The centre-left needs to get nastier if it wants to win again.
The transatlantic centre-left is in the midst of an identity crisis. But despite what Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic Primary and Jeremy Corbyn’s threat to create a new left-wing party in the UK might suggest, this crisis is not one that pits left against right. For more than a decade, the Right has mastered a politics of moral existentialism: employing a language that raises the stakes of politics by locating policy debates in a broader conflict between good and evil. President Obama was correct to call on Democrats to ‘toughen up’. But rather than just having the confidence to speak up, centre-left politics needs to learn to be combative and leave business as usual behind. Lessons from the MAGA movement and the Brexiters suggest that confrontation pays dividends, when applied selectively. If a beleaguered and demoralised centre-left wants to reunify voters around a progressive vision of politics, it must first be willing to get divisive.
US House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was one of the first politicians to learn the new politics of existentialism when he was successfully ousted by Republican activists in 2014. He tried appeasement by opposing gun control, voting against prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation and earned a 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee. But when Cantor signalled he would work with Obama on immigration reform, he became a traitor to activists who saw Democrats as an existential threat to their way of life. Ten years later, the purge of the Republican Party was complete while the Conservative Party saw an exodus of votes to Reform even as it publicly adopted increasingly right-wing stances. For a long time, it has not been sufficient for politicians to be nominally committed to the causes they claim to care about. Their voters believe they are locked in an existential battle and expect their representatives to fight with an intensity that demonstrates they understand the stakes. Trump and Farage’s success has already shown that this uncompromising politics of moral conflict carries wider purchase with an electorate searching for somewhere to apportion blame.
Until recently, Democrats were reluctant to embrace this offensive style of politics. Weeks after denouncing him as a fascist, Joe Biden posed smiling alongside his 2020 opponent. The commitment to constitutional norms was admirable, but also undercut Democrats’ characterisation of Trump as an existential threat. This is changing. When Trump recently reprised his nickname for California’s Governor, Gavin ‘Newscum’, Newsom shot back: ‘Donald Trump is the real scum’. Democratic firebrand Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, who comes from the ‘opposite’ wing of the Party, was equally direct when she called the President a rapist. An analysis of Newsom’s tweets found that his anti-Trump clap-backs received triple the audience of his usual posts. Social media likes aren’t everything, but for a beleaguered party struggling for attention, the mobilising impact must count for something.
None of this is to say that confrontation alone is enough. The centre-left also needs to select the ideological lens through which to channel its attacks. An equally important lesson from the Trump and Brexit years is that voicing outrage at every perceived transgression weakens the messenger’s credibility. It is right that progressives stop clutching their pearls at every comment made about immigration, for example. The centre-left will need to be careful how it chooses its struggles. It should try to stand for positions that are consistent with a broader narrative about what it is trying to do and that it knows can connect with popular anxieties. Democrats were right in 2024 to present Trump as a threat to democracy. Most voters agreed democracy was at stake. But if it wants to look credible, the centre-left must be prepared to fight the battles it picks with an intensity that is consistent with the threat they identify.
Democrats are beginning to understand this. Closer to home, selective adoption of the language of existentialism could offer an escape route for a Labour Party that has seen its support crater. The risk of inflaming ‘polarisation’ shouldn’t sound so bad to a government whose citizens are increasingly unified against it. In the past, Labour has picked battles only to fight them with one hand tied behind its back. Changes to inheritance tax and the now infamous winter fuel cuts were presented as necessary cost cutting measures even as their opponents framed them as broader ideological battles. The government lost these battles largely because it did not fight them as part of an existential struggle for a progressive vision, even as there was space to frame them as part of a necessary transfer of opportunity to younger generations. To take on Reform, Labour must have the confidence to identify and pick fights it has cause to believe it can win, and then go for the jugular to win them.
The obvious place to start is Brexit. PTSD from the 2019 general election has terrified Labour of further alienating its Red Wall voters and led it to reconcile itself with an outcome it once opposed. But if Farage is really as dangerous as Labour say he is, they will need to take him apart for the damage he has already done. The overwhelming evidence is that there are electoral rewards to reap from attacking Reform for its role in an outcome that has made Britain poorer. Voters believe Britain was wrong to leave the EU by a margin of 56% to 31%. Even 60% of Leave voters want to see a restoration of economic ties to the bloc. There may have been a consensus among these voters to curb immigration, but that hasn’t happened. Labour should blame Reform and take them to task for ‘destroying lives for the sake of a vanity project’, or words to that effect. Add to this the fact that Labour is hemorrhaging almost three times as many votes to the Greens and Liberal Democrats as to Reform, and the case for reunifying the anti-Brexit coalition looks convincing. It would have the added benefit of putting a potential new Corbyn-led party in an awkward position with the pro-EU young voters it will hope to enlist.
Labour has made a start with its EU trade deal. For a government that has staked its reputation entirely on its capacity to deliver, provoking a fight over even closer reintegrationoffers a way to kickstart the growth that has so far eluded it while also reuniting a significant section of voters in opposition to Reform. It is true that, despite evidence of a mood shift in the country, this approach will land better with some groups of voters than others. But Boris Johnson showed in 2019 that uniting one side of that divide against its fractured opposition can be effective. Besides, a party polling at 22% cannot afford to be picky about which votes it wins back.
On both sides of the Atlantic, centre-left parties look directionless and exhausted. While their opponents have drawn energy from presenting policy skirmishes as part of broader existential battles, progressives have pulled their punches, or else picked the wrong terrain to fight on. They would do well to act like the stakes are as high as they say they are. For better or for worse, the future of the centre-left is in a politics of aggressive yet strategic confrontation that the Right has been practicing for years.
