The great international backlash against corporatism has officially begun.
On Saturday,
Jeremy Corbyn, a Member of Parliament for a small North London district called Islington North, officially won election as leader of the UK Labour Party, Tony Blair's old party, taking almost 60 percent of the vote in a four way race.
A 200 to 1 longshot when he announced his candidacy just a few months ago, Corbyn shot to the top of the polls, and eventually the top of Britain’s main opposition party, by embracing real progressive economics and attacking the failed politics of austerity.
His victory speech, in which he took aim at the “the grotesque levels of inequality” in British society, was a perfect microcosm of what made his campaign so popular with voters.
Corbyn has an uphill battle ahead of him if he wants to become Prime Minister, but progressives here in America should still pay close attention to the direction he takes the Labour Party.
That’s because for all intents and purposes, “Jez,” as his supporters call him, is the British version of Bernie Sanders.
Like Bernie, he’s a veteran politician who’s stuck to his core progressive values no matter what.
Like Bernie, he’s a democratic socialist who wants to put right-wing austerity out to pasture for good.
And just like Bernie, he’s been the target of a media ignore-and-then-smear campaign that’s tried to make him out to be an unelectable “crazy radical.”
In a recent piece for the Guardian, for example, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair - a member of the same Labour Party as Corbyn - said that if Corbyn were elected, Labour would face “defeat” and “annihilation.”
That’s right, annihilation!
I don’t know why anyone would listen to the guy who helped lie Britain into Iraq, but anyways, on Saturday, Labour voters saw through all the media hysteria and picked Corbyn as their leader.
And they did that because we’re currently in the middle of a great trans-Atlantic backlash against corporatism.
To understand what this backlash is and why it’s happening, you first need to understand something about the past 30 plus years of Anglo-American politics.
