When Moderation Becomes Appeasement
If your chief goal is to find a middle ground with the far right on social issues, you’ll end up condoning its values—just ask Keir Starmer.
IN LIGHT OF DEMOCRATS’ LOSS to Donald Trump last fall, many commentators (and some politicians) have urged the party to moderate its policy positions, particularly on cultural issues—transgender equality and immigration foremost among them.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, seems to offer an example of the “substantive moderation” strategy working. He took over the Labour party in 2020 after Jeremy Corbyn, a strongly left leader, led the party to its worst result in a century during the 2019 election. Starmer moderated both symbolically (almost literally wrapping himself in the flag) and substantively, hacking apart the party’s progressive platform piece by piece. And in 2024, he won—resoundingly. Labour more than doubled its parliamentary representation and secured a 174-seat majority, only a couple of seats short of the record majorities won by Tony Blair a generation earlier.
Starmer’s achievement is real, but this story needs context. To start with, it’s not clear that Labour won the election so much as the Tories lost it. The Conservative party had been in power for almost a decade and a half. Conservatives were on their fifth prime minister—all of them, in their own ways, failures. Liz Truss in particular did irrecoverable damage to the party’s brand—crashing the economy, vaporizing half a trillion pounds for no intelligible reason, and famously being outlasted by a supermarket lettuce. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, had, without exaggeration, the worst election campaign launch I have ever seen—he barely managed to get through his speech, drenched by rain and drowned out by noise. Starmer was able to appear positively statesmanlike throughout the campaign simply because he did not look like he was about to cry the entire time.
In this larger context, Starmer’s strategy of moderating, keeping his head down, and letting the Tories defeat themselves was sensible enough. Even progressives like me who disagree with aspects of Starmer’s politics can acknowledge that some amount of policy moderation was useful to the party last fall amid the election. But what has happened since provides a stark case study for the limits—both practical and moral—of giving ground.
Because Starmer did not stop after he moved into 10 Downing Street. The PM reminds me of a phenomenon that will be all too familiar to students of military history—the subpar commander who, having successfully used a particular stratagem once, attempts to replicate it in all future engagements. A tactical withdrawal worked in one battle, so now they tactically withdraw in all their battles.
With an infuriating predictability, the strategy that helped Labour win power has not helped the party successfully govern. The country’s a mess, with low growth, failing services, and stagnant wages. But Labour have ruled out—often explicitly in the name of moderation—fixing any of the structural issues causing these problems: They won’t challenge the Brexit project that has crushed our growth, nor will they think outside the framework of the Conservatives’ tax and spending rules. Further, now that the country’s problems have become their problems, they’ve taken to scolding the public for wanting quick fixes. It is necessary, they aver, for everyone to endure a bit of pain. Politicians love talking like this, but no peacetime electorate has ever responded well to it.
Like leaders the world over, Starmer has had to face the threat of a rising far-right. The beginning of this year saw Elon Musk aggressively intervening in British politics. Last summer, the country was rocked by racist riots in which ordinary Brits attempted to burn asylum seekers alive. The country’s national press is famously unbalanced and obsessive on “trans issues,” and in recent years, the situation has gotten significantly worse. One organization charted an increase from 60 trans-related stories being published in U.K. outlets in 2012 to around 7,500 in 2022.
Starmer has responded to these pressures by employing the one stratagem he knows: giving ground. To meet an ever more radical right halfway, the Labour Party has had to take on much, much more illiberal positions than anything countenanced previously. One goal of the anti-trans movement for some time has been to prevent trans people from safely using the toilet in public. Use of the bathroom, they argue, must be dependent on biological sex. This would require trans people to constantly “out” themselves and risk alarm or outrage by using facilities that do not match their gender expression.
The function of this advocacy is to prevent trans people from being able to comfortably exist in public. Instead of countering it, Starmer has aggressively moved to embrace the anti-trans position—one well to the right not only of his own previous stances, but even those of past Conservative governments.
