Transcript: Britain’s Floundering Labor Party Is a Warning to U.S Dems

This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 19 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is The New Republic show Right Now I’m the host, Perry Bacon, and I’m honored to be joined this morning by Toby Buckle. He’s a writer for, among other outlets, Liberal Currents, and of course The New Republic. He’s based in Scotland, and he’s published a lot of pieces both about American politics but also about British politics and connections between those two entities. We’re going to talk about some parallels between what the Labour Party in Britain is doing and what is happening in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and some comparisons and some analogies and so on. So, Toby, thanks for joining me. Welcome.

Toby Buckle: Cheers, Perry. I should say I was a pretty devout listener to FiveThirtyEight back in the day. I used to do every podcast every week for a bit. So it’s a pleasure to actually meet you.

Bacon: Great to meet you too. Those were good times. And those guys, just for a plug, I think Galen Druke is now doing a podcast of his own, and Nate Silver comes over from time to time. They’re doing a great job there.

I assume our audience is not experts in British politics, but I think a lot of things happening in British politics are worth thinking about in terms of America, comparing it to. So I want to talk about the current prime minister of Britain, named Keir Starmer, and he’s sort of governing in a center-left direction. I want to talk about that a little bit, but talk about first how he got there, the person he replaced. How did he become the head of the Labour Party?

Buckle: Yeah. Cool. So we’re coming out of a very long period of Conservative rule, about 14 years, starting with David Cameron, and all through…

Bacon: So Tony Blair loses, and then I guess his successor lost, right? Gordon Brown.

Buckle: Yeah. Gordon Brown lost. Gordon Brown was in office not for a full term. And then he was replaced by David Cameron. And then we had five Conservative prime ministers. Towards the tail end of that, the leader of the Labour Party was someone called Jeremy Corbyn. He was a sort of left socialist, even by British socialist terms. Pretty left leader. As a very rough analog, maybe like a British Bernie Sanders, but much more left than Bernie, and I would say worse than Bernie.

Corbyn lost two elections. One closely, one disastrously, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. The first one he lost, he lost, but it was close. The second one he lost was like a blowout. It was the worst result for us in a hundred years or so. And after that, he was replaced by Keir, who had not, I think interestingly for Keir, had not had a long history in politics before this. He was a lawyer before this, head of the Crown Prosecution Service. He ran on a sort of left, but not as left platform as Corbyn. He ran as like, I’ll still be left-wing, but not as completely out there, unelectable as Corbyn was. And since then he’s gone right and right. He won the last British general election quite convincingly, 18 months ago.

Perry Bacon: In 2024, like a few months before the U.S. election. Right?

Buckle: Yeah, only about, I want to say only about four or five months before. Don’t quite remember that.

Bacon: And my understanding is while he positioned himself as not being that different than Corbyn when he took over, by the election, it was becoming more clear he was doing a moderation thing more broadly. Was it obvious before the election that he was moving the party, moving the Labour Party more to the right than maybe he had previewed at the beginning, or is that wrong?

Buckle: Yes. He definitely moderated by the election. Both substantively and symbolically, there was a lot of policies that were toned down, but also just the presentation. This is when the Labour Party really started everything they did, they had a big British flag behind them. And Starmer just sort of looks, not to be too personal about it, but he just sort of looks like a middle manager. And so he has very like centrist vibes to him. What I would say though is yes, they moderated before the election, but actually in a lot of ways, the big policy changes have come since the election.

Bacon: Let me focus on the election first. So what did he change before the election? What were some of the policy switches between Corbyn and Starmer pre-election?

Buckle: So one of the things that they’ve been, I think, really concerned about: the messaging and positioning on Israel and on antisemitism, because one of the things that took Corbyn down is, this is controversial, but he was widely felt to have not done enough to address antisemitism within the party. Corbyn is, as many lefties are, a very strong critic of Israel. He was widely felt to not have done enough on antisemitism within the party. Whether the man himself is an antisemite, I don’t know. But that was a big thing. And so a lot of it was really repositioning away from that.

There was an evolution along culture war issues, so principally trans rights and immigration, where you could tell the Starmer team was very, very uncomfortable taking progressive positions in those spaces. Right? And so both of those had evolved somewhat prior to the election. But the real radical swings came post-election.

