British election - a harbinger of the future?

Submitted by David W. Lincoln (Canada), Dec 20, 2019 at 16:00

I see this piece & update were written before December 12. Very good analysts are saying the old model is broken, and we will be seeing the emergence of Johnsonism, whatever it will be.

I'm a Western Canadian who has been called redneck more than once by those who presume they are more Canadian than all other Canadians (this is Laurentia, which does not have a good track record in how to run a country). I sympathize with those who used to vote Labour, but voted Conservative on December 12 - especially those in Northern England (the reference used was the Red Wall). Well, Labour received a drubbing so severe, you have to go back to 1935 to see a Labour Caucus that small. So, is this populism? I say it is, because of where the elites are wrong. This is hardly imagined, but dismissed by those who have the most to lose by abandoning virtue signalling.

When you have David Starkey and Matthew Goodwin providing distinctions on a theme, and with talented writers in various newspapers dissecting the Labour Party, as if they were doing an autopsy, and they are doing it quite professionally - the biggest enemy of the Labour Party is its ego.

I close with 2 quotes from Thomas Sowell:

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

The self-flattery of the vision of the left gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left and regardless of its disastrous consequences

The pathology cited by Thomas Sowell has more to do with the protected, aka the elite, because it can afford to be wrong. If the not so affluent, and not so comfortable, were as debilitated by such wooly headedness, the day to day drudgery only leads to more disenchantment.

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