I've said this before, but if Kamala wins, whoever created the first brat/kamala edit is going to go down as one of the more powerful king makers in recent history. It represents a huge shift in the democratic party and how they market to voters. There's also something to be said about the Reagan connection. You mentioned that Reagan wouldn't recognize the party as it exists today, but in many ways he is the founding father. He brought an old Hollywood style pageantry to the white house. The progression of that is people looking to the presidency for entertainment instead of protection or guidance.
We've gone from old hollywood (Reagan) to reality tv. (Trump) and now the democrats have figured out how to be culturally relevant again, and are seizing it. Obama was the last president that people viewed this way. Little discussion about policy, mostly just vibes.
Oh my godd yes yes yes on every point,—stan accounts going forward are going to decide the future of american politics and of the world, for better or for worse (which makes the reveal that like 40% of twitter stan accounts were from Brazil all the more fascinating).
Reagan absolutely is their founding father of the republican party, but he's also the founding father of american politics today in general,—he set the precedent for a conflation of mass media (like you put it so well, old hollywood) and american politics to create an entertaining spectacle to distract from policy. Like you said, it's vibes based and not policy based. I think we can see that clearly through Clinton's saxophone playing on late night shows in the 90s and Obama's whole '08 campaign.
Your point about Trump being a continuation of this lineage from Old Hollywood to Reality TV, sort of a following trhough with the trends of television, is so so fascinating to me too. And perhaps the reason his campaign succeeded so well in 2016 was because people were still consuming cable reality television and tweeting nonstop about it (not that that doesn't still happen, of course, but there were definitely more people tuned into television in 2016 and a helluva lot more people tweeting about it),—but that conflation made Trump the perfect candidate for the time with his twitter/reality tv candidacy.
With all that in mind it does seem like both parties at the moment are attempting to divine a new version of Reagan's entertainment politics for the 2020s with Trump going for a conservative podcasting approach and Harris going for a stan-account/virality approach,—it does makes me wonder though if the trump campaign staff is simply spending too much time on musk's twitter and have had their perceptions of reality warped completely.
One of the funniest critiques I see people throw at trump nowadays is that he’s boring. That he’s got no “gotcha” nickname for Kamala. Like he's a tv. show that's gotten stale. That is how the public evaluates the worth of a candidate. We should never forget that.
Right, it reveals so clearly where the priority is. Politics is expected to be reality television and this frustration with trump (even if it’s sardonic) eerily mirrors the frustration people had with characters in the later seasons of shows like the office.
The discarding of M4A and Abolish ICE and ACAB and Defund the Police and Palestine by many when those things were no longer zeitgeisty enough was predictable but still enough to make me shake my head.
Right! Like it makes sense for them to be memory holed with the constant virality cycles, but at the same time it feels as if the political class has finally figured out how to manufacture cycles for themselves to obfuscate unpopular policy. It's wild to watch.
One thing I really wonder is whether US politics is perhaps a bit like a river flowing out to sea, with all parties naturally always leaning towards the right. So GOP might go way into the fringes (we could say they’re already pretty deep in the weeds but I guess there’s always an even deeper marsh to wade into) and as Dems finally take their proper Center Right position (which all the rest of the world has been ascribing them since forever, speaking of them as ‘leftists’ has always been laughable at best) one hopes a new fresh actually leftist left wing party will arise, taking perhaps the Omars and Tlaibs and Sanderses and Bowmans that are continuously being slapped down by The New Reagan.
On the subject of Brat Reagan, only reason she is not a war criminal yet is lack of opportunity, she’s rearing to go, as evidenced in all her positions on Gaza and the military in general. I haven’t heard any calls to follow international law in any sense.
It’s really pretty bizarre. Right Wing generally tends to have way more party loyalty than the left, because it tends more towards groupthink as a good thing, so they have been letting a lot slide…. And I absolutely think Harris will take the win carried largely by the center right since she could not be more disappointing to the true left.
Absolutely, the river flowing out to the sea is an apt analogy, though it could also be said that that river is flowing from the Wall Street-Pentagon-White House trifecta described by C. Wright Mills, the same spring that emerged during the global hegemony the US basted in after WWII as the US was the only fully industrialized country not touched by the war. It's a very conservative stream, that's to say, and the priority is to retain economic supremacy worldwide and that goal does not at all coincide with leftist politics in any way, hence the slide right of the American centrist party (and yeah, it's funny when people refer to dems as leftists because the only way that could be further from the truth would be if they were to refer to the republicans as leftists).
