Moderators: eCat, hedge, Cletus
The Democrats never seemed to have a problem having a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan as their Senate Majority leader.Corbyn is a notorious anti-semite. It would be like having a known racist as the dem nominee here.
You're joking right?crotch wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2019 10:02 pmHard to get a teaching position in the state of Kentucky with a 6th grade education...maybe in Ohio but not Kentucky. Try Masters degree in Secondary Education son.Jungle Rat wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2019 7:51 pmFunny coming from a hilljack redneck who probably never made it past 6th.
Jungle Rat wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 7:54 pm A gas station kid with no teeth can get a job in Kentucky teaching school.
It’s the same story across England—working class electors deserting Labour en masse. We won’t have a breakdown of how people voted according to income and occupation for a while yet, but a few of the opinion polls in the run-up to election day contained some astonishing findings.
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The crumbling of the ‘Red Wall’ is the big story of this election and some commentators are describing it as a “one off.” The conventional wisdom is that working class voters have “lent” their votes to the Conservatives and, barring an upset, will give them back next time round. It’s Brexit, supposedly that has been the game-changer—an excuse leapt on by Corbyn’s outriders in the media, who are loathe to blame Labour’s defeat on their man.
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This analysis doesn’t bear much scrutiny. To begin with, the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history. At its height, Labour managed to assemble a coalition of university-educated liberals in London and the South and low-income voters in Britain’s industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North—“between Hampstead and Hull,” as the saying goes.
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Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election was followed by a surge in party membership— from 193,754 at the end of 2014 to 388,103 by the end of 2015. But the activists he appeals to are predominantly middle class. According to internal Party data leaked to the Guardian, a disproportionate number of them are “high status city dwellers” who own their own homes.
A careful analysis of the policies set out in Labour’s latest manifesto reveals that the main beneficiaries of the party’s proposed increase in public expenditure—which the Conservatives costed at an eye-watering £1.2 trillion—would be its middle class supporters.
For instance, the party pledged to cut rail fares by 33 per cent and pay for it by slashing the money spent on roads. But only 11 per cent of Britain’s commuters travel by train compared to 68 per cent who drive—and the former tend to be more affluent than the latter. Corbyn also promised to abolish university tuition fees at a cost of £7.2 billion per annum, a deeply regressive policy which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, would benefit middle- and high-earning graduates with “very little” upside for those on low incomes.
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Left-of-center parties in most parts of the Anglosphere, as well as other Western democracies, have seen the equivalent of their own ‘Red Walls’ collapsing. One of the reasons Scott Morrison’s Liberals confounded expectations to win the Australian election last May was because Bill Shorten’s Labour Party was so unpopular in traditional working class areas like Queensland, and support for socially democratic parties outside the large cities in Scandinavia has cratered over the past 15 years or so.
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He points out that left-wing parties in the US, Britain and France used to rely on ‘nativist’ voters to win elections—low education, low income—but since the 1970s have begun to attract more and more ‘globalist’ voters—high education, high income (with the exception of the top 10 per cent of income earners). The nativists, meanwhile, have drifted to the Right, forming a coalition with the business elite.
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Plenty of better writers than me—Douglas Murray, John Gray—have debunked the notion that the only reason low-income voters embrace right-wing politics is because they’re drunk on a cocktail of ethno-nationalism and false hope (with Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin taking turns as mixologists). It surely has more to do with the Left’s sneering contempt for the “deplorables” in the flyover states as they shuttle back and forth between their walled, cosmopolitan strongholds. As Corbyn’s policy platform in Britain’s election showed, left-wing parties now have little to offer indigenous, working class people outside the big cities—and their activists often add insult to injury by describing these left-behind voters as “privileged” because they’re white or cis-gendered or whatever. So long as parties like Labour pander to their middle-class, identitarian activists and ignore the interests of the genuinely disadvantaged, they’ll continue to rack up loss after loss.
