One of my biggest bugbears in recent years has been hearing this idea being banded around in socialist media; (I don’t want to say left because that can mean too many different things) that suggests that socialists are to blame for our lack of societal traction.
To me, this is total nonsense. While you can argue, and I’d agree, that the Corbyn campaign didn’t do everything 100% perfectly strategy wise for example; the discourse amplifies tiny strategic errors as being the virtual sole cause of loss of support amongst the electorate. Societal political literacy and media influence get mostly overlooked with less importance placed upon them. People like Nigel Farage and Richard Tice get the opposite treatment. Some prominent British socialist journalists are quick to praise Nigel Farage in particular as a political strategic genius. I’m not saying he isn’t a shrewd operator and a great public speaker / showman. He is. But he, and most others like him generally find their popularity falls into their lap. All they have to do is avoid a mega blunder that would cut through to the mainstream and expose them for the anti-worker charlatans they are and always have been to a population that barely pays attention to politics at all. Apart from on polling day where about half of them can be bothered to actually turn up and express their anger at how much more shit the country has become since last time.
And that’s in a country where we still have a modicum of common sense and we aren’t by and large a zombie wasteland like the United States. There, you don’t even have to avoid the mega blunder. You can be an out-and-proud fascist, rapist, fraudster and so on; and still win the popular vote. It’s almost as if the less strategy you have, the better. So, why do we allow Farage, or Tice, or any of the rest of them to get painted as strategic masterminds even by socialists like Aaron Bastani (who I generally like); and meanwhile someone like Jeremy Corbyn gets harsh criticism from the same journalists and outlets for tiny strategic errors that would never even make the news if Farage did them?
We don’t like to blame the public. We don’t want to have to say that a large part of our electorate are blithering idiots (which often leads them to racism, bigotry and sometimes violence); but it’s true. Look at every man or woman on the street “vox pop” video that’s been released on youtube or broadcast on TV in the last few years. They almost seem to be getting stupider, more racist and more bigoted with every single video. Maybe they are. Take Bastani’s recent trip to Runcorn for example. The vast majority of the people he talked to were convinced that Britain is a poor country and we have to choose between either housing and supporting British born citizens, and treating “illegal migrants” (aka desperate asylum seekers who have been through a hell of a lot to even get here) to lavish lifestyles in hotels. And they also tend to think that the migrants don’t want to work, when they are literally being prevented from working. The government refuse to reverse a couple of decade old policy that stops refugees contributing to society because it allows them to more easily demonise the vulnerable people; which in turn benefits them politically. Although it will benefit Farage more obviously.
Even the people he interviewed who weren’t entirely brain rotted didn’t have much of use to say. Out of the whole almost half an hour long video, only one person mentioned the Green Party (the only left of centre party in England), and he was basically the only person who made any cogent points at all. As far as the two women I think it was who said they were going to vote Labour in the parliamentary by-election; the best argument they came up with was that Labour just needed a bit more time to see if they could turn it around. Aaron mentioned this as notable in his summary of the video as well.
We need to be honest about the fact that British people are very, very stupid and uninformed on average at this point. Yes, you can say that Farage and Reform are “strategic” in terms being best placed to manipulate fools into voting against their own interests. But they’re not strategic masterminds. They’re just benefitting from decades of societal decay. There’s nothing significantly wrong with the left’s strategy. It’s been more than good enough to win elections in 2017 and 2019. We’ve seen it in Canada and Australia in the last couple of weeks. I’m not saying those results were good for the left. They weren’t. But those countries show that the more educated a society is, the more likely it is that they will resist fascism. Canada and Australia have definitely fallen back in education standards and political knowledge as well, which is why the results were still bad for socialists and social democrats. The “Shit Lite” party (as The Juice Media would say) won in both of those cases. I think that’s a really good illustration though of what this is really about.
Smart countries vote for socialists. Moderately intelligent countries vote for the neoliberals, and brain dead looney populations vote for obvious charlatans who offer nothing to them, and get propped up by the media, like Nigel Farage.