Perry Bacon: On the economy, I guess since he was trying to present as more pro-growth and less redistributive, I felt he was giving Tony Blair, Bill Clinton 1990s vibes to me, even pre-election on the economy: “we want to be pro-growth.” Is that the way to think about it?

Toby Buckle: Pro-growth, but without a plan to achieve growth. One thing we have that sort of hangs over all British politics that has no American equivalent is Brexit. Now, Corbyn had a complicated relationship with Brexit. He opposed it, but in a sort of complicated way. Starmer had a complicated relationship with Brexit but by the time he had essentially decided the basic [deal] that we hammered out for Brexit is going to remain in place. Right. And two, the Tory—the Tories are Conservatives—the Conservative framework on tax and spending is also going to remain in place.

And so you were committed to a reasonably low-tax regime, but also to balanced budgets. And those three together essentially meant there was no way really to invest more money to fix public services. You were kind of locked into this basically Conservative approach to the economy where you nickel and dime all the public sector stuff in order to keep taxes low and to keep the Brexit project intact. And I think they assumed that just being a bit more sensible than the previous Conservative government, which to be fair is not hard, but being a bit more sensible than the past Conservative government would kind of fix the economy by itself without addressing any of these underlying structural issues that were slowing our growth. And it hasn’t worked. The economy was cack beforehand, it’s cack now, and now it’s their economy and they’re being blamed for it.

Bacon: So the run-up to this 2024 election, I remember this was covered in the British press very much, when in the American press there was certainly some consultants from this group called Third Way, a famous centrist group in the U.S., who were, according to Politico—again, American reporters—advising Starmer. Was it clear to you at that point that Starmer was getting advice from these sort of American consultants who in the U.S. are always pushing a sort of Bill Clintonism? Because that was reported in the American press, that there was collaboration between Kamala Harris’s staff and Starmer’s staff about centrism being useful in both places.

Buckle: Yeah. I mean, there was certainly talks between them, I’d almost be hesitant to overplay that. Because the centrism that Starmer has ended up going for is well in advance of anything that Kamala Harris did. He’s gone much, much further down that road. I think there was definitely talks.

Bacon: You don’t see Third Way as imposing something on Starmer. You don’t think that’s the case at all?

Buckle: I mean, I think they found their way to it fairly organically. I’m sure there was talks and people met. What I would say is it’s a similar philosophy. I think the philosophy is, in both countries, we’re dealing with a rising far right, and one way of understanding what that is, is it’s a backlash to social liberalism. It’s “woke went too far,” and then people got sick of it and then they voted for fascists. That’s sort of the story that they have in their head.

Bacon: We’ll come back to why that’s wrong in a little bit.

Buckle: So then if that’s the story that you have in your head, then the solution becomes, well, we’ve got to moderate, particularly around these culture war issues. I think that was a feeling for many in the Labour Party well predating that election. There was a very, very active opposition to Corbyn, both I think for legitimate and illegitimate reasons, through his entire tenure. So to these elections that Corbyn lost. There were always people saying, this is not what we need to be doing. We need to be doing this moderation thing.

Bacon: But Corbyn, my position, his politics were much more economic left than social left. Is that wrong? Was he both left? Because Bernie Sanders is known for being more economic left than social left, but was Corbyn saying trans kids should play basketball in 12th grade? Was he doing social liberalism in a way?

Buckle: It’s a good question. And you’re quite right, Corbyn is not socially illiberal at all. But was certainly much more known for the economic stuff. I think the thing about this idea of like, it’s “woke gone too far,” is it doesn’t track to anything real, and it’s not really based on anything. So there’s a lot of people in the sort of most right-wing element of the Labour Party, it gets called Blue Labour, who are very, very anti-woke and does that come from Corbyn? Does it come from anything real? No, it’s because they don’t like trans people, I think.

Bacon: So in the U.S. we had Black Lives Matter. We had a very active trans movement. It made sense that there was a reaction to it because there is a social justice left in the U.S. actually. So let’s come to… Starmer wins this big election, and this is a victory that appeared to be kind of overwhelming, right? And talk about the way the first-past-the-post system works. In some ways, they won a very low percentage of the vote and a very high percentage of the seats. Talk about that a little bit.

