Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party
Woe it is to be a Labour wonk right now. A streak of nihilism has infected the party’s boffins after Kamala Harris’s defeat in the American presidential election. The American economy zoomed under Joe Biden yet voters defenestrated his party. Essays such as “The Death of Deliverism” by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury, which argued in 2023 that voters would not thank Mr Biden’s Democrats for a thumping economy, are passed around the British left like sombre samizdat texts.
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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “The triumph of false consciousness”
Britain November 30th 2024
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From the November 30th 2024 edition
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