The other day I sat, slack-jawed, reading Kamala Harris’ book — which was not easy to do with my eyeballs permanently rolled into the back of my head. (On one issue that killed her campaign, trans policy, she still hasn’t got the slightest clue what she’s talking about.) At one point, I even tried to imagine what America would be like today if this woke lawyer had actually won last year.
Then it occurred to me that we already kind of know. We actually have a pretty good test case of exactly that: a center-left lawyer-politician coming to power last year after a massive immigration wave had discredited and ousted the previous incumbent. Enter Keir Starmer, my high school frenemy, and now prime minister.
But unlike Harris, Starmer has at least shown signs of understanding his problem: he kicked the far-left Corbynites out of the party, called out anti-semitism, and in his big speech to his party’s annual conference this week, spoke proudly of flying the Union Jack, saying “we placed too much faith in globalization.” In office, he backed Israel’s war against Hamas strongly for a year-and-a-half, followed the science by banning puberty blockers and sex changes for kids, tightened immigration rules a bit, and pursued deregulation of the private sector, especially housing.
In one recent poll, his approval rating is 18 percent, with 61 percent disapproving. His government, just a year old, is polling around 19 percent. And in his first year in office, the new anti-immigration Reform Party has doubled its support from 15 to around 31 percent. The Tories — who gave Brits a massive wave of non-white, non-European immigration after Brexit — are at a historic low of 15 percent. Boris may have done what no leftist could: destroy the most successful political party in the West.
This, to put it mildly, is an earthquake. A party barely a year old is almost more popular than the Tories and Labour combined. On paper, Starmer still has four years to right the ship. But in reality, a prime minister who is loathed by four out of five Brits is like Wile E Coyote five feet off the cliff edge. To get a flavor of the general public’s view of Keir, check out this hilarious profile. Money quote:
Then there is the voice — a cornucopia for sketch writers. We could fill pages with descriptions of the thing — an expiring corncrake, a Dalek suffering stasis of the lower bowel, a fart in a coffin, etc. His love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways — ‘I follow the game like any other carbon-based life form’.
The fart in a coffin did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British.
No vote was ever taken on this policy of making London 40 percent foreign-born, a place where English is now often not heard at all — and even where it is, is almost always in a foreign accent. But the minute anyone ever proffered the slightest objection to mass migration (around a million migrants a year for the past four years), the charge of “hate” and “racism” was instantaneous and deafening.
Elite right and left were as one, defying the public for decade after decade. The hangover, especially after Boris’ brutal betrayal, is now here. (For a single glimpse, think of yesterday when a British citizen named Jihad attacked a synagogue, with two dead, and a flash mob of Hamas supporters swarmed Downing Street.)
In his speech, Keir recounted a chat with a voter who felt she had to tell him how much she liked one of her non-white neighbors before she could complain about the rise in crime and disorder in her neighborhood. On that conversation, Keir said:
What was really happening was that she — an ordinary, working class, woman in Oldham, a Labour voter, felt that she had to prove to a Labour politician that she wasn’t racist before she could even bring up the issues in her community.
That is something Kamala Harris has never said. And will never say.
I point this out to show that rhetorically, Starmer has definitely moved to the center. And yet still ... he sinks. The far left is seen as toxic, but the soft left is deemed something even worse: lame and insincere. Does this prove that the Dems should avoid the center touted by yours truly, because compromise will make them seem weak and still unable to compete with the real populists? Or has Keir not actually gone far enough?
My view is that it’s the latter. His core position on immigration policy has been only to tweak and tighten it, like Harris proposed but a bit ballsier. Higher standards for English fluency, longer waits to apply for citizenship, a tougher values test, a longer period before you can stay indefinitely, and lower migration levels over the course of five years: this is the “crackdown”. It would not end mass migration; it would cement the status quo; and then it would continue to increase the foreign-born population more slowly and carefully than in the recent past.
Compare that with the clarity of Reform’s proposal: require all those on visas during the “Boris wave” to renew their visas after five years, under much higher standards (i.e. removing up to 600,000 of them); end all immigration outside “essential” services immediately; require students to return home when their visas expire; withdraw from asylum treaties to turn away small boats in the Channel; and remove access to welfare benefits for non-citizens.
Keir, in other words, wants to keep the elite’s core policy while changing the tone and some substance. Reform actually wants to reverse the elite policy and stop illegal and legal immigration, period. Reform is taking seriously the sense that Britain itself is under cultural assault, and Keir denies any such assault. Everything is fine, if we pretend there’s no problem with Islam, no influx of unskilled workers, no housing shortage, no terrorism, no anti-Semitism, and no incipient civil conflict. Asked to respond to Reform’s latest plans, he said:
I do think it’s a racist policy, I do think it’s immoral — it needs to be called out for what it is. It’s one thing to say we’re going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here, I’m up for that. It’s completely different thing to say we’re going to reach in to people who are lawfully here and start removing them.
I recall Nancy Pelosi’s view six years ago that a border wall is “an immorality.”
What a skeptical British public hears, I suspect, is Keir’s desire to appear to have shifted on immigration, while actually still believing that removing any legal immigrants is racist and immoral. Which of course implies that the 45 percent of Brits who want lower legal immigration are themselves racist and immoral. Which suggests he still doesn’t get it.
