Corbynism Can’t Happen Here

Even though the polls always suggested the likelihood of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in yesterday’s British elections, his continued presence as the head of the Labour Party filled me with a great sense of foreboding. The local press excavated from Corbyn’s not-so-distant past videos that revealed him to be, at best, indifferent to anti-Semitism: as he for the moral character of an imam who had accused Jews of drinking the blood of children; as he a mural artist who’d painted a cabal of hook-nosed bankers; as he Zionists of lacking “English irony.” When confronted—he tended to express irritation rather than contrition.