Buckle: Yeah. So to maybe really break this down for American audiences, imagine there’s no presidency and there’s no Senate. And whoever wins the House of Representatives appoints the president, right? That’s our system. So, but then also imagine you have a quasi multi-party system, right? So you have all these districts, but instead of just Republican and Democrat, it might be three parties, it might be four, but it’s not proportional. If you get 20 percent of the popular vote, that does not mean you get 20 percent of the seats. It depends how that 20 percent is distributed between all these districts, right?

So you can get popular vote seat splits, that isn’t what happened here. Labour did win the popular vote, but there was a pretty big discrepancy where they got about a third of the popular vote and they got about two-thirds of the seats, which was pretty wild. Now the Tories did even worse than this sort of smaller parties that claimed… and we also have regional parties. So there’s the Scottish National Party, there’s a Welsh National Party called… I’m not going to even try and explain the entire British party system. But yes. So they’d come in, they have a massive majority.

Bacon: They have a massive majority, but they actually don’t have a massive popular will. If only a third of the country votes for you, it means they might have overperformed their position, is what I’m trying to get at here. Is that possible?

Buckle: Yeah, definitely. And I mean it depends what you want to count. I mean, at the end of the day in our system, it’s seats that count, right? You win by winning seats. So I don’t want to on that front be too hard on the Starmer people. They won under the rules of the game that exist. Whether those are good rules or not is a completely different question. They run under the rules that exist. What it does mean is they’ve got a lot of seats with really narrow majorities. There’s a lot of Labour MPs where you breathe the wrong way and that majority would fall, and so it’s deep but shallow. It’s the position that they’re in.

Bacon: And so from my perspective, what I’ve seen is that they’ve really focused on immigration and being, look how tough we’re on immigration and trans issues. Look how intolerant of trans people. That’s my perception. Talk about what they’ve done once they got in office.

Buckle: Yeah. So on the economy, nothing. There’s been some stuff around workers’ rights. I think the best bits are they’ve had a policy of wanting to build a lot of new homes and they’ve been fairly green energy. That’s the progressive stuff. They’ve not, as they committed to, they’ve not challenged the Brexit project and they’ve more or less not challenged this Conservative tax and spend. So they’ve not been able to do a lot about the fact that public services are underfunded because they’ve locked themselves in this position.

A far-right party, which is called Reform, significantly rises. They’re leading in the polls right now and the Labour approach, their political approach has been, we need to go after those voters. And the main thing that they’re concerned about is immigration. The U.S. Democrats will talk out of both sides of their mouths on immigration. They’ll say, look, we welcome legal immigration, but we do need to be tougher on illegal border crossing. Labour has gone significantly further in that. In a speech in May of last year, Starmer said that the main problem facing the country was immigration, by which he meant legal migration.

Bacon: Okay. Biden would never say that, right?

Buckle: No. And he went on to say, and I will directly quote, that “legal migration had done incalculable damage to the country” that one of the main priorities of his government was to bring it down. And they’ve introduced a host of new measures to make the lives of legal migrants in this country—we’re talking people who are here working for our health system, we’re talking people who are here because they’re married to a British citizen—to make those people’s lives more expensive, more insecure, and more difficult.

And then also, I would say this is perhaps less politically consequential than immigration, but it’s still a pretty profound policy change. They were elected in 2024 on a pledge to make trans people’s lives easier. They pretty quickly scrapped that. They then went on to do some stuff like ban puberty blockers at the urging of the right-wing press. They are now in the process of introducing one of the most authoritarian bathroom bills in the developed world that would ban trans people from accessing any single-sex space. So a trans woman cannot use the women’s toilets, but equally, and I think this isn’t well understood, also cannot use the men’s.

Bacon: Where would they go?

Buckle: Yeah. And then the question becomes, what if an establishment only has male or female? So it’s de facto a prohibition on trans people existing in public. Republican governors have vetoed less than that.

Bacon: I was thinking that as you said it. This is the British Labour Party, which is supposed to be left of center or left of something. At least in theory.

Buckle: Yeah. So which is why I say, and I think this is probably the clearest example: this is well to the excess of what even your most annoying center Democrat has done. Gavin Newsom has talked out of both sides of his mouth on trans women in sports. He’s made some slightly unpleasant snarky jokes about trans people, and he’s gone on right-wing podcasts. He’s nowhere close to this. I’m not defending Gavin Newsom, but there is a mile of policy here.

