Voters In the U.K. Send a Clear Message. Will Democrats Pay Attention?

In the end it wasn't even close. When all the ballots were finally tabulated, Boris Johnson won going away. Not only that, his Conservative Party netted 47 seats in Parliament, giving them an imposing total of 365 to Labour's 203. For comparison, think combination 2010 midterms and 1988 presidential election here. Not since Margaret Thatcher's landslide win in 1983 has there been a blood bath like this in the United Kingdom.

Johnson was unusually gracious after the election, thanking voters in North East England for having faith in him. He really should've thanked his Labour Party opponent, because Jeremy Corbyn did everything humanly possible to gift-wrap the election for Johnson, a man who is only slightly more popular with Britons than Donald Trump is with Americans.

Corbyn ran on one of the most progressive platforms in the history of the British Isles. How progressive? Let's put it this way, next to Corbyn, Bernie Sanders looks like Ronald Reagan. As James Carville adroitly observed after the election, "You can go so far left that you can lose to an unacceptable incumbent. That’s the lesson. The lesson is screaming right in your face."

Now before I go any further, I wish to clarify a couple of points I've made over the last couple of months. One, while there are similarities between Sanders and Corbyn, Sanders is not nearly as unpopular in America as Corbyn is in the U.K. Secondly, this wave of right-wing populism that has swept through most of Europe and the United States is not remotely close to receding. This week's election results bear that out.

And therein lies the dilemma for Democrats as they decide who their nominee will be next year. On the one hand they have two candidates in Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who are running on a very progressive platform; on the other, they have candidates like Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bloomberg who are running on a more moderate platform. And in between, there's Pete Buttigieg, who appears to be straddling the line between the two camps.

What strikes me as particularly alarming about what happened in the U.K. is where Johnson drew a lot of his support from. He mentioned in his victory speech the people in North East England. Northumberland and Durham are the two largest counties in that region and both are home to millions of working-class workers who have grown fed up with the empty promises of the political elite.

Sound familiar? It should. In 2016, Trump won the presidency by basically running an inside straight throughout the Rust Belt region. People who for decades had voted Democratic, switched their allegiance because they felt no one was paying attention to them.

There is an undeniable link between both men that should worry Democrats. Whatever their shortcomings - and brother have they got a ton - the two are very effective at preying on the fears and frustrations of people who have been left behind in this new, multicultural world; a world that has seen a steady decline in manufacturing jobs and wages. Corbyn and his Labour Party had no plan for reversing both trends; and while no one seriously believes Johnson does either, he at least paid lip service to them. As a result, voters gave him a resounding victory.

I have been saying this for quite some time now. Progressives need to get it through their thick skulls that they're not running against Mitt Romney in 2020. The agenda that Sanders and Warren are proposing for the country simply isn't resonating with voters in the Midwest. Just the opposite, in fact. Medicare for All will lead to the end of private insurance for tens of millions of workers, while the Green New Deal will be a job killer in the very states Trump carried in 2016. If either of these two proposals find their way into the Democratic platform next fall we could be looking at an epic loss for the Party across the board.

Here's how you know there's trouble brewing ahead. Even after getting his ass handed to him, Jeremy Corbyn remains popular within the Labour Party. The denial over there is beyond belief. Likewise, most progressives are oblivious as to how out of touch they are with millions of working-class voters in this country. It's like they're selling oranges in an apple orchard.

The cultural war that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are waging in their respective countries is unlike anything we've ever seen in modern politics. If liberals on both sides of the pond don't start taking it seriously and soon, the results will be catastrophic for the West.