The left shouldn’t get too excited about the US mid-term election results

There is much jubilation in left wing circles over the gains made by the Democrats in the US. But the Democratic Party can’t really be considered ‘leftwing’ in a sense that would be understood in Europe. Many of the newly elected Democrats would have found comfortable homes in John Major’s administration had they been English.

As Gerard Baker points out today in the Times “the elections endorsed a shift in the Democratic Party. A remarkable number of the Democrats elected this week are anti-abortion and pro-military”.

So these elections shouldn’t act as a ‘wake up call to Brown and Blair’ as some of their more vociferous critics have suggested (in that quaintly clichéd way beloved by so many self-righteous political extremists). In fact they represent a return towards the centre ground in American politics; probably more centre-right than centre-left and certainly not the dawn of a socialist people’s republic in the world’s only remaining super-power...