While American politics have certainly grown more polarized and less prone to compromise—essential to make a system of divided government work—during the Trump era, it’s occaisonally worth reminding ourselves that were part of a larger trend among Western democracies.
The Economist (“Is British politics broken? Its centre is cracking“):
When Sir Keir Starmer was elected just over a year ago, Labour ministers warned that their government was Britain’s last chance to see off populism. The political centre has sprung a leak even sooner than they feared. Just one in five voters now supports the government; Sir Keir’s personal ratings as prime minister are dire. On September 5th Angela Rayner, his deputy, resigned over unpaid taxes, prompting a wide cabinet reshuffle.
The extremes, meanwhile, are all fired up. Whereas the Conservative Party is moribund, Nigel Farage, the leader of the hard-right Reform UK, told his party conference that he would be prime minister as soon as 2027. Although Reform has just four MPs, he is not delusional: were an election held tomorrow, Reform would have a coin-toss chance of a majority. Other insurgents sense their moment, too. Zack Polanski, a self-styled “eco-populist”, is the new leader of the once-fusty Green Party, with a pitch to be the Farage of the left. Jeremy Corbyn, whose self-belief is undented by four and a half calamitous years as the Labour Party’s leader, is running a new hard-left outfit.
Britain is not the only democracy where the centre is crumbling. On September 8th France’s centrist government fell over spending cuts, caught in a pincer of the hard left and right. In Germany the established centre parties have steadily lost votes, as the political system has fragmented. The middle is hollowing out in America, too, as voters are polarised between MAGA and a mob of fight-the-oligarchy lefties. The difference is that Sir Keir still has a commanding majority in the House of Commons. He must use it.
Some believe the problem he faces is that British politics is plunged into incoherence. Voters, sick of low growth and failing public services, have become grouchy and fickle, ready to follow any party that lets them vent their frustration. The other theory is that Britons, fed up with immigration, are suddenly lurching towards nativism. Accordingly, Labour’s stock is falling and Reform’s is rising because voters are shifting en masse from the centre-left to the radical right. Neither theory is correct.
In fact, the Brexit referendum of 2016 accelerated a trend in which age and education, rather than class, are the best predictors of voting behaviour. Work by the British Election Study, a research project, shows how this is splitting left-leaning young graduates from right-leaning pensioners.
A decade into this phenomenon, I still don’t completely understand it.
Clearly, just about everywhere, people have become disaffected from the liberal consensus that prevailed in the postwar period. Whether we call it globalism, neoliberalism, or something else, the working classes in particular have come to see that free trade and generous migration policies have benefitted the elites while diminishing their earning power and political influence. Relatedly, we’ve seen the rise of nativism—a sense that traditional values have been overrun.
In the United States, at least, there was a sense, shared by both ideological elites and the working class, that neither of the two major parties represented their interest. It seems that this is now happening in the UK, where a government formed by a party other than the Conservatives or Labour could happen for the first time in a century.
Like the US—and unlike the rest of Western Europe—the UK has a first-past-the-post electoral system. But the House of Commons is half again as large as the House of Representatives despite the UK having a fifth the US population, allowing smaller parties to actually gain a foothold.
At the same time, voters see political parties as clustered in two ideologically distinct blocs, on the left and the right.
Most of the volatility comes from Britons switching among parties within “their” bloc, not from one bloc to the other. Labour is losing voters to parties to its left; the Tories to Reform. In the general election of 2024, the two old parties won a combined vote share of 57%. That was the lowest since 1910, but it was a triumph compared with today’s polls, which give them a total of just 39%.
An injection of fresh competition into Britain’s stale two-party system should be healthy. Voters have been badly served; no wonder they are shopping around for something better. In practice, however, it could make Britain much harder to govern. When electoral fragmentation meets Britain’s ancient first-past-the-post voting system, it produces unpredictable results. Small shifts in votes can produce huge differences in each party’s tally of parliamentary seats. First past the post inflates the importance of tactical voting, further distorting the relationship between how people vote and the governments they get. When support for a party subsides after an election, many more MPs fear that their seat is in danger. This dampens the willingness to take risks. Hence, Labour is like a beached whale: it has a vast parliamentary majority, yet as its support has ebbed it has become paralysed.
ln the US, of course, these fights have to take place within the two major parties. Here, the MAGA wing has come to completely dominate a Republican Party that was nominated Mitt Romney as recently as 2012. The Democrats are more divided, housing everyone from hard-core Progressives to NeverTrump erstwhile Republicans.
We shall see what happens elsewhere.