I think what Labour offers is an example of if you took reactionary centrists in the U.S., people like… I think the most named one would be someone like Matt Yglesias. Ezra Klein used to be good, but now has said a lot of stuff about, we need to see it from their point of view. We need to meet them in the middle. Josh Barro, a lot of the stuff that gets said in the New York Times opinion page. If you took those people and gave them a political party and removed all constraints, and they just kept going, because one of the things about trying to appease the far right is it’s so bottomless. You say, okay, we’ll put some controls in on immigration. That doesn’t make them happy. Okay, well, we’ll reduce the number of legal migrants. That doesn’t make them happy. We’ll do it more, and you end up…

It’s not that the policies of the Labour government are center-left or even center. They’re far-right. A year or two ago, a national bathroom ban on any single-sex space would’ve been considered a far-right proposition. But the thing is, if your thing is we need to appease the cultural conservatives and we also don’t care about listening to progressives, you’re just going to be pulled. And I think what this Labour government shows as a lesson for Democrats is one, how fast you’ll be pulled. This has happened in 18 months. Normally when you get an ideological direction change in a political party, it’s decades. Bill Clinton was the capstone of a decade of work within the Democratic Party. This is 18 months. Arguably, most of the change has been within the last year. So one is how fast you’ll be pulled.

And then the other is how little it’ll work. The percentage of people who voted Reform at the last election who are now voting Labour, so the number that they’ve won over with this is zero percent. That’s a statistic. Meanwhile, Labour have lost 60 percent of their own voters since the last election. They won with 33 percent of the vote, which is not large, they’re at their lowest polling, they were on 16 percent. Right. More than half their coalition is gone.

And to put that in context, the Bernie or bust movement, which we have had so much handwringing over and so much animosity over in the U.S., was at most three or four percent of the Democratic Party coalition. The Labour Party has lost an order of magnitude more than that on its left flank. So it’s both been a disaster in terms of policy. We’ve got the worst of both worlds because it also has just not worked politically. It’s one thing to do some policies we don’t like if we win an election, but it doesn’t. So that’s where we are.

Bacon: Let me ask two questions. First of all, immigration, trans rights. Are there any other issues that specifically they are pushing to the right on that we should know about? I know those are the two I’ve read about as an American looking at it, but are there any other issues? There’s a few other issues that are in this reactionary centrist bag usually in the American context, but I wasn’t sure what’s going on in Britain.

Buckle: Those are the main two. If you want to mention policing, they have increased police powers, and there’s been a long-running controversy where they banned… they made membership of this group illegal, a group called Palestine Action, which I think was recently overturned in court. I think that is generally felt to have also been in the same sort of thing, so you could talk about that. But I would say immigration and trans rights are your two clearest.

Bacon: And the thing that’s important here is not just that the whole point of these policies is to stop the far right. But what it appears to have happened is not only has Labour declined, but the party that’s trying to stop Reform is now polling worse than ever, and Reform is gaining ground. Right?

Buckle: Reform is at about 30 percent in the polls. So not a majority, but with our system, if everyone else is broken up, you could conceivably win a majority with that.

Bacon: But they’ve gained ground in the last 18 months, that’s what I’m getting at. Is that right?

Buckle: Reform has gained. Now, that hasn’t come from Labour. It’s come from the Tories, our traditionally center-right party. What you’ve seen is, in the same way as in the U.S. at the beginning of the Trump era, there were some moderate, some anti-Trump Republicans. Now they just kind of aren’t. We’re seeing the same thing here where the traditional center-right is just nuked from orbit, right? And the votes that used to be with the Tories are now sliding into Reform.

At the same time, the votes that used to be with Labour are now often sliding into other progressive parties. So our regional parties, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, are actually both progressive. We have lefa-nationalists. We also have a party called the Lib Dems, the Liberal Democrats, which used to be our centrist party but is now kind of like a liberal alternative to Labour. They’re doing pretty well in some areas. And we have a Green Party.

With the new leaders, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, that are doing very well. For the Green Party, they’re polling at about 15 percent, which, you know, isn’t going to win the majority, but 15 percent for the Green Party… normally this is like a 4 or 5 percent type thing, so they’ve come a long way. And what they’re capitalizing on essentially is progressive discontent with Labour, because Labour is our liberal progressive party, right? They’re supposed to be a socialist party.

