It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US.

I subscribe to The Economist which would like to support the Tories but has had nothing but contempt for Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Some people say that the Democrats in the US are like the losers in professional wrestling but the complete incompetence and inability of Labor to get elected makes it possible for conservatives to get elected by pandering to a particular segment of the population. Voters have no interest in talk about redistribution if they think they think the people who talk about redistribution push policies that will leave people with nothing to redistribute. Jeremy Corbin did nothing to push back on the perception that he wanted to turn the UK into Cuba, and by not providing a viable alternative the Tories became useless. Corbin hoped that the fall of the Tories would lead to the rise of Labor but oddly it doesn't work that way.

> It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US.

100%.

The inability of Labour to make headway at this time is so depressing.

The common ground between the UK and the US is the inability to find and promote leaders with a combination of age, charisma and ability on their side.

If their best are those elected, the future is grim.

Labour has nobody to blame but themselves. They walked the exact same path that democrats did in the US—abandoning their working class base in favor of college educated liberals. The error in that approach became clearer more quickly for them because they don’t have (as much) the added overlay of racial sectarianism to keep working class minorities voting for them.

Agree 100%. IMO abandoning the working class is by far the stupidest thing the Democratic Party has done in recent memory. And even now, as it should be becoming crystal clear, they still don't seem to have the ability for introspection. They keep thinking they should be winning handily, and on the merits this is a plausible argument, but they really have a hard time with culture. I find it very frustrating, because I am pretty sympathetic to having the US become a modern social democracy like some Western European nations, but our politicians seem to focus on culture wars instead. When your party can have basically all of the ideas and the other party still succeeds dramatically by just saying they hate you, it's time to ask why.

The problem is, with what platform are you gone capture those working class people. You can't just win on the rural working class. You need to convince deserve urban working and upper class citizens.

In the US, if you want to go after the rural working class then you better be talking correct about abortion and guns otherwise you will get nowhere.

Its really not easy to do.

Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt. And continuing to pursue gun control is an unforced error on the part of the Democrats (though they eased off quite a bit on that starting with Obama, to be fair).

IMO the Democrats would have been better off focusing most of their effort on something like single payer health care, along with minimum wage and housing affordability, things like that. Those are issues that are ostensibly part of the party platform but are not high priorities.

> Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt.

Calling abortion a “wedge issue” leads you to thinking about it the wrong way. Sure, democrats say abortion is an unimportant distraction the GOP likes to trot out—but only insofar as everyone unilaterally accepts their position on it. They certainly didn’t treat it that way when Roe was repealed.

There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about. Parties need to triangulation on positions that keep their coalition together, and avoid positions that allow the other party to divide their coalition. It’s just math.

> There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about.

Aka, propaganda doesn't actually exist. At the very least, my team doesn't do it.

Thinking your political opponents are duped by propaganda just means you lack the ability to think outside your bubble and understand people who have different values and priorities. Certainly abortion views are not the result of GOP propaganda, seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the subject of careful compromises in all but a few liberal democracies. (Views on immigration, same sex marriage, multiculturalism, etc., aren’t the product of “propaganda” either. Most people in my home country of Bangladesh would agree with the GOP on all those issues—especially if the shoe were on the other foot and you were talking about e.g. hearing people speak foreign languages in Dhaka—but they certainly don’t have positive views of the GOP itself.)

This myopia is a great shortcoming of democrats (of the last 20 years—the party used to be savvier in the past), because it leads them to believe that politics is about lecturing and badgering, instead of building coalitions of people who agree more than they disagree.

Thanks for elaborating my point in detail. For reference, my post

"There are no wedge issues - propaganda doesn't actually exist. At the very least, my team doesn't do it."

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abortion_Laws.svg

I don’t understand your response. Are you saying all those other people in other countries are duped by GOP propaganda as well?

> seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa

List of countries with same or more restrictive laws for abortion when compared with Texas

Europe - None

Asia - Afghanistan, iraq, syria, Yemen, Burma, Papua new Guinea, Bangladesh

Africa - Somalia, Mali, Malawi, south Sudan, Congo, Niger, Nigeria, Madagascar.

America - Venezuela, Haiti, Suriname, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, tiny Caribbean islands.

Your use of the phrase "seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa" would have been a great example of propaganda, especially considering that no country in Europe is as restrictive as Texas. Especially, leading with "Europe,..." instead of leading with " barely 2 dozen non European countries across the 200+ countries in the world".

But as we all know wedge issues and propaganda don't exist. So, my previous paragraph can actually be deleted.

The GOP didn't so much make abortion a wedge issue as much as evangelicals captured a big chunk of the party's lame duck platform during the various positional realignments of the 60s-80s. The GOP, by almost sheer luck, managed to stumble in to an apathetic voter block, and came out with one of the strongest, most long lived cores of voters out there.

The real strategic leadership of that block mostly died off in the 2000's though, leaving evangelicals headless and politically adrift. These days most seem to have reverted back to being somewhat apathetic in the positive direction, and aside from abortion, are voting completely based on the products out outrage culture.

Abortion and guns are different. Many rural voters own guns and personally feel a loss from gun control. The average rural voter has a basically libertarian bent and would probably be pretty happy with a truce that they are left alone about guns and women are left alone about abortion.

Like it or not the electoral map favors rural voters, Democrats can recruit more urban voters and it will make no difference for winning seats. If Democrats gave up 5% of their urban votes in exchange for 3% of the rural votes the Republicans would find themselves in the wilderness.

Depends on how those votes are distributed, in both directions, but I doubt either would make a huge difference. One thing to remember is that rural areas are less red than cities are blue. A 75/35 split seems to be the most common rural distribution, whereas many city districts are 90% dem with the GOP struggling to outperform the greens or libertarians.

The GOP stands to gain nothing in the urban cores outside of a few southern cities and Texan cities, but they currently live for the suburban fight. The Dems biggest struggle out in the sticks is less that they can't field any candidate that isn't an 80 year old union man or a local youngin' fresh out of college who says all the wrong things (and is thus unelectable).

New York City was 80/20, with Trump making significant gains in heavily immigrant neighborhoods: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/20/us/politics/e.... Trump won 26% in LA County. He ran within 7% of Biden in Miami-Dade County. The GOP absolutely has room to grow among working class Hispanics and Asians in cities.

You’ve got it backward. You do it by not talking about abortion (and other things that divide your coalition of urban liberals and working class people). “Celebrate your abortion” isn’t helping democrats with my Bangladeshi immigrant family in Queens either.

The people you’ll lose doing that are the Rockefeller republicans—Silicon Valley and Westchester types. And that’s fine.

They were at a 33 point lead in the polls recently, the biggest lead of any party since the early 90s.