Britain must learn from America’s populist disaster
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/11/britain-must-learn-from-americas-populist-disaster
by Wagamaga
Britain must learn from America’s populist disaster
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/11/britain-must-learn-from-americas-populist-disaster
by Wagamaga
33 comments
BoJo is what happens when you elect with Trumpist soundbites.
Not to be too pessimistic, but the one person who seems be studying this closest is Mr Farage…
We still haven’t learned from our populist disaster.
The moral seems to be that most people don’t give a fuck about a buoyant stock market if they still can’t buy food or pay rent.
Maybe one to consider among all these promises of ‘economic growth’.
“Populist disaster.” It’s been half a week and he’s not even president yet. Literally nothing has happened. What disaster are you people talking about?
If you think Britain learned its populist lesson after Brexit I’ve got bad news.
There is one certainty in Democracies: Amnesia.
Britain today is literally the definition of a ‘populist disaster’. Trump may be a populist, and a pretty unpleasant one at that, but he’s got a long way to go before he inflicts anything like the level of self harm that Brexit had on this country. As for learning from it we darent even discuss it. What ever trump does the UK will kiss his ass while he does it
Here’s what to learn:
If you treat a large section of the electorate like stupid children who don’t know what’s good for them, then that section of the electorate are not going to vote for you and your party. This should have been learned in 2016, both in the UK and US, but it appears it wasn’t.
Trump didn’t win because of populism, he won despite his populist views.
Trump won because of the inflation and wage stagnation that occurred during Biden’s term – to quote Clinton “*It’s the economy, stupid*”.
During Biden’s term supermarket prices, petrol prices, and rents increased dramatically and working class wages didn’t.
Could Biden have prevented that – no, but if you are in charge then you are going to get the blame from a public that doesn’t understand economics. Are Trump’s policies going to improve things – almost certainly not, but again you have a public that doesn’t understand economics.
The Democrats were doomed as soon as they nodded through Harris as the candidate, a person who could not effectively argue that what their boss, Biden, had done during that period of high inflation was not good enough and what they would do differently in the future.
Whereas from Trump, despite all his obnoxious pronouncements, the electorate saw someone that had been in charge when economic times were better and voted for that – they were able to separate what offended them from what affected them.
I’d rather we actually learn from our own right wing populist takeover of a mainstream political party to be honest and how ever a grifting liar like Boris Johnson became prime minister than try and even compare US politics to ours.
People probably need to learn WHY people voted trump and see whether that’s resonating with similar people in the UK. When they find that out the left can adjust their rhetoric/target/approach to impact the disillusioned. But no, let’s just call them stupid and wrong instead
What exactly is the alternative? The same two parties that do nothing but line their own pockets?
Why don’t people actually see why Trump got a second victory with an even bigger landslide than he got in 2016 despite how unpalatable he is.
People don’t give a fuck about identity politics if they can’t start families and have homes of their own, much less feed their children.
People are sick and tired of celebrity endorsements, identity politics, issues of mass immigration going ignored, address these issues and Trump would never be anywhere near power.
It’s a cautionary tale and we in Britain are not immune to it, Labour lost 2 million votes down from 2019, meanwhile Reform trebled their voter share.
Calling people far right isn’t going to cut it anymore
People should really go and watch videos of Trump and Harris being interviewed before leaping to conclusions imo.
In the UK you will tend to see clips of Trump saying something ridiculous and not much from Harris. In reality (and while I am the political opposite of Trump), Trump generally comes across as a confident fairly normal person who has clear plans and ideas that he is excellent at framing in a way which is easily understandable and appeals to the average person. He is obviously narcissistic and brash, but he is in the US where this is viewed much more positively. It’s actually quite hard to spot the bullshit when he is talking and it is always buried deep in some sentiments that seem common sense. He doesn’t really voice a lot of the more crazy or alarming things that surround his campaign like the project 2025 stuff, if he believes in it he doesn’t announce it.
