Democrats, Labour, And A Contrast In Styles

Democrats Aren't As Weak As Their Myths Say

"There is a major liberal/left-leaning party that is actually every bit as incompetent as folks on Twitter seem to think the Democratic Party is. 

It’s called Labour."

These words, from friend of the site Lakshya Jain while doing me the pleasure of promoting a column on how feckless Keir Starmer is, have stuck with me for a while, as Starmer and Labour have struggled mightily against the open goal that is a Boris Johnson government, and Democrats have, you know, governed America, and I've been thinking about the way that so much of the discourse around Democrats seems stuck in a 2009-2015 loop, where their fecklessness could be taken for granted. Now, that's not true, plainly - instead of negotiating against themselves on a stimulus package, they just passed the thing themselves. Instead of bloating it with tax cuts like Obama did in search of GOP votes he'd never get, Joe Biden just skipped that and passed the damn bill. He's about to do it again with an infrastructure package, and his working relationship with both the centre of his party and the left could be accurately described as a shade or two above cordial, a feat never achieved by Obama.

The narrative of Democratic fecklessness manifested itself in the way everyone just assumed they'd need a "miracle" to win those Georgia runoffs (will making fun of this Mike DeBonis tweet ever get old? It better not), or the way that so many people took Roger Wicker (R-MS) at face value when he said that Joe Manchin was done negotiating with the White House hours before Manchin struck a deal on expanded unemployment. It manifests because of a sense memory of the last time Democrats held a trifecta, when they were, in many ways, in office but not in power, getting Mitt Romney's health care plan and a tax cut masquerading as a stimulus done. They didn't try to go too far too fast, and ended up doing not nearly enough.

Dave Wasserman @Redistrict

However, drawing a second Black majority district would likely also mean a dramatic reconfiguration of #LA05, where Julia Letlow (R) was just elected and enjoys plenty of bipartisan goodwill. This is where the politics could get complicated for Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) & others.

It manifests in this idiocy from Dave Wasserman, who seems to think Republicans will always push their partisan advantage but somehow Democrats will just take a pass because, well, they like the widow? Seriously? How that got out of his brain onto a keyboard without him saying "this seems like a hilariously stupid thing to posit, maybe I shouldn't" is beyond me, but apparently it did. It manifests itself in the idea that 2022 is just a deadset disaster for Democrats, as if there aren't a dozen articles on this site dismantling all of those arguments. And the thing is, if you actually think that I'm wrong, that Democrats are this disaster, take a trip across the pond, and you'll actually see what a disunited, dispirited, useless leftwing political party looks like.

…

Since the Labour win in the fall of 1974, there have been 11 general elections. In 8 of those, someone not named Tony Blair has led the Labour Party, and in those 8 elections, Labour has won… 0 of 8. In the three elections that Blair has led them, they have gone 3 for 3. In the 80s, they decided that a policy of nuclear disarmament would win, they got slaughtered, and then in 92 they moderated, and came closer to winning. It took another dose of moderation under Blair, and then they won massive majorities, and even though the 2005 majority was smaller - a majority of 67 - than the previous ones, it was still perfectly workable. That election saw Blair win 355 seats - and since then, no Labour leader has achieved 270. Yes, there are legitimate points to be made about Scotland, sure, that's not really the point though. Blair won, and nobody else has. And yet, since Blair, Labour has run 3 leaders from the soft left - Brown, Miliband, and now Starmer - and one from the hard left, and none of them have won. They know the path they need to take to win office - there is literally one path that has gotten them into office since the initial entry into the European Union in 1973 (or, at least, since the confirmatory referendum in 1975). And they're choosing to continue the soft left, lily livered bullshit that saw Brown and Miliband fail, and which is currently seeing Keir Starmer fail miserably.

Starmer has the privilege of running against a chucklefuck of a Prime Minister and he'd honest to God probably lose seats if an election was today. Starmer is continuing a playbook that is well ridden to failure, and 4 election defeats didn't cause Labour to move to the centre and reconsider strategy in any way. Just a reminder, Democrats treat every swing against them in a state special election cause panic, and these asshats have lost 4 elections on the hop and they're running the same playbook as they ran for losses 1 and 2 again. This is laughable, because we all know it will end the exact same Goddamn way.

Democrats engineered a stunning turnaround in the entire Democratic primary in a week because they didn't want to do anything to risk a loss in 2020, and Labour still just shrug their shoulders at the idea of doing what it takes to win office. They are enabling the racist, incompetent, useless government they claim to hate so much by being too focused on their own stupidity to actually hold any power by winning an election.

Whatever you think of Democrats, Labour are the actual version of the feckless, useless Democrats mirage that exists. They have thrown away government for a decade by putting their own comfort above Electoral considerations, and now Britain will have at a minimum of 13 years of Tory rule. Democrats are imperfect, but at least they're in office, and actually governing in the interests of the people. And every Democratic doomer should be grateful for that.