We tend to look at politics through the lens of a battle between parties, in particular, given our voting system, as a battle between the Conservatives (who usually win) and Labour (who sometimes win). Through this lens, we see constant skirmishing: Who did well at Prime Minister’s Questions? Who is leading in the polls? We see policy evaluation: How is the economy doing? And we imagine that the real battle is fought in the lead-up to the general election at which the party with the best track-record and policy proposals will win.
In December, Elon Musk announced that he was considering giving $100mn to Reform to help the party win the next UK general election.
That makes it a very good time to ask whether the ‘battle between two parties’ is still a valid lens through which to view politics? This is the first of two articles which argue that looking at politics through this lens may have been a serviceable approximation, but is now a dangerous distortion of reality:
- The idea that politics was a ‘battle between two parties’ was only ever an approximation to reality.
- Now it is not even an approximate description of the battle for power. This should be obvious to all in politics, but apparently is not.
- This means that progressives are ‘fighting the last war,’ a dangerously misguided approach.
Always only an approximation
There has always been more to it than just the two main parties. In the UK, Labour has always had the backing of the unions, and the Conservatives have always had the backing of most of the media, the Church, most of the establishment and the very wealthy.
Even before Murdoch came onto the UK media scene in 1968, The Daily Mail, The Times, and The Telegraph were all staunchly right-wing. The Daily Mail has supported the far-right since the 1930s. The Times had William Rees-Mogg as its editor from 1967 to 1981. Rees-Mogg co-wrote the extreme right-wing book, The Sovereign Individual which argued for dismantling ‘mass democracy’ and the post-war social contract. It also had a huge influence on market fundamentalists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. And The Telegraph has been nicknamed ‘The Torygraph’ since at least the 1970s. On the other hand, The Mirror and The Guardian have always been left-wing.
The establishment is hard to define and, of course, not homogeneous, but it is reasonable to say that it has tended to be right-of-centre. The Church of England was described in 1917 by Maude Royden as “the Conservative Party at prayer” and this may still be fair. Professions like lawyers, bankers, doctors and top civil servants have always been relatively well-paid, and this used to correlate with voting patterns.
Of course, the extremely wealthy have always preferred a less redistributive system to a more redistributive one and tended to support the right wing.
So, both parties had backers with significant (though probably unequal) power. It was always only an approximation to think of politics as being a battle of ideas between parties, but it was perhaps a workable approximation.
Now not even an approximate description of the key dynamics
Events over the last decade in both the US and the UK show that looking through the lens of a ‘battle between parties’ is no longer close to being an adequate description of what drives politics. This should have been obvious in the US.
For the past eight years the US has received clear evidence that Donald Trump and his backers were prepared to distort and dismantle US democracy in pursuit of power. There was strong evidence that illegal Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election occurred “in sweeping and systematic fashion” during the campaign in order to help Trump win power, and he stacked the Supreme Court with loyalists. This both helped him overturn Roe v Wade and later ensured that he was granted immunity for any official acts. Most notably, he incited an insurrection when he lost the 2020 Election and has also been convicted of fraud and sexual abuse.
Viewed through the conventional two-party lens, given the evidence above, Trump would not even have been a credible candidate for the Republican nominee for the 2024 election. That he was chosen as candidate in 2016 was strange enough. As Lindsey Graham (who later became a Trump supporter) said “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” He was right in the sense that the traditional Republican Party no longer exists because Trump has made it his party. And, of course, he has just won the 2024 election.
But Trump did not do it alone. He had the backing of a powerful network of far-right think tanks, media outlets, social media channels and big donors.
Among the think tanks, the Heritage Foundation which compiled the Project 2025 plan stands out. Their plan was so toxic that before the US election, Trump disclaimed it, saying “I know nothing about Project 2025 … I have no idea who is behind it”. In fact, well over 100 of his former staff members were heavily involved in preparing this plan for his second term. And in 2022 he had said, “This … group [is] going to lay the groundwork in detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America”. Once the election was out of the way, the denials ended.
The section below gives an idea of some of the Project 2025 provisions.