And so a lot of the sort of core Labour vote… I really delved into the weeds of the trans rights one, and so I met a lot of people who do trans advocacy in the U.K. or are just sort of part of the LGBT rights movement generally here. And there are a lot of people there who went from voting Labour, or at least open to voting Labour, who are like, “Never again. I will never cast my ballot for you.” That’s probably not a huge number of people, but with immigration, there’s a lot of people who have a foreign spouse who are worried. It’s just a lot of votes they’ve lost on their left flank without compensating by bringing any votes on the right flank, and it’s just left them in a really, really precarious position. Like I said, they’re between 16 and 19 percent in the polls. The Democratic Party in its worst moments in the last four decades is never close to that.

Bacon: Now the reactionary centrists in the U.S. have heard this critique of Starmer, and their reaction has been generally, well, the problem is Starmer is not doing well on the economy. And if he was doing well on the economy but doing this, it would work. And there’s some truth in that, that Starmer has not improved the economy and that would probably help. Right?

Buckle: Oh, for sure. But what I would say to that is the reason he’s not improved the economy is also this reactionary centrist thing. Because the reason he’s not improved the economy is he does not feel confident to challenge the Brexit settlement.

So just as a two-sentence introduction for Americans: Britain was part of the European Union, which meant we had trade deals with them which were mutually beneficial. It also meant we had freedom of movement with them. So 20 years ago, if I as an English person wanted to go live in France, I could, and if a French person wanted to come live in England, they could, right? It was like moving from one American state to another. You could just do it.

Now, that meant that the anti-immigrant people got a lot of political hay running against the European Union. And the motivation for us leaving the European Union was not, I would argue, primarily economic. It was not primarily about these political questions. It was about immigration. This was what they ran on: “take control of our borders.”

So the reason we left the European Union, which has absolutely hamstrung our economic growth because it took us out of all these trade deals… the reason was anti-immigrant sentiment. Right now, the reason Starmer is afraid to revisit any of that is not that it’s not popular. It’s well understood in this country by all but the really hardcore that Brexit has not worked.

If you poll British people, “Should we rejoin?” 60 percent say yes. If you say, “Maybe not rejoin, but pursue closer ties”—there’s a spectrum, there’s ways we could have closer ties without fully rejoining—that could poll 70, 75 percent. It’s not a popularity thing. It’s that he knows that if they were to revisit the Brexit settlement, it would mean running into and having to confront anti-immigrant fearmongering from the right-wing press. And their whole political project is geared around not doing that.

So yeah, I’ve been incredibly vocal about the trans rights thing; is that the number one thing bringing their polling down? It hasn’t helped. But no, that’s not the main thing. I would agree, and this is Matt Yglesias’s answer—we went back and forth on this on Bluesky—it’s the economy. But the reason they can’t fix the economy is because of this insistence that we capitulate in advance on this stuff.

Bacon: Let me ask a basic question. In the U.S., if I ask, are people anti-immigrant? I would say it depends on how you frame the question. People want a sense of border control, but they also don’t want ICE shooting people or grabbing kids from houses and so on. Is British sentiment similar? Where are British citizens on immigration broadly? Is it similar to the U.S. where it depends on what the framing is, or is there some coherent sentiment?

Buckle: Yeah, so I would say British sentiment is worse, but then once you dig down below the top line, in both cases there’s a lot of ambiguity with regards to how you answer the question. So if you ask Americans, “Do you think legal migration is good for the country?” you’ll get a pretty sizable majority, like 60 percent or something. If you ask British people the same thing, it’ll be the other way: 60, 70 percent say bad.

But underneath those top-line numbers, there’s a lot of ambiguity. So if you ask, “What do you negatively associate with immigration?” it’s crime. Either people coming here illegally or committing crimes while they’re here. And if you say, “Do you approve of people coming here on student visas?” Yeah, they’re fine. “Do you approve of people coming here on spousal visas?” Yeah, they’re fine. “Do you approve of people coming here to work in the NHS?” Yeah, they’re fine. I mean, there’s a hardcore anti-immigrant who is against all of it, but I think what’s going on in both cases is the median voter’s view of the way immigration works in both countries is factually wrong.

