"The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’"

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Don't agree with everything in the article but interesting points.

Quote:

Corbyn, meanwhile, began to win grudging praise from the guardians of established opinion for his willingness to coordinate the resistance. Yet this was, precisely, his undoing. Cummings’s plan had always been to win by losing. The point of the parliamentary drama was to reduce Corbyn—whose entire appeal had been based on the fact that he did not look, act, or calculate like a politician—into someone who did exactly that, and to paint the only movement in generations that had genuinely aimed to change the rules of British society as the linchpin of an alliance of professional-managerials united only by their willingness to deploy every legalistic or procedural means possible in order to reverse the results of a popular referendum and keep things exactly as they were. If the results of the 2019 election mean anything, they reveal an overwhelming rejection of centrism. Particularly instructive here are the fates of the rebels who broke from Corbyn’s Labour to form Change UK, including Chuka Umunna, who was widely billed as Britain’s future answer to Barack Obama. On realizing that there was virtually no support for another centrist party, they ultimately joined the Lib Dems. Though the Lib Dems did increase their share of the overall vote (slightly), doing so largely served to knock out their ostensible Remainer Labour allies in close races. Not one of the defectors managed to win a seat. Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem candidate for prime minister, who had somehow convinced herself it would be a winning formula for the Lib Dems to run as a single-issue anti-Brexit party while also making clear that under no conditions would they ever form an alliance with Corbyn’s Labour, failed to win her own district and is no longer an MP. Labour lost fifty-four seats to the Tories—fifty-two of them in Leave-voting districts. But, as James Schneider, Corbyn’s director of strategic communications, confirmed when I showed him a draft of this piece, only three (Dennis Skinner, Laura Pidcock, and Laura Smith) were from the radical left of the party. Dozens of “moderates” had, effectively, blown themselves up. The same, incidentally, is true for the Tories: not one of the purged Remainers who ran for their old seats as independents returned to Parliament. The center of British politics has become a smoldering pit. The country is now being governed by a hard-right government placed in power by its oldest citizens, in the face of the active hatred of its increasingly socialist-inclined youth. It’s fairly clear that for the Johnson team, Brexit was never anything but an electoral strategy, and that they don’t have the slightest idea how to translate it into economic prosperity. (It is an unacknowledged irony of the current situation that the people most likely to profit from the Brexit process are, precisely, lawyers—and, probably secondarily, accountants. For everyone else, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they will improve their current situation, and quite easy to imagine Johnson being remembered as one of the most disastrous prime ministers in British history.) The next few years are likely to be tumultuous. What remains to be seen is whether Labour can fully break from of the trap into which past generations of centrists have placed it: as a party that represents the interests and sensibilities of both carers and administrators at the same time.