The hard left meeting the hard right is an old political story, as Hitler understood in calling his party the National Socialists. So in these days of turbulence it’s no surprise that the leftist supporters of Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn should find common cause with the rightist backers of Donald Trump. They like Vladimir Putin’s Russia even as he flattens Aleppo; they are anti-globalism; they are anti-establishment; they oppose or are skeptical of NATO, the cornerstone of the Western alliance; and they see a conspiracy of what Trump has called “global financial powers” behind everything.

Then there’s the fact that nearly half of female Labour MPs have accused Corbyn of failing to stop “disgusting and totally unacceptable” abuse of women by his supporters. One difference exists, however. The movement of “Corbynistas” — an alliance of young leftist dreamers and old guard Leninists who have demolished Tony Blair’s centrist “New Labour” as comprehensively as Trump has hijacked the Republican Party — embraces an ideology. It’s anti-American and anti-Western and broadly anti-capitalist, much in the mode of Cold War Soviet sympathizers.

Trumpism, by contrast, is an anger-driven, conspiracy-fueled, scapegoat-manipulating, ideology-free movement dedicated to the elevation by any means of one man, portrayed as a savior, to the most powerful office in the world.

Read the full article at the New York Times.