In both countries, people believe that illegal immigration is much higher than it is. Most people in Britain believe that most immigrants are here illegally. Regardless of what estimates you take, that is preposterously untrue. Most people believe that immigrants commit crime at a higher rate. In both countries, we know from every study done on this that first-generation immigrants commit violent crimes at lower rates. People believe very, very strongly in Britain that immigrants are supported by social services, that they’re claiming welfare from the system. Whereas in fact, almost every visa route you could be on explicitly bars you from claiming public support. There is just no way to do that in our system.

It’s actually one of the reasons why the anti-immigration push… one of the many reasons it’s harmed our economy so much is immigrants under our system are very good for revenues, right? Because they can’t claim public services and we essentially tax them double. You have to pay for the NHS once through your taxes, and then a second time through a surcharge. So you’re paying twice the taxes and taking almost nothing out. And so it’s actually, from a purely financial perspective, good to have people come in. And so we’ve stopped that happening.

But anyway, to your question about public sentiment: public sentiment is bad in the U.K., but it’s bad because it’s based on things that are just factually wrong. A really telling example of this is if you ask British people, “Would you like to stop legal migration of illegals?”—no, “Would you like to stop legal migration completely?”—45 percent will say yes, which is an insane position that would destroy the country.

But if you say, “Would you want to stop all inward migration knowing that it would lead to staffing shortages in the NHS, our health service?” only 15 percent will say yes to that. Which I find super interesting because doing that would almost certainly lead to NHS staffing shortages. But that argument hasn’t been made. No one’s championed it. And people like Labour just validate the right-wing lies. And so we’re stuck in this thing where the average voter believes that by kicking out all the immigrants we’ll become wealthier and more prosperous. And we kick out some and they’re like, “Oh, shoot, what do we do?”

Bacon: So to come to the big question here in the U.S. context, basically when you read the U.S. centrists—the Way to Win report or all these publications, think tanks, that all basically say Democrats must move to the right on social issues, they must be less “woke,” and then they will inherit the earth. From your experience, how do you respond to that?

Buckle: Why didn’t it work for Starmer? Why hasn’t it worked anywhere?

Bacon: “Well, it hasn’t worked anywhere” is a good question. Right?

Buckle: Why is it a disaster every single time it’s been tried? Because they used to say, “Ah, look at Denmark.” Their Social Democrats took an anti-immigrant… they just got eviscerated in local elections. They lost Copenhagen for the first time in a century. Why does this never work? Now, I’m not saying you have to take a maximally left-wing view, right?

Bacon: Of course.

Buckle: You have to take positions that don’t offend your own voters.

Now, I know that sounds wild, but actually not being offensive to the people whose votes you need, that’s sort of what politics is. Look, it has not worked. And let me tell you why it’s not worked. It’s not worked because politics isn’t just about policy, it’s about values. Politics isn’t just about how many visas does the government issue. It’s about do we believe that a diverse society is an acceptable thing or even a good thing, or do we believe a society where everyone looks and thinks alike will be better and stronger? That is a values distinction, right?

When you approach an electorate, you’re not just approaching them with, “Here’s the 10 things we’re going to do.” That’s part of it, that’s important. You’re approaching them with, “Here is what we believe.” The values are how voters decide whether they trust a politician or not, whether they will stay with them when times get tough, and if they understand what the politician is doing. If you compromise, you essentially contradict yourself on values.

Right now, Starmer is attacking Reform for being racist, which they are. But on what basis does he say that? On the one hand, he seems to think it’s wrong for Reform to say that the U.K. is being colonized by immigrants. I agree. That seems like a less than nice thing to say.

But at the same time, Starmer has previously said they’ve done incalculable harm to the U.K. Which is it?

And so what you end up with is… if you look at politics in terms of what are the values parties are communicating, what is the story they’re telling you about what has gone wrong with the country and how to fix it, what you end up with is a competition between a coherent story on the far right—that what’s gone wrong is too many immigrants and we need to kick them out—and an incoherent story on the center-left that doesn’t make any sense.

Bacon: I want to finish with two ideas that have been in Liberal Currents content that is maybe not about this reactionary centrism of Starmer, and I’ll end there. One is that… and you wrote this piece that really made me think. You wrote a piece to basically argue that the democratic left in the U.S. for a while was kind of running against the Democratic Party, and winning primaries is not going to be easy for Sanders particularly in 2016. Running against the Democratic Party is not a way to win primaries. A lot of Democratic voters think the Democratic Party stands for civil rights and so on.

