Mediaboss Marketing

An outright majority in Frances parliament for a movement founded just over a year ago is clearly a huge achievement. Emmanuel Macrons fledgling force has captured the imagination of the entire world following yet another exceptional election win on Sunday.

Those left stunned by the blitzkrieg-style success of La Rpublique en Marche! (LREM, or The Republic on the Move!) should not, however, overlook a development that is arguably of far greater significance: the sudden death of Socialist France. That 351 out of 577 MPs will now make up the Macron cohorts in the National Assembly is remarkable, but the fact that a Socialist Party (PS) that was in government until last month will have as few as 29 seats is absolutely astonishing.

Such figures mean that the party of Franois Mitterrand, the longest serving president in the history of the Fifth Republic, is now a relatively powerless minority. Franois Hollande, who began his career as an advisor to Mitterrand, was a PS head of state with a comfortable parliamentary majority but he did not dare seek re-election because he knew wipe-out was coming.

Both Hollande and Mitterrand once represented the triumph of the romantic left one in which apparatchiks inspired by the class struggle and the excesses of capitalism were able to fight for social justice from within the Paris establishment, rather than from the street. The PS galvanised the immense revolutionary spirit of the French people and turned it into a formidable democratic unit. Now it is an anachronism that could only muster 6 per cent of the vote during the May presidential elections which saw Macron enter the Elyse Palace.

Macron says door 'remains open' for Britain to stay in EU

In terms of historical developments, this is on a par with the decline of the British Liberal Party before the First World War. A radical new movement Labour hastened the demise of the Liberals in the UK, and in France LREM is having the same effect on the Socialists.

Hollandes incompetence had a great deal to do with this. Before the start of his five-year tenure in 2012, he said: I dont like the rich. His attempts to introduce atop rate of income tax of 75 per cent led to entrepreneurs leaving France. The result of such initiatives was predictable enough: unemployment rocketed, along with the cost of living, as violent street demonstrations became the norm. Just like under Mitterrand in the early eighties, U-turns were essential so as to prevent economic collapse.

In Hollandes case, this involved appointing financially astute civil servants such as Emmanuel Macron, a former Rothschild banker, to try to bail the country out. Contrary to silly myths, Macron was by no means Hollandes protg. He was not even a member of the PS while an unelected finance minister, and was certainly not brought in to keep the Socialists in power under another name. Macron was solely seen as a bright problem-solver who could get things done.

Instead of using talent like Macron to bolster their overall image, however, the PS split between market-friendly social liberals, and the hard left. Most disastrous of all was the manner in which senior ministers just gave up on their party once it was obvious that Macron would prevail.

It was Hollandes Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a classic PS success story who rose from Spanish immigrant to the second highest office in the French state, who announced that the party was dead and gone, and that he wanted to join LREM. This was within a couple of days of Macrons presidential victory.

French president Emmanuel Macron offers refuge to American climate scientists

Perhaps the most disgraceful and most telling conduct came from Sgolne Royal, another of Hollandes most senior lieutenants who was drawn to LREM in recent weeks. Not only was she a former PS presidential candidate, but the mother of Franois Hollandes four children. Despite failing to win a parliamentary seat in 2012, Royal seemed to believe that entitled dinosaurs like her had a right to govern thanks to nepotism.

Hollande caused outrage when he made the mandate-less Royal his Ecology Minister in 2014. The deeply cynical Royal even expressed anger and surprise towards Macron when he declined to keep her on in the job this month.

Champagne socialists are referred to as la Gauche Caviar (the Caviar Left) in France, and there are plenty of others like Royal: those who owe their pampered, moneyed lifestyles to the PS, but who betray democratic socialism whenever it suits them. There was no question of them standing up for their party in the face of the Macron Miracle. They simply capitulated.

LREM is not aparty in the conventional way that the LR and PS are. It is a voting bloc with Edouard Philippe, an LR veteran as prime minister, and plenty of PS turncoats also in Macrons cabinet. New recruits who will now form the presidential majority in Parliament include scores of ordinary people from civil society, along with other pragmatic (some might say opportunistic) politicians from the left, the right, and the Christian democrat MoDem group. The proportion of women in the National Assembly is close to 40 per cent for the first time.