And the point you make about the republican party's loyalty is accurate too,— that's how it's been able to slide so far to the right. It feels to me as if that slide right has become something of a convenient excuse for the democratic party to occupy the center right lane that the republican party once occupied before its slide to the message board fascists. And so now there's truly "no alternative" to neoliberal capitalism and american imperialism because who else is there to vote for. I can't help but feel as if that's part of the design here. I think the Bernie movement spooked the establishment tremendously and the american political class is much more tight knit than they seem. There's a quote about Ted Cruz from someone who knew him well saying how Cruz spoke of his role in politics as akin to a WWE wrestler and i think that speaks well to how the presentation of american politics is primarily a stage shared between heroes and villains depending on which side of the culture war you're looking in from.
Oh yeah I think I heard a few other such accidentally too honest comments of politicians admitting how they play-act all the drama and discord and then just go for drinks later. It goes hand in hand with Alex Jones’ defense that he was ‘clearly playing a character’ with his insane alt-right conspiracy hate/fearmongering. I guess that’s the issue with the US having such a powerful core relationship with the ideas of a) marketing and b) Hollywood. That’s why the slide into ‘truthiness’ as Colbert once put it (Colbert who has turned out no stranger to truthiness himself, now that the time had come to call out the Dems for once).
It feels like both sides are totally happy with a world where truth as a concept is not just indeterminable, but also fundamentally irrelevant. If you are with us, your truth is Our Truth. You cannot even take a sliver from Their Truth and question the clash between the two because Their Truth is an Evil Truth and our truth is the Good Truth. They want to finance the murder of children because they are depraved. We want to finance the murder of children because it’s sad but inevitable and necessary for our safety. Can’t you see how different we are?
Anyway since the dems have systemically been cutting down actual progressives (illustrated beautifully by AOC who was supposed to be The One Who Broke Through but then started promotional videos with Biden wearing aviator glasses and smarming for genocide) a new left is needed. I would be curious to see how many people would flock to it. I still keep thinking to Bernie’s actual attempt and the insane grassroots power he had immediately mobilized just by breathing and not being a fucking ghoul.
Honestly it makes total sense that the dems have no policies to run on, since they don’t actually want to change any policies.
It's abysmal, right? To put on smoke and mirror games with the atrocities we're aiding and abetting globally,—not to mention the horrendous failures of american life domestically,—is cruel beyond belief. And to see so many people buying into such a fake wrestling match and pouring all of their political thought into an ice cube tray of "nothing will ever change" feels like torture.
Bernie unlocked something in many hearts, i think, including mine. It's been quite sad to see the virality that helped fuel the grassrootsness of his movement be coopted in this way. The truth is though we don't just need a leftist party, we need more parties and we need them to be viable. We need a multiparty system, i think, if we're to ever make any sort of non-surface level betterment of our lives.
But otherwise i guess recently i've had a fun time recently thinking about what would happen if Trump's cult of personality completely dilapidates the republican party of its old guard in 4 to 8 years' time and whether leftists could storm the gates and take the republican party to the far left of the dems. It'd be a funny, if incredibly unlikely, outcome to this whole mess to have communists running as republicans and hey all we'd really need to do stylistically is to throw a hammer and sickle onto the red elephant to make it work lol
It really could be done tho. The GOP has already coopted freedom of speech as ‘their issue’, along with a general ‘stick it to the man’/ ‘don’t tell me what to do’ attitude that, if used less duplicitously, could definitely promote leftist views as easily as right wing ones.
Hmmm.
Reminds me of someone’s idea to basically start ‘leftist propaganda infiltration’ campaigns into the right wing social media buzz circles. Like, the right has been putting a LOT of effort into infiltrating and coopting the left - bots, shills, accusations of ‘Nazis were leftists actually, it’s in the name see, it’s the SOCIALIST PARTY’ and similar garbage… We’re missing a trick there. We like to think we’re smarter but we definitely haven’t shown ourselves cleverer.
But imagine the reverse. You wouldn’t even have to lie. They love a good conspiracy theory. Say instead of bleating at them about the dead children they clearly couldn’t give less of a shit about, you make a cowboy vibe profile posting about all the money siphoned out of the country to fund Israel. Some people would start scratching their heads. Obviously not when we snooty lefties say it… but if it were them? Hmmmmm.
