“Twenty years from now, will we be a country of Democrats and Republicans taking turns on who’s in power?” Pete Buttigieg asked recently. “I’m not so sure.”
Speaking to Mosheh Oinounou, a podcaster and former CBS News producer, the conspicuous institutionalist casually blasted the country’s institutions and proposed that, amid the wreckage, America’s political future was not at all intuitive. “We’re past the point of just believing that there’s some pendulum that comes back and forth,” Buttigieg went on. “I think that both parties should examine the chances of their survival.”
Americans love to decry the country’s limited political menu, and talking up third-party challenges to the two-party system has been a cottage industry at least since Ross Perot. In a time of anti-establishment feeling, there’s additional incentive to hype a crackup, even though structural forces make that chatter look perennially foolish. And I’m not predicting that America’s two major parties are going to actually split up anytime soon. But peek across the Atlantic at the changing shape of our close-cousin democracy in Britain, and the possibilities seem, as Buttigieg suggests, open.
It was just last summer that Keir Starmer and Labour won a smashing victory over Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives, bringing a striking end to more than a decade of Tory austerity rule and securing the second-largest parliamentary majority since World War II. But just over a year later, Starmer’s net approval rating has fallen from plus 10 to minus 40.
Labour as a whole has lost more support in its first 10 months in office than any other governing party in 40 years. Labour’s Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, broke into tears last month in Parliament, in a richly symbolic event for the British political media. Since resuming power, her party has struggled to deliver meaningful new policy or escape the widespread impression of nervous, triangulating centrism.
To trust the polls, the strongest challenger is now not the Conservative Party, as tradition would suggest, but Reform — Nigel Farage’s rebrand of the upstart Brexit party, a populist-nihilist meme factory very much in the MAGA mold. Reform won only five seats in Parliament last summer, but it has maintained a steady polling lead over Labour since April — and an even larger lead over the Tory coalition from which it mostly sprang. Through the summer, polls have suggested that in the event of a sudden election, Reform would win, indeed quite spectacularly: Estimates suggest a huge 200-seat margin, for a party that did not even exist at the time of the Brexit vote.
Then, in late July, the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced the formation of a splinter party of the left, in partnership with Zarah Sultana, a 31-year-old former Labour member of Parliament who declared, in leaving the party, that it was “dead. It’s dead morally, it’s dead politically, and it’s dead electorally, as well.” She echoed Rosa Luxemburg, saying, “In 2029, the choice will be stark: socialism or barbarism. Billionaires already have three parties fighting for them. It’s time the rest of us had one.”
The rollout has been seen as a bit of a mess, and the party doesn’t yet even have a proper name: In media reports, it’s been called “Jeremy Corbyn’s party,” and “Your Party,” after a phrase on its website, though Sultana has disavowed that as its name and the title remains T.B.D. But the new party quickly reported that 700,000 supporters had signed up, and in recent polls, it has registered 5 to 15 percent support — and even support at the lower level of that range, one analyst calculated, could result in Starmer’s Labour losing perhaps 345 seats in a future election.
Although this reversal of fortune for Labour is in many ways striking, it is also not exactly surprising, at least to me. Britain has been mired in maddening stagnation since the financial crisis, as I’ve written before. In the run-up to the vote last summer, I suggested that “it will be both a generational wipeout and an anticlimactic changing of the guard, with Labour not writing a new political chapter for Britain but content to preside somewhat thanklessly over the ‘Stagnation Nation’ status quo instead.”
On the night of the election, the commentator Gary Gibbon asked, memorably, if it was a “loveless landslide”; the British political scientist Robert Ford suggested that even in victory Labour was inheriting a “legacy of ashes.” And even the parliamentary landslide was a bit of an illusion, the result of a strategic decision to maximize seat totals in a low-turnout election, and aided by the growth of small parties. Labour narrowly won a third of the popular vote last summer, securing ultimately three million fewer votes than Corbyn’s version of the party had, in 2017.
American political scientists sometimes talk about the “hollowness” of our two major parties, each seeming to grow less capable of restraining its members or herding its constituents toward any particular goal. But in Britain, anti-establishment feeling has already turned their two legacy parties into complete husks, with Starmer now something of a centrist lame duck and the conservatives a modest rump coalition polling not much above the traditional also-rans the Lib-Dems and the Greens. Of course, it’s much easier for splinter parties to emerge in a parliamentary system.
