A Devil’s Bargain

Today Nick Cohen asks a good question: how does the useless Jeremy Corbyn still manage to maintain loyalty and followers?

What kind of leader produces such unthinking loyalty from his followers and, more pertinently, what damage does he inflict on the souls of followers prepared to give it?

Jeremy Corbyn is not particularly interesting. Labour officials tell me that the key to understanding him is to grasp his intellectual inferiority complex, which resulted in him turning to political dogmatism as others with his disadvantages turn to Scientology. The socialist dogmas of the 1970s gave his limited mind certainty and freedom from responsibility, and a set of enduring precepts.

There had always been a strain on the British far left that opposed European co-operation because ‘capitalist’ Europe threatened to rival the Soviet Union, the 20th-century object of their utopian fantasies. Corbyn had a ready-made anti-European policy right there. Starting with the Stalinist purges of Soviet Jews in the early 1950s, and extending to the wider left after the Israeli-Arab war of 1967, the notion that leftwing antisemitism didn’t exist surrounded him. In this milieu, it was natural to ally with the goosestepping Shia fascists of Hezbollah, and wild-eyed creeps who babbled about how the Jews caused 9/11; natural, too, to use the racist sneers of his class and generation to tell British Jews in his audience they did not understand ‘English irony’. And… well, I could go on, as you surely know.

I think the answer to Nick’s question is a kind of devil’s bargain.

David Hirsh in Contemporary Left Antisemitism argues that there are two traditions to the left. There is the democratic left which gave us the vote, trade unions and the minimum wage. Then there is the totalitarian left – which is as different from the democratic left as darkness from noon. From it, came gulags and show trials and ideology and blood.

It’s been obvious since he won the Labour leadership that Corbyn is from this second totalitarian tradition of the left. People aren’t stupid, they sense the intellectual darkness around Corbynism, they don’t particularly like it but many have been willing to accept it anyway, as ‘part of the package’.

Why? Because Corbyn also talked about the injustices faced by ordinary people struggling against the austerity of the last nine years. If you’re a lone parent of three in a falling-down private rental, or an unemployed 58 year old living on foodbanks and Universal Credit, his message is going to resonate. There are people out there hoping for a socialist Labour government to save them. They are only just hanging on, and they are the people who are going to be let down most of all.

The 2017 election intensified this because Labour surpassed very bad expectations. Since then the narrative has been ‘one last push’. It has been ‘we are so close to power, Jeremy’s enemies are panicking’.

‘Therfor bihoveth him a ful long spoon/That shal ete with a feend,’ said Geoffrey Chaucer. Medieval literature isn’t my field but what I think Chaucer is saying here is: when you deal with the devil, keep your eyes open, because he’s like to fuck you over. And so it is proving.

In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank explored the attraction that Republicanism had for working class Americans. He looked at the disconnect between what Republican voters wanted and what they were actually getting. ‘Vote to stop abortion: receive a rollback in capital gains taxes… Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.’

You could tabulate a similar vote/receive for Corbynism, based on what it’s likely to look like in power. Vote for meaningful work and a strong welfare state; receive Brexit on WTO terms and an economy in freefall. Vote to end homelessness and reform the housing market; receive international alliances with authoritarian states. Vote for solidarity with migrants and asylum seekers; receive tolerance of anti-semitism and an end of freedom of movement.

Corbyn’s team have relied upon people not realising that if they are not credible on issues like Brexit and antisemitism they are not likely to be credible on fixing the economy and social justice either.

There are signs, however, that the credibility gap is beginning to close, and that people are catching up.

Labour lost 79 seats in local elections this week. I had very far left people in my timeline, previously loyal to JC but who couldn’t vote Labour this time around because they were so disillusioned with him. Corbyn spent the day of the People’s Vote march campaigning in Morecambe. It went independent.

It has been a long time since 2017.

As I said, I can understand why people living in the hell of poverty might want to overlook Corbyn’s baggage.

But what about the more established supporters of JC – the Guardian and Jacobin columnists, the pundits, journalists and outriders?

What’s their excuse?