FACULTY LOUNGE POLITICS FAIL IN ENGLAND.

Spiked's Brendan O'Neill offers an item that could be a Friday short take.  "Why won’t you racist fascists vote Labour?"  The essay is about the supposed party of the toilers becoming the party of the metrofexuals.

The mass working-class defection to the Conservative Party; the colonisation of Labour by middle-class graduates; the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need – anyone who thought these historic shifts and quakes would be reversed by having sensible, forensic Sir Keir Starmer at the helm of Labour has just received the rudest awakening imaginable.

I'm eventually going to pivot to the United States, as some of the dynamics at work in Blighty are also at work here.

The revolt against Labour is more than a reckoning with Corbynism or Starmerism – it is a democratic confrontation between working-class communities and a political elite who they believe, quite rightly, views them with contempt, disdain and pity.

There is not, yet, the kind of spat between Trumpians and establishmentarians among the Tories.

What now? Well, we can cheer the working-class revolt against Labour without being naive about the Tories; without buying into the idea that the Conservative Party understands or respects these working-class communities. Let’s see what the Tories come up with. Let’s see what they mean by ‘levelling up’ – whether it will be just a few more economic crumbs thrown from the centre to the regions, or a genuine democratic engagement of working-class communities in the political and economic future of the country. Boris, take note: the revolt of ordinary people against the elites is only just starting.

It's Melanie Phillips who comes up with a pungent description of Labour.

It had become instead the party  of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.

Yet Labour was pinning its hopes on a leader who embodied precisely that set of attitudes: a “human rights” lawyer who had voted Remain and who actually lives in the fashionable north London district of Camden.

Indeed, all you need to know about Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party and why it can never win back the decent, fair-minded, patriotic working-class was in the picture the Labour leader proudly tweeted of himself and his deputy, Angela Rayner, taking the knee to the Black Lives Matter agenda.

This is why the party doesn’t get it and shows no sign of ever getting it. There may well be members who disapprove of the extremism of tearing down historic statues; or who think Extinction Rebellion goes too far in causing a public nuisance; or who are appalled at the witch-hunts against those who insist that biological sex is unalterable or who are made to confess to their own “white privilege” — or who find themselves up before a disciplinary panel accused of using racist language for observing that you couldn’t turn on the TV “without some person of a colourful disposition having a moan about something” (yes, really; it’s a moot point which is worse, the intolerance or the illiteracy).

Sound familiar?  Power Line's Steven  Hayward sets up the pivot.

Biden is more polarizing than either Obama or Trump at this point.

Meanwhile, I persist in arguing that the Democratic Party’s lurch to the far left is doing us a great favor by making explicit and visible what they usually try to conceal, and setting up a backlash that might actually break the country’s now three-decade old 50-50 split. My two witnesses are Democratic strategist James Carville, and New York Times columnist (but vehemently anti-Trump) Bret Stephens, both of whom say much the same thing today, despite having very different political outlooks.

It's going to take the Republicans or some other opposition coalition to get a positive message together, and yet, the same follies that ail Labour ail the Democrats.  The language of the faculty lounge is the language of the North London dinner party, and that might still be a fracture for the Democrats.

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in ... neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

Ross Douthat suggests that it's not the faculty lounge talk, rather; it might be the record on crime and education.  "So the core question facing Democrats isn’t how faculty-lounge rhetoric plays with today’s swing voters. It’s how left-wing policymaking might create tomorrow’s swing voters, if the liberal city becomes ungovernable again."  That's part of it: the corona tyranny and the return of stagflation will be additional problems for Democrats.