By David Kamioner | December 14, 2019
The recent terrible election result for the British Labour Party — a group that is akin ideologically to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — perhaps contains warnings for the Democratic Party in this country.
Two of the most apparent political yellow lights are these: Don’t run too hard to the Left. And don’t substitute a working-class base for a losing strategy of relying on the urban elite and Fischer-Price revolutionaries.
Related: Conservatives Take Big Majority in U.K. Election
In their excellent 2017 book “Shattered,” Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen diagrammed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.
They were writers embedded with that campaign.
Parnes and Allen started off as Hillary supporters. By the end of the book, they were not Donald Trump voters — but they had seen up close the arrogance and political blindness that led to Clinton’s upset defeat in November 2016 and they were not complimentary to her or her team.
The duo chronicled how former President Bill Clinton urged his wife, the candidate, to pay more attention to traditional Democrat blue-collar voting blocs in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. But Hillary Clinton and her campaign team ignored Bill Clinton — and lost the race in those states.
That bloc, translated into British politics, was the “red wall” of northern English voters who were traditional Labour supporters, some of whom had never voted Conservative in their lives.
Some entire voting districts had never gone Conservative since their inception.
But they did this past Thursday — because Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ran to the almost hardest Left imaginable in Western politics, ignored the working class for his own brand of left-wing city agitators and hardcore young Bolshevik poseurs, and refused to take a stand on the most important issue of the day to the Brits: Brexit.
Conservative Party supporters chant Boris Johnson's name as he leaves Sedgefield during his victory tour of the north east.
The seat was previously held by Labour PM Tony Blair but turned blue during Thursday's election #GeneralElection19 pic.twitter.com/4vDkMyqOSp
— LBC News (@LBCNews) December 14, 2019
This happened in — by American definition — a center-Left nation that may have given a moderate Tony Blair-like Labour Party an electoral mandate.
Less than 10 years ago, center-Left Labour was enjoying a decade of running the British government.
But they swung hard-Left with the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn and his minions — and on Thursday suffered their worst result as a party since the 1930s.
Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are leading the same charge in the United States.
Not content with the left-wing stances of former President Barack Obama, they seek to bring the Democratic Party to a point where it would be unrecognizable to the same people who voted for Bill Clinton 20 years ago.
Related: Joe Biden Goes After Far-Left Elizabeth Warren: ‘We Can Unite the Country,’ He Insists
Look at the crowds that Sanders and Warren draw — and you will notice two things.
One, you’ll see they are miniscule compared to the crowds that show up for President Donald Trump.
And two, they’re composed to a great degree of that same noxious mix of urban liberal elites and campus PC warriors that drove the British Labour Party to ignominious wreckage.
The Dems are not a political party notorious for learning from history.
From their general leftward lurch to their newfound (actually oldfound) enthusiasm for socialism — Sanders, Warren and their supporters may be sleepwalking over a cliff much as Corbyn just did.
This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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