As Hillary Clinton nursed her wounds after slumping to defeat in New Hampshire at the hands of Bernie Sanders, the British could be forgiven for asking if recent history is replaying itself on the other side of the Atlantic. Only six months ago, the voters in Labour’s leadership contest repudiated the ancien regime and stormed off the political centre-ground by choosing Jeremy Corbyn, an equally improbable left-winger.
There is plenty to separate the 74-year-old Sanders from the 66-year old Corbyn, not least because the Labour leader’s worldview is grounded in visceral anti-Americanism. Nor as far as one can see does the senator from Vermont surround himself with hardline Trotskyites. So much of the explanation for Corbyn’s victory is peculiar to British and Labour politics — Tory austerity, the toxic legacy of the Iraq war, the decay of Labour’s moderate “Blairite” wing, and the hapless leadership of Ed Miliband among them.
For all that, after decades shouting from the fringes of their own parties, Messrs Corbyn and Sanders have assembled remarkably similar and potent coalitions. As she heads to the primaries in Nevada and South Carolina, Hillary would do well to avoid the egregious mistakes made by Corbyn’s opponents.
The Labour leader could scarcely be called charismatic. His unique selling point was that he was different. His opponents — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, holdovers from the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eras — merged into a single shade of grey. Corbyn contrived to marry old-left nostalgia to youthful excitement — drawing support from baby-boomers who had once marched in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, from politically disengaged working class voters and from millennials loaded with student debt.
As one of the defeated contenders remarked ruefully, he offered a ride in a multicoloured VW camper van while his opponents pitched up in dull, family saloon cars.
The establishment candidates had policies on everything but nothing to match the simple message of the Corbynista: British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives had been able to load austerity on to the backs of the hard-working classes because Labour’s leadership had colluded in economic austerity and been soft on City bankers.
For City bankers, read Wall Street, Corbyn’s appeal was emotional, but no less potent for the absence of coherence. The angry and the insecure tend to be forgiving of an absence of intellectual rigour.
So what should Hillary take away from the dismal failure of what used to be called New Labour (a designation, incidentally, borrowed during the 1990s from Bill Clinton’s New Democrats)? Most obviously, loosen up. She may be better prepared for the presidency than anyone in recent history, but Hillary will lose it unless she shows energy and enthusiasm.
Second, show empathy with the voters’ anger: The populist left more often amplifies grievances than answers them, but this does not mean the grievances are groundless.
Finally, throw out all the detail for one simple story: A successful and a fairer America are indivisible.
— Financial Times
Philip Stephens is a commentator and author. He is associate editor of the Financial Times.
