Folks who typically break their arms congratulating themselves for a nuanced political understanding are going to take the easy Corbyn/Sanders:Johnson/Trump comparison, and they're right that this was a devastating blow for the socialist politics. But the looming Brexit issue doesn't have an analogy in America and that's really going to make the above comparison fall a bit flat.

Labour activists like Owen Jones were helpfully candid last night for those of us who try to follow this stuff but don't have the broad familiarity with British politics. His view was that the coalition they tried to build to float Labour turned out to be too heavy a trick, and it wasn't a coalition that mimes American Dem Left and American Dem Center, it was around Brexit. A Labour coalition that brought together the remain position and the Brexit position in the demand for a new referendum based on a specific deal was too tough to pull off.

It's a political failure, to be sure. But there have been successful left/liberal coalitions in some other western European elections lately (Portugal, for instance) but they don't speak English there so we aren't as likely to view them as a close approximation of our political culture.