Smiles Across the Pond

Change the party, win the country, save the world. No pressure.

British elections on the 4th of July? What a year this is.

And - for a change this week - they provided uplifting news for the Center Left. The retooled Labour Party rolled to a dominant victory, sending Conservatives to their worst electoral performance since before 1776.

Of the many contemporary dynamics the Founders did not anticipate, getting outstripped by Great Britain on the “liberal democracy” front might top the list. But here we are.

As countries across the globe face resurgent right-wing movements (see: EU elections, France, Germany, Canada, and the United States), the UK is home to the most successful Center Left rebound, with Keir Starmer leading his party to the largest parliamentary majority in history.

We’ll have more soon on the international overlap of the Center Left’s charge to stem the tide of authoritarianism. This global story is being told forcefully by Yair Zivan, editor of Why Centrism is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization, recently highlighted in his piece in The Atlantic titled The Center Must Hold and by The Economist on “Why political centrists must rediscover their passion”.

But the prime example is what happened yesterday in the UK.

Roundabout Victory

How the Center Left achieved this victory through the Labour Party offers a vision for democracy defenders around the world, and especially for Democrats here in the former colonies.

We have a straightforward theory of the 2024 election: Democrats – should “say the words” that appeal to moderate voters. We have argued Democrats must distance themselves from the Far Left to appeal to the crucial bloc in the middle that decides elections. For months, polling suggested this approach would work, as it did for Bill Clinton in 1996. There is academic research that supports the approach as well. 

But the strongest evidence may be happening right across the pond, in a country from which we once sought to distance ourselves in the pursuit of happiness. As we commemorated this effort yesterday with fireworks and hot dogs, Labour won a landslide victory against the Tories. How Labour did it is instructive for us, and worth unpacking. Because British politics have tracked American politics in broad strokes for decades.

Let’s start in the 1990s, when Labour elevated Tony Blair as its moderate leader. In step with Clinton, Blair pioneered the politics of triangulation (they shared consultants), and rolled out the “New Labour” brand which focused on reducing crime, using markets to produce social benefits, and reducing government spending. 

Blair led Labour to enormous majorities and successfully implemented expansions of the welfare state that dramatically reduced child poverty. Blair was a centrist, and angered the Left with his agenda. But he led the UK for 10 years and remains the longest-serving Labour leader in British history. 

However, Blair and his Labour successor, Gordon Brown were saddled with both the fallout from the Iraq War that Blair championed and the 2007 financial crisis. Brown lost in 2010, beginning Labour’s long wilderness era. Labour has not won a general election since 2005, and the most recent one, in 2019, wasn’t even close (Tories won 44% to Labour’s 32%). 

Much like the United States, the UK was hit with a wave of anti-immigrant populism that culminated in the historic Brexit vote in 2016, the same year Trump won. The Brexit result shocked political commentators and, similar to here, led to a leftward lurch and a resurgence of leftist activism. 

However, unlike the United States in 2020, where the Far Left was unsuccessful in contesting the Democratic primary election, the British Left gained the reins of power in the form of Far Left leader Jeremy Corbyn. In the UK, leftist activists have more influence over the nominating process, and they were able to install Corbyn. 

Corbyn is an unreconstructed socialist who makes Bernie Sanders look like a moderate. He supports nationalizing utilities, energy companies, and railways, and implementing confiscatory tax rates.  He is deeply anti-Israel, saying that Hamas is "an organization dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region.” His campaign was managed by “Momentum” strategists who have ties to Justice Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. Corbyn, promising to mobilize youth turnout, instead led Labour to two consecutive electoral defeats, the latter the worst election defeat the party had faced since 1935.

But what happened next again proves our theory of the case. Labour decided it was more interested in winning than in pushing a Far Left agenda. Moderate Keir Starmer (once a more radical young man who shifted to the center) took over the party and immediately began removing its Far Left staff and members who had fomented anti-Semitism.

Labour in the UK has had a deeper anti-Semitism problem than Democrats in the United States, and Starmer was quick to sack members of the party who had engaged in egregious acts of anti-Semitism. These members were concentrated in the left wing of the party. One member was sacked for sharing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and two more members were suspended, one for saying that Israel had “green-lighted” the Hamas attack on October 7th. Starmer also suspended former Labour leader Corbyn because the anti-Semitism problem during his leadership of the party and expelled four Far Left factions from the party. Other leftists simply understood the direction of the party and resigned. The result was to show the British electorate that Labour had abandoned its brief flirtation with Marxism, and was returning to the Blairite tradition that had proved so electorally popular.