Yes, turnout was low in the second round of parliamentary elections (almost 43 per cent), and there are already concerns about the possibility of an unrestrained hyper-presidency, but opposition to Macron is, in fact, just as likely to come from within his eclectic coalition as it is from outside. LREM rejects extremism, whether from the far right National Front or the radical leftist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed).

A vital rebooting of French democracy is underway, as a progressive young president tries to halt the march of aggressive populism. Macron is not dictating any ideology, nor indeed any rigid programme. He is a consensus politician, who is prepared to listen, and to compromise.

In such circumstances, the PS had every opportunity to fight for its core objectives. Instead, it displayed a shameful defeatism that belies its important role in the development of modern France.

Excerpt from:
Macron's latest success heralds the death of French socialism and it was socialist defeatism that caused it - The Independent

It's clear that for anything resembling socialism to succeed, movements like Occupy and Podemos, electoral challengers like Bernie Sanders, sympathetic elected officials and an anti-capitalist party alongside a left movement, all need to be in the mix. (Photo:Waywuwei / Flickr)

Anti-capitalism needs a viable political party. Whether it's a big one, like the Democratic Party -- which Bernie Sanders' supporters are hoping to influence and dreaming, perhaps, of taking over -- or a robust third party that's openly socialist, it's clear that without a party that operates in conjunction with left movements, it will be difficult to achieve goals like Medicare for All, free higher education, student loan forgiveness, environmental and climate protection, and substantially shrinking the military and the vast prison system. Something on the order of Mlenchon's "France Unsubjugated" movement, which is solidly anti-capitalist, rejects the centrist austerity consensus and won a substantial portion of the national vote in the recent primary, would be up to the task.

That is precisely what several essays inRethinking Revolution: Socialist Register 2017advocate. Edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, with 19 essays by different authors, two -- by Jodi Dean and August Nimtz -- attempt to resuscitate the idea of a vanguard party.Socialist Register 2017marks the centennial of the 1917 Russian revolution and so tries to draw lessons from it, a key one being a vanguard party. Though other essays in the book throw cold water on that idea, Nimtz's view is worth noting: Marx's writings on "independent electoral power and armed organization" of working people, memorized by Lenin, helped usher in the first-time-ever successful workers' revolution. Perhaps the problem here is with the term "vanguard," very popular back in 1917 but in 2017, not so much. Just a party, not necessarily a vanguard party, but just a party would do, as one of several elements necessary for socialism.

Indeed, these essays argue not only for a party, but also for other sources of power. It's pretty clear fromRethinking Revolutionthat for anything resembling socialism to succeed, movements like Occupy and Podemos, electoral challengers like Bernie Sanders, sympathetic elected officials and an anti-capitalist partyalongsidea left movement, all need to be in the mix.

These essays span a wide range of political developments, including eco-socialism in South Africa, the welcome rise of left Laborite Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, the heritage of Eurocommunism, how climate change will drive political uprisings, socialism in South America, the legacy of the Chinese revolution, the pitfalls of identity politics and much more, all linked together by the theme of how to bring about socialism. Of course, socialism has and will come about differently in different places, and one of this volume's aims is to articulate those differences and the distinct challenges socialism faces in various parts of the world.

"It doesn't take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution," writes Andreas Malm about the Middle East in his essay on revolution in a warming world. He mentions that the US military has long viewed climate change as a security threat, especially in the global South, envisioning "a century of permanent counterinsurgency in hot slums sliding into the sea." As global warming leads to famines and water shortages, people will revolt -- indeed, in the last century, famine had more than a little to do with propelling the Bolsheviks to power and then leading to disaster: "the scarcities seemed to allow for no other general course of action than a food supply dictatorship. Here the seeds of Stalinist counterrevolution were sown." That could well be what we are in for with climate change: famine, revolution and counterrevolution. If so, and if climate change is an inevitable corollary of capitalism, then anti-capitalism should land quickly on any thinking person's agenda; there is no time to wait for what Malm calls "the dawdling bourgeoisie." He also critiques the notion of the Anthropocene epoch, which implies that all of humanity is somehow responsible for climate change, when in fact it's wealthy Western countries that have left by far the biggest carbon footprint -- one that affects all people. "There are no jobs on a dead planet," he concludes.

