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This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The signal couldnt have been clearer if the entire British electorate had beamed it into the clouds Thursday night, standing with 13 million flashlights on hills and towers to project a blinding new sun over the Eastern Seaboard. No, Corbyn didnt win the election outright, but nobody else did either. This was supposed to be a rout, the final destruction of left-wing electoralism, a tiny and barely formed thing crushed under Theresa Mays heels; instead, Labour has denied the Conservatives their majority, and destabilised the government to the extent that it might have to call another election within a few months, one which theyre well on course to win.

Corbyn has shown that while centrism and fascism gurgle mindlessly over a landscape flattened by low voter turnout and mass political apathy, its socialist politics that can drive the optimism and engagement needed to stop them. And if a left-wing platform can flourish here in Britain, a country toxified by decades of assault on the commons and centuries of racism, it can win anywhere even in a country that elected Donald Trump.

Similarities between Corbyn and Sanders can be overplayed yes, theyre both kindly white-haired socialists despised by their party apparatuses but immensely popular among younger voters, but Corbyns socialism is situated in a far deeper internationalist tradition, while also being considerably more inflected with recent theoretical developments than Bernies Cold War New Dealism. And while its still unfortunately important to keep relitigating the 2016 election, Corbyns triumph offers a blueprint for the future. Its left the dominant myths of 21st-century politics crushed along with the Tory majority, namely thatelections are won from the center.

For 20 years, Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pitched themselves to everyone and no one, jettisoning socialist dictums like public ownership and a general suspicion towards finance capital. The result was 20 years ofsteadily fallingvote shares. In 2015, Ed Miliband abandoned his leftist leanings for more of the same, and he barely improved on the previous election.

This year, as the entire country appeared to have lurched sickeningly to the right, while newspaper columnists lauded a rabidly nationalistic Conservative party for occupying thenewmiddleground of British politics, as every numbers-obsessed party wonk urged Labour to drift rightwards with what appeared to be the national tide, Corbyn stood on an unashamedlyradicalmanifesto. The newspapers, almost without exception, derided it as a fairy tale, bordering on Bolshevism. And it delivered a 9.6 percent shift towards Labour, a swing that outstripped Blairs victory in 1997, the biggest increase in the partys vote share since 1945.

Its not just that centrism is unpopular; theres simply no such thing. The center is a fiction, believed in only by politicians and the people who would like to become them; political science majors and the people who teach them; journalists and the people who imitate them. Nobody else has ever identified themselves with something as vapid and empty an ideology of no ideology, the plan to keep everything the same, the residue of class power disguised as a doctrine. Its the imaginary space between parties, a desert, a wasteland. For most people, the world doesnt revolve around a happy stable core: its a nightmare, in which the rich want to fill their veins with the blood of the poor, in which the old promises of health and security are vanishing, in which everything has gone and continues to go monstrously wrong.

The Tories did not have a workable plan to actually improve things for the people of Britain. Instead, they demonised Corbyn personally. As the campaign whirred to a finish, a vast media campaign excoriated him for supposed links to the IRA, mostly based on meetings he held with the Irish Republican Sinn Fein party, and supposed sympathies for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. After the brutal attacks in Manchester and London, the Daily Mail cynically tried to spin the horror into a campaign issue, devoting a fullthirteen-pageattack on aLabour party it claimed was led by a terrorist ideologue under foreign influence. It didnt work. None of it really stuck. Nobody really cared.

This experience should haunt Democrats as they pursue a byzantine investigation into Trumps alleged Russian ties. In a world that still hasnt recovered from the 2008 crash, most voters simply do not care about geopolitical conspiracy theories; they want politics that will make a difference to their own lives. And the Democrats cant offer that either: whatever its merits, the Russian probe offers a distraction from the fact that the mainstream offers noideological alternative to Trumpism. After all, if Trump is impeached, the country is left with Mike Pence, and then after him a catalogue of further monstrosities, degenerating and without end. Even if the collusion narrative is true and its become so vast and convoluted it seems unlikely to prove Trumps undoingthis is not the terrain on which modern conservatism should be fought. Political change doesnt come out of Senate hearings; it comes from the people, and people are far more receptive to good progressive policies than they are to shrieking about treason.

