Looking at Sir Keir Starmer, you start to understand why the Japanese invented ritual seppuku. Less than two years ago, Starmer led the British Labour Party to a commanding general-election victory, securing 411 seats in Parliament and becoming the first Labour Prime Minister in over a decade. But today, his approval ratings are in the toilet and his government is in disarray, with the Green Party scoring election wins against him on the Left and Nigel Farage’s xenophobic Reform Party rising on the Right. It’s been a humiliating fall from grace, and Starmer finally admitted defeat last week, announcing his resignation. (With his exit, Larry the Cat has outlasted six successive PMs.) But people in the United States should be paying close attention to the rise and fall of Starmerism, too, because if elected Democrats in this country don’t make some changes, they may soon meet the same fate.
As I’ve written before, there’s one primary reason Starmer lost the British public’s goodwill: he got elected because everyone was sick of being governed by the Conservative Party, and then proceeded to govern like a Conservative himself. In his short tenure, Starmer fought to deny welfare benefits to British children and elderly people, targeting both ends of the age spectrum for financial austerity. His government bragged about “Immigration Enforcement raids at the highest level in UK history,” and he endorsed home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s repulsive plan to confiscate the jewelry of refugees to fund their processing fees. On Gaza, he was two-faced, recognizing Palestine as a state but also supplying military intelligence to Israel to bomb it, while waging a brutal crackdown on protesters at home. In Birmingham, he authorized police action against garbage collectors who’d gone on strike to prevent a pay cut. In short, he enacted dozens of policies that his Tory predecessor, Rishi Sunak, might just as well have, earning himself insulting nicknames like “Sir Kid Starver” in the process. So when Starmer’s ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson, was arrested on suspicion of giving “sensitive government information” to Jeffrey Epstein—and it became clear that Starmer had been warned about Mandelson’s ties to the notorious pedophile, but appointed him anyway—the scandal was just the last in a long line of self-inflicted wounds.
There was one institution, though, that loved Starmer and all that he represented: the Democratic Party in the United States. It’s easy to forget among all the other chaos that surrounded the 2024 election, but the Democrats brought several of Starmer’s top advisors to Washington, D.C. to coach Kamala Harris on how to win her own race. At times, the influence was not subtle:
The two campaigns have deployed strikingly similar messaging. “Stop the chaos, turn the page, start to rebuild” was Labour’s slogan as it made a case against the Conservative Party that had been in power for 14 years. “We’re not going back. It’s time to turn the page… and to end the chaos,” Harris said, trying to position herself as the change candidate in her debate with former president Donald Trump.
Mike Tapp, who served as the Under-Secretary of State for Migration and Citizenship under Starmer, reportedly told Harris to take “concerns around immigration and borders” seriously, and to emphasize that she, like Starmer, was a former prosecutor who would be tough on crime. Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former head of policy, emphasized the importance of “making sure that the Democrats stay on the center ground,” and not be seen as a party of the Left. Apparently, their advice was heeded, as Harris would soon be promising to “[add] 1,500 border security agents to protect our border,” and even tried attacking Donald Trump from his right on immigration, blaming him for congressional Republicans’ decision to block a bipartisan enforcement bill. The Cheney endorsements followed, and, well, you know the rest.
Like Starmer, Harris went down in flames. But the Democratic Party “stayed on the center ground,” and for the people who run it, that was more important than winning. To quote what political writer Jon Schwarz, nearly 20 years ago, dubbed the Iron Law of Institutions:
The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
In the context of the last few election cycles, this means the establishment liberals who run political parties, on either side of the Atlantic, would rather lose than win by tapping into populist energy and shifting to the Left. That was the case with Harris, who adamantly refused to break with Joe Biden on Gaza, and it was definitely the case with Starmer.
It’s easy to mock Sir Keir as a failure, but he accomplished his only real mission: crushing Jeremy Corbyn and the upstart leftist movement he represented. When Corbyn was leading the party, Starmer worked behind the scenes to undermine him on Brexit policy, as Oliver Eagleton has documented in his book The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right. Guided by power brokers like Mandelson and chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, Starmer also gave credence to the spurious antisemitism smears against the man who was ostensibly his leader. This was treachery on a Shakespearian level, and it worked: dogged by endless controversy, Corbyn’s incarnation of the Labour Party lost the 2019 elections to the Conservatives. But Starmer didn’t mind. The Iron Law was in full effect, and a loss was exactly what he needed to oust Corbyn and take his place. After he became Labour leader, he told the Left explicitly that his goal was to remake the party along more centrist lines, and that if anyone disagreed, “the door is open, and you can leave.”
