The British election -- lessons for Americans?

Does the British election result on December 12 constitute a warning to the US Democratic party that it should avoid moving to the left?  I don't believe so.  Almost every factor in that election was so different from the issues and conditions in our own election next year that almost no relevant comparisons are possible.

First, the overwhelmingly dominant issue in the British election was Brexit -- the restoration of national independence and full democracy.  There's no equivalent issue in the US.  The US is not subject to the rule of a corrupt, un-democratic, multi-national quasi-state with the ability to interfere constantly in our internal affairs and to override our own laws and policies.  If we were, obviously breaking free from it would be the dominant issue in US politics, but we aren't.

Second, the British election didn't involve any equivalent of the main issue in next year's US election -- the need to remove a grossly-unqualified and dangerously-unstable president who promotes bigotry and division, actively sabotages our relations with other democracies, and appears to be in thrall to a foreign dictator.  Claims of similarities between Trump and Boris Johnson (beyond a trivial physical resemblance) are flat-out absurd.  Johnson is an experienced politician whose record as mayor of London shows him to be a fairly typical moderate conservative, if more charismatic than most.  If anything, he's more comparable to Reagan than Trump, if you have to reach for a US analogy at all.  A better British parallel to Trump would be Nigel Farage who, while he deserves great credit for his long leadership in the fight for Brexit, holds crank views on a number of issues and has little sense of political realism.  But Farage has never come anywhere near being a serious candidate for prime minister.

Britain's main parties also bear little resemblance to their supposed US counterparts.  The British Conservative party recognizes anthropogenic global warming and the need to combat it, accepts the existing system of universal government health coverage, and supports abortion rights.  It was a Conservative government that legalized gay marriage in Britain.  Britain's Conservatives are not dominated by religious extremists as the US Republicans are; Britain has far too few hard-line religionists to form the base of a major party (and those it does have are mostly Muslim).  There are now 24 openly gay or bi Conservative members of Parliament -- can you imagine 24 openly gay Republicans in the House?  There's no equivalent of the fever-swamp reality-denial and ideological extremism that fester in the Republican base here.  Overall, the British Conservatives are probably a little to the left of moderate Democrats like Biden and Obama.  Johnson has actually moved the party toward the center on issues like public spending and the minimum wage.  NRO is decidedly unimpressed.

As for the Labour party, the main controversy surrounding it is the repulsive anti-Semitism pervading its ranks -- and no, both-siderists notwithstanding, the other major British parties do not have the same problem.  Those parties do have occasional individual bigots (as the US Democrats do), while in Labour it's a pervasive and systemic problem (like racism in the US Republican party).  Again, there just isn't a good parallel here between Labour and the US Democrats.

There is one major issue I would say does hold a warning -- mass immigration and the tendency of political elites (of all major parties, not just the left) to react to voters' concerns about it with scolding and name-calling rather than listening to them.  Such condescension inevitably drives voters toward fringe radicals who do listen to them.  This issue is growing in importance all over the developed world, not just the UK and US -- though it carries more weight in Europe, with its much higher population density and long history of relatively homogenous societies.

Britain is a different country with a different culture, different politics, and different dominating issues.  It's always tempting to interpret any major story from a foreign country in terms of your own concerns.  This US militant Catholic site took the British result as a rebuke to abortion, even though that topic hardly came up during the campaigning, and all British parties basically accept abortion rights.  It would be difficult to think of an issue less relevant to the outcome.

There are various arguments that can be made for and against a strong shift to the left by US Democrats, but the British election doesn't have any light to shed on that question.