The questions that the reactionary right offers itself as the answer to, it turns out, are actually far better solved by socialists. Trumps Republicans as well as the Tories and UKIP launch themselves happily into questions of identity and community. People, and older people especially, feel like they have lost their country and want to get it back; theyre concerned by the disintegration of close-knit social ties, the anonymity and alienation that comes in the wake of a world surrendered entirely to market forces and lacerated by international free trade.

These are genuine and important concerns. The rights solution, whether tacit or overt, is anti-immigrant hysteria and ethnic homogeneity: we can restore a mouldered social fabric just by making sure that nobody has to see any Muslims on the street. And there are people who will embrace this answer, if its the only one offered. But the better answer that we can take a country back by wresting it away from private interests and into communal ownership; that we can restore communal ties by restoring the sphere of the commons will always be more popular.

America is no exception. The Democratic Party still sees two distinct working classes: a core, traditional working class that is white and intrinsically, helplessly racist, and a more peripheral working class, ethnically differentiated, its own kind of special interest. The only difference is that while British centrists desperately try to appease this imaginary proletariat with witless flag-waving and a constant tilt towards social exclusionismis this racist enough for you? how about this? American centrists tend to write it off altogether in favour of a minority coalition who, presumably, dont need a roof over their heads or anything to feed their kids.

Corbyns success shows that none of this is necessary. Instead of a politics based on the triangulation of various evils unfettered capitalism, institutional racism, endless war abroad, endless immiseration at home something good is possible, and not just possible, but viable.

But it wouldnt be right to talk about what the American left can learn from Corbynism without also thinking about what we in the UK can learn from the American left. The Outline hascataloguedthe immense enthusiasm among Americans for Corbyn; Ive seen it first hand. Throughout election night I received a constant stream of congratulations from friends across the Atlantic; comrades Id visited in New Orleans let me know that theyd crammed themselves into a bar to watch the BBC live stream. Others sent pictures of themselves in Corbyn T-shirts and badges.

Throughout the difficult two years of Corbyns leadership, plagued by petty in-fighting and the occasional terrifying doubts, every American leftist I knew was absolutely confident that he could pull it off. They could see something a lot of voters and commentators here, even those of us on the left, couldnt. While British people contended with the heavy historical baggage of Labourism and the questions of the partys future, Americans saw only a politician who had the chance to do something good. And they were right.

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The truth about Jeremy Corbyn staring us smack in the face: Socialism isn't bad - Salon

How many additional millions of people have to die before intentional fools like Bernie Sanders will acknowledge that socialism quickly destroys any society that it takes over?

The death toll is easily at least 75 million when you add up all the innocent people who were starved to death, worked to death or shot in the back of the head like weve witnessed in the last 100 years in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, North Korea, Cuba and now Venezuela.

In 1999, when the socialists took control of Venezuela it was the wealthiest country in Latin America.

Venezuela still has the greatest petroleum reserves of any country in the world but children now needlessly die there because hospitals dont have very basic medicines. The average Venezuelan has lost 20 pounds because there is no food, beverages, dairy products or cooking oil. All the farms and food-processing facilities were nationalized by the government. Basic hygiene products arent to be found.

An uncharismatic socialist Venezuelan dictator ignores the will of 85 percent of the people there. The capital has been locked in daily violent demonstrations for several months. Scores of demonstrators have been murdered by roving gangs of para-military goon squads, funded by the socialist dictator.

Socialism is always quickly destructive.

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Harry Griswold: Keep deadly socialism in check - La Crosse Tribune

Posted by Paul Anthony Melanson, June 13, 2017

Robert P. Barnidge noted that, Pope Francis has made his social and economic tendencies clear since the early days of his pontificate. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis criticizes the notion that reducing the disproportionately-high income tax burden on high-income earners can stimulate investment and economic growth as a crude and nave trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. For the Holy Father, inequality is the root of social ills, though he fails to explain precisely why a society of unequal wealth but a relatively high standard of living would somehow be less reflective of Gospel values than a society that shares equally in poverty.