David Schwartzman's essay on eco-catastrophism concurs, naming the two major threats to civilization: nuclear war and catastrophic climate change. "Only transnational class struggle on a scale not witnessed in human history has any chance of preventing catastrophic climate change," he writes. That struggle would be greatly assisted by coordination among various functioning anti-capitalist parties in different countries.

Besides nuclear war and catastrophic climate change, a third threat looms for humanity, if socialism does not succeed -- a threat not discussed in this volume: fascism. A fascist candidate recently made it all the way to the French election, while governments in the US, UK, Hungary, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and elsewhere have all lurched so far to the right that it would not take much to morph from reactionary to fascist. Meanwhile, centrist austerity will not only fail to counter fascism, but will create enough misery to fuel it: We have seen this happen many times in various countries since the 1920s. Where socialists have failed to organize, fascists have teamed up with capitalists to scorch the planet and dispossess billions, resorting quickly to the military. We saw this in the 1966 mass murder of leftists in Sukarno's Indonesia and in the South American dictatorships of the 1960s and '70s. Today, we are witnessing the murderous war on drugs in President Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines or, still nascent, in the anti-immigrant policy agenda of Trump's United States. In these precarious times, socialists and anti-capitalists everywhere have their work cut out for them.

One place with bright prospects in this respect is South Africa, whose workers are, according to an essay by Patrick Bond inRethinking Revolution,"the world's most militant." Bond's article, "South Africa's Next Revolt: Eco-socialist Opportunities," lists "red-green (socialist-environmentalist) victories since the fall of apartheid in 1994: access to free HIV/AIDS medicines, the partial decommodification of municipal water and electricity services and workplace health and safety class action lawsuits." But on the downside, "neoliberalism has dug itself deep into social and environmental management since 1994." And there have been terrible defeats: South Africa's powerful and militant National Union of Mineworkers led a wildcat strike in 2012, in which 34 workers were massacred by police, basically on the orders of a former union leader turned government official.

Unlike South Africa, Bolivia pretty much alreadyissocialist. In Robert Cavooris's essay, he expounds upon the history of Bolivian neoliberalism and austerity and how it led to Evo Morales's victory and the success of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Cavooris argues that the rejection of neoliberalism throughout South America paved the way for outsiders to assume political control. Despite limited wage increases, he observes, the pink-tide states all put in place "popular welfare programs and worker subsidies." Unfortunately, as we have witnessed in recent years, without accompanying structural economic changes, for instance the nationalization of banks, these popular programs cannot hold off discontent, when, say, a worldwide slump in commodity prices (think oil in Venezuela) batters the country. The pink tide is not pink enough, according to Cavooris, who highlights "the distinction between a revolutionary transformation of the state and a doomed reformism." He writes that if "neoliberalism is thought abstractly as the dominance of the market over the state, then the presumed solution would be the wielding of state power to restore the balance."

For the troubles besetting the left and recently-left South American states, Cavooris prescribes "more power to the communes in Venezuela, more land for the landless movements in Brazil, more space for the self-management of unions in Bolivia and for the 'taken' factories in Argentina." Unfortunately, counterrevolution has already brewed in Brazil and Argentina. However, if an immensely popular left-wing leader like Lula makes a comeback in Brazil and if right-wing president Macri's penchant for privatizing and austerity stirs revolt in Argentina, things could change quickly.

In his essay on Venezuela, Steve Striffler argues that socialists must use electoral politics, despite ferocious counterattacks. "Attempts to change the structure, operation and even personnel of the state, while simultaneously confronting capital and putting key sectors of industry, finance and commerce under social control/ownership produces the fiercest opposition. This is precisely why, both Chavez and Morales recognized, the process must be accompanied by the creation of alternative organs, institutions and spaces of working class power." Striffler observes that this is an exhausting struggle, but a necessary one: The creation of a welfare state is not enough. "The power of capital must be broken," he writes. If not, the business elites will find a way to undermine socialism -- as they are currently doing in Venezuela and have done in Brazil and Argentina.

