Leftoid polarizers thwart realignment in UK; workers punish Labour, not defect to Tories

In a recent post before the UK snap election was called, I detailed how a populist realignment must take place in Britain and Europe. Populists and economic nationalists from the major economies must rise to power, and extend each other favorable terms for unwinding the EU (and possibly NATO, on the separate but related track of military spending).

That was in response to an episode of the What's Left podcast, where they explained how the British are in no bargaining position to extract a favorable "leave" deal from the EU. That is only true until other crucial nations within the EU become overtaken by Eurosceptic parties -- of which the Labour party in the UK was supposed to be the second domino to fall, after Salvini in Italy. The French are ready to elect someone like Le Pen in the coming decade, so that would make the three largest economies in the EU aside from Germany -- which will never take part in a Eurosceptic insurgency, since they are by far the greatest beneficiaries of the EU and NATO system.

But I tempered that analysis with some uncontroversial observations about how willing the various partners in a realignment are to form a whole new dominant coalition. Partisan polarization is so intense these days, in all countries, that it would likely be delayed.

Plus, the upcoming economic depression has not occurred just yet, as the central bank of the US has resumed printing money to hand out to the elites, by the hundreds of billions (quantitative easing). Realignments require an economic catalyst, which makes even the elites wake up and take notice of how crumbling the system has become, and in need of a re-building.

There were national elections scheduled in Britain and France for 2022, so it would have to wait at least until then. (Clearly the Democrats will lose 2020 here, and realignment will wait until 2024 at the earliest.) With an election called early, in 2019, it goes without saying that the realignment would not take place, and the dominant party (Conservatives in the UK) would continue on in their ineffectual disjunctive phase of the regime cycle.

That's exactly what happened, to nobody's surprise if they read this blog. I didn't pay attention to any of the polling either, although that confirmed the analysis. If you listened to any left podcast other than What's Left (and perhaps a few others I'm unaware of), you were clueless. Especially if you followed Chapo Trap House -- utterly deluded about the possibility of a Labour victory, just cheerleading for their side rather than clearly analyzing the situation.

Still, delayed realignment is one thing, and total annihilation is another. By making the central distinctive goal of their campaign the reneging of the Brexit referendum, Labour might as well have not campaigned at all. They would've saved some face with the working class in de-industrialized regions, particularly the British Rust Belt of the West Midlands, who have had their material living standard destroyed by economic globalization and mass immigration. (Those are two sides of the same coin -- foreigners willing to work for less than Britons, whether they work abroad in an off-shored factory, or on British soil as immigrants.)

Those de-industrialized workers voted overwhelmingly Leave on the referendum, and their supposed patrons in the Labour party decided to reject the will not only of the nation, but even of their own party members! They courted the economic elites, who benefit from the cheap labor that globalization and immigration deliver, but they forgot how to count (typical lib arts majors). There will never be enough professionals to outnumber workers in a head count, which a major national referendum comes close to being. Wealth, influence, prestige -- yes, but not in a head count. The vote cast by a member of the media elite in London does not receive greater weight than that cast by a former auto manufacturing worker in Birmingham (Northfield).

When voters receive such a flagrant slap in the face, they will repay that disrespect the only way that they can -- by humiliating their party with the worst loss in nearly a century. Increasingly the bottom 80% of society have nothing left to lose, so their fortunes will not change massively if the Conservatives hold on to power for another several years. And while the party apparatchiks will never be penniless, their fortunes do change a great deal depending on how much power they have at the time. When one side has the leverage and the least to lose, the other side had better accede to their demands.

That clarifies the interpretation of this historic win for the Conservatives -- it is a temporary illusion, lasting as long as the de-industrialized workers decide they are not being taken seriously by Labour about these major issues. At the end of a regime cycle, there are seemingly historic gains for the dominant party that appear to cement its reign forever. I don't know enough British electoral history, but in the US, Jimmy Carter won back the South, which had not voted Democrat since 1960; Herbert Hoover poached Texas from the Solid South Democrats; and James Buchanan won the Whig strongholds of Kentucky and Tennessee. And yet in the very next election, these disjunctive parties got wiped out by Reagan, FDR, and Lincoln, who ushered in entirely new regimes.

Once Labour jettisons its economic globalist and social-cultural woketardism, the Rust Belt workers will happily vote again for Labour -- as will legions of those who have been voting Conservative for awhile now, and who can only look at the destruction of their society as the result. Much like the economic populists, or the social conservatives, who vote Republican during the Reagan era in the US -- it was the Thatcherites and Reaganites, not the quasi-socialists of the 1950s, who opened the borders and deregulated all of our social and cultural practices.

The result will be not just a fleeting win for Labour, as under Blair, but a rearrangement of the electoral coalitions, ushering in a new era in which Labour will become the dominant rather than opposition force in government.

As mentioned in that earlier post, this requires parts of the Right to defect to the Left in countries where the neoliberal era has been dominated by the Right -- the Anglo-Atlantic countries. But there is a whole 'nother group of countries where neoliberalism has been dominated by the Left -- the Mediterranean, and the Anglo-Pacific nations of Australia and New Zealand. There, it is parts of the Left who must defect to a new populist Right.

That's why our anti-woke Left princess Aimee Terese is so tolerant toward the populist, anti-globalization Right -- she's Mediterranean by blood, and Aussie by nationality. If she wants a society resembling the Midcentury egalitarian paradise, that will be overseen by a Right dominant party in Australia. She would belong to the opposition Left in that new era, but in order to get to such a world, she'll have to team up with the anti-neoliberal Right in order to leave behind this world, where the Left has been the dominant neoliberal party Down Under.

Her counterparts closer to her ancestral homeland -- Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France -- will do likewise. Salvini has already struck a bargain to welcome former Left voters into his Right coalition by agreeing to a huge wealth transfer from the prosperous North to the poor South (the citizen's income), contradicting his party's former history of wanting secession for the rich North. Le Pen will pursue something similar to get Left voters to join her, and whoever the Australian Le Pen / Salvini is, will offer the same to get the Aimee Terese's on board with a realigned party system.

In the meantime, the partisan polarizers must be minimized as much as possible. Bernie should not be competing for wokies' votes, but to steal away the white social conservatives who have left him for Biden (the white professionals are lost permanently to Warren, Buttigieg, etc., and blacks are locked in for the machine candidate Biden). Just as Trump won on a message of "only I can win enough of the other side's voters," so should Bernie be pushed to campaign on "only I can win Trump voters -- and if you feel allergic to them, tough shit, they're just as American as we are."

Bernie of course is not doing that now, and will not be doing that next year. But that's how it must work. So far, the only visible signal of hope for realignment is the aloha goddess Tulsi, but in order for her -- or someone similar -- to have something to build off of, Bernie needs as strong of a showing as possible. Bernie then would be the John C. Fremont to Tulsi's Abraham Lincoln.