Ouch.
I can't blame Labour and its supporters for being sore about this. Who wouldn't be? Nobody likes taking this kind of a trouncing. In politics or in any area of human endeavor.
However, responses from the hard left portion of Labour's base go well beyond the normal and expected response of licking one's wounds, trying to figure out what went wrong and going back to the drawing board, as it were.
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| What's the Definition of Insanity? |
And protest they did. "Two people were arrested as hundreds of protesters descended on Downing Street to "defy Tory rule" after Boris Johnson's election victory," reads this Evening Standard headline. As you might expect, this did not go well. "One witness said Whitehall had "descended into chaos" the story claims, and reports on such activities as "Protesters hammered on a bus trapped in the cordon and shouted “free the bus” and “this is our bus”, before chanting the children’s song The Wheels On The Bus." "A handful linked arms briefly to block the exit to the bus while shouting “whose bus, our bus”.
"Visibly frustrated passengers on board were eventually allowed to leave, while protesters tried to board and remonstrated with police amid demands to “free the driver."
Social media is likewise lit up with angry sentiment. Look up #NotMyPrimeMinister on twitter and you'll fast see what I mean. Tweets express dismay over the future of the NHS (National Health Service), opposition to austerity, cuts and privatization and depicting photos and footage from the abovementioned Downing Street protests.
And The Guardian, always the stalwart of good, rational journalism that it is, recently ran this headline: "Britain needs its own Mueller report on Russian ‘interference."
Is any of this sounding familiar? Does it remind you of anything?
Yes, of course. Trump's 2016 victory in the US. Well now we can cue the same kind of ongoing protest and outrage in the left leaning press in the UK. Some of it sensible and justified, but just as much of it hysterical and stupid. And there are, of course, the usual condemnations of working class voters who opted for the Tories as "stupid" and ignorant of their own class interests.
Can we on the left please stop this?
We are embarrassing ourselves. A headline in the Daily Express perhaps puts it best: "Election protests against Boris branded 'pathetic' and 'disgusting' - 'THEY are fascist!' ANTI-Boris Johnson activists have been slammed for being "disrespectful" and "arrogant" after protests erupted across the country against the Tories' landslide election majority."
Indeed.
"Utter cretins. You have the right to protest. But not the right to stampede into London, disrupt everyone, be unruly and vile, if you do, you can f***ing do one. I just can't stand their level of sanctimonious arrogance. They lost, so they change to balaclavas and smoke and aggression because they think they're right and perfect etc."
Others pointed out the protests by "pathetic middle class kids" helped "persuade the so called Labour heartlands that they want nothing to do with you."
I can't say I disagree.
I'm not saying that we can not and should not protest Johnson or Trump when warranted. I'm not saying that Labour, like the Democrats, should not act as the official opposition to the governing party. They're called the "official" opposition for a reason, after all. A key feature of liberal democracy is the right of its citizenry to protest, challenge and criticize the government in power. This provides a check on the power and excesses of the government, keeps them on their toes and motivates them to perform well. At least in theory. Nothing wrong with that.
Moreover, I'm not especially happy about Johnson's victory myself. I'm an avowed social democrat who occasionally flirts with outrightly socialist ideas. The UK Labour party would be my natural home were I a Brit, despite my disagreements with them on some other issues - immigration, identity politics, diversity for diversity's sake, most feminism etc - and my overall disdain for the romanticist culture of protest and revolution for its own sake that tends to pervade much of the western activist left.
Thing is, Labour's defeat here was much less a repudiation of social democracy and much more an expression of exasperation with the long, drawn out process of Brexit. Labour promised a softer deal and another referendum to get the voter's stamp of approval. The Tories, conversely, ran on the slogan of "Get Brexit done." Since a lot of brexiteers were in these more northern, traditionally Labour districts, this put Labour in a very difficult, maybe even impossible position. Hardly what I'd call an endorsement of fascism and racism. In hindsight, the outcome was quite predictable.
What I'm asking is for the left to stop being the political equivalent to that "nice guy" we've all known who whines and moans about how women won't date him because he's too nice. Now we call guys like that incels, and oddly enough, leftists don't like these sorts of fellows much. And with some reason. While it may be objectively true that the women in question would be better off dating nice men as opposed to abusive ones, it's also true that the choice is not the "nice" guy's to make. Incels who whine about women who won't date them come across as entitled. The women chose some other guy. The thing to do is some self reflection and try to figure out why the women made the choices they did so that the incel can make the necessary corrections and hopefully achieve a different result down the road.
The same dynamic applies here. It seems absurd that I should have to point out that if you call the working class stupid, ignorant and racist, they're not going to like you or support your cause any. These kinds of leftists become the incels of the political world. Not involuntarily celibate, but involuntarily out of power. And for many of the same reasons. Their sense of entitlement stands in for a lack of effort to woo the objects of their affection, and they wear their resentment at the predictable and inevitable outcome on their sleeves.
Boris Johnson and the Conservatives won a clean election fair and square. I hate to have to be the one to tell you this if you're a lefty Brit in the mold of Momentum or the Socialist Worker or whatever, but yeah, Boris Johnson is your prime minister. Your feelings on the matter don't override the laws of your land and the fundamental premise of democracy. Certainly you're allowed to disagree with Tory policy. You're allowed to protest it. You're allowed to join Labour, the Lib-Dems or whomever and put your own two-cents worth into the division of an alternate policy agenda.
But please do so intelligently and in a manner that respects the democratic process and the will of the electorate. Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. And, in the interests of fairness, Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada, regardless of what rightist voters in Canada's more conservative western provinces may happen to think - and take it from me, they don't think highly of it and are doing no shortage of whining themselves. So this isn't just a leftist thing, but the left should be better than this. If you claim to be for "the people" then the place to start is to respect their will, respect their right to self determination, respect their right to make up their own minds on issues while simultaneously trying to persuade them of the benefits of following a more social democratic as opposed to a more conservative political approach. Calling them stupid and racist probably isn't a good strategy. Just a thought. There can't be social democracy without the democracy, after all.
Please, let's stop being the incels of the political world.
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