I think it is definitely doable, it's the classic struggle of awakening class consciousness in the working class, pushing past political affiliation and the urban/rural dichotomy. All of american political history can be seen through the suppression of this possibility, though, so it would be difficult. It would be a tremendous step, though, if the rural working class in the country were to take a leftward turn and honestly it's something that's worth taking into consideration.
you put words to how i’ve been feeling about the DNC and the dems in general, the comparisons to reagan and carter are BRILLIANT. you’re a breath of fresh air, griffin. i’m always eager to read your thoughts, and i’m so grateful for your writing.
Congrats! You were able to go much deeper than I could, + still have people listening to you.
You're absolutely right about "protest fatigue"; seems like public, physical, street demonstration is a dead tactic now in so many ways: authorities have massive internationally- shared counter-playbooks against every level, press takes what it already wants and ignores the rest, ordinary people are just tired of being yelled at, + can't keep the causes all straight anymore.
I also see a new, American left party as inevitable at this point; possibly beginning as soon as this election is over.
But no more from me on that. Looking forward to your next installment.
i think that we’ve definitely seen the end of what i’ll refer to here as “slogan protests,” aka protest movements not organized around a concrete demand but around catchphrases as to garner the most internet traffic like BLM or the Occupy movement,—but i think the pro-palestine movement still has juice precisely because there’s a concrete demand to it,—namely stop weapons shipments to Israel.
And an american leftist party is absolutely needed, i wonder how it could possibly ever come about, though…
I'm looking to examples in other places, like Lula's party coalition in Brazil, or the French coalition formed by Insoumise. A loose confederation with a basic 3-point 'platform' to attract atomized soft soc-dems, that the hardcore factions can opt in or out of as they like- but can't dominate, or fracture, in pursuit of such dominance.
Nobody's seen anything like that in a while here; but that doesn't mean it can't work.
oh i agree 100% that those are great examples of leftist parties we should strive towards, but their electoral systems are also fundamentally different from ours,—their structure allows for the existence of leftist parties in a way that our two-party system does not, it would seem
So we make our own "permission". Remember what political parties are in other countries (like Brazil): they're not just advertising agencies for ideologies, they're active social organizations; they exist and do things all the time, not just yell at you to vote when you're supposed to. They're 100 or 1,000 small circles, that form points along much larger ones.
Our politics are different now, yes; but only bc they were made that way, forced that way even. But that mode is wearing out, bc half the voters or more in America are alienated from it.
More will be soon.
It's imperative that we on the left find new (or resurrect older) ways to do politics, before the fashos find new ways to "manage" politics in order to exclude us.
Great read. There's definitely a shift in the democratic party towards the center but Kamala herself is an empty vessel. She's not driving the bus as Biden was asleep at the wheel as well. And on the GOP side it's the opposite, Trump is the only one driving the bus which is why his power and reach only amount to rhetoric, mean tweets, and dressing up like a dictator for a day in the oval office. I fear the Democratic party has too much institutional power embedded in all that surrounds us-Mass Media, Schools/Universities, Entertainment, etc that they can ride out a "vibes", "Brat, or "freedom" campaign with really no explanation or policy platform to speak of. All they are doing is running on "don't vote for Trump". Once they get in office (and they probably will) the injection of instant cash to 1st time home buyers will be a foregone conclusion among other gimmicks. This will be passed off as "we are championing the middle class!" but in reality just another way for the gov't to directly compete with the economy.
i loved this. you’ve so eloquently summed up the cultural and social shift since this summer. also really liked the bit about smarm - it got me thinking about similar phenomena in UK politics and how it’s played into recent elections here (our political parties all have tiktok accounts!) - can’t wait for the rest of this series
Oh yeah the UK definitely has a similar thing going on with the Labor party being pulled past the center and towards the fiscal right, especially with Starmer smh—not seemingly as bad as Macron in France tho at least tbf
Incredibly written.
I've said this before, but if Kamala wins, whoever created the first brat/kamala edit is going to go down as one of the more powerful king makers in recent history. It represents a huge shift in the democratic party and how they market to voters. There's also something to be said about the Reagan connection. You mentioned that Reagan wouldn't recognize the party as it exists today, but in many ways he is the founding father. He brought an old Hollywood style pageantry to the white house. The progression of that is people looking to the presidency for entertainment instead of protection or guidance.
