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Keir Starmer is no longer Prime Minister because everyone agreed that his Prime Ministership was disgraceful shit and wants him gone. It is hard to think of a more thorough rebuke of Labour’s strategy. Said strategy consisting of trying to out-fascist the fascists by an all-out attack on trans rights (including banning youth trans health care, trans sports, and trans acess to public bathrooms) and a Trumpish crackdown on immigrants. Stunningly, this cynical, evil policy did not lead to a bonanza of peace and happiness. Instead, Labour experienced electoral collapse and fascists have been empowered; some of them staged brutal anti-immigrant pogroms in Northern Ireland this month.
The plan to undermine the right by giving the right everything it wants has failed. It must be the moment to try something new, right?
Alas, probably not right. Andy Burnham, Starmer’s likely successor, has followed Labour in going hard right on immigration and has refused to take a stand against the hideous assault on trans people. Instead he says that the new brutal regime of trans discrimination should be implemented “in the fairest and most compassionate way possible.” Thanks, Andy. That’s vision.
The centrist commitment to appeasing fascists is generally presented (not least by centrists) as an electoral imperative undertaken for pragmatic reasons. But that doesn’t really explain why the centrists cling to fascism lite when fascism lite has so obviously been an electoral fiasco. Voters on the left have turned to the Greens in disgust over Labour’s feckless racism, while Reform fascists on the right continue to want fascism from fascists, not fascism lite from people who claim not to be fascists.
When your electoral theory is proved wrong, you change your electoral theory. But that’s not what Labour is doing, which makes you wonder if it really is an electoral theory, or whether it’s something else.
Maybe they’re bigots
At Liberal Currents, Toby Buckle explains Labour’s inability to adjust as a function of radical centrist ideology.
One of the many failings of reactionary centrism is its utter unfalsifiability: if you lose an election you have to move to the right on social issues to win next time. If you win an election you have to move to the right to govern. If things are going well politically it means it’s working. If they’re not, you need to give more ground. Appeasement, for them, is something reasoned from, not reasoned to. Reactionary centrism cannot fail, it can only be failed. This makes it a hopelessly exploitable strategy: if you are committed to giving your enemies what they want, they learn pretty quickly to just keep asking for stuff. In an age where neo-fascism is on the rise, this is a very dangerous operating software to have running on a politician’s brain.
What Buckle is describing is motivated reasoning; centrist know the answer they want and back and fill to get it.
But that still leaves open the question, what is doing the motivating? What is the unspoken driver of the mental equation in which every input results in the output “more fascism”?
Buckle provides the right answer. Centrists would prefer the votes of cishet white male coal miners (or cishet white male anyones) to those of women, LGBT people, and/or non white people. Or as Buckle says:
A common feature of all of the worst elements on our side—from reactionary centrists like Starmer, to centrist columnists in the US, to anti-alarmists who scold us for being scared of Trump, the dirtbag left who can’t get over their hatred of ‘normie resist libs’—is the contempt they have for the people who actually vote for centre-left parties in the 21st century.
Buckle concludes, “This, too, is gender”—and he could have just as easily said, “This, too, is race.”
Either way, it’s not quite true that Starmer has “no core values whatsoever” as Buckle argues elsewhere in the essay. This is a common way to ding centrists, but I think it can obscure the bigotry which Bukle rightly identifies behind those utilitarian glasses.
Or to put it another way, it’s fairly clear that one of Starmer’s deepest core values is the belief that the fascists are right. Not perhaps, on the full extent of their genocidal program. But in their basic assertion that certain people are more fully human than others, and in their identification of cishet white men able-bodied non immigrants as the most fully human, they have, in Starmer’s view, the right of it. If you believe that every situation requires more fascist appeasement, then it makes sense to identify you not as a misguided foe of fascism, but as a fascist with, perhaps, some minor reservations.
People believe what they do
To clarify, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Starmer believed in fascism deep in his heart and then adopted fascist policies. Often it works the other way; if you adopt fascist policies, motivated reasoning will encourage you to justify those policies by hating marginalized people. Pragmatic discrimination and internal hatred are intertwined. This is only one reason why it is dangerous to start down the road of hate. To get back you have to acknowledge to yourself that you have done evil, and people would rather do almost anything than admit that.
You can see the dynamic in the infamous conversation between Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and Charlie Kirk about trans issues, hosted on Newsom’s stupid podcast.
Charlie Kirk is a far right Christofascist, and an open anti trans bigot. In choosing to have Kirk on his podcast, Newsom was already signaling that he believed that Kirk’s views were reasonable and worth debating. He also signaled that he wanted to position himself as a centrist for the 2028 presidential contest in hopes (I guess?) of winning the big pro Charlie Kirk Democratic primary vote.
Starting from that point, what followed was disgusting, but not surprising. Here’s a transcript of their interchange on trans issues. It starts after Newsom asks Kirk for advice on broadening Democrat’s appeal.
Kirk:
Get better ideas, governor. For example, you have an opportunity to run to the middle and see this man’s office, you’re talking to me, of all people. So you right now should come out and be like, You know what? The young man who’s about to win the state Championship in the long jump in female sports, that shouldn’t happen. You, as the governor, should step out and say no.
Newsom:
No, and I appreciate.
