Fixating on abstractions

From British Labour's problems could hurt US Democrats too by Michael Barone.  I have lived in the UK five times in my life from my childhood in the 1960s to as recently as 2003.  I am reasonably familiar with the parallels between Britain and my own country, the US.  It is a curious comparison of lab results to see their respective developments.

They are not tightly correlated but their common cultural heritage frequently create some intriguing parallels.  You just can't let yourself get carried away by them.  

Barone is pointing out some of the recent trends in the fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Democratic Party in the US.  And there are some legitimate parallels there.  But only up to a point.  

Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout election ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 4-percentage-point margin. It was an unexpected result and a harbinger of Donald Trump’s even more unexpected election as president five months later.

In both countries, key votes were cast by white non-college graduates. Blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania and the Midwest switched to Trump. Working-class voters long loyal to Labour joined leading Conservatives in supporting Brexit.

Supposedly ascendant coalitions of metropolitan professionals and racial and ethnic minorities were, to their self-righteous rage, defeated. Metropolitan London, comprising 20% of the nation’s vote, was 60%-40% to remain in the European Union. But the rest of England, 70% of the United Kingdom, voted 57-43 for Brexit.

Much as the Conservative Party is reviled, the Labour Party is now despised.  The winner is the least disliked party, which happens to be the Tories by a pretty sizable margin.   

Barone doesn't make that point but I think it to be true here as well.  I am not sure that the Republicans are actually gaining American affections as a party.  But they are sure holding their own better than the Democratic Party's open contempt for voters (and the emerging voter contempt in return.)

Barone does capture some of that dynamic.

“Labour,” writes Telegraph columnist Janet Daley, “has not just, as everybody keeps saying, ‘lost touch’ with its traditional supporters: it now holds them in open and quite febrile contempt.” And she adds some historical perspective: “What is the point of a political party that began as the voice of the industrial proletariat when there is no more industrial proletariat?”

The Labour Party was founded in 1900 as the political arm of labor unions at a time when the working class was the majority of the electorate. Continental parties with similar heritage are in even more trouble. France’s Socialist Party, which won the presidency in 2012, got 6% of the vote in 2017. Germany’s Social Democrats, founded in 1863, have now fallen to a distant third place in polling for next September’s election, with the Greens emerging as the chief competitor of the governing center-right CDU/CSU.

He ends with this keen insight.

One lingering problem: Working-class-dominated parties have concrete goals relevant to large constituencies. But high-education-class-dominated parties tend to fixate on abstractions aimed at increasingly microscopic groups (transgender rights) or to virtue-signal their own superiority over the benighted masses (as with claims of “systemic racism”).

This may not be a winning tactic in a Britain that “has fundamentally shifted” and “become a more open society,” as its multiracial Sewell Commission recently concluded, or in an America that elected a black congressman from a white-majority district in 1972, a black governor of Virginia in 1989, and a black president in 2008 and 2012. 

The great middle of the US, 75% of those above the bottom 15 percentile and below the top 10 percentile are up for grabs.  They live lives driven by the need for income to be earned to sustain families, faith, community.  They love their country and are anchored in the meaning of that country in their local traditions and local institutions.

When national institutions, and particularly national political parties, begin to drift into abstractions and conceptual issues untethered to the well-being of the 75%, those parties lose relevance and gain disrespect.  Whichever party is seen and understood to be the most obviously committed to the 75% has a pretty good strategy for success.  Right now though, the electorate are undecided as to which party that might be.