Starmer has also swung rightward on immigration, and it didn’t take long for him to do so: In a speech in November 2024, he accepted the right-wing premise that the main problem facing the country is immigration and announced that he considers it a duty of his government to address it. This spring, the government followed through on this rhetoric with a host of measures designed to make the life of legal migrants in the U.K. harder, more expensive, and more insecure. (He has since offered an insipid apology for some of the language he has used to advocate these policies, but he has not disavowed the policies themselves.)
The apparent goal in all this is to regain votes at the center and to pre-empt a future electoral challenge from the far right. By this standard, it has been a catastrophic failure. Reform (the U.K.’s most prominent far-right party) has made big gains in local elections and now leads the polls nationally by a significant margin. In the month during which Starmer moved most to the right, his approval rating collapsed—today, less than a quarter of Britons have a favorable view of him.
This is all in line with what simple political science would lead us to expect. Cross-national studies show that mainstream parties that try to compete with the far right on immigration consistently fail to achieve their goals: It doesn’t gain them votes, and it often loses them. Starmer’s strategy of constantly giving ground raises the salience of the issue; it implies that immigration really is the problem that nativists say it is, and it even legitimates the idea that regular politics has failed people. This all amounts to a complex way of validating fascists: It is effectively saying the far right has the correct concerns, the clearer view of politics, and the greater authority to hold forth on the issue. As a number of us who study and teach politics put it in an open letter responding to Starmer’s May 12 immigration white paper, attempts to sate the far right with concessions in this area will never work for a simple reason: “They will never be satisfied.”
STARMER’S POLITICAL MYOPIA IS TYPICAL of politicians and commentators I would characterize as reactionary centrists—those who, in addition to having moderate policy preferences, share a view of the far right as having unaccountably low agency, and figuring them as simply reacting to the actions (and alleged excesses) of leftists, progressives, and advocates of social justice.1
Reactionary centrists rarely imagine solutions to political problems that do not involve a policy move to the right, especially on social issues. Won an election? You’ll need to give ground to govern. Lost an election? You’ll need to give ground to win next time. That this is obviously unfalsifiable doesn’t bother them in the slightest.
One of the main problems with reactionary centrism can be put in this way: Politics is about both policy and values. To use immigration as an example, the number of visas to be issued would be a question of policy, but whether a pluralist society is a good thing would be a question of values. Reactionary centrists tend to focus exclusively on policy, and sometimes they reframe issues of values as actually being about policy. Changing the policy offer is virtually the only way they can imagine a party appealing to a larger number of voters.
But values matter—not just morally but practically. Voters judge governments, and decide which politicians to trust, based on values. A party’s policies matter in part for what they tell us about their values. Politicians supporting punitive restrictions on immigration are communicating that they believe immigration is bad for the country. If those measures include making language requirements and “good character” tests more stringent, they are also communicating that they believe diversity is a threat to social cohesion, and a homogeneous society is a better one. They might deny these implications. They might not even directly intend them. But the implications are clear nonetheless, and people vote on the basis of them.
Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do. Starmer’s substantive concessions on trans issues and immigration are the most obvious thing in the world to them: He’s giving the median voter the policy they want! But the party isn’t just communicating a policy; its policy is communicating its values—and the “values” proposition is hopelessly incoherent. The government is simultaneously saying it believes and does not believe in liberal core principles. To liberals, this feels like a betrayal. To the right, Labour’s concessions appear inauthentic and pandering.
If you think politics is just about finding a middle ground on policy, consistency in values can seem like stubborn dogmatism. Reactionary centrists in the United States frequently criticize leftists and progressive liberals for refusing to make the compromises they see as necessary for winning. But here, too, Britain offers a hard lesson. For almost two decades, our politicians have listened to anti-immigrant voices and prioritized their concerns—arguably over all others. To placate the anti-immigrant right, our leaders have stalled our economy, mangled our constitution, and diminished our standing in the world. And rather than recede in satisfaction, those voices have grown louder and angrier than ever.
