Winning Ain’t Victory Without Real Change
Lessons from the UK. Centrists who didn't deliver sent voters into the waiting arms of the right.
The consensus is that this is the year for the Democrats. They have the political winds at their backs. Even with the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and everything Republicans have thrown at the wall, smart money says Democrats take the House and maybe the Senate. And anything that limits the power of this president is good. I’ll grant all of it. Net positive.
But what happens after a good cycle or two, if the winners don’t understand what they won? If they don’t see the pain that powered their victories?
We don’t have to guess because it already happened in Britain.
A year and a half ago, Labour won in a landslide. Imagine our centrist Democrats, the Newsom and Buttigieg wing, sweeping into power with the biggest majority in a generation. The Tories were finished, the same way a lot of folks think Republicans are about to be finished. But Labour walked in and decided the mission was better management. Be the adults in the room. Trim the spending. Talk tough on the border. The ship was fine, just needed a steady hand.
Now look at them. Reform is Nigel Farage’s party, which is their MAGA more or less. Reform is leading the polls and Labour’s a distant second. Their MAGA has led just about every poll since late last year. Starmer, the head of Labour, is one of the least popular leaders in the Western world. A year and a half ago centrists won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.
When a party wins on the promise of change and then delivers management, the people who abandon ship don’t all come back. The ones who move, move right. The angry ones, the ones who feel lied to, don’t drift off to some nicer party on the left. They turn to the man burning it all down, which is always how the right takes power. Afterward, centrists throws up their hands, convinced the country is turning right, when in reality they’re turning desperate. If you promise change and deliver the status quo, things don’t get better, for a lot of people they get worse.
Britain at least has a buffer. They build coalitions, so no single party runs the whole thing alone usually. The damage is scattered and slower. But the US doesn’t have that. We’ve got winner-takes-all, with gerrymandering stacked on top. Here, a centrist party that wins big and then governs scared doesn’t lose gracefully. It delivers the whole country to MAGA. The House, the Senate, the gavels, all of it.
A year and a half ago the left won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.
Our centrists, the Newsoms, the Buttigiegs, the Slotkins, are on the rise right now. They aren’t leaders. They aren’t fierce advocates for structural change. In fact this is exactly the kind of compromise-driven, go-along-to-get-along Democratic Party that abandoned the working class and helped usher in MAGA. Hell, Newsom can’t even bring himself to tax billionaires. These are folks who don’t get the depth of pain across our the country. And they certainly don’t get the ferocity behind the criminal administration wrecking our democracy. The Democratic Party and its faux-leaders don’t see what’s coming, or they see it and don’t care. In the end it won’t matter which.
The cost of living is so far out of reach for young people that you can’t fix it with a tweak. There’s no tax credit, no rebate, no clever little program that closes that gap. It will take transformation. It will take building things again. The same is true for jobs. AI and robotics are about to come for human labor in a way this country has never seen, and Democrats have no plan for it. None. They’re not ready for the losses. They’re not ready for what happens to a person, to a town, to a whole generation, when the work goes away.
And they’re sure as hell not ready for what’s happening at the very top. This week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. I wrote on Thursday about how we built him, how public money and public research and public contracts carried him up the hill while we kept no ownership. Our tax dollars built SpaceX and then we handed over the deed. The pretenders in the Democratic Party, the ones about to take the reins, have no answer for that. They have no intention of stopping the next massive giveaway. Why? Because they don’t want to upset the interests who fund their campaigns.
Lack of accountability for guys at the top is the clearest indicator that we need systemic change. Forget for a second the question of genocide in Gaza. Forget the West Bank. You don’t have to know the answer for those to agree we should honestly investigate war crimes. The International Criminal Court already issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister for using starvation as a weapon of war. Our government’s response? To go after the court. To sanction its officials, and defend the war criminals.
A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.
Here at home, we’ve got a Justice Department unit whose entire job is crimes against humanity. Did it ever investigate Joe Biden’s cabinet, the men who signed off on the bombs? It didn’t. It won’t. They go after small men in faraway places, and give a pass to the policy masterminds here. The impunity of the powerful doesn’t start with Epstein or end with him. It runs straight through the war machine, the financial machine, the whole arrangement. A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.
We’ve got from now until the end of primary season to pick the right people. The candidates who understand our fight is structural. The ones who are ready for what’s actually coming. The ones not owned, willing to take a real risk.
The winners were supposed to be an alternative to rightwing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their MAGA because a real alternative takes work.
If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain. The winners were supposed to be an alternative to rightwing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their own MAGA because a real alternative takes work.
That’s the thing about the so-called adults in the room. The centrists, the moderates, the corporatists, they won’t do the hard work. In part because they’re bankrolled by entrenched interests who will use every weapon in the arsenal to maintain status quo. And in part because of fear. They’re terrified of blame, so they’d rather keep walking toward disaster than take a chance on something better. Real reform means changing the whole structure, the democracy, the social fabric, the economy itself, and that’s going to take fight.
People are desperate for a life that works but it’s easier for Dems to keep their heads down, push gently for incremental change, and hope things will get better on their own.
They won’t.
Corbin Trent
https://afightworthhaving.com/
Bingo. You are the only one that hits the nail on head every paragraph.
Why isn't Jennifer Welsh inviting you on her show? You are too left-wing?
I stopped going to a local Democratic organization meeting. They are drooling over the possibilty of Pete Buttigieg winning. I asked what did he do as Transportation Secretary? Did he fundamentally change how airlines are providing horrible service while upselling all the time? Did he do anything to slow down the train monopoly? He's so boring I can't think of one thing he did. Most Dems like him because he's articulate. You see where articulate Obama got us - trillions to Wall Street while millions lost their home and the winners were people like Steven Mnuchin.
Some believe it will take a revolution to have a government who puts its citizens first, over trillionaires and monopolies. What do you think Trent? Who is the progressive who is going to cause fundamental change? The only hope I see is Mamdani, but he can't run. He is a super power - the only one who can be against Trump and walk out with Trump having his back. It was magical. Perhaps the most amazing political moment I've witnessed.
Once again, Corbin, you hit the nail on the head. Nicely done, and thank you. If we do indeed sweep MAGA from power, we the people will need to fight even harder to hold our newly-elected representatives accountable. I do not want to simply return to the old status quo. I want better. Much better. Solving all of our national problems is not hard. It just takes the resolve to say no to the oligarchs. To start, eliminating the cap on wages subject to social security taxes would allow us to fund universal healthcare, among other things. The less fortunate among us should not be subsidizing the already obscenely wealthy. Throughout history, societies that have experienced the wealth inequality that the U.S. is experiencing now have all fallen to revolution. I fear we are ignoring that lesson.