A salient difficulty besetting Venezuela and sabotaging its socialism is scarcity. "The opposition still possessed the capacity to seriously disrupt the economy," Striffler writes, adding that it was able to "generate political instability and undermine support for the government." Striffler observes that in a liberal democracy moving toward socialism, this will almost always be the case. Elites will fight back bitterly and not hesitate to reduce the country to poverty to further their aims, as has happened in Venezuela. "There is perhaps no better expression of this," Striffler writes about Venezuela, "than the periodic efforts by the business class to create a scarcity of consumer goods by reducing production, selling in alternative markets, limiting imports, or simply hoarding supplies, in effect promoting economic turmoil in order to foment political instability."

This has been going on in Venezuela for some time. Indeed, the recent lessons of socialism in South America couldn't be starker: While social welfare programs that provide housing, medicine, school and even cash payments to poor and working people are popular, in and of themselves they do not complete socialism's task. Capitalism must be confronted and restructured out of the picture, or it will come roaring back, dispossessing multitudes and roasting the planet, more destructive and chaotic than ever, and it will tear humanity's house right down to the ground.

Continued here:
On the Road From Anti-Capitalism to Socialism, We Need a Political Party - Truth-Out

We need only to revisit the 2016 presidential election to confirm many millennials preferred Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, to free market capitalists. Did they get the full picture of what a socialist society looks like? What they heard loud and clear were the words free," fair" and equal." Is there something in the way America has nurtured our children that lends toward an attitude of entitlement?

Americas foundation of a free society is built on the engagement of all society in the economy, initiative, entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. In socialist societies, the elite make the rules for the masses, thus stripping away individual freedoms. Senator Sanders promoted free health care, free education, and relief from college loan payback, which encourages an attitude of irresponsibility and loss of initiative.

What Sanders did not talk about is what socialism looks like in actuality. Cuba, for example, is no longer a classic socialist society because it wasnt working; recently it turned toward a mixed economy with some elements of capitalism. Socialism fails because it cannot financially support all the social programs for the masses. Prior to recent reforms, Cubans were denied private property rights. With socialism comes scarcity of commodities and greater poverty. Poor human rights records permeate many socialist countries.

Sir Winston Churchill, former prime minister of Great Britain, fought socialism within his country for 50 years. He understood it took away individual freedoms and would not lead to prosperity for the populous. Churchill revered Americas constitutional governance. Thus far, socialism has yet to yield prosperity for the masses.

I think some of what has attracted young millennials to socialism is the idea of equal distribution of wealth; the wealth gap in the world offends their sense of fairness. Perhaps the shrinking job market and burgeoning student loans have created a level of hopelessness that has led millennials to Bernie Sanders and socialism. Experience teaches that blessings given without working for them are valued less than those using the sweat of our brow. In a socialist society there is no benefit to the individual to invest greater effort, greater excellence, or innovation, so incentive is lost. This is not a path to personal prosperity. Is this a world you want to live in?

Ben Sasse, senator from Nebraska, has written a book that may give clues as to why millennials are susceptible to socialism. He questions the current culture of parenting in his book, "The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance." The book discusses the dangers of delaying adulthood into the late 20s.

Sasse writes: Lowering expectations, cushioning all blows and tolerating aimlessness not only hurts them, it also deprives their neighbors, who desperately need their engagement."

In my experience, delaying adulthood encourages dependency, idleness, prevents growth of resiliency, initiative, self-confidence and the mental toughness necessary to successfully navigate adulthood. Millennials have grown up surrounded by bubble wrap, participation trophies" and safe places free from an opinion they disagree with.

Today's accepted norm is remedial classes for college freshmen to prepare students for college-level study. Sasse found that about one-third of college freshmen do not return as sophomores. When do they learn to navigate challenging situations which are always a part of life?

Overprotective parenting, or helicopter parenting," has led to 30 percent of teenagers reporting feeling sad or depressed (American Psychological Associations 2014 Stress in America survey). Christian Smith, sociologist from Notre Dame, reported the prevailing feelings of young adults are personal struggle, confusion, anxiety, hurt, frustration, and grief ("Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood," 2011). This kind of parenting coddles kids and gives them the impression they are the center of the universe, to their detriment.

Coddled youth are primed for an ideology that removes any responsibility for their circumstances. Experience taught me that free things are devalued, so why promote that expectation? Some millennials want fairness in all aspects of life. All people are flawed and treat people unfairly at times. If we practiced the godly principle of treating others better than ourselves, the results in society may yield more fairness.

