Sunday, August 09, 2015

The Pendulum Swing

There seems to be a resurgence for the left in electoral politics.  Bernie Sanders is drawing huge crowds and worrying establishment Democrats and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn, originally a protest nomination for Labour party leadership and very much a UK equivalent of Sanders is causing alarm among Blairite Labour Party elites by giving every sign that he might be about to win.

And of course here in Canada the so called center left Liberals are a distant third while the left wing NDP is a credible contender for government itself.

The so called center left parties like Canada's Liberals internalized the message post Reagan that the only alternative was neoliberal economics and politics run for the benefit of the few and the wealthy with at best, some token nobelese oblige thrown to the poor as their policies swelled their ranks.  Emboldened, the political right charged ever further down the field to the kind of far right extremism that conservatives once purged from their ranks dragging the hapless moderate middle with them.

Now Canadian Liberals, Wall Street Democrats and Blairite Labour Party grandees all watch in shock and fury as the progressives they have repeatedly used, abused, lied to and disrespected abandon them in droves.  'Such people are unelectable!' they howl 'You are throwing power to the far right!' - who they share almost all the same policies with - but such alarmist rhetoric is based on outdated views of the electorate at large.

In the US the public at large elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as President in 2008 and re-elected him four years later and will elect any of the Democrats currently vying for the nomination Clinton, Sanders, ANYONE over any of the lunatics currently cage-battling to run the Republicans.

In Canada the NDP just elected a majority government in the most right wing province in the country and is polling in the lead federally.  In the UK the Labour Party just lost the most recent election largely because they became too right wing to keep the support of Scottish voters who turned to a left wing nationalist alternative and until they realize that if people want to vote Tory they will vote Tory not Tory lite they will be in permanent opposition. 

Far from being a disaster Corbyn is their only hope.

1 comment:

Purple library guy said...

For a long time, people could afford to believe in the fairy tales the rich sold them under the guise of "economics", or thought they could. Things seemed to still be pretty much OK, everyone was busy with their own problems, if the Very Serious People said up was down, well, no doubt they knew what they were doing.
It takes time for policy changes to have an impact. It takes time for organized theft on this massive a scale to penetrate to where it really messes with people's lives--and the impact has been blurred because at the same time, technology was moving forward, blunting the effects.

But there comes a point where things have been getting worse for as long as you can remember and it's starting to get a bit desperate, starting to look like your kids are gonna be screwed, and you start to wonder if the authoritative types talking down to you really know anything or not. And then if someone starts saying something different, tells you "No, giving the rich more money doesn't make you better off, just them. Giving corporations money doesn't create jobs, using the money to create jobs creates jobs." and other blinding flashes of the obvious, just maybe you start thinking it might make sense to run things for real people instead of our plastic surgeried overlords.

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