The Democrats Are in Danger. So Are the Republicans.

New York Times

2 days ago

'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.
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