{"id":1569,"date":"2017-06-10T04:23:18","date_gmt":"2017-06-10T11:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=1569"},"modified":"2017-06-10T04:23:18","modified_gmt":"2017-06-10T11:23:18","slug":"a-case-for-jeremy-corbyn-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=1569","title":{"rendered":"“A Case for Jeremy Corbyn”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Roger Cohen, Op-Ed Columnist, June 5, 2017<\/p>\n

[This prescient column written just before the election was discussed last night by Cohen with Charlie Rose<\/a> on PBS.]<\/p>\n

For a long time I could not bring myself to write about the British election. Trump-coddling, self-important, flip-flopping Theresa May, ensconced at 10 Downing Street without ever being elected prime minister, was going to sweep to her hard-Brexit victory and take the country down her little England rabbit hole.<\/p>\n

There were more important things to think about, like the end of the American century in 2017, one hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution. A boorish clown named Donald Trump brought down the curtain.<\/p>\n

In Britain, anyway, there was no story: The June 8 vote was a formality. The Labour Party was in meltdown, having exited the Blairite middle ground for leftist orthodoxy under Jeremy Corbyn. The British, their ludicrous vote to leave the European Union gradually sinking in, had morphed into sheep. May would get her mandate to do her worst, with Boris Johnson, a foreign secretary who long since forsook any claim to be taken seriously, cheering her on.<\/p>\n

Then came two unspeakable terrorist attacks, one in Manchester and one in London. As I\u2019ve argued before, the Islamic State should be driven out of Raqqa, whatever it takes (and if you have any doubt, watch Matthew Heineman\u2019s new movie \u201cCity of Ghosts\u201d about the citizen-journalist group \u201cRaqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.\u201d) Iniquity has its capital. From there it will emanate until crushed.<\/p>\n

Of course Trump tried to make cheap political capital from the blood on London\u2019s streets. He quoted London\u2019s mayor, Sadiq Khan, out of context in a flurry of tweets<\/a> aimed at buttressing the case for his bigotry. The president of the United States just felt like insulting a prominent Muslim.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump bears about the same relationship to dignity as carbon dioxide to clean air. And this is the man May and Johnson have coddled, in the name of offsetting the Brexit debacle with increased U.S. trade.<\/p>\n

Johnson, by the way, assured the world a couple of months back that British seduction of Trump had been so effective that efforts to convince the president not to quit the Paris climate accord \u201cwill succeed.<\/a>\u201d After all, Trump had been offered a state visit, horse-drawn carriage, the queen; all that British pomp for His Neediness. We know what the word of Johnson, who was for the European Union before he was against it, is worth. It\u2019s worth zilch. No wonder Trump\u2019s finger-to-the-planet Paris decision prompted scarcely a British whimper.<\/p>\n

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.<\/p>\n

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Of all the obscene spectacles one has had to endure over the past several months, the worst has been that of the United States and Britain \u2014 their finest hour but a wan memory \u2014 competing for the favor and lucre of despots. To heck with the European Union, there\u2019s always Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Xi Jinping. So begins the post-American century. How we have fallen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Disgust, at some level, must find an outlet. Suddenly, we have an election after all. The expected Tory landslide has evaporated. May has led an abysmal, blundering, eat-your-peas campaign.<\/p>\n

The prime minister embraced a hard Brexit at a moment when some people are finally experiencing buyers\u2019 remorse. She came up with a \u201cdementia tax,\u201d the essence of which was to punish people for living too long; it did not go down well. She has exuded \u201cthis sense of entitlement,\u201d in the words of Parry Mitchell, a member of the House of Lords who quit the Labour Party last year over Corbyn\u2019s radicalism.<\/p>\n

Corbyn, by contrast, has made no campaign mistakes. His slogan \u2014 \u201cFor the Many not the Few\u201d \u2014 was no less effective for having been borrowed from Tony Blair. The ardor of his followers, particularly the urban under-30s, is remarkable. To them he is a near Messianic figure, the righter of capitalist wrongs; the proud socialist who will nationalize the railroads, make universities free again and inject billions into the National Health Service (while somehow balancing the budget). Like Bernie Sanders, and indeed Trump, he\u2019s the man who will upend the system that brought you the Iraq war, the 2008 financial meltdown, the euro crisis, rampant impunity and ever-more-unequal societies.<\/p>\n

Opinion polls now put Corbyn within a few percentage points of May. There is the possibility of a hung parliament.<\/p>\n

Elections take place in the real world; they often involve unpleasant choices. I dislike Corbyn\u2019s anti-Americanism, his long flirtation with Hamas, his coterie\u2019s clueless leftover Marxism and anti-Zionism, his NATO bashing, his unworkable tax-and-spend promises. He\u2019s of that awful Cold War left that actually believed Soviet Moscow was probably not as bad as Washington.<\/p>\n

Still, Corbyn would not do May\u2019s shameful Trump-love thing. He would not succumb to the jingoistic anti-immigration talk of the Tories. After the terrorist attacks, he said \u201cdifficult conversations\u201d were needed with Saudi Arabia: Hallelujah! He would tackle rising inequality. He would seek a soft departure from the European Union keeping Britain as close to Europe as possible. His victory \u2014 still improbable \u2014 would constitute punishment of the Tories for the disaster of Brexit. Seldom would a political comeuppance be so merited.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Cohen, Op-Ed Columnist, June 5, 2017 [This prescient column written just before the election was discussed last night by Cohen with Charlie Rose on PBS.] For a long time I could not bring myself to write about the British election. Trump-coddling, self-important, flip-flopping Theresa May, ensconced at 10 Downing Street without ever being elected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1570,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions\/1570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}