We've gone from old hollywood (Reagan) to reality tv. (Trump) and now the democrats have figured out how to be culturally relevant again, and are seizing it. Obama was the last president that people viewed this way. Little discussion about policy, mostly just vibes.
Oh my godd yes yes yes on every point,—stan accounts going forward are going to decide the future of american politics and of the world, for better or for worse (which makes the reveal that like 40% of twitter stan accounts were from Brazil all the more fascinating).
Reagan absolutely is their founding father of the republican party, but he's also the founding father of american politics today in general,—he set the precedent for a conflation of mass media (like you put it so well, old hollywood) and american politics to create an entertaining spectacle to distract from policy. Like you said, it's vibes based and not policy based. I think we can see that clearly through Clinton's saxophone playing on late night shows in the 90s and Obama's whole '08 campaign.
Your point about Trump being a continuation of this lineage from Old Hollywood to Reality TV, sort of a following trhough with the trends of television, is so so fascinating to me too. And perhaps the reason his campaign succeeded so well in 2016 was because people were still consuming cable reality television and tweeting nonstop about it (not that that doesn't still happen, of course, but there were definitely more people tuned into television in 2016 and a helluva lot more people tweeting about it),—but that conflation made Trump the perfect candidate for the time with his twitter/reality tv candidacy.
With all that in mind it does seem like both parties at the moment are attempting to divine a new version of Reagan's entertainment politics for the 2020s with Trump going for a conservative podcasting approach and Harris going for a stan-account/virality approach,—it does makes me wonder though if the trump campaign staff is simply spending too much time on musk's twitter and have had their perceptions of reality warped completely.
One of the funniest critiques I see people throw at trump nowadays is that he’s boring. That he’s got no “gotcha” nickname for Kamala. Like he's a tv. show that's gotten stale. That is how the public evaluates the worth of a candidate. We should never forget that.
Right, it reveals so clearly where the priority is. Politics is expected to be reality television and this frustration with trump (even if it’s sardonic) eerily mirrors the frustration people had with characters in the later seasons of shows like the office.
The discarding of M4A and Abolish ICE and ACAB and Defund the Police and Palestine by many when those things were no longer zeitgeisty enough was predictable but still enough to make me shake my head.
Right! Like it makes sense for them to be memory holed with the constant virality cycles, but at the same time it feels as if the political class has finally figured out how to manufacture cycles for themselves to obfuscate unpopular policy. It's wild to watch.
I mean you absolutely could not be righter.
One thing I really wonder is whether US politics is perhaps a bit like a river flowing out to sea, with all parties naturally always leaning towards the right. So GOP might go way into the fringes (we could say they’re already pretty deep in the weeds but I guess there’s always an even deeper marsh to wade into) and as Dems finally take their proper Center Right position (which all the rest of the world has been ascribing them since forever, speaking of them as ‘leftists’ has always been laughable at best) one hopes a new fresh actually leftist left wing party will arise, taking perhaps the Omars and Tlaibs and Sanderses and Bowmans that are continuously being slapped down by The New Reagan.
On the subject of Brat Reagan, only reason she is not a war criminal yet is lack of opportunity, she’s rearing to go, as evidenced in all her positions on Gaza and the military in general. I haven’t heard any calls to follow international law in any sense.
It’s really pretty bizarre. Right Wing generally tends to have way more party loyalty than the left, because it tends more towards groupthink as a good thing, so they have been letting a lot slide…. And I absolutely think Harris will take the win carried largely by the center right since she could not be more disappointing to the true left.
Absolutely, the river flowing out to the sea is an apt analogy, though it could also be said that that river is flowing from the Wall Street-Pentagon-White House trifecta described by C. Wright Mills, the same spring that emerged during the global hegemony the US basted in after WWII as the US was the only fully industrialized country not touched by the war. It's a very conservative stream, that's to say, and the priority is to retain economic supremacy worldwide and that goal does not at all coincide with leftist politics in any way, hence the slide right of the American centrist party (and yeah, it's funny when people refer to dems as leftists because the only way that could be further from the truth would be if they were to refer to the republicans as leftists).
