A Blaring Warning For The Democratic Party From Across The Pond

Leaders of the UK's Labour Party did the hard work of sounding a 10,000-alarm warning to the Democratic Party about what happens when you abandon politics and embrace so-called popularism.

Shoutout to those folks. Americans see you and we appreciate you.

Labour leaders, including the walking political catastrophe known as Keir Starmer, have tried to counter the UK's well-funded, Kremlin-coordinated fascist onslaught the way a lot of scared centrists and elected Democrats in the United States have approached America's fascist onslaught: By parroting some fascist talking points in a slightly kinder and gentler way, failing to effectively push back on the cursed ideas (and ideology) that drives and grows the fascist project into a seemingly unstoppable Goliath, and begging people to support them rather than inspiring them to cast a pro-democracy vote.

UK Labour over the past couple years has tried to out-fash the fascists in many ways—particularly on immigration, where Labour officials sound a lot like far-right German parties—and now their popularity has plummeted, according to recent polling, which shows the Green Party tied with Labour in voting intention. Two recent UK Labour posts in which the party is bragging about deporting immigrants are indistinguishable from posts by Germany’s far right parties.

It took the conservative Tory Party a decade to end up neck and neck with Reform UK, a far-right party led by known Russian asset Nigel Farage. It took the Starmer-led Labour Party much less time to alienate the many UK voters who want nothing more than a major party to stand up to the fascists making headway in national and local politics all the time.

The lesson here isn't a hard one. It's not difficult to see the writing on the wall. You can't out-fash the fascists, so don't try (and maybe you shouldn't try since fascism is hostile to all things human and decent; just a thought from a humble blogger). Stop trying to peel away parts of the fascist electorate and instead use your money and power and influence to tell otherwise disengaged people -- folks who sit on the sideline, convinced both major U.S. parties are exactly the same -- what to think about political issues. Don't concede far-right framing around immigration and economic matters and everything else that drives voter turnout. Fascists gain power by changing people's minds—that is how they gain a foothold in multicultural liberal democracies that have largely rejected far-right messaging for decades. 

Popularism, supported by well-meaning but ultimately outmoded moderate liberals like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, is based on the stunningly naive belief that a narrow political agenda that ignores thorny issues (abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, the environment, little things like that) and focuses on the price of groceries and gas and rent can beat back the fascist boogeyman. Popularism is the pinnacle of quant-brain politics, the firmly held belief that a political party can gain and maintain power through analytics. It is based on the faulty idea that what people think or feel about a certain issue is fixed in time, that it can never be altered by any counterargument. This ignores the right wing’s ability to bend the public will in their favor and it engenders a helplessness among liberals. 

Labour went all in on so-called popularism and their voters have overwhelmingly rejected it. This is especially true for younger voters: 45 percent of voters aged 18 to 25 said in a January YouGov poll they planned on voting for a Green Party candidate, up from 26 percent in September 2025. Labour officials spent 2024 and 2025 offering voters what they thought they wanted—based on growing support for the fascist party—and it created a remarkable collapse that could (will) lead to a wipeout for Labour in upcoming elections.

Appealing to people's material interests will always have a place in the anti-fascist agenda, as we need to keep painful conditions from fanning the rage, desperation, and hatred that fascists rely upon. You cannot do so by abandoning human rights and core political values, or you’ll follow Labour’s path into irrelevance.

Popularism is a loser's mindset. A commitment to popularism allows the right wing to shape public sentiment, giving up the entire playing field to a movement that is all too glad to take it (and keep it). Liberals are pouring over polls and trying to figure out what they stand for as their opponents craft reality itself. 

The hopelessly detached popularist crowd in October published a report, Deciding To Win, that constitutes a plea for Democrats to become even more boring in an age of dopamine overload, to ignore the conversion of politics into content to be consumed by a populace with no understanding of its own history. It operates under the assumption that Americans are citizens when we are not. We are consumers of goods and of content because that's all we were ever taught to be. The popularists' manifesto is for a world that no longer exists. 

Among Deciding To Win's suggestions for the Democratic Party: Stop talking about labor rights, raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting and defending immigrants, protecting and strengthening abortion rights and access, and promoting diversity in business and government. Why? Because these things did not poll well in their research. It’s hard to see the merit in the popularist approach after November's Virginia gubernatorial race, in which a MAGA-style Republican blanketed the D.C.-area airwaves with odious anti-trans and anti-immigrant ads and lost by a million to a vanilla, cut-and-paste Democrat who talks like she's a West Wing cast member but pushed back on the Republican's scorched earth attacks on migrants and transgender people.

'They are acquiescing to a far-right agenda'

Liberals the world over have to stop playing defense if the left is ever going to stop the right's oligarch-fueled momentum.

