may seem that what we just witnessed across the Atlantic was the “Brexit election.” It is certainly true that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s thumping victory, securing an overall majority of close to 80 seats in Parliament, had much to do with his promise, endlessly repeated, to “get Brexit done.”
But Brexit has become, and perhaps always was, about a lot more than Britain securing a divorce from the European Union and restoring itself as a self-governing sovereign state, massively important though those blessings are. Brexit represents many other connected matters relevant beyond British shores, which contain important lessons for Democrats hoping to displace President Trump in the White House.
Many of the British who voted to leave the EU did so because they felt that the oligarchy in Brussels and its allied ruling class in Westminster governed without paying any attention to the concerns of people ill-placed to thrive in a globalized economy, outside the knowledge class, not readily receptive to progressive ideology, not media savvy, and not living within commuting distance of London or the great universities.
They felt that the EU and Westminster elite were changing Britain in undesirable ways and without asking a by-your-leave of the public. These changes included cultural ones linked partly to immigration, complaints and worries about which were met by the metropolitan Left with accusations that Brexit supporters were knuckle-dragging racists. This was not a passing phenomenon. In the immediate aftermath of the election just passed, many such revolting insults were again hurled at working-class voters who switched to Johnson and the Conservatives.
“Remainers” did not learn from the 2016 Brexit referendum vote. Instead of recognizing their folly in treating huge swaths of their compatriots as second-class citizens, they continued to sneer at them with metropolitan disdain. On social media, Remainers almost invariably denounced Leavers as fools or knaves, falling into that most tedious trope of political debate, which is to talk as though no one with brains and goodwill could possibly disagree with one’s own opinion.
For more than three years, Parliament thwarted the democratic will of British voters. Those who supported this obstruction added insult to injury. The recent election result in Britain is payback. The country wanted Brexit done, but many voters also wanted to deliver a resounding kick to those who disdained them for so long.
Several connected matters weighed heavily in the scales. Johnson is charismatic, intelligent, charming, opportunistic, circumstantially honest, and an obvious rogue. His Labour opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, is an anti-Semite, who, throughout his long career, has also supported nearly every enemy of Britain, from the Soviet Union to the Irish Republican Army. He has been an avid adherent of pretty much any terrorist organization you care to name, notably not just the IRA but also Hamas and Hezbollah. And he is an extreme ideologue pushing for all the woke extremes offered in the catalog of leftist folly.
Labour was crushed not just because the country voted for Brexit, wants it done, and doesn’t like being treated with contempt for it. The party was rejected because its leader and its policies were too left-wing and utterly uninterested in the legitimate concerns and reasonable beliefs of ordinary people.
This is all good news for Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg, who are competing for the “moderate” lane in the Democratic presidential primaries. Buttigieg is considerably less centrist than he claims, but Biden, feeble though he is in other respects, may be the real deal — the only leading Democratic candidate who has genuinely resisted the lurch leftward initiated by Bernie Sanders, perpetuated for three years by the #Resistance and social justice warriors, and then enthusiastically adopted by Elizabeth Warren and several other lesser contenders.
The lesson Johnson offers to Democrats by drubbing Corbyn and Labour is that if you opt for cool, global, woke attitudinizing, and couple these to unrealistic and unpopular policies, you will be sent packing by voters. Kamala Harris learned, to her cost, that the Twitter crowd isn’t where political power really lies. Democrats can keep pretending that mass illegal immigration is a wonderful thing and that America must adopt all the crazy -isms of the progressive Left.
But if they do, Trump will be laughing all the way to a second term. Just as Johnson is laughing all the way to 10 Downing St. right now.