Harris on the other hand is an absolutely *abysmal* public speaker who never would have made it through an open primary. She comes across as insincere, unconfident and doesn’t seem to have any actual concrete plans, let alone be able to present said plans to voters. She completely flounders when asked even simple job interview fodder questions like “tell us about a mistake you have made and leaned from” and is completely unable to answer the obvious questions of – if topic x is so important to you then why have you done nothing about it in the last 4 years? She was also in charge of borders at a time of widespread discontentment with illegal immigration in the US, including news channels running stories about South American gangs taking over apartment buildings or towns of 30k people having 30k immigrants settling there. Obviously a lot of this is either misinformation or amplified by the media but she had no answer or even an attempt at an answer.
Harris was quite possibly the worst candidate the democrats could have picked, a complete charisma void up against someone who despite how he appears on UK news is very charismatic to Americans. People will read a lot into Trump’s policies and the media but it’s actually surprising how close it was given the gulf between them in how they come across. The only takeaways you can confidently have is that you need a politician who is charismatic and has an actual platform and plan that they can explain to voters. This seems like politics 101 to me so it is utterly baffling how the Democrats bungled this so badly. They seem to have believed they could just run on an anti Trump platform, but whatever Trump is, for all his negative qualities, he doesn’t come across that way to the average voter.
Starmer is very lucky that he was up against Sunak, another charisma void, and the lesson Labour should take is that they need an actual platform and to spend the next 5 years doing things that actually improve people’s lives that they can run on or the next Tory who can hold an audience will have them out.
I think the issue really is that across the West, incumbents are struggling to stay in power because major things like covid and the war made life worse and everyone poorer. Doesn’t really matter who the incumbent is, or the opposition
I feel the wrong lessons will be learned, the dems lost because at the end of the day no one cares about social issues if they struggle to pay rent or buy food. Gaza, Ukraine and other talking points matter little day to day if gas is expensive and food prices are going up all the time. The dems talk down to middle America and working class Americans and present themselves as holier than thou, that they know best and it doesnt work. Trump and Vance go on Rogan and have casual conversations, they appeal to the latter group and get their vote and sway undecideds. If you talk down to people and call them stupid and whatever ist then you’ll only dissuade them from voting for you
The lesson is pretty simple. Fundamental change beats the status quo.
America have trusted a snake oil salesman, but his message was about change. The other candidate went on TV and said she’d change “absolutely nothing” about Biden’s term. That in itself is the lesson.
The lesson is for centrists not to alienate the left wings of their own parties, because eventually they’ll stop turning up. Trump got the same number of votes this time as he got in 2020. The Democrats shit on their own left wing and installed a Vice President who had already been roundly rejected by voters in a nomination race. 19 million 2020 Biden voters stayed home this time as a result.
The legacy media just don’t get it.
Trump, Brexit… they don’t have a clue because they’re so metropolitan elitist and can’t comprehend the state of the both nations when you move away from the economic centres.
We talk about losing European migration, the largest benefactors of said European migration is London. Not Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds or Sheffield. It’s so simple why people have voted the way they have, unless you’re profiteering from the current system.
We won’t learn, it was just the latest repeat of what we’ve seen across the West for over a decade. A majority of the population are very against mass-immigration and keep voting to express this:
– Brexit
– Fdl, AfD & Le Pen
– Trump
All driven overwhelmingly by anti mass-immigration sentiment (also a major cause of the recent Tory’s collapse when their actions failed to match rhetoric that had kept them in power).
If left & centre-left parties would simply acknowledge this so blatantly evident majority opinion **they could have spent the past decade governing instead of right/far-right parties**.
Can someone explain what populist actually means as I don’t think those that say it even know. More popular, won a majority, what is it exactly and why is it bad, can anyone explain?
Andrew Marr doesn’t really have a good angle on the situation in my opinion. The vibe in his article is that Labour are on the right track and that problems will come from elsewhere.
However what Labour are doing will have almost zero impact on quality of life for most people (in this parliament), and almost certainly make it far worse for a few million. In addition the trio at the top are charmless in the extreme, always a problem when times are tough.
Labour will not be ‘winning’ when 2029 comes along, the only question is will the Tories and others be in a position to offer anything to the public.
What should Britain learn? That political figures can be flawed personally? Capable of hatred, revenge, criminal acts, fraud, theft, treasonous behaviour etc etc?
