Character Assassination and Bullying: On the vote in the UK

I take two lessons away:

1. Character assassination works. Jeremy Corbyn is not a racist antisemite. Boris Johnson is. Corbyn lost votes because of well-publicized lies; Johnson did not.
2. Bullies are popular, even among the people they are bullying.

I look at this loss, and I see ghosts of the losses of Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, John Kerry to W. Bush, and Al Gore to W. Bush. The exact same pattern: minor failings of a liberal candidate of good character are blown up, falsified, and endlessly reported, while major failings of conservative candidate of foul character are glossed over and buried. Those liberal candidates never knew what hit them.

Time to change our strategies. We need to fight bullying and character assassination, and that will be the subject of at least one more post.

And, 100 years after the failure of the Second International to unify against World War I,  nationalism still trumps class consciousness. Many people don't vote for bread and butter, even when they're starving.