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 (P2025) is a plan which contains both controversial policies and systematic actions to unwind any remaining checks and balances on their implementation, including a list of key employees to be replaced so that Trump can implement these ideas without hindrance in his second term.
Controversial policies
Departments that come under fire include the FBI (who raided Trump’s residence at Mar a Lago as part of its investigation into his handling of state documents) and the Education Department, which P2025 plans to abolish in its entirety. A federal fund worth $18bn for low-income students will expire. There will be cuts to funding for free school meals, and the Head Start program which provides services to children of low-income families will be eliminated.
P2025 wants the Department of Health and Human Services to “maintain a biblically-based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. The project seeks to cut Medicare and Medicaid, and urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care. The plan also aims to roll-back LGBTQ+ rights.
According to Wikipedia, the Environment Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will be closed, and the EPA’s staff, including the science advisor, will be selected based on managerial skills rather than scientific qualifications. States will be prevented from adopting stricter regulations on vehicular emissions, as the state of California has, and regulations on the fossil fuel industry will be relaxed.
Unwinding checks and balances
Project 2025 proposes that the president should have total personal control of the entire federal bureaucracy, including agencies such as the Department of Justice which are currently independent and whose independence is essential to preserve the rule of law.
P2025 will prevent the Federal Elections Commission from countering misinformation or disinformation about election integrity. And as well as the areas explicitly mentioned in the document, Project 2025 also claims privately to have drafted around 350 executive orders that are not public.
To counter the risk that the target departments and agencies may be staffed with people who do not subscribe to these policies, P2025 has a database of around 10,000 replacements for key staff members across government. Trump’s picks for his cabinet give an indication of the sort of people who are likely to be in the database. There is a saying, “a fish rots from the head.” P2025 is a plan to make sure the rot spreads as fast as possible.
The supporting role of media
Many in the traditional media who might have been expected to call this out have instead normalised or downplayed Trump’s history and plans. Newsweek’s ‘neutral‘ reporting of Project 2025 is a case study. Reading their coverage, you would have no idea that there was any basis for concern at all about the plan.
The Washington Post, which had for the last 36 years endorsed one or other of the candidates, decided at the last moment not to endorse Harris because its new owner Jeff Bezos feared that, if his newspaper endorsed her, Amazon would lose valuable government contracts under Trump. Several Washington Post journalists resigned in protest. The LA Times did much the same at the bidding of its owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, and saw resignations in protest. Many other media outlets were intimidated by Trump’s threats of retaliation against those who criticised him.
Social media, rather than providing a counter-argument, has buttressed Trump. Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg (a protégé of Peter Thiel who sat on Meta’s board), has always been supportive of market fundamentalist ideas. Twitter was more neutral and possibly even predominantly progressive until 2022, when Elon Musk bought it. He claimed to be a ‘free-speech absolutist’ but in practice this meant allowing back accounts that had been banned for hate speech and disinformation, tweaking the algorithms to boost far-right content (especially his own Tweets) and throttling progressive content. Musk now has over 200 million followers and has started suspending those who criticise him. He is also strongly supportive of Trump’s campaign.
Billionaires as a class supported Trump
As Forbes pointed out in August, “26 billionaires have already given more than $1 million apiece to pro-Trump PACs and committees … The top industries among Trump’s top billionaire backers are casinos finance, and oil and gas”. But even this pales when compared with Musk’s donations of over $250mn to the Trump campaign, in return for a role in the new regime.
Trump is a convicted criminal, was supported by a foreign power, has indicated that he intends to dismantle both democratic safeguards and the post-war social contract. He was also the instigator of an attempted insurrection. In a traditional contest between two parties, one of which was led by such a candidate while the other was led by one who was at worst uninspiring, the result would not have been in doubt: something has changed in America. The combined power of hostile foreign states, big money and hi-tech using state-of-the art psychological techniques to swing the views of the population has made traditionally unthinkable results a reality.
In part two, I shall look at what is changing now in the UK, what our response has been so far and, most importantly, what it needs to be.
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