Not everyone recognized the electoral promise in Starmer’s efforts. In 2021, Jacobin wrote,

Keir Starmer has been leader of the Labour Party for almost eighteen months. Despite some recent narrowing in the polls, he still consistently trails behind the Conservatives, and few people seriously believe he is capable of winning the next general election.

The central purpose of Starmer’s leadership, however, has not been preparing for electoral success, but rather consolidating the control of Labour’s hard-right factions over the party apparatus. On that front, his record has been one of roaring success.

Now, three years later, Labour is on track for its greatest electoral victory in history, even greater than what it won under Blair. What Jacobin failed to realize is that reducing the power of the Left within Labour was a precondition to electoral success. It’s hard to overstate how wrong the Jacobin left has been. They have written more than 200 pieces on how Starmer was dooming Labour, while Starmer just won a historic majority. Here’s one example:

Starmer did not win it by “mobilizing the base” or by offering “bold policies.” Rather, he has won over swing voters by promising stability and centrism. 

Labour Leader Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech still resonates today (we wouldn’t mind hearing a Democrat borrow from it - properly cited of course):

Comrades, 463 resolutions have been submitted to this Conference on policy issues, committed honestly, earnestly, and a lot of thought has gone into them. Of those 463, 300 refer to something called the next Labour Government and they refer to what they want that next Labour Government to do. I want to take on many of those commitments.  I want to meet many of those demands. I want to respond to many of those calls, in practice – not in words, but in actions. But there is of course a pre-condition to honouring those or any other undertaking that we give. That pre-condition is unavoidable, total and insurmountable, and it is a pre-condition that in this movement we do not want to surmount. It is the pre-condition that we win a general election. 

Because you are from the people, because you are of the people, because you live with the same realities as everybody else lives with, implausible promises don’t win victories.  I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions.  They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, mis-placed, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

The Kinnock speech is worth reading in full. 

Starmer’s strength reveals a lesson for American Democrats: taking on the extremes within one’s own party sends a valuable signal to the electorate – a declaration of independence, of sorts. We need a Center Left faction willing to fight against the excesses of the Far Left. And the center is the path to victory, on both sides of the Atlantic. Labour tried the progressive strategy of “impossible promises” and lost, twice in a row.

Now Labour has embraced the center, explicitly contrasted themselves with the Far Left, and won a historic victory. Following the lead of their American cousins, the Brits have tossed out an out-of-touch Tory government.

American Democrats should return the favor by embracing the center, and once again win an against-the-odds fight over tyranny. It’s self-evident.

Imperfect Heroes Winging It

These strategic choices of parties are important. But we have also been reminded this week of flaws in our leaders, and in how history can turn on personalities. We are living in real time watching the decisions of imperfect humans.

Liz Cheney shared a speech from the historian David McCullough yesterday which stressed this fact:

Very often we are taught history as if it were predetermined, and if that way of teaching begins early enough and is sustained through our education, we begin to think that it had to have happened as it did. We think that there had to have been a Revolutionary War, that there had to have been a Declaration of Independence, that there had to have been a Constitution, but never was that so. In history, chance plays a part again and again. Character counts over and over. Personality is often the determining factor in why things turn out the way they do.

These were not “experienced revolutionaries”:

We tend to see them—Adams, Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, George Washington—as figures in a costume pageant; that is often the way they’re portrayed. And we tend to see them as much older than they were because we’re seeing them in the portraits by Gilbert Stuart and others when they were truly the Founding Fathers—when they were president or chief justice of the Supreme Court and their hair, if it hadn’t turned white, was powdered white. We see the awkward teeth. We see the elder statesmen.

At the time of the Revolution, they were all young. It was a young man’s–young woman’s cause. George Washington took command of the Continental Army in the summer of 1775 at the age of 43. He was the oldest of them. Adams was 40. Jefferson was all of 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Rush—who was the leader of the antislavery movement at the time, who introduced the elective system into higher education in this country, who was the first to urge the humane treatment of patients in mental hospitals—was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, none of them had any prior experience in revolutions; they weren’t experienced revolutionaries who’d come in to take part in this biggest of all events. They were winging it. They were improvising.

More than usual, we are improvising these days.

The path forward for how Democrats should run is self-evident, but who runs is not. There is no experienced revolutionary waiting in the wings. For some questions we can’t just look across the pond.