So, Why Do Extremists Win?

 Why extremists win.

When lack of conviction is up against passionate intensity, there’s no contest

Melanie Phillips Sep 1 ∙ Preview

Abdul el Sayed campaigning in the Democratic party’s Michigan Senate primary with far-left influencer Hasan Piker

This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£).

Why do so many vicious and dangerous extremists seem to be on a winning streak while sensible, decent, middling folk are being left forlornly nursing their bruises?

In America and Britain, politics is increasingly being polarised between extremes with the sensible middle having been all but abandoned.

In the US, the Democratic party is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the hard-left Democratic Socialists of America. It’s fielding candidates for office, such as Abdul el Sayed in the Michigan primary and Zohran Mamdani, now Mayor of New York, who are winning elections even though they are fanatical Islamists.

In Britain, the public has been astonished to find four Islamists elected to parliament on a “Gaza First”platform, even though for the vast majority of British voters the Middle East has absolutely no relevance to their interests and indeed many can barely place Gaza on a map.

Meanwhile the Reform party, which represents an insurrection against the political establishment over Britain’s fracturing national identity, is facing its own insurrectionary challenge from the fierce “ethno-nationalists” of Restore, who want British identity to be restricted to white people (amongst whom British Jews, in the mindset of various Restore types, are apparently not to be numbered). And the Conservative party, once the titan of British politics, is struggling to remain relevant at all.

Not only are the extremes winning their contests but they have even moved the centre of political gravity. What was once considered “far left” is now deemed “centrist;” what was once “centrist” is now described as “right-wing” or even “far-right”. Moderation and realism, aka small-c conservatism, are excoriated by lefties as near-fascist and by righties as globalist — even when small-c conservatives are themselves in revolt against liberal universalism, mass immigration and Islamisation.

So how come the extremists, who by definition are a minority of the public, are able to call the shots? The perverse scenario now unfolding in British politics provides a clue...