The Corbynite Maneuver

It's politics, Jim, but not politics as we know it.

For those of us who believe, or want to believe, that it is still early days, and Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders cannot end up winning their party’s nomination, recent events in Britain are a wake-up call. There, it just happened. Jeremy Corbyn, a backbencher with no ministerial experience, and a reputation for political position well outside the mainstream, has won the Labour Party leadership by a wide margin.

Conventional wisdom is that Labour has killed any chance it had at the next election.

But really, can we count any more on conventional wisdom? By conventional wisdom, Corbyn had no chance at the leadership either.

Maybe the math has changed: perhaps you no longer win by building a broad coalition of disparate interests, and straddling the middle ground. It might be that that approach is now self-defeating. Voters may now know too much, thanks to the saturation of media new and old, and be too aware of the hypocrisy and cynicism of such consensus politics and those who pursue them. It may be that they crave instead a man who does not compromise but seems to take definite stands—even any sort of stands.

Corbyn may speak to those who, as per the last post here, feel there is no core to public life any more.

Ideology is for wonks. Trump’s polls seem to show that people care more for a sense of firm character, of being in charge (not exactly principle, although principle can lead to this result) than they do about ideology. Nor is this really a new thing. Polls in 1968 showed that, when Robert Kennedy died during the primaries, much of his support went to George Wallace. His ideological opposite, but they both radiated a sense of knowing their own minds.