Lessons from the British Wave

Politics is about dreaming how the world could be. But to enact change, you must win power—and that requires accepting the world as it is.

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Additionally, I wrote an article about Keir Starmer and “The Letters of Last Resort” for The Atlantic last week. This fascinating ritual—of incoming prime ministers producing handwritten orders of whether to use nuclear weapons if the British government is wiped out in a surprise attack—is one of the most interesting intersections of national security with philosophy and morality that I’m aware of in modern geopolitics. This is a gift link, so it’s free to read for everyone.

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I: An electoral wave hits Westminster

In Britain, the Conservatives have been wiped out. The result was never in doubt, but the scale of the defeat is historic. The center-left Labour party has won 412 out of 650 seats, crushing the Tories, who were left with just 121—a mere 18 percent of the seats. Keir Starmer is Britain’s new prime minister.

Within this landslide victory are hidden several crucial lessons for the United States and other peer democracies, ranging from how to defeat performative culture wars populism to how to be ruthlessly savvy in pursuit of electoral victory.

Once the votes were counted overnight, the schadenfreude-ometer registered an off-the-charts reading. Several awful senior Conservative politicians lost their seats and are now out of politics. Liz Truss (who famously failed to outlast a lettuce and routinely humiliates herself in pursuit of power) withered yet again, becoming the first former prime minister to lose her seat in more than a hundred years.

Jacob Rees-Mogg—often described as the “Honourable Member for the 18th Century” due to his anachronistic views, adoration of top hats, and the bewildering fact that his aristocratic family has employed the same nanny for more than 58 years—was one of the defeated.¹

But because British politics can be uniquely delightful, his defeat did not end there. Following electoral protocols, every candidate—from the lowliest fringe lunatic all the way to the prime minister—must stand side-by-side on stage while their respective vote counts are read aloud. That tradition produced the rather remarkable photograph below, in which Rees-Mogg stood next to one Barmy Brunch, the candidate of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, who decided to mark the occasion by sporting a baked beans balaclava with fried eggs for eyes.

Amusements aside, this was a seismic result. The Conservatives have been in power for fourteen years and have presided over the steady decline of British public services, its reduced global power through Brexit, a series of scandals, a surge in cronyism, and, all too often, tragicomic bumbling incompetence.

That incompetence was capped off by a disastrous election campaign, which began with Rishi Sunak standing outside as rain poured down, soaking his hair and expensive suit with not an umbrella in sight, all as his opponent’s political anthem blared in the background. Sunak, who has the political acumen of a turnip, continued his shrewd campaign strategy by making the astonishingly boneheaded move of leaving early from the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-Day to race home for a run-of-the-mill TV interview, leaving his foreign secretary standing next to actual world leaders (as if nobody would notice?).²

But my personal favorite was the education minister, Gillian Keegan, going to Winchester to campaign for the Conservative candidate—only to realize that she had arrived precisely one day early, leaving her to be photographed by the local newspaper, completely alone. (Both the government minister and the candidate she was supposed to campaign for lost their seats). This proves, yet again, that The Thick of It is a documentary.³

However, Labour has inherited a mess—and the euphoria of party victory will soon give way to the hard choices of national governance. The sheen will inevitably come off at some point; Britain’s systemic problems don’t simply disappear because one man has replaced another in 10 Downing Street. But it is, nonetheless, a new dawn for Britain and an opportunity to reinvigorate a country that, in so many ways, has been in political and economic decline. Voters have given the country a fresh start.

II: Liz Truss shows that British democracy still works

I know, I know, saying anything positive about Liz Truss’s premiership sounds absurd. But hear me out, not for what she did (she was uniformly a disaster), but for what her swift downfall revealed about British politics.

Normally, when politicians take charge of a country, pollsters track their popularity over time. But when you are prime minister for 49 days—and a significant chunk of that time is set aside to mourn the late Queen—well, you end up with a pathetic chart like the one below. She didn’t even make it long enough to have a line! When you’re in line chart territory and you end up with a point, you know you’ve screwed up. Here is Liz Truss’s sole approval rating from YouGov.

In case you are not quite gifted in math(s)⁴, I shall explain that having an 11 percent approval rating is bad. But it’s particularly bad when your party previously won 46 percent of the vote in the last general election. The upshot is this: the majority of Truss’s own party turned on her. British voters responded to an objective policy failure by changing their support beyond tribal partisanship.

Now, examine Sunak’s chart. Unlike Truss, he was in power long enough to get a line, but it’s a really bad line. Consider how the number of people who say he was doing badly soared from around 28 percent in October 2022 to 72 percent in June 2024. These are disastrous numbers, sure, but what they also show is significant change over time. Failing to govern effectively led to a collapse in public support—one of the best metrics for responsiveness in democracies. In a functioning democratic system, there needs to be a robust, rapid connection between performance and public opinion

Alright, now here comes the gut punch.

Let’s compare Truss’s point and Sunak’s line to Trump’s favorability, from January 2017 (when he became president) to today.⁵ It is a flat line. This line includes every Trump scandal, his remarks about Charlottesville, his suggestion that injecting disinfectant or shining a very powerful light inside the body might be a good idea during a deadly global pandemic that left a million Americans dead, two impeachments, January 6th, being found liable for sexual assault, and being convicted of 34 felonies. None of it moved his favorability up or down more than a few points. No matter what Trump did, about 43 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of him.

Virtually nobody changed their mind.

When I helped manage a winning campaign for Governor of Minnesota in 2010, the candidate kicked off our absurdly long campaign by telling us: “We’ve already won forty percent. They’ve already won forty percent. The next twenty months will be about persuading the remaining twenty percent.”