And I think you were sort of arguing a better approach might be for the people in the progressive, leftish wing to run as Democrats, but run as Democrats who are going to fight the right even harder than the moderates are. I liked the piece. I think that’s happening. I think AOC is very popular right now because she’s kind of dropped the critiquing of the party—she does some of that, but is more now like, I’m a warrior for defending democracy and against fascism, even more than Hakeem Jeffries. So talk about that, where maybe the leftist, socialist part of the Democratic Party maybe got it wrong, and where they’re improving.

Buckle: Yeah. You summed it up pretty well there.

Bacon: Sorry about that. Maybe I should let you do it first, but anyway.

Buckle: No, I think that’s right. I think there can be a tendency when you’re trying to primary an incumbent to trash the party. I think the problem that you run into is that American political parties are much bigger-order things. So in the U.K., there’s no such thing as a primary and party membership is like 1 percent of the country. Right? You don’t have those big inputs.

But what you can often get, and I think this is increasingly true in American politics, is American politics is a two-teams thing, right? There is a liberal team and a conservative team. And people identify as part of one of those teams. And I think what you can run into is if I run on a message of Democrats suck, I might mean Chuck Schumer and the party leadership, but what a lot of people in the primary electorate are going to hear is, “You suck.” And guess what? To be honest, sometimes the far left has kind of run on a message of “you suck” to the people whose votes they need.

I think there’s also been a narrative that emerged after the 2016 election that this was a backlash not to “woke,” but this was a backlash to economic anxiety. That because of neoliberalism, people were poor, people were unequal, they were sort of turning to fascism because of that.

Bacon: In some ways, that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama created Trump. Their neoliberal policies created Trump, is what the Bernie crowd was kind of hinting at, right.

Buckle: Kind of hinting? Overtly saying. That’s what Bernie said. He said both parties—and I’m quoting him directly in his New York Times interview—he said, “both parties are to blame.” Now, again, one, I don’t think that’s the best narrative, I don’t think that actually is what happened. But two, if you are trying to appeal to a voter who likes Obama, that’s not going to be a great message, is it?

And I think actually we can learn something from Republicans here. When they did the Tea Party, how did they express this idea of we don’t like the leadership, but we need to rally the activist base, the rank and file? They had a brilliant framing: RINO. Republican In Name Only. Right? That’s genius, because what you’ve done is you’ve really navigated that such that you’re saying, Our problem is with the leader, with this specific person, not the team. You know, we’re not trashing the team that we’re all on. It’s just this one person—actually, they’re not really on the team, not like you and me. And so we need to get rid of them for someone who is like you and me.

I mean, put it this way: if you’re a sports fan, right? And you’re going to go see the Eagles or whatever. And someone starts trash-talking the Eagles and saying, Oh, their defense is rubbish, it’s no wonder they lost. Whether or not you tolerate someone saying that will depend on whether or not you see them as a fan of your team. Whether or not you see them as having standing. If it’s someone from the opposing team trash-talking your team, you’re going to be like, Well, F you, buddy. Get lost, get out of here. But if it’s someone you know is a long-term fan of your team and they’re saying it because they want your team to win, then you’ll accept them saying it. If we’re both fans of the Eagles and I say, Listen, we’ve got to change out that player because he just messes it up every single time, because I want us to win, then you’ll accept what I’m saying. But if you’re not seen as being on the team, you won’t accept that.

Bacon: I don’t know if Bernie Sanders and AOC read your piece or not. And I’m guessing they didn’t. But if you noticed in 2024, they rallied behind Biden and Harris in a way to show they were team players. And then in 2025, when they went on that tour, they said “fighting oligarchs,” which was not a critique of Democrats. There are some Democratic oligarchs, but you can see oligarchs as separate from the Democratic Party. And that critique felt like it included Trump and some other people, but did not necessarily criticize other Democrats. And I feel like I’ve seen some polls showing AOC is very popular with Democrats—I wonder if somebody’s internalized a general version of your message and that’s helping. Do you see the left as being smarter about this now, is what I’m trying to ask. Have they advanced on this toward what you’re saying?