And the point you make about the republican party's loyalty is accurate too,— that's how it's been able to slide so far to the right. It feels to me as if that slide right has become something of a convenient excuse for the democratic party to occupy the center right lane that the republican party once occupied before its slide to the message board fascists. And so now there's truly "no alternative" to neoliberal capitalism and american imperialism because who else is there to vote for. I can't help but feel as if that's part of the design here. I think the Bernie movement spooked the establishment tremendously and the american political class is much more tight knit than they seem. There's a quote about Ted Cruz from someone who knew him well saying how Cruz spoke of his role in politics as akin to a WWE wrestler and i think that speaks well to how the presentation of american politics is primarily a stage shared between heroes and villains depending on which side of the culture war you're looking in from.
Oh yeah I think I heard a few other such accidentally too honest comments of politicians admitting how they play-act all the drama and discord and then just go for drinks later. It goes hand in hand with Alex Jones’ defense that he was ‘clearly playing a character’ with his insane alt-right conspiracy hate/fearmongering. I guess that’s the issue with the US having such a powerful core relationship with the ideas of a) marketing and b) Hollywood. That’s why the slide into ‘truthiness’ as Colbert once put it (Colbert who has turned out no stranger to truthiness himself, now that the time had come to call out the Dems for once).
It feels like both sides are totally happy with a world where truth as a concept is not just indeterminable, but also fundamentally irrelevant. If you are with us, your truth is Our Truth. You cannot even take a sliver from Their Truth and question the clash between the two because Their Truth is an Evil Truth and our truth is the Good Truth. They want to finance the murder of children because they are depraved. We want to finance the murder of children because it’s sad but inevitable and necessary for our safety. Can’t you see how different we are?
Anyway since the dems have systemically been cutting down actual progressives (illustrated beautifully by AOC who was supposed to be The One Who Broke Through but then started promotional videos with Biden wearing aviator glasses and smarming for genocide) a new left is needed. I would be curious to see how many people would flock to it. I still keep thinking to Bernie’s actual attempt and the insane grassroots power he had immediately mobilized just by breathing and not being a fucking ghoul.
Honestly it makes total sense that the dems have no policies to run on, since they don’t actually want to change any policies.
It's abysmal, right? To put on smoke and mirror games with the atrocities we're aiding and abetting globally,—not to mention the horrendous failures of american life domestically,—is cruel beyond belief. And to see so many people buying into such a fake wrestling match and pouring all of their political thought into an ice cube tray of "nothing will ever change" feels like torture.
Bernie unlocked something in many hearts, i think, including mine. It's been quite sad to see the virality that helped fuel the grassrootsness of his movement be coopted in this way. The truth is though we don't just need a leftist party, we need more parties and we need them to be viable. We need a multiparty system, i think, if we're to ever make any sort of non-surface level betterment of our lives.
But otherwise i guess recently i've had a fun time recently thinking about what would happen if Trump's cult of personality completely dilapidates the republican party of its old guard in 4 to 8 years' time and whether leftists could storm the gates and take the republican party to the far left of the dems. It'd be a funny, if incredibly unlikely, outcome to this whole mess to have communists running as republicans and hey all we'd really need to do stylistically is to throw a hammer and sickle onto the red elephant to make it work lol
It really could be done tho. The GOP has already coopted freedom of speech as ‘their issue’, along with a general ‘stick it to the man’/ ‘don’t tell me what to do’ attitude that, if used less duplicitously, could definitely promote leftist views as easily as right wing ones.
Hmmm.
Reminds me of someone’s idea to basically start ‘leftist propaganda infiltration’ campaigns into the right wing social media buzz circles. Like, the right has been putting a LOT of effort into infiltrating and coopting the left - bots, shills, accusations of ‘Nazis were leftists actually, it’s in the name see, it’s the SOCIALIST PARTY’ and similar garbage… We’re missing a trick there. We like to think we’re smarter but we definitely haven’t shown ourselves cleverer.
But imagine the reverse. You wouldn’t even have to lie. They love a good conspiracy theory. Say instead of bleating at them about the dead children they clearly couldn’t give less of a shit about, you make a cowboy vibe profile posting about all the money siphoned out of the country to fund Israel. Some people would start scratching their heads. Obviously not when we snooty lefties say it… but if it were them? Hmmmmm.