Sasse promotes the idea of building five character traits: 1) Give youth more exposure to intergenerational experiences and break away from the tyranny of their peers. 2) Develop a work ethic. 3) Embrace limited consumption, dont overindulge in meaningless luxury. 4) Travel to learn about other cultures - discover what subsistence means. 5) Learn to read great literature.

Perhaps it is time to rethink our parenting styles.

Linda Holub, of Dakota Dunes, S.D., has lived in the Sioux City metro area for more than 40 years. She and her husband, Dave, have four adult children. A certified life coach professional with a master of arts degree from Liberty University in Human Services, Counseling: Life Coaching, Holub is co-chair of the Siouxland Coalition Against Human Trafficking.

More here:
THE REGULARS: Why are many millennials attracted to socialism? - Sioux City Journal

NEW GEOGRAPHY--California is widely celebrated as the fount of technical, cultural and political innovation. Now we seem primed to outdo even ourselves, creating a new kind of socialism that, in the end, more resembles feudalism than social democracy.

The new consensus is being pushed by, among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer (photo above). 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.

Californias progressive regime of severe land-use controls has helped to make the state among the most unaffordable in the nation, driving homeownership rates to the lowest levels since the 1940s. It has also spurred a steady hegira of middle-aged, middle-class families the kind of tax-burdened people Gov. Jerry Brown now denounces as freeloaders from the state. They may have access to smartphones and virtual reality, but the increasingly propertyless masses seem destined to live in the kind of cramped conditions that their parents and grandparents had escaped decades earlier.

A green peoples republic?

There is some irony in a new kind of socialism blessed by some of the worlds richest people. The new policy framework is driven, in large part, by a desire to assume world leadership on climate-related issues. The biggest losers will be manufacturing, energy and homebuilding workers, who will see their jobs headed to other states and countries.

Under the new socialism, expect more controls over the agribusiness sector, notably the cattle industry, Californias original boom industry, which will be punished for its cows flatulence. Limits on building in the periphery of cities also threaten future growth in construction employment, once the new regulations are fully in place.

Sadly, these steps dont actually do anything for the climate, given the states already low carbon footprint and the fact that the people and firms driven out of the state tend to simply expand their carbon footprints elsewhere in their new homes. But effectiveness is not the motivation here. Instead, combating 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.

A different kind of socialism

The oligarchs of the Bay Area have a problem: They must square their progressive worldview with their enormous wealth. They certainly are not socialists in the traditional sense. They see their riches not as a result of class advantages, but rather as reflective of their meritocratic superiority. As former TechCrunch reporter Gregory Ferenstein has observed, they embrace massive inequality as both a given and a logical outcome of the new economy.

The nerd estate is definitely not stupid, and like rulers everywhere, they worry about a revolt of the masses, and even the unionization of their companies. Their gambit is to expand the welfare state to keep the hoi polloi in line. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, now favor an income stipend that could prevent mass homelessness and malnutrition.

How socialism morphs into feudalism

Unlike its failed predecessor, this new, greener socialism seeks not to weaken, but rather to preserve, the emerging class structure. Brown and his acolytes have slowed upward mobility by environment restrictions that have cramped home production of all kinds, particularly the building of moderate-cost single-family homes on the periphery. All of this, at a time when millennials nationwide, contrary to the assertion of Browns smart growth allies, are beginning to buy cars, homes and move to the suburbs.

In contrast, many in Sacramento appear to have disdain for expanding the California dream of property ownership. The states planners are creating policies that will ultimately lead to the effective socialization of the regulated housing market, as more people are unable to afford housing without subsidies. Increasingly, these efforts are being imposed with little or no public input by increasingly opaque regional agencies.

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.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center forOpportunity Urbanism. His newest book,The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author ofThe New Class Conflict,The City: A Global History, andThe Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.Prepped for City Watch by Linda Abrams.

Originally posted here:
California's Descent to Socialism or How the 'Nerd Estate' Controls the Rest of Us - City Watch

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.

Go here to read the rest:
The truth about Jeremy Corbyn staring us smack in the face: Socialism isn't bad - Salon