Going further still, Evangelii Gaudium calls for structural transformation that would restore to the poor what belongs to them. If, as Pope Francis suggests, property is possessed not by its owners, then, truly, property is theft, to quote 19th-century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhons famous phrase.

Contrast this embrace of Socialism with the thought of Pope Saint John Paul II:

the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decisions disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order.

The Popes have consistently condemned Socialism because it is intrinsically evil. See here.https://www.tfp.org/what-the-popes-have-to-say-about-socialism/

But Francis promotes it.

If youre not concerned about Francis as a Catholic, you should be.

http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2017/06/francis-property-is-theft-and-socialism.html

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Francis: Property is theft and Socialism is the answer - Catholic Citizens of Illinois (press release)

However, he warns, if California follows the socialist model preferred by its wealthy, liberal political class, it will have to expropriate that same elite to pay the cost, which fleeing middle class families cannot afford.

Kotkin writes:

The new consensus is being pushed by, among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer. The financier now insists that, to reverse our worsening inequality, we must double down on environmental and land-use regulation, and make up for it by boosting subsidies for the struggling poor and middle class. This new progressive synthesis promises not upward mobility and independence, but rather the prospect of turning most Californians into either tax slaves or dependent serfs.

[C]ombating climate change has become an opportunity for Brown, Steyer and the Sacramento bureaucracy to perform a passion play, where they preen as saviors of the planet, with the unlikable President Donald Trump playing his role as the devil incarnate. In following with this line of reasoning, Bay Area officials and environmental activists are even proposing a campaign to promote meatless meals. Its Gaia meets Lent.

To these burdens, there are now growing calls for a single-payer health care system which, in principle, is not a terrible idea, but it will include the undocumented, essentially inviting the poor to bring their sick relatives here. The state Senate passed the bill without identifying a funding source to pay the estimated $400 billion annual cost, leading even former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to describe it as snake oil. It may be more like hemlock for Californias middle-income earners, who, even with the cost of private health care removed, would have to fork over an estimated $50 billion to $100 billion a year in new taxes to pay for it.

In the end, we are witnessing the continuation of an evolving class war, pitting the oligarchs and their political allies against the states diminished middle and working classes. It might work politically, as the California electorate itself becomes more dependent on government largesse, but its hard to see how the state makes ends meet in the longer run without confiscating the billions now held by the ruling tech oligarchs.

Read Kotkins full essay here.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the most influential people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author ofHow Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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Liberal Geographer: California is Descending into Socialism - Breitbart News

The United Kingdom election returns had hardly begun coming in when conventional wisdom started to form. A day later, it solidified. The elections demonstrated the renewed vitality of hard Left, progressive politics in the English-speaking world.

Even if Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had not exactly won, he had shown how the Left could win. He had road-tested the kind of politics Americans had seen at work last year in the Bernie Sanders campaign. And he had proven that style of politics would prevailif not this year, then surely in the near future.

There is a certain truth to this narrative. British Prime Minister Teresa May made a grave miscalculation, lost her majority in Parliament, denied herself another three secure years in power, and will probably be gone as prime minister by late summer. But a closer analysis of the election exposes significant flaws in the conventional narrative. American conservatives should indeed study the British election closely. They should not, however, be disheartened by it. It offers them valuable lessons on how to remain in power, and how to use the power they hold.

To begin with, its important to understand that while the British Conservative Party (the Tories) lost their majority in Parliament, they still remain in office and will likely continue to govern the nation. Before the election, they held an absolute majority in Parliament, of 331 seats out of 650. They lost 13 seats, dropping to 318, some eight votes shy of a majority.

But within a few hours, they began forming a coalition with a traditional ally, the Democratic Unionists (DUP) of Northern Ireland. That party won ten seats. The Tory-DUP alliance would thus control a majority of 328 of the 650 seats. To be sure, that majority is slender, and could suffer attrition as members of Parliament (MPs) died or left office. But a majority it nonetheless is. And it would permit May to retain her prime ministership and the Tory Party to rule.