To the far right, it was never about specific policy outcomes. Stricter visa rules and lower net migration numbers are all expressions of their underlying values—a committed, revulsion-based opposition to the project of multiracial, symbolically equal society. On trans rights, reactionary centrists similarly imagine—with that special naïveté that often afflicts self-proclaimed pragmatists—that some policy tinkering, perhaps a few compromises on women’s sports, will be enough to calm everyone down. It won’t.
Accepting that the populist far right cannot be satisfied with normal political compromises is a first step towards engaging with our real circumstances, which are becoming clearer every day. The Trump administration is now investigating how it might start “denaturalizing” unwanted U.S. citizens, including political opponents. A top Trump adviser posted a tweet seemingly advocating the genocide of all Hispanics in the United States. There simply isn’t a middle ground between this worldview and a liberal belief in human rights.
Skeptics may claim, You’ll never win voters by telling them they’re racist. But some voters are, abjectly, racist—those who tried to burn refugees alive in the U.K., for instance, or who marched in Charlottesville in the United States chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They are a minority, but a larger share of the electorate than is often imagined quietly supports them.
Our disagreement with fascism is, ultimately, one of values, and it is on that level that the rhetorical fight against fascism must be taken. Those to the left of the populist, nativist right must articulate a competing, values-based vision to give everyone else—and especially the complacent middle—a true alternative to reaction; they must offer a clear, compelling, and coherent story about what the sorts of lives we want people to be free to pursue, and what type of society we want to have to support those dreams. And part of this story will be about just how dangerous, how utterly society-destroying, the far right’s story is. What policy views people can be persuaded to support will follow this conversation, not the other way around.
To someone who prioritizes policy above all else, discussing issues at this level may feel like so much PR, or rhetorical fluff—high-minded words that take us far from the substance of politics. But this is how most people think about politics most of the time. That’s because political ideologies—socialism, liberalism, fascism, and so forth—are, above all else, clusters of values. They are ways of thinking, as much as they are sets of conclusions. They provide frameworks for interpreting and engaging with society and politics. And policies either embody and make actionable the values used to justify them—or they (implicitly or explicitly) contradict them. For a party to be persuasive, for it to appear genuine and authentic, its policy and values must both serve the same story. And that story must clearly show why they are right and their opponents are wrong.
This is the limit of appeasement. We reach it when policy concessions cease being normal political compromises intended to achieve and express a set of values and become instead a validation of the convictions of the opponents of democracy. A party that passes this point loses the ability to persuade because it has conceded that its own side is wrong.
Starmer has marched his party past this limit, and his entire line is collapsing as a result. On his right flank, nearly all the crossover votes he gained last election from Conservative defectors have gone back to the right, with some returning to the Tories but even more decamping to Reform. His left flank is collapsing; up to a third of his coalition is moving to other liberal parties or undecided. Last week, he received the news that a breakaway former Labour MP plans to form a new political party. Despite a messy and muddled launch announcement, this yet-unnamed party has already hit 10 percent in a new poll. Only half of Labour’s 2024 voters plan to do so again.
To put this in historical perspective: Tony Blair won a further two terms following his landslide in 1997. Keir Starmer may not make it through the current parliamentary term.
His failure ultimately stems from a philosophic confusion about what politics is. It is necessary, for even the most pragmatic politician, to think in terms of values. They dictate not just when we should moderate, but when we can. At present, we cannot.
Toby Buckle is a former political campaigner and activist. A U.K./U.S. dual national, he's worked in both countries for progressive candidates and causes. He hosts the Political Philosophy Podcast and writes for a number of publications on U.S. and U.K. politics, philosophy, and religion. You can follow him on Bluesky.
To be clear, there are centrists who hold a high-agency account of the far right and blame fascism on the fascists. Anti-Trump conservatives (including those who write for The Bulwark) are an example.
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