Why Labour Lost — And Why We Must Press On
Leading up to last week’s election, Jeremy Corbyn came to be seen as “just another politician,” not an outsider. Despite its ambitious program, our campaign lost its insurgent feel and got drowned out in the Brexit culture war. But we can’t retreat from our goal of creating a Britain for the many, not the few.
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“Defeat,” I wrote in Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, “is an underrated experience in political life.”
We’ve just had a horrific experience. The last few days have felt like a death in the family. Exploding, with little decorum, into bitter family feuding, as such deaths often do. We’re all aghast and ashamed, lashing out: “you did this!” It has hit all the harder because, while making mental room for the possibility of a disastrous outcome, we really didn’t see this coming. So I really don’t want to think about the “advantages of defeat,” as Charles Eliot Norton described it. It feels as awful and beside the point as pontificating about what’s in the will.
Like it or not, though, this work has to start soon. We have to find a way to relate to defeat that is neither ghoulishly upbeat nor in thrall to it. How do we not slide into denial and bullying demands that fellow activists buck up? How, on the other hand, do we not catastrophize about catastrophe?
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