Furthermore, Labours success should not be overblown. It remained well behind the Tories both in numbers of parliamentary seats (262 versus 318), and in the popular vote (roughly 40 percent to 42 percent). The Tories share of the popular vote actually climbed by more than 5 percent, although the Labour share increased by nearly 10 percent. Although Labour picked up a substantial net gain of 32 seats, its gains came at the expense, not so much of the Tories, as of smaller third parties, especially the Scottish Nationalists, who lost a net of 19 seats (of a previous 35) in all.

Even without further analysis, these results hardly suggest a massive rejection of the Conservatives. Rather, they indicate that Britain may be returning to something more like a two-party system, with smaller regional or special interest parties giving way to bigger parties that have broader, national appeal.

Labour also seemed to have made gains because Nigel Farages party, the UKIP, had disappeared. UKIP existed to promote Brexit. With that achieved, the party basically folded its tent. Forecasters had mistakenly predicted that UKIP voters would migrate to the Tories. But many did not, voting for Labour instead. That is crucial: it suggests that many pro-Brexit, nationalistic voters voted for Labour for economic reasons, given that Britains exit from the European Union seemed assured.

Here, then, is one important lesson for American conservatives: Do not count on retaining the loyalty of working-class voters in places like western Pennsylvaniaplaces that gave Donald Trump the necessary margin for victorywithout rewarding them on the bread and butter issues. In particular, American conservatives should be very wary of cutting health-care programs severely.

Labour made extremely effective use of the charge that May and her Tories were starving Britains national health-care system of funds. That charge resonated with aging working-class Britons who may well have supported UKIP or Brexit. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Labour Party, under leaders like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, had snubbed and stiffed those voters. In that respect, they resembled our own aloof and arrogant Obamas and Clintons. But under Corbyn, Labour began to court these neglected, deplorable voters again with, it appears, a fair measure of success. Conservatives: Be sure that the Democrats have grasped that piece of Labours strategy, and beware of it.

British conservatives had absorbed that lesson even before the election, and they should pay even more attention to it in the aftermath. May was depicted as a Red Tory in large part because of her views on social welfare. She or her Tory successors will probably blush an even deeper red now. Voters who favor nationalist causes, like Brexit or Making America Great Again, value a robust nation-state, not only because it guards its borders jealously and protects its native working class from low-wage foreign-born competition, but also because its health care and social security programs shelter them from the worst ravages of (what Edward Luttwak calls) turbo-capitalism.

A turn to the center on social welfare issues would be very good for conservativism both in Britain and in this country. In Britain, it would mean the Tory Party would break even further with the economic policies of Thatcherism and continue its return to an older and deeper conservative tradition. That is the tradition associated with post-War Tory prime ministers like Harold Macmillan and, in the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli.

In those periods, the Tories aspired to beand in fact weregenuinely the party of the nation as a whole, rather than (like Labour) of one particular class. Their leadership consciously sought to combine the dynamism, innovation, and risk-taking of capitalism with substantial protections for those most vulnerable to the dislocations and deprivations that unfettered capitalism inevitably causes.

In my opinion, that is the true and natural habitat of conservatism in any advanced modern society. And it is the kind that comes naturally to President Trump. To an extent almost wholly unrecognized by commentators, with the notable exception of Conrad Black, both Trump and his followers are moderates. Trump appears to recognize not only the political necessity of protecting core social programs, but also the social imperative for doing so. The deplorables are an essential part of the national community, and the nation needs to give them their due.

Finally, a word about the Ulster MPs on whom the Tories depend. These are not the anti-Catholic bigots of the past, even a past as recent as the 1980s. Their leader, Arlene Foster, is a young Protestant woman who has earned the praise of the UKs Catholic Herald, for her openness to Roman Catholics and her partys staunchly pro-life values. It is not altogether unimaginable that Foster could play a leading role in the next UK cabinet, or perhaps even become prime minister.

The Tories dependence on her party for remaining in power gives Foster extraordinary leverage. It may even be that the Britain that emerges from this election, while taking a more progressive tack in economics, will steer in a more conservative direction on social and cultural issues. Its not a bad combination for American conservatives to espouse.

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The UK Election Means Voters Want Moderation, Not Socialism - The Federalist