Buckle: I think so, right? I think even just last year. I definitely see what you’re saying. I mean, Zohran Mamdani would be another example, because he started that campaign with Cuomo running, saying, I’m going to be the one who stands up to Trump. But by the end of the campaign, Cuomo was urging Republicans to come in and save him. And Mamdani was able to sort of say, I’m the Democrat. I’m the one standing up for our party and not selling us out. And he won. Right. Like in a two-teams politics, the person who is most clearly on your team and will most clearly stand up to the other team will usually win. Right?

Bacon: Win the primary, you’re saying, is probably what we’re getting at. If the left wants to win primaries, they have to be seen as true Democrats in a certain sense.

Buckle: Yes. And to your point, I think they increasingly are. And I think also there is just a shift in the Democratic Party primary electorate. Where at the beginning of this era, it might have been left versus center that divided us amongst Democratic base voters, now it’s fight versus don’t fight. Right? And the fight people are winning.

The people I was critiquing earlier, the sort of reactionary centrists, they exist in elite spaces. They exist in The New York Times, party consultants. Among just your base primary voters, that debate is won. People do not want to compromise. They want to fight. And if you can position yourself as the person who’s going to fight, you’re probably going to win a primary.

Bacon: Final point. I don’t know if this was your essay or not—I should have looked it up—but there was a Liberal Currents essay right after 2024 that basically argued that this idea that Trump is winning because Americans are poor or because there’s economic anxiety is not accurate, because Americans are very well off, and this economic story of Trump’s rise and the rise of the far right in the West is maybe not accurate. And I saw AOC went over to Munich over the weekend and sort of gave another version of the working class is in decline, and wages are sagging, and this is the rise of the far right. I would like that story to be true, because I support socialist policies in an economic sense, but I’m not sure that’s actually true. So talk about what’s your sense of the rise of the far right in the U.S. and in Britain and other places, and the connection or lack of connection to actual material economic conditions.

Buckle: Yeah, I think that was my essay. It was called “A Disease of Affluence.” And I agree. I like AOC generally; I think she’s come a long way from Bernie. I think she does sometimes slip back into that narrative. And I just think it’s not the best narrative. So the data is in on this pretty largely: to the extent that Trump attracts working-class votes, he does so on the basis of social issues, not economic ones. There’s been a lot of empirical work done on this, and I think that’s pretty much answered now.

What I would also point out is bigotry is very often a top-down thing. I don’t think we should get into this view that it’s some property of the working class that we just hate foreigners or something. I think a lot of what you see with anti-immigrant sentiment is… I mean, look at the Epstein files and the way they talk about racial issues and the way they talk about transgender rights. I think transgender rights actually is an even clearer case. Who even knew what any of this was 20 years ago? This is a media panic that kind of cascaded down, and I just think that can’t be the whole story. There are very, very racist people who are very, very affluent. Right?

I think what the 2016 election was about, what the 2024 election was about, is a very, very old story in American politics, which is politicians appeal to people not on the basis that they’re poor or middle-class or whatever. They appeal to them on the basis of, “You will have social inferiors. If you elect us, there will always be people beneath you.” This goes back all the way to the debates over slavery. Calhoun argued against Lincoln. Lincoln said, look, if you do away with slavery, we’ll be more prosperous. And Calhoun said, you don’t even get it, man. You don’t get it. It’s not about having more money. It’s about always being above someone. That’s what I offer the whites, and that’s why they’ll always back me.

And that’s what Trump offers. If you look at his economic platform, it’s at very best incoherent, right? He’s certainly not populist or putting money in workers’ pockets or anything to do with that. No. What he offers you is: Women don’t know their place anymore. Too many foreigners. Black people don’t know their place. There’s all this weirdness going on with transgender people. I’ll put those people back in their place. That’s the message of Trump.

And I think we’re just a bit too polite about it. There’s some elite discourse thing where we don’t just say people are racist. And sometimes people just are racist. I think we’re too charitable to Trump voters, and we tell this story of, “Oh, they’re poor and oppressed, and it’s no wonder they’re effed off.” They’re just bigots, you know? And sometimes you just need to name those beliefs directly as the only way of confronting them, because those beliefs are not unique to the working class.

Bacon: Toby, this was a really great conversation. I feel like a lot of people are going to learn a lot from it. Thank you for participating. Thanks everybody for joining me and take care, Toby. Thank you.

Buckle: Thanks, Perry. Bye-bye.