Kirk:
But would you do something like that? Would you say no men in female sports?
Newsom:
Well, I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair.
Kirk:
Would you speak out against this young man, [name withheld], who right now is going to win the state Championship in the long term? I can see you wrestling with it.
Newsom:
No, I’m not wrestling. I’m not relation with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you. By the way, someone with four kids, I think-And two daughters, right? Two daughters. And I have a daughter, too. And a wife that went, God forbid, to Stanford and played on the junior national soccer team, and a guy who got into college only because it was left-handed and could throw a baseball a little bit or hit the ball for a little bit. So I revere sports. And so the issue of fairness is completely legit. And I saw that. The last couple of years, boy, did I saw how you guys were able to weaponize that issue at another level?
Kirk:
Not weaponize.
Newsom:
Weaponize may be a pejorative, you’re right.
I removed the name of the athlete that Kirk is misgendering, because she doesn’t deserve to have her name and existence constantly demeaned by disgusting bigots.
But note that Newsom himself does not make that point. He does not object to Kirk misgendering her. He does not shame him or rebuke him for using Newsom’s platform to attack a high school student and a child. He has invited Kirk on to have a civil discussion, and so, rather than offer even a token objection, he aligns himself with Kirk in the name of civility even when Kirk uses brutally uncivil, cruel slurs directed, again, at a child who is Newsom’s constituent.
Rather than pushing back, Newsom starts babbling in an effort, not to convince Kirk that trans people are human beings, but in an effort to convince himself they are not. He reframes Kirk’s slurs in less ugly terms, insisting that “it’s an issue of fairness…It’s deeply unfair.” Then he brings up his wife and daughter, urging people—and urging himself—to identify with his family members, who have in no way been threatened or slurred, rather than with the child being targeted for harassment and death threats on his own podcast.
Reading that transcript, you are watching a centrist embrace bigotry in real time. Newsom is, strategically, asking a far-right activist for advice on campaigning and reaching young men. Kirk tells him that he should be a bigot, using explicitly bigoted slurs.
And Newsom responds by rationalizing the bigotry the way bigots do—by decentering the person being targeted, and by substituting himself and his family (and particularly women in his family) as vulnerable and endangered. Suddenly it is not trans children of color who are the victims of bigotry, but white adult men. Suddenly Newsom isn’t doing bigotry to strategically defeat fascism. He is doing bigotry because in his view it, and fascism, are morally right.
How to break the doom loop?
I don’t know how to solve the UK’s problems; they are in a really bad place.
The badness of that place, though, does suggest that we ourselves may have some better paths forward. Newsom’s exercise in hobnobbing with the fascists has received a lot of (rightful) criticism, and while some 2028 contenders (like Buttigieg and Harris) have toyed with less virulent forms of his anti-trans bigotry, others (Pritzker, AOC) very much have not.
More, I think that Trump has given the entire Democratic party a strong incentive to push the party left through procedural reform. Expanding the court will mean that Democrats can pass campaign finance reform. But it will also mean that you’re going to have a court that believes in Roe and privacy rights and as a result is very unlikely to let things get as bad as they have in the UK on trans issues.
Which is another way of saying—bigotry is a vicious circle, but fighting bigotry can be a virtuous one. If you prevent people from doing bigoted things, and censure them for saying bigoted garbage, they often convince themselves that bigotry is wrong, even if they were wobbly on that previously. We do not have to replicate the UK doom loop—or the Democratic doom loop on immigration which in part got us here. If we manage to ride Trump’s unpopularity to real power and real change, more change, and better things, start to be possible.
I also think that real change may be helped along if we are willing to say (as Buckle does) that the failure of Starmer, and the failure of Newsom, is not just that they are empty suits; it’s not just that they’ve misjudged pragmatic strategy. Their failure is that they’re bigots. Being more successful, being smarter, means rejecting fascism, whether it clothes itself in vulgarian drag or wears a bland suit.
Who's to say after at least 30 years of centrism and trying to be Republican/conservative lite not being successful that if we do it *this time* it won't result in decades of electoral and policy success? Surely not us leftists', whose vision is an obvious failure despite never have been tried.
I think you're underestimating the role of geography in Labour's mistakes: specifically the "Red Wall" of villages and towns in England's former coal mining country, that Labour feels sentimentally attached to and also believes that it must win in order to have a chance of power.
Most such areas are very socially conservative (as dangerous work like coal mining fuelled patriarchy) and flocked to Farage's Reform UK, once such a right-wing but not Tory (as the Tories were blamed for closing the mines) alternative existed to vote for.
December 2019 will have convinced many Labour politicians that Labour had no future if it wrote off the Red Wall and becomes a purely metropolitan-focused party. Labour under Starmer likely leaned into anti-immigration as it was clearly popular in the Red Wall (as shown by the strong Faragist showings even prior to their local election triumphs), and because they didn't see any strong economic offer they could make to such places.
Rising global interest rates (due to Trump's profligacy) meant they weren't in a position where they could bribe them with higher welfare benefits (they lost a huge amount of support from trying to balance the books by means-testing winter fuel payments for retirees), while villages and small towns established purely to extract coal (and that were poorly educated due to brain drain) were of little appeal to employers.