Surely, every citizen, whether from a democracy or a tyranny, ALREADY KNOWS THIS!
Politics is about the attainment and maintenance of power over non-political citizens. Nothing more. Nothing altruistic, it’s all about THEMSELVES. This applies to all of them, from Churchill to Hitler, from Mao Tse Tung to Margaret Thatcher.
Trump is different because he’s like all the other sociopaths in power, but DOESN’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT! He doesn’t pretend that he cares about *people*, all he wants is their *votes*.
So there’s little to learn – Trump is just another flawed politician, only weird as well.
1. Understand that democracy **depends** upon an *informed* electorate, and that a deliberately misinformed electorate is one of the biggest dangers to democracy, if not the biggest. Leveson 2 or equivalent HAS to happen, and oversight committees need real teeth.
Yes, there are limits to what can be achieved, and mass media now includes sources like Rogan’s podcast that are beyond immediate control, but we can still affect change. Unchecked “news” channels and Talk Radio have been huge players in what’s happening in the US. Start seeing them as the threat they are. Stop letting foreign/non-Dom cunts run our news. We can’t be united when we’re divided.
2. Take *immediate* steps to stop the 2-tier justice system in which it’s clearly “one rule for them, another for us”. Make fines relative to net worth. Ensure swift & harsh punishments for PMs who overstep the line. We can’t be united when we’re divided.
3. Stop dismissing core concerns out of hand. There are often truths at the heart of populist rhetoric that need to be listened to. Yes, they are nearly always dressed up, but for example immigration needs to go hand-in-hand with integration (and very strong deterrents for those who break those rules). We can’t be united when we’re divided.
And that’s just for starters. Wish I had hope any of those would be implemented. Seems we’re doomed to follow suit.
This is what we here in the UK need, uprising of the people (non-violent of course). We don’t work for Starmer or his left wing bullshit, he’s a Davos puppet with Bill Gates hand up his stinky pinky hole. He should resign in disgrace but even if he does he’ll still get paid 100k for the rest of his life, yep Jim fixed it for this fool to make reparations to people who we the people never hurt, harmed or hated. If that’s what they want to do, they need to take it from the party donors. After all it’s been the generations of politicians who agreed to pay in the first place, the people didn’t get a choice other than whatever the government pays will definitely come out of our pockets 100%.
> Britain must learn from America’s populist disaster
Yeah, it must learn that politicians should actually do what the public want.
I voted for Kamala but UK is a prime example of what not to do.
Your economy is in the gutter, your wages are low, your national white guilt has your country flooded with illegal immigrants and not the productive kind, and your people are going to jail for hurting peoples feelings online.
I’ll take Trump any day over what yall have.
There is one topic in the UK that will lose Labour the next election and it’s immigration. If Labour do nothing but sit on it for the next few years there’s an incredibly strong reality in which reform win.
This is coming from someone that voted Labour. It’s pretty much the one topic most people are united on and care about in real life.
Britain voted for Brexit, then Boris, and finally made Farrage an MP. We’ve already fallen foul to populist shills.
What disaster? Trump’s not in the White House until January. The current disaster is of the democrats making. Kamala the border czar ignored the problems along the border and paid the price, as well as with being preoccupied with minority issues. You can’t have a health system or welfare state and open borders. Fix that and populism will melt away. It’s no coincidence that mass migration has coincided with zero productivity growth, zero wage growth and stagnant GDP per capita. The UK is now a low wage / productivity and high tax country. Importing thousands of third world deliveroo drivers who pay little to no tax won’t deliver growth or defeat populism.
If Farage got shifted in as Conservative leader, he would win a landslide hands down in a similar way to trump. Boris could probably also swing it a second time if he got in. It really is just the Conservative party itself blocking this from being our future I think
We won’t. Odds on, Farage will be PM within a decade, and I’ll live out the rest of my days in an isolated shack in the mountains, far, far away from the lunacy of it all.
We won’t learn. The current government will do nothing (like all the others) to tackle the main priorities of the British people and in 4 years time we’ll end up with a reform party surging in the polls
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