Let us say that you are leading a movement which, if it wins, will save hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, and will take millions of out of poverty.
The corollary to this is that if you fail, if you lose, those people will die or be stuck in poverty, and generally that many others will fall into poverty.
Your loss, then, occasions a great deal of suffering.
It is often hard to know what to do to win, and there are red lines. Unless a situation has descended to civil war, or you intend civil war, like America’s founding fathers or slavery abolitionist John Brown, you shouldn’t murder, and obviously rape and torture are off the board no matter what.
But because the stakes are so high, you do have a responsibility to play your hand seriously. It isn’t actually a game.
In modern democracies, the most important thing is to control parties. Margaret Thatcher said that her victory was only complete when Labour accepted her ideology. If they hadn’t, when they got into power, they would have just un-done everything she did. John Major, the Tory PM wasn’t her true successor–Tony Blair was.
When Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour party he took over a neoliberal Blairite party. Most of the MPs had voted for most of the worst Tory policies, or abstained from the key votes. They were complicit in a great deal of the evils of austerity.
They were implacable enemies of Corbyn, as were the party bureaucrats. Indeed, a story came out with emails proving that these bureaucrats worked against Corbyn in the 2017 election. Given just how close that election was, they probably cost Corbyn the victory.
Had Corbyn won, he would have refunded the NHS. If it was a majority victory, he’d still be Prime Minister and he wouldn’t have bungled the Coronavirus response like Johnson, a bungling which appears to have about doubled the death rate next to comparable European countries.
Those bureaucrats, then, are responsible for the deaths caused by Johnson being PM. If you don’t understand this, you need to learn how, because this sort of thing is the key driver of why our societies are so bad: The forseeable consequences of evil actions are treated as if they are incidental. Having incompetent ideologues in charge of government who believe that “society doesn’t exist,” and that government isn’t responsible for people’s welfare has consequences.
Corbyn also failed in another important way: He never kicked out MPs who were traitorously constantly attacking him, nor did he support the mandatory re-selction of MPs, a process by which the Labour membership gets to vote for their nominee.
Doing both of these things would have transformed Labour back into a proper left-wing party, and given Corbyn a much greater chance at victory. Even if he lost both elections, his successor would be left-wing and properly supported by the party, and in first past the post democracy, the second party will eventually wind up in power.
Nothing is more important than ideological control of a party.
Now, the thing here is that neither of these strategies required Corbyn to go against his beliefs: Corbyn always said he believed the party should be run by the membership. Re-selections, indeed re-selection every election, is exactly and completely in accord with that.
Corbyn is a truly good man, but like a lot of people of his generation, he has an addiction to being nice, confusing it with being good.
Being nice to bad actors, to MPs who support cutting the NHS and social welfare and bailing out bankers, isn’t good, it’s evil. They need to be removed from power. This isn’t terrible for them, no centrist MP is likely to wind up on the bread lines if they aren’t an MP (which is part of why they were willing to be evil).
Then we have Sanders. Sanders was never as good a man in political terms as Corbyn, his politics are nowhere near as good. Still, he was a good man in American terms.
Sanders is also addicted to niceness. He refused to attack Biden on Biden’s terrible record, a record which is at odds with everything that Sanders claims to believe in, supposedly because Biden was his good friend.
This is dereliction of duty. If he had done it because he believed it was the best strategy, fine. It might or might not be. But to put his friendship with Biden against the welfare and even the lives of millions of Americans is a sickening betrayal of principle and of his followers.
Power has responsibility. Those who work to save millions of lives and make sure millions more are not in poverty, have a responsibility to their mission, and that responsibility does not allow one to put one’s personal desire to be “nice” ahead of the mission.
Good and nice are not the same thing. Niceness is, well, nice, but people who are willing to impoverish and kill millions are evil people and they need to lose their power. The actions taken to remove their power may not be “nice,” but they are good.
I admire Corbyn more than any other British politician of the past 40 years. But he failed in part because he wasn’t willing to be even moderately ruthless against people who were, well, doing a lot of evil. Traitors, in fact.
As for Sanders, well, it appears the same is true. He asked his followers to fight for someone they didn’t know, but he wasn’t willing to fight someone he did know.
A hypocrite, in effect.
Sanders’ and Corbyn’s times are done. They were the best of the Boomers, the last major politicians who hadn’t sold out or sold their soul. Their failures are not theirs alone. Brits and American Democrats genuinely prefer to let people die and live in poverty than vote for a moderate left-winger. That it is older Brits who voted against Corbyn whom Johnson’s policies are killing is ironic.
New politicians will now rise. Hopefully those on the left are people who understand that if one is the champion of the people, one has responsibilities which go beyond being nice to those doing evil. That, in fact, their responsibility is to remove all power from those who use that power from evil.
Doing so won’t be nice to the people who lose their power. It will be “nice” and good to those who are lifted out of poverty or who don’t die due to evil austerity policies, corruption, and incompetence.
Gotta decide what’s more important. Being nice to bad people, or doing good.
And you have to be willing to actually use power when you have it. The right certainly is. The left needs to be.
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There’s been a vast amount of foolishness in the discussion about this.
The bottom line here is that there was a referendum, and “leave” won.