By DEXTER DUGGAN
With beefy, bellowing blond moptops improbably ruling putatively conservative political parties in both the United States and United Kingdom, the search for other parallels is tempting.
Neither Donald Trump nor Boris Johnson fits a casting director’s dream of a supposedly suave persuader, but their successful challenges to ossified assumptions paid off at the ballot box in more than one election.
Nor are they alone. Recently victorious national leaders with a take-charge image include Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Whatever the inflections of these pols’ philosophies, each of them and also others successfully sought distressed voters who’d been shunted aside by economic globalists with shimmering think-tank theories that suffered in reality.
When the widely despised proposal for the UK to leave the smothering European Union showed that in fact it was more widely loved in a triumphant June 2016 vote, speculation turned to the other side of the Atlantic and unlikely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s potential for victory the following November.
Trump in part was reaching to the same sort of voter who powered what had been dubbed Brexit in Britain. Was Brexit a crystal ball revealing the Manhattan multibillionaire’s upcoming win?
Not only was this so, but also both Brexit and Trump continued to be rejected and plotted against for many more months despite their electoral conquests.
As Brexit triumphed, the London-based left-wing UK Guardian reported on June 24, 2016:
“The decision in favor of Brexit, following a bitterly close electoral race, represents the biggest shock to the political establishment in Britain and across Europe for decades, and will threaten the leaderships of both the (Conservative) prime minister, David Cameron, and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.”
Indeed, Cameron resigned the same day, and although Corbyn defiantly hung on, his potential political future was to end in December 2019.
Brexit faced one devious delay after another since 2016, with establishmentarian plotters’ apparent hopes that it would collapse and die of a heart attack or even tottering old age before it could cross a finish line that kept being pushed further and more complexly down the road.
Meanwhile, Trump might as well never have won the presidency at all in the view of leftist liars and schemers who alleged one non-existent crime after another against him, beginning even before he was sworn in as president in January 2017.
In early December 2019, House Speaker and bad Catholic Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), on the defensive, revealingly said the impeachment push against Trump wasn’t a hasty effort because it actually had been going on for two and a half years.
That is, well before any of the phony offenses currently alleged against the president.
Britain’s Conservative Party long had been criticized by conservative activists as conservative in name only. But, however much the recently chosen prime minister, Johnson, might be lacking in proven principles, he chose to throw his lot with devoted activists who deeply resented the EU’s overwhelming bureaucracy and wanted the UK cut free from its strangulation.
Johnson threw down a challenge by calling a wintry general election, hoping for a thorough housecleaning. His daring clearly was rewarded on December 12 by a drastic rebuke shaming the opposition Labour Party and much empowering the Conservatives.
“Get Brexit Done” was the Conservative Party’s powerful election slogan. A news photo showed Johnson at a lectern labeled, “Get Brexit Done. Unleash Britain’s Potential.”
The prime minister lost no time revealing his grasp of the dynamics by rushing off to thank traditional Labour voters for their noteworthy switch.
BBC News reported on December 14 that at a talk in Labour’s heartland, where a Conservative Party member of Parliament was elected for the first time in 84 years, Johnson declared, “We are the servants now and our job is to serve the people of this country and deliver on our priorities. And our priorities and their priorities are the same.”
One remarkable aspect of this result was that the Conservatives were the ruling party going into the election, although weakly so. They weren’t thrown out by aggrieved voters but rewarded for running against their own ambivalent record.
Also, considerable commentary noted that laboring-class British voters still thought that honest work and pride in their own country better represent their sentiments than elitist shame and dislike of the land beneath their feet.
It seems the same in the U.S.
Left-leaning columnist William Galston posted at The Wall Street Journal on December 17: “The revolt of the working class against the center-right/center-left establishment is the biggest political story of the past decade. For the most part, the working class has moved right rather than left, fueling the growth of conservative populism throughout the West.”
The UK general election that again affirmed pro-Brexit power turned attention anew to foreshadowing how similar voter sentiment across the Atlantic could affect Trump’s 2020 presidential race — just as Brexit 2016 in effect predicted Trump’s 2016 victory.
Despite historical defects in accuracy, polls had been showing that Trump led all his potential, impeachment-loving Democrat foes for the 2020 race, even though the president had been hammered by years of bellowing media and leftist hysteria.
You think Trump is a loudmouth? His is no more than the sounds of a mouse squeaking up against the hurricane and tornado volumes of his desperate, though often ineffectual, establishment enemies.
Conservative Republican campaign consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on December 16:
“One thing the UK elections reminded politicians of is that voters hate having to repeat themselves, and they get very impatient if they make their choice known and you then ignore them. Another lesson that the American left may or may not learn in time is that far-left policies and anti-Semitism is a really bad combination.
“As we look ahead to 2020, we will have a president who remains committed to a core set of promises that the American people want kept,” Querard added. “Democrats whose mission it is to oppose the president simply because he is the president may well find themselves punished for getting in the way of what the voters want done.”
Indeed, Trump bragged at rallies that he actually kept more promises than he made.
Querard said that “we will once again see the combination of far-left policies as espoused by every Democratic presidential candidate and the anti-Semitism from The Squad that is routinely embraced by today’s Democratic Party.”
“The Squad” is an appellation created by admirers of their left-wing extremism and disinclination against Israel.
An Important Distinction
One definite distinction between Trump and Johnson is that Trump has a proclaimed pro-life position that his administration has pursued. UK Conservative leadership lacks this stand, even though avowedly leftist UK parties are worse.
On December 13 the website of Britain’s largest pro-life organization, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), reminded its supporters it was time to get to work.
“It’s now essential that pro-lifers throughout the UK contact their newly elected MPs of whatever party, both to congratulate them personally on their election and to urge them to work against and vote against all attempts to decriminalize abortion in Britain, following the last Parliament’s imposition of abortion in Northern Ireland last July, with the support of the previous Conservative government,” the SPUC said.
“The Conservative Party has won their biggest parliamentary majority since 1987. Whilst it is good that the party forming the new government does not have a policy to decriminalize abortion, we must learn the lessons of history,” it said.
“Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government elected by a huge majority in 1987 had no party policy on abortion. However, they introduced legislation which, with their backing, legalized abortion up to birth and human embryo research,” the SPUC said.
Although Johnson’s recent victory has brought forward political comparisons with the size of Thatcher’s win, I recall speaking with a SPUC leader in the 1970s who viewed Thatcher with no fondness, considering her as a foe of pro-lifers.
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