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by untog 2885 days ago
Sigh. No. Just a few differences:

- Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party. Neither Hillary nor Bernie have that position in the Democratic party, because it doesn't exist. A party's presidential candidate is not the same as their party leader. And the method by which each is elected is radically different.

- Corbyn was already leader when these events happened. This is the equivalent of Bernie winning the primary (which as mentioned above is already a poor analogy) and then being lied to about what the DNC was doing in outreach for the presidential election. So, not something that mirrors reality at all.

- Bernie Sanders was not a member of the Democratic party before seeking to become it's presidential candidate. Corbyn has been a member of the Labour party for decades.

- Corbyn represents the resurgence of a relatively old wing of the Labour party, not the beginning of a new movement like Sanders.

Basically every part of this dynamic is different. They're both very interesting to study in their own right, and trying to conflate the two to make a political point does nothing justice.

1 comments

In both cases, the party establishment tried to prevent a candidate on the left from gaining power through deceitful means. They tried to rig things against Bernie and Sanders.

That’s the comparison being drawn here. Does that make sense?

(Yes, the details are different as the mechanics of these party systems are very different.)

To the extent that the comparison is so absurdly simplistic that it doesn't do justice to either of the situations it's trying to describe, sure, it makes sense.

Staff within the Labour Party running ads to deceive their party leader into believing they were running a more progressive message than they actually were is literally nothing like anything that happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016.