I think it is definitely doable, it's the classic struggle of awakening class consciousness in the working class, pushing past political affiliation and the urban/rural dichotomy. All of american political history can be seen through the suppression of this possibility, though, so it would be difficult. It would be a tremendous step, though, if the rural working class in the country were to take a leftward turn and honestly it's something that's worth taking into consideration.
I don’t think it’s impossible. Though yeah they have made an art form out of suppressing it.
Ok that might actually be hilarious enough to make the whole nightmare somewhat redeemable.
Haha rightt
you put words to how i’ve been feeling about the DNC and the dems in general, the comparisons to reagan and carter are BRILLIANT. you’re a breath of fresh air, griffin. i’m always eager to read your thoughts, and i’m so grateful for your writing.
Thanks so much, sarah!! Was genuinely worried that this would miss the mark for a bit, I've been thinking about it for the past two weeks so much haha
i desperately need the next part of this
you’re my favorite philosopher. this isnt a joke. i’m serious.
woah huge compliment wow
Congrats! You were able to go much deeper than I could, + still have people listening to you.
You're absolutely right about "protest fatigue"; seems like public, physical, street demonstration is a dead tactic now in so many ways: authorities have massive internationally- shared counter-playbooks against every level, press takes what it already wants and ignores the rest, ordinary people are just tired of being yelled at, + can't keep the causes all straight anymore.
I also see a new, American left party as inevitable at this point; possibly beginning as soon as this election is over.
But no more from me on that. Looking forward to your next installment.
i think that we’ve definitely seen the end of what i’ll refer to here as “slogan protests,” aka protest movements not organized around a concrete demand but around catchphrases as to garner the most internet traffic like BLM or the Occupy movement,—but i think the pro-palestine movement still has juice precisely because there’s a concrete demand to it,—namely stop weapons shipments to Israel.
And an american leftist party is absolutely needed, i wonder how it could possibly ever come about, though…
I'm looking to examples in other places, like Lula's party coalition in Brazil, or the French coalition formed by Insoumise. A loose confederation with a basic 3-point 'platform' to attract atomized soft soc-dems, that the hardcore factions can opt in or out of as they like- but can't dominate, or fracture, in pursuit of such dominance.
Nobody's seen anything like that in a while here; but that doesn't mean it can't work.
oh i agree 100% that those are great examples of leftist parties we should strive towards, but their electoral systems are also fundamentally different from ours,—their structure allows for the existence of leftist parties in a way that our two-party system does not, it would seem
So we make our own "permission". Remember what political parties are in other countries (like Brazil): they're not just advertising agencies for ideologies, they're active social organizations; they exist and do things all the time, not just yell at you to vote when you're supposed to. They're 100 or 1,000 small circles, that form points along much larger ones.
Our politics are different now, yes; but only bc they were made that way, forced that way even. But that mode is wearing out, bc half the voters or more in America are alienated from it.
More will be soon.
It's imperative that we on the left find new (or resurrect older) ways to do politics, before the fashos find new ways to "manage" politics in order to exclude us.
Oooo you went there and I am so glad you did
yeahh, i am too!
felt veryy uncertain going there tho ngl
I would imagine
pure 🔥🔥🔥
Great read. There's definitely a shift in the democratic party towards the center but Kamala herself is an empty vessel. She's not driving the bus as Biden was asleep at the wheel as well. And on the GOP side it's the opposite, Trump is the only one driving the bus which is why his power and reach only amount to rhetoric, mean tweets, and dressing up like a dictator for a day in the oval office. I fear the Democratic party has too much institutional power embedded in all that surrounds us-Mass Media, Schools/Universities, Entertainment, etc that they can ride out a "vibes", "Brat, or "freedom" campaign with really no explanation or policy platform to speak of. All they are doing is running on "don't vote for Trump". Once they get in office (and they probably will) the injection of instant cash to 1st time home buyers will be a foregone conclusion among other gimmicks. This will be passed off as "we are championing the middle class!" but in reality just another way for the gov't to directly compete with the economy.
i loved this. you’ve so eloquently summed up the cultural and social shift since this summer. also really liked the bit about smarm - it got me thinking about similar phenomena in UK politics and how it’s played into recent elections here (our political parties all have tiktok accounts!) - can’t wait for the rest of this series
Oh yeah the UK definitely has a similar thing going on with the Labor party being pulled past the center and towards the fiscal right, especially with Starmer smh—not seemingly as bad as Macron in France tho at least tbf