In the United States, a similar pattern has emerged. Harris lost in humiliating fashion, but top Democrats refuse to learn their lesson. They’re sticking to their centrist guns, and actively sabotage any attempt to invigorate the party with new, left-wing ideas and leadership. For example, take senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani in his race for New York City mayor, even after he became the Democratic nominee. Despite Schumer’s intransigence, Mamdani has become the most charismatic and successful standard-bearer the party has seen in a generation. Or consider DNC chair Ken Martin, who insists that “there are a lot of good billionaires” the party could rely on, or California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, who is fiercely resisting taxing those billionaires despite strong public support for doing so. Or take a look, if you can stomach it, at the “Promise to America” being propagated by Representative Josh Gottheimer, which includes such rallying cries as “We are capitalist, not socialist.” These figures’ first priority isn’t to defeat Donald Trump and the Republicans, or even to enact popular policies, but to make sure the Democrats remain a centrist, pro-corporate party, no matter what else happens.
Both Starmer and the Democratic leadership, though, have become victims of their own arrogance. The politics they want is perfectly lukewarm gruel, rejecting the excesses of the far Right, but without actually opposing any of the Right’s basic beliefs: that capitalism and private property are good economic principles, that borders are important and need to be controlled, that police and the military should continue to get as much funding as they want. The voting bases of these parties don’t actually support those politics—in fact, the latest polling shows that U.S. Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism, so politicians like Gottheimer have no business declaring that “we are capitalist.” But contempt for the voters, and democracy itself, is built into the business model. These leaders have assumed that, if they successfully suppressed the Left for one or two election cycles, the public would be forced to come crawling back to them, and accept their brand of technocratic, pro-market liberalism as the only game in town. Apparently, they really thought they could banish all contrary opinions to the irrelevant fringes.
But politics doesn’t work that way. In fact, by standing for nothing in particular, both the Democrats and the Labour Party have brought themselves to the brink of irrelevance. If you’re a right-wing voter in the U.K., there’s no earthly reason for you to support Keir Starmer and his “tough on immigration” policies when Nigel Farage is available. It’s like voluntarily eating chocolate-flavored rice cakes instead of actual chocolate. Meanwhile, if you’re a left-wing voter, the attempt to pander to Farage’s constituency reveals that Starmer is someone you can never trust. The same dynamic holds true for the Democrats and their own efforts to tack to the right, whether it’s Gavin Newsom saying that he agreed with the late Charlie Kirk on trans rights, or Governor Abigail Spanberger refusing to repeal anti-union “right to work” laws in Virginia. This stuff alienates the Left, and doesn’t win over the Right, leaving a constituency of nobody at all.
What both Labour and the Democrats forgot is that, even in a deeply compromised pseudo-democracy, people have free will—and that if you ignore their wishes for long enough, they may turn away from you for good. In both the U.S. and the U.K., people are now doing exactly that, and choosing the socialist Left in growing numbers. Starmer and his Labour Party got a nasty wake-up call back in February, when they lost a parliamentary seat in Gorton and Denton to the Green Party, who ran a 34-year-old plumber named Hannah Spencer as their candidate. As it turns out, when you tell leftists to leave your party, they do it. Likewise, we’ve just seen voters in New York send a slate of three left-wing candidates to Congress, all of them endorsed by democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and two of whom defeated longstanding incumbents. People have seen what lukewarm “center ground” liberalism has to offer, and decided they want nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately, that also creates an opportunity for the Right. When Starmer came to power in the U.K., I warned that “Farage is already outflanking Starmer on key issues,” especially opposing cuts to children's benefits, and that “prolonged Starmerism could strengthen the far right’s position even further.” It’s not always nice to be proven correct. If a general election were held today, polls suggest Nigel Farage has a good chance of becoming Britain’s next prime minister, where he’d be able to wreak colossal damage on immigrants, poor people, and anyone else he dislikes. Likewise, the vapid emptiness of the Democrats has given us a second Trump administration with an ever-increasing body count, both within the United States and abroad. These party leaders forget, or don’t care, that their decisions have consequences for real human beings—and because they refuse to allow the Left a foot in the door, they’ve given the Right an open invitation to run rampant.
Keir Starmer is stepping down now, but don’t feel too bad for him. He’ll soon have a high-paying job in the private sector, possibly on the board of some ghastly nonprofit or think-tank. He leaves behind an ignominious record, like a suspicious wet spot on the carpet. Other political figures have done more damage—Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu, to name the most obvious. But there is something uniquely repellent about Starmer. He’s a human rights lawyer who supports and defends genocide; a prosecutor who surrounds himself with the dregs of the Epstein network; a Labour prime minister who breaks labor strikes. In power, he tried to reject the Left and the Right equally, only to find himself caught between a hammer and anvil.
But there are Starmers everywhere in the United States, and for the moment at least, they still control the Democratic Party. Chuck Schumer is ideologically a Starmer clone, and so is Hakeem Jeffries, and so are Ken Martin and Josh Gottheimer. Even Kamala Harris isn’t fully out of the picture yet, and more sinister agents are waiting in the wings. In the months and years to come, they’re going to try very hard to keep the Democrats bound to pro-corporate liberalism, and stifle any chance to move beyond it to a left-wing politics that offers real progress, just as Starmer did to Labour. If they succeed, the results will be a disaster for everyone.
The U.K. has kicked Starmer to the curb. If the Democrats don’t change their tune and embrace the rising tide of the Left, they may soon find themselves sitting alongside him, and they’ll deserve it.
