Friday, March 29, AD 2024 10:27am

Lessons

News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:

LONDON—British progressives were already down from their huge losses in Thursday’s election, as they lost pretty much every contest to the Conservatives, from Dublingtonampton and Worcestershiresauce to Hogwarts and the Shire.

But their depression turned to sheer terror as Boris Johnson removed his long-running disguise and revealed himself to be Donald Trump.

Classic Trump!

The shocking revelation came after Johnson’s victory speech following Conservatives’ huge wins in yesterday’s elections. “Oh, and by the way, old chaps” — he removed his mask and revealed himself to be Donald Trump — “you’re all part of the greatest country maybe ever. You’re welcome!”

“We’re making the UK great again!”

“You should have seen the looks on their faces,” Trump said, laughing, later on. “I mean, it’s a really good gag. I had them going for decades.” Trump said he developed the idea of the Boris personality when he wanted to go slum it “among the people” abroad but didn’t want any press attention. “Sometimes you just wanna be one of the boys.” According to the ruler of both the United States and the United Kingdom, things “spiraled out of control” when he took on the Prime Minister job in July, but he wanted to keep the fun going as long as possible.

“It’s pretty fun over here. Lots of golf. The food is weird — even the McDonald’s doesn’t taste quite right — but it’s a nice change of pace from Washington.”

Go here to read the rest.  The Democrats should be alarmed by the rout of Labour.  Since World War II, British and American politics have usually tracked each other oddly. Labour comes to power in 1945 and Truman keeps the White House for the Democrats in 1948. The Conservatives, under Churchill, come back to power in 1951 and Ike wins in 1952. JFK wins in 1960 and Labour wins in 1964 under Wilson. Nixon wins in 1969 and the Conservatives under Ted Heath are back in power in 1970. In 1976 Carter wins and Labour wins under Callahan. The Conservatives win in 1979 and Reagan wins in 1980. Clinton wins in 1992 and Labour wins under Blair in 1997. The Conservatives win in 2010 and Trump wins in 2016. The tracking is imperfect, most notably Blair being in power during the time Bush the Younger was in power, but it is pretty close. (Come to think about it, Blair represented himself as New Labour, a kinder and gentler, more moderate variant of Labour, and both the Bushes strove to do the same thing with the Republican party.)

Small chance that the Democrats will learn from the Labour debacle however, as Toby Young at Quillette explains:

 

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. Get woke, go broke.

Will the Democrats learn from Labour’s mistake and make Jo Biden the candidate—or even Pete Buttigieg? I wouldn’t bet on it. The zealots of the post-modern Left have a limitless capacity to ignore reality even when it’s staring them in the face. As I said to a friend last night after the election results starting rolling in, fighting political opponents like Jeremy Corbyn is a bit like competing in a round-the-world yacht race against a team that thinks the earth is flat. It can be kind of fun, even exhilarating. But until they acquire a compass and learn how to read a map, it’s not really a fair fight.

Go here to read the rest.  As Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, the Left has the tendency to forget nothing and to learn nothing. Or as the parody account of the unforgettable Titania McGrath has it:

 

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Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Monday, December 16, AD 2019 7:58am
WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Monday, December 16, AD 2019 9:04am
Mary De Voe
Monday, December 16, AD 2019 10:07am

Citizenship is good will for the common good. Patriotism is the acknowledgement of each and every person’s sovereignty and being a public servant to the sovereign person who is a citizen in Truth and Justice

Mary De Voe
Monday, December 16, AD 2019 10:09am

All of a sudden we are fellow citizens…after they desecrated all of our Founding Principles and aborted all of our constitutional Posterity. We will see…

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