ayase
State Alchemist
It’s astonishing to me that most other politicians haven’t cottoned on to this yet and adjusted their attitudes accordingly. I think most Americans (and Brits) would at this point be fairly happy to see their leaders get Ceaușescu‘d for the endless grift we’re fully aware nearly all of them are involved in while the people get poorer. All the while, they continue to talk like the most important thing in politics is reasonable middle-class civility. Pro tip: People struggling to feed their kids or pay their rent do not care about being civil. They do not care about the lofty ideals of a “democracy” they can see in their bank balances is failing them. They care about surviving. I think we’re getting to the point where we’ve successfully sent enough people back to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid that they’d be more than capable of tipping it over. And make no mistake the UK and USA are in this together, we have been since WWII, our governments follow the same trajectories even if one is a little further behind. Look at Thatcher and Reagan, or Clinton and Blair. They were cut from the same cloth. Our 14 years of Tories were their 8 years of Bush, Starmer is our Obama (a presentable, civil moderate promising change probably he won’t deliver, likely resulting in people being more jaded than ever by the end of his time in office) and if Labour doesn’t nut up and use that whopping majority to actually do something about inequality, it’s entirely possible Farage could be our Trump. Tory loss next time, which seems inevitable (particularly since a fifth of their voters will be literally dead from old age in five years) will probably kill them for good and open the door for a Reform takeover.
It baffles me why people like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn don’t just stand up on a stage somewhere and tell the truth about how corrupt the system is, how in hoc politicians are to lobbyists and billionaires, how the press are part of it and that’s why people are worse off and nothing ever changes. Take a page out of Trump’s book. But the liberal left is too full of champagne socialists more concerned with writing articles in the Guardian about gender politics or how the people for whom the cost of housing has increased six times above inflation in the last half-century should be funding reparations for colonialism neither they nor their penniless peasant ancestors had anything to do with (the upper classes were exploiting them as disposable factory labour just as much as any colonial people. Let’s not forget the Highland Clearances, the Settlement of Ireland or the Enclosures Acts, when poor British people had the land of this country stolen from them by the nobility just like Africans or Native Americans. The prototype for Empire was the British Isles. Hell, the Liberal Democrats still have “The Land” as their anthem which is all about this, not that they ever seem to talk about it now). Out of touch does not begin to describe it. The success of people like Trump and Farage is their failure, but they still haven’t woken up, which is ironic.
Didn’t I say Corbyn should have purged the right of the party just like he himself has now been purged along with the left? He wasn’t tough enuss, and that’s the real problem with the left in the Anglosphere. They aren’t willing to shout loudly enough about the real problems and their causes (let alone actually tackle them) which allows the Trumps and Farages of the world to pin it all on immigrants and the “liberal media” (which is actually anything but) while riding those same lobbyists’ and billionaires’ waves of cash into office and proceeding to continue allowing the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. You have a massive cohort of angry, angry people with very little to lose in both Britain and America and all someone has to do is rile them up and point them in the right direction. And that direction is Parliament/Capitol Hill but as long as the inhabitants of those places can keep those angry people divided and at each other’s throats, they’re eating well (and sending the bill to their donors).