Lefties have finally begun to accept they got immigration wrong and need to adjust; but they cannot actually stop believing that mass immigration is still a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness”. As Biden blurted out in 2015, making white Europeans an “absolute minority” in America is a “source of our strength.” The Dems feel they have to adjust because the country is full of racists, and Trump is so dangerous. But they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.
That’s where Ezra Klein is, it seems. In a podcast last week, he pitched the Starmer line for the Dems, and Ta-Nehisi Coates represented woke purity. Ezra crossed a woke line when he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Kirk assassination that Kirk was doing politics “the right way” — engaging opponents, debating them, rather than demonizing or canceling them.
This, of course, remains anathema to the woke. In their critical theory worldview, those who oppose them cannot be reasoned with — because reason itself is a form of oppression — but only opposed, canceled or demonized, because all opposition to wokeness is rooted in ineradicable “white supremacy”. Coates is still peak 2020:
[Kirk] just slurred, across the board, all sorts of groups of people ... if you ask me what the truth of his life was — and the truth of his public life — I would have to tell you it’s hate.
There were many things I disagreed with Kirk on, but the idea that the truth about the public life of this avowed Christian was “hate” only makes sense if you conflate the term “conservatism” with “hate”. Which Coates, of course, does.
And he is lying. There are no “slurs” or slur words in Kirk’s beyond-voluminous record. None. Google it yourself. You think you wouldn’t know by now if he had? (Coates’ sole evidence is that Kirk said “tranny” twice in 752 pod episodes over six years, a word that was ubiquitous among gay men until ten minutes ago.) Against this false claim, Klein caved, refusing to defend himself on the substance of Kirk’s views and conduct.
But Ezra’s true capitulation came, of course, on the trans question. Coates:
So, when I read [Kirk’s] words toward trans people — Jesus ... I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t. … If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.
Coates, mind you, is the author of this career-defining sentence:
I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died [at Ground Zero on 9/11]. They were not human to me. [My italics]
Klein first makes a pragmatic case — “In losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly ... We’ve just begun to lose that argument terribly — and that has put people in real danger” — and then tips his hand:
A huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.
Bingo. That’s Starmer on immigration: restrictionists are immoral but we’ve got to do something or we’ll keep losing. And somehow Keir and Ezra think we can’t see through them. Of course we can. Behind the rhetoric, the woke mindset still reigns.
And let’s look at what Americans actually believe “about what policy should be toward trans people”: there are big majorities for allowing trans adults to transition to the sex they want, and for banning discrimination against them, which is now the law of the land, thanks to a Trump nominee. How is that “fundamentally and morally wrong”?
According to Klein, it’s because even bigger majorities oppose sex changes for children, don’t want biological men competing against women in sports, and believe that being male or female is a function of biology, not something entirely in your head. Disagree if you want, but why is this “fundamentally and morally wrong”? It just isn’t. Nor is it “fundamentally and morally wrong” to undo the unprecedentedly reckless immigration policies of Biden and Boris.
We’re not stupid. No amount of fake rhetorical moves to the center will work. When very basic things that most human beings take for granted — that foreigners are not citizens and citizens come first, that men are not women, that children are not adults — are deemed fundamentally immoral in one political party, that party deserves to lose.
And they will.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a fun chat with Katie Herzog on how she finally quit drinking; a bunch of dissents and non-dissents over the pod with Wesley Yang on the transgender madness; 10 notable quotes from the week in news, including Yglesias Awards for two GOP senators; 18 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of Donna Summer paired with David Lee Roth; a seaside window in Scotland; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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Back On The Dishcast: Katie Herzog
Katie is a journalist, podcaster, and longtime friend of the Dish. She’s a former staff writer at The Stranger, and she’s contributed to The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Free Press, and The Weekly Dish. She hosts the podcast “Blocked and Reported” alongside Jesse Singal, and she just wrote her first book, Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how Katie’s drinking became a problem, and why naltrexone isn’t widely known. That link also takes you to a lot of commentary on last week’s episode with Wesley Yang and last week’s column on our post-literate, post-liberal era.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Michael Wolff on Epstein, Karen Hao on AI, Charles Murray on finding religion, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, David Ignatius on the Trump effect globally, Mark Halperin on the domestic front, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness.
As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. From a new subscriber:
The Dishcast is a gem. Even when I disagree with you, I want to hear your perspective and that of your guests. I appreciate the texture, respect, and nuance of your debates with others.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Comey indictment, Trump’s new plan for Gaza, and the Rapture. Examples:
Santiago Ramos starts a great debate with Noah Smith over the meaning and utility of suffering.
Camus warned that reason often “shape-shifts into ideology.”
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
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The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. One writes:
I’ve always enjoyed reading everyone’s contest entries and related facts and stories. My brain doesn’t seem to function this way, so I have never tried to guess the window, but since this is such an animal-friendly crowd, I am happy to share a photo of my new kitten, Toggle, apparently doing her best with this week’s contest. Spud, our 15-year-old beagle mix, is supervising from the couch:
I love that you put together this contest every week!
