Donald Trump is looking pretty invincible right now, and it's easy to lose hope that Democrats will ever be able to regain power. But back in the '90s, liberals in Britain were in a similar predicament. Alastair Campbell, right hand man to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and co-host of the podcast "The Rest Is Politics," joins Tommy to discuss how the Labour Party vanquished the iron grip of Thatcherism, the importance of party rebranding, and how Democrats can reclaim populism in the age of Trump.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.Get your copy of WOODWORKING: http://crooked.com/books
How did the Labour Party rise from Thatcherism's shadow?
And they're right, by the way. They're right.
Yeah. And I saw in 2019, you were doing an interview with the garden where you said the populism of the right would not be defeated by the populism of the left. Can you unpack that a bit and tell me if you still think it's true?
I think there's a form. Well, The populism of the right to me means you don't see politics as a way to solve problems. You see politics as a way to exploit problems. So I don't think we should do that. I think we should always pursue a politics that is about trying to address problems and make life better for people. The second part of the right-wing populist is polarization.
We don't exist to bring people together. We exist to drive people into tribes and get them fighting each other. I don't want to do that. I don't think the left should do that. And the third part of their shtick is lying, post-truth. So I don't think we should do any of those things.
What I do think, however, that we need to learn from them and do better than is done now relates to the way that we communicate and the way that we relate to people in their lives. I feel sometimes that politicians on the left they do think that people are sitting around obsessing about what politicians are saying and thinking and doing. They're not. They're not.
So how do you get into those people's lives? Or how do you get into their lives in those times when you need to be in their lives, like they're deciding whether or not to vote and they're deciding what to vote. How do you get into them? So that when they're making that decision, one, they know who you are, they know what you stand for, and they quite like it.
Right now, they don't know who a lot of the other side are. And when they hear them, they just think, I mean, the big thing that's really harming labor here at the moment is people's feeling that, or saying that they don't think the change that was promised has been big enough or fast enough, right?
Now, and meanwhile, they see Trump with his fucking pen and he's, you know, here's another one and here's another one with banning straws and- Right, executive orders left and right. Right, okay. But what I think is that the processes, the reason why so many young people are zoning out is that one, they can't afford a house. The jobs are pretty insecure.
They're not going to be better off than their parents. And they look at politics and they see slow processes. often pretty average people not inspiring not motivating and so i think that's the bit of it's not populism um in the traditional sense but how do the politicians on the left become the friends of these people because naturally that's what they should be
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