In the United States, the story isn’t quite the same. Here, the Republican Party has endured in part by allowing itself to be taken over fully — a brief period of Never Trump Republican resistance giving way pretty quickly to a party completely remade in the image, and according to the whims, of MAGA. Perhaps the American right would be more split in two, like in Britain, if Donald Trump hadn’t secured the 2016 nomination and then the presidency. And perhaps, as Buttigieg suggested, it could split even further once Trump himself leaves the stage
On the left, by contrast, the tensions are, for now, at least more beneath the surface, with factions pulling apart under what is nevertheless still a big-tent party. In the wake of Trump’s re-election in November, Democratic self-criticism often took the form of punching left, faulting woke excess for Joe Biden’s unpopularity and Kamala Harris’s disappointing electoral performance. But in the months since the inauguration, the left has been racking up conspicuous electoral and intercoalitional victories.
Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the New York City mayoral primary has been the most visible example, generating enormous national attention and indeed considerable party pushback. But Mamdani is not alone.
In Seattle last week, the upstart progressive Katie Wilson, running in the primary for mayor as an outsider advocate for renters and mass transit riders, edged out the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, though both will advance to the general election this fall. In Minneapolis, the leftish Omar Fateh beat the incumbent, Jacob Frey, to secure the nomination of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party of Minnesota, the state’s local stand-in for the Democrats, despite — or perhaps in part thanks to backlash to — a wave of xenophobic hate online. (Fateh is, in fact, a native-born American, caricatured by right wingers online as the face of the country’s immigration invasion.)
And in California the dwindling roster of Democratic candidates for governor may well make the progressive firebrand Katie Porter the odds-on favorite to succeed Gavin Newsom. As recently as last year, Newsom passed over Porter when appointing a successor to complete Dianne Feinstein’s Senate term. At the moment, Porter, a former House member, is polling well ahead of the rest of the field to replace Newsom.
None of this is to say that American leftists represent a blueprint for Democrats everywhere in the country — let alone that their notable successes portend an actual split in the party. But it does illustrate a growing tension, which may seem eternal but was much less visible in the first Trump term, when everyone from die-hard social justice warriors to Reagan Republicans seemed to join together in what looked not just like a coalition of convenience but a remarkable, anomalous and ideologically consistent left-liberal alliance.
The 2020 Democratic primaries heightened some ideological contrasts, but the alliance remained relatively stable in the early years of the Biden administration, with some temperamental moderates adopting more progressive positions on immigration, for instance, and Biden ultimately partnering with Bernie Sanders to develop his policy program. Especially during Trump’s first term, the gravitational force of Trump was so strong that you could find yourself at a rally or protest watching suburban readers of The Bulwark and organizers of the Democratic Socialists of America cheer for the same applause lines.
That arrangement soured, but it’s still not clear what it means for the party that purports to stand for both factions. In a healthier democracy, a big-tent approach might mean more room for ideological experimentation along any number of vectors. But one of the perverse dysfunctions of the present moment is that it combines widespread, even genuinely bipartisan anti-establishment feeling with a relentless nationalization of politics.
This makes it hard for any entrepreneurial politician to plot a course of independence — or even follow the idiosyncratic preferences of constituents — without seeming to affect the reputation of the national party and perhaps imperil its chances for the White House. Voters in one city may want a Democratic mayor who bashes the national party, for instance, but the result is that voters elsewhere see a nationally prominent figure at war with leadership, doing damage to the Democratic brand. Voters in another state might prefer a conspicuous centrist, with the result that those on the left side of the national coalition feel discounted. Or, perhaps, pummeled, including by leaders praised as future presidential candidates.
Lately, the spirit of Democratic defeatism that was so obvious right after the election has given way to something a little more confident and combative — though national approval of Democrats is at 30-year lows, the Democratic voters dragging down the figure are still loyal to the party, and Democrats have regained an advantage in party affiliation and opened up a sturdy lead in generic-ballot congressional surveys. The British experience, though, suggests a different interpretive framework entirely: that after an anomalous period of left-liberal unanimity, the two factions are again veering apart, giving off sparks of hostility along the way. That may be manageable, or even healthy, heading into 2026. But 2028? Look out.
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