They must stop accommodating or—worse yet—imitating the fascists, and fight them. Tell them they are wrong and bad and everyone who supports them is wrong and bad and they should feel badly for throwing their support behind such a hideous agenda. That Labour has taken the opposite approach over the past couple years has led to a mass exodus of otherwise likely Labour voters seeking an alternative party that will counter the fascist tide.

Labour officials should not concede that the vile Reform party has some good ideas about immigration when its immigration policy—as much as one can call it a policy—is an ethnically pure United Kingdom that might make Pink from The Wall blush. Labour—and all liberal parties in western democracies—should reject completely the anti-human fascist stance on immigration and say proudly and enthusiastically that immigration is good, immigrants are good, and we should have more of it. Be confident in your belief that a better world is possible. Otherwise people won't believe you.

Britons see what's going on here. They've watched Starmer and his Labour Party leaders “chasing right-wing votes in a way that is causing division in society” and they know this only strengthen's the UK's fascist leaders and the messaging they use to transform hate and prejudice into votes.

A high-ranking labor union official in the UK was brutally honest when asked about Starmer's failure as a counter to British fascism. Starmer, the union boss told The Independent, is “legitimizing Farage’s claims that we are facing existential threats from people who are fleeing wars around the world, and instead of standing up for decency, they are acquiescing to a far-right and populist agenda. They can’t win that battle. They just can’t win it.”

Starmer sometimes sounds like Farage, just as some elected Democrats in the US have sounded eerily like Trump in talking about immigration. Starmer in a recent speech said the UK would become “an island of strangers” if the government did not put strict limitations on migrants. Starmer didn't say the UK would no longer be a country if the government kept allowing black and brown people to enter, but the implication is strong, bordering on painfully obvious.

In the US, where tens of millions of voters like to imagine their politics are in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a pro-immigration policy can be easily and accurately labeled as Christlike. The polar opposite of the blatantly anti-Christ immigration policies executed by knowingly evil men like Border Patrol official and cosplaying SS officer Gregory Bovino, a Christlike immigration policy would be the furthest left policy ever conceived: Free housing and clothing and food for everyone coming to the country's border in search of safety and economic stability. Dignity For All. A truly Jesus-centered immigration plan would loudly and forcefully shout down the fascist plan as antithetical to what God wants for his children, and instead use the immense power of government to protect and defend and shelter those most in need.

Even as Democrats clean up in off-year and special elections in our newly competitive authoritarian political environment, the Democratic Party has reached eye-watering levels of disapproval among supporters who are howling for bloodless party leadership to Do Something as we enter a second year of nonstop constitutional crisis made possible by our captured Supreme Court. That Democrats in 2026 will capture a House majority (almost) goes without saying, unless the doomers are correct and the Trump regime somehow ends free and fair elections in the United States (I remain skeptical). If a new Democratic House majority toys with the popularism bullshit Labour officials have embraced, they will lose support from the very people who have created the largest protest movement in modern American history and pushed pro-democracy forces into power as a bulwark against the fascist henchmen running the joint.

Some of this liberal inaction—both for the Labour Party and the Democrats—comes from a place of fear. Some of it stems from simply not caring about certain human beings out of political expediency. Fascists never have anything to lose and they operate accordingly; they know they only need to win once to do permanent damage. Pro-democracy forces trying desperately to maintain some semblance of a functioning society have everything to lose in every election, and they operate accordingly.

The pro-democracy side's inherent fragility often collapses in the face of the fascists' anti-fragility. In many ways, this is the animating force of 21st century global politics. Liberal democracy offers people moral constraints without problem-solving while right-wing populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints. So it goes.

Popularism isn't a failing project for Labour leaders in the United Kingdom. It has already failed, terribly and predictably, leaving Farage's fascist party stronger than ever before as voters dismiss Labour as capable and willing to fight back. That's good news for pro-democracy folks in the US, I suppose. Elected Democrats don't have to wonder if mealymouthed popularism will work as an effective strategy against a fully radicalized Republican Party. They can look across the Atlantic and see that popularism is a a nonstarter for anyone even vaguely interested in protecting what's left of the republic and strengthening it against future fascist advances.

If Democrats want to lose the rabid levels of support they've seen in the first year of American tyranny, they will go the way of Labour and squeamishly offer an agenda that concede fascist talking points, inspires no one to defect from the right, and alienates core supporters. Or they will fight. Those, for better or worse, are the only remaining choices.

Do I feel good about the which of those choices Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are likely to make? I don't. But we have reason to believe the next Democratic majority will be younger and feistier, less married to decorum and norms than any Democratic majority in recent history. Millennials and zoomers who grew up with an anti-democracy GOP know who they're fighting. That gives me some hope. 

Featured image is Prime Minister Keir Starmer calls the Amir of Qatar, by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street