In 1987 Mr Biden was so taken by the British Labour Party leader’s line about being the first of his family “in a thousand generations” to attend college that he borrowed it. Neil Kinnock is best known in America as the man whose oratory Joe Biden plagiarised. At first, with due credit. Then, on television, without. The ensuing furore helped sink Mr Biden’s first run for the presidency.
The sense that Labour was being taken over by scary Marxists helped keep the party out of power for 18 years. He was never prime minister, but he paved the way for Tony Blair and 13 years of Labour rule from 1997. The DSA stumbled this week when Francesca Hong, who once called for abolishing the police, narrowly lost the Democratic nomination to be Wisconsin’s next governor.
This was made harder by Militant, a Marxist group that practised “entryism”: rather than running for office under their own banner, its cadres entered a larger party and sought to turn it far to the left—just as the DSA does with the Democrats. A Sunday Times reporter tacitly recorded Wall’s “civil war” comments; the Tories gleefully quoted them in campaign ads. The DSA is passionate about gay rights; Militant thought homosexuality was “a problem which will disappear under socialism”, in the paraphrase of Michael Crick, author of “Militant”, a fine book on the movement. But they could heed what Labour learned in its wilderness years: that utopias are not real, that gradualism is not betrayal and that the electorate are not “incidental onlookers”. A left-wing party must constantly prove “that its idealism is not lunacy”, as R.H. In America today, Lord Kinnock fears, it could be “prolonged, unimpeded Trumpism”.
It, too, is struggling with infiltrators: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a populist-left group that is on a roll. But candidates backed by the DSA are winning enough primaries, and making enough noise, to delight Republicans. The parallel with Britain in the 1980s is striking. Back then Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister, was enraging the left by curbing unions and privatising state-owned industries. (Maggie, unlike MAGA, believed in free markets.) Labour was desperate to unseat her, but first had to convince voters it was trustworthy. Unsurprisingly, Militant’s secret agenda did not remain secret. Britain in the 1980s had a gloriously muckraking press and a ruling party that played hardball, as a non-cricketing nation might put it. In the one big city that Militant ended up running, Liverpool, it brought lawlessness, fiscal ruin and endless scandal. There are differences between Britain then and America now. The DSA is not plotting a violent revolution. It is obsessed with opposing Israel, whereas Militant thought every global conflict could be soothed with socialism. What the two episodes have in common, though, is a small group with unpopular and potentially disastrous policies determined to foist them on a bigger party. For the DSA, the key insight has been that not many people vote in primaries, so a well-organised entryist group needs to win over only an impassioned few to capture a Democratic nomination. He set about expelling Militant members from Labour—no easy task when they hid their affiliation. Fainthearts accused him of conducting a witch-hunt. Nonsense, he retorted, Labour’s constitution clearly barred its party-within-a-party tactics. He had to persuade people, he remembers, that “even the broadest churches had walls and if they didn’t they ended up as heaps of rubble. He succeeded, eventually. The Democrats cannot simply plagiarise the Kinnock model. Their party is less centralised; its leaders cannot stop radicals from competing in primaries. Tawney, a historian, once put it. The alternative in Britain in the 1980s was a principled Conservative government with no effective opposition.
