Minutes after the exit poll, the Labour left’s narrative was set. Brexit, not socialist policies, had cost Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party the 2019 general election. Those within the movement who had counseled against a second referendum on EU membership claimed vindication. Those who took us toward that policy could either — like Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell — plead guilty, or protest fatalistically that while the policy was bad, the Brexit pincer grip would have damned us whatever was done. Left influencers’ former flirtation with anti-Brexit politics evaporated as completely as the dodgy People’s Vote campaign itself.

With Britain finally out of the EU, we’re all Lexiters now (though pollster YouGov reports that 59 percent of Labour members want to rejoin). But there’s a deeper problem: the dynamics within Corbynism that allowed the radical left’s shot at state power to be squandered remain substantially uncorrected.

Short of a politically activated revolutionary working class, taking back the Labour Party remains a component of most socialists’ hope for the future. But failing to address the dynamics that led the Labour left to get Brexit so wrong will lead to structurally similar failings over whatever landmark issues a hypothetical future left electoral project is faced with. Today, the Labour left in defeat seems worryingly uncurious about the regressive influence earlier defeated lefts have sometimes inadvertently had.