Today, those in-between numbers are even less malleable. How many people haven’t really made up their mind in the upcoming presidential election? The number of swing voters has steadily declined in the United States as partisan tribalism has ramped up. And, because of the electoral college, only a tiny sliver of those voters will cast ballots in the decisive states that will ultimately determine who is in power come January 20, 2025.

This lack of responsiveness is a disastrous feature of American democracy. Part of the explanation lies in a toxic political environment defined increasingly by negative partisanship, amplified by poisonous information pipelines that, too often, reflect a funhouse version of reality back at viewers and listeners. If you exclusively watch Fox News or Newsmax and follow MAGA accounts on Twitter, why would you ever change your mind about Trump? In that fantasy media world, none of the evidence against him is real and he’s just the victim of an incessant witch hunt.

The hard truth is that American voters no longer inhabit a shared reality. By contrast, shared reality is alive and well in Britain, where most people get at least some of their news from the BBC or other trusted sources and the information pipelines are at least somewhat regulated, creating a shared sense of what’s really going on.⁶ That’s a crucial fact because democracy requires a mutual reality to operate—and it’s breaking down in the United States.

Meanwhile, the shared sense of reality was a disaster for Rishi Sunak, because his government’s objective governance failures led directly to a landslide defeat.

III: Lessons for the United States and the world

Politics often involves two simultaneous, but sometimes conflicting, impulses.

The first is to imagine what the world could be. This is where we dream, where we allow our idealism to guide our imaginations. If we lose sight of this side of politics, we are utterly lost.

This side is also the true motivation for engaging in politics. We want to use political action to make the world better, to shape it in accordance with our values. Our policy ideas are merely a mechanism for improving lives and escaping from avoidable catastrophes. This is why we must care; as maddening as it can be, the pathway to human prosperity is paved by politics.

The second aspect is to accept the world as it is in order to gain power.

We inhabit flawed political systems. The press is deeply imperfect. Voters are uninformed, or worse, misinformed. Large sections of the population don’t vote. And voter perceptions can be unfair, giving a free pass to abusive, malicious politicians, while directing their vitriol toward someone who actually cares. The political sphere is neither ideal nor fair. But if you fixate on that unfairness during a campaign, you will lose.

In Britain’s last general election, Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to a devastating defeat but famously boasted that “we won the arguments,” as though elections are some lofty debate competition rather than about deciding who governs. Winning the arguments but losing seats is an unwise trade. Being right but outside of power doesn’t mean you have tackled child poverty or saved democracy or reduced the risks of climate change.

You can’t improve lives if you don’t win.

Problems emerge for political movements when they either ignore the hard-nosed element of strategy and tactics or, even more foolishly, they conflate it with the first—basing campaign strategy on an imagined ideal world that doesn’t exist. When that happens, even the most well-intentioned parties lose, left in the political wilderness.

Keir Starmer, by contrast, ran a strategically brilliant campaign. As

James O'Malley

put it:

Starmer understood the rules of the game he was playing – and worked hard to optimise his party to win within them.

He understood that you can only fight elections with the electorate you’ve got – not one that you can choose. And if he wanted to win a majority and form a government, he knew that he would have to make political choices and push Labour outside of its ideological comfort zone, so that the party could reach voters who do not instinctively share its values.

Now, Britain’s Conservatives are not remotely akin to the authoritarian political movement that is America’s Trumpified Republican party. Rishi Sunak and his entourage were gracious in defeat and decent in their post-election conduct, celebrating the peaceful transition of power.

Nonetheless, Democrats—and other political parties across the globe that are facing authoritarian populists as their adversaries—need to learn a lesson from Keir Starmer.⁷ Dream big, but run campaigns in the world as it is, not as you wish it would be. Be ruthlessly savvy to win—according to the rules of your system—to wield power and prevent would-be autocrats from destroying democracy from within. That’s why, while I won’t wade into the Joe Biden debate in this essay about British politics, I will say this: every decision Democrats make should be guided by a laser-like focus on what is most likely to defeat Donald Trump. Nothing else matters, because if Trump wins, winning the argument won’t cut it.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Keir Starmer won power. Now, he faces the more daunting test: can he govern?

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1. If you want to see the most absurd caricature of a 12 year-old British aristocrat, this video of Jacob Rees-Mogg as a child, interviewed by French television, is really something to behold.

2. In thirteen years of living in the UK, I’ve recognized that Britain has two secular national religions: the National Health Service and World War II. This is why Captain Tom was such an adored figure during the pandemic. As a result, the only way Sunak could have made a worse decision than leaving the D-Day commemorations early would have been to stab a nurse along the way, which he managed not to do, despite his complete lack of political acumen.

3. If you haven’t seen The Thick of It, it’s the best British political TV show I’ve ever seen and it is in my top three British TV comedies ever, along with the absurdly funny Peep Show and, if you’re up for some cringey juvenile humo(u)r, The Inbetweeners.

4. Fun fact: British people—which now includes me!—say maths, not math. Another fun fact: Britons also use “quite” as a modifier that reduces intensity rather than enhancing it (“quite nice” is less nice than “nice” in British English, whereas it’s the opposite in American English).

5. It’s not a perfect comparison because overall favorability is different from approval ratings for prime ministers, but the overall point is certainly correct.

6. British tabloids tend to be awful, but they play a lesser role in political discourse compared to airwaves media—particularly the BBC’s news television and the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, which sets the agenda in British politics to a remarkable degree (full disclosure: I’m regularly a guest on the Today programme, so I’m slightly biased, but I think most politically active Britons would agree with my characterization).

7.

Anne Applebaum

has written this post-mortem on how Labour learned how to defeat populism in The Atlantic, which I recommend.