The war in Ukraine “implicitly issues a challenge to the unseriousness, the smallness, of what passes for public life in the 21st-century West,” …
The war in Ukraine “implicitly issues a challenge to the unseriousness, the smallness, of what passes for public life in the 21st-century West,” declares Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. “As everyday Ukrainians pull together and arm themselves with guns and petrol bombs, Britain’s military top brass have rather different concerns. Such as why you should avoid using words like ‘manpower’, ‘strong’ and ‘grip.’ ” It once “took war to hurt us; now it only takes words.” This war on European soil confirms “history is coming violently back to life, and that, morally, politically and physically, we are not prepared for it.” “In a loose sense,” warns Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot, Republicans are already “the party of the multiracial working class”: In 2020, “Trump carried the overall working class (noncollege) vote by 4 points.” And the GOP won that vote for Congress “in three of the last four elections,” with a tie in 2018. Dems presume it’s “purely a matter of white working class voters,” but “since 2012, nonwhite working class voters have shifted away from the Democrats by 18 margin points.” This “should be unacceptable”: “What is the point of a left party that cannot command the loyalty of the working class and therefore plausibly claim to represent its interests?” Dems must “rebrand themselves on cultural issues, where they are decidedly out of step with working class opinion on issues around crime, immigration, race, gender, schools and language policing.
