who are progressives really?

and indeed, who is the enemy?

One of my favourite things about Substack is the way you can now stumble across regular, thoughtful updates from academics and experts who, twenty years ago, you would only have encountered through a book every few years, and even ten years ago you’d have had to actively hunt down via a personal blog on some obscure corner of the internet. Now though, the distance between research and reflection has collapsed, and with it that lag between events and the feedback of experts regarding the same.

I was originally planning to write about Maduro this week. But I don’t yet have anything genuinely insightful to add, and there’s little value in repeating a take for takes sake. Instead, I found myself lingering on two pieces I read almost by accident. This one, by Ben Ansell, that tells a compelling story about Reform voters’ attitudes to discrimination, bubble graphs galore. The other, Britain’s Party Members, from Tim Bale, Paul Webb, and Stavroula Chrona, examined not just how party members think about politics, but how they feel about it: about leadership, institutional and political legitimacy, and in particular, their political opponents.

Taken together, they circle a problem British politics has not quite grappled with yet. Not ideology, exactly (we’ve had plenty of that) but permission. Who feels entitled to be angry. Who feels authorised to break norms. Who experiences politics as a form of moral expression, and who experiences it as protection against loss.

Political parties like to imagine their members as heightened versions of the electorate: more engaged, perhaps, but broadly representative. This was perhaps always a fiction, but never before has it been so clearly distorted. Data on party membership collected after the 2024 general election shows that Britain is not merely divided by values or policy preferences, but by fundamentally different assumptions about what politics is for, and what kinds of authority it is allowed to exercise in pursuit of that purpose.

Members of Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats now resemble one another far more than they resemble the median voter. They are disproportionately graduate, urban, socially liberal, and morally confident. On net zero, Europe, immigration, gender roles and Britain’s past, their views cluster tightly. Inside progressive parties, disagreement often feels likes it’s centred around mountains built of minutiae, but outside of them, it is widespread.

This matters because party members do not merely campaign. They select candidates, shape leadership incentives, and decide which arguments sound serious and credible before they ever reach the electorate. Over time, this creates not just a gap in opinion, but a gap in salience. Progressive members are often convinced that the most morally important questions are also the most politically urgent ones. Voters are not so sure.

For many progressive members, politics is a space of moral alignment and expression. For many voters, it is a mechanism for managing insecurity. This difference is not semantic. It shapes how policies are received by the voters they are supposed to serve. Climate transition, migration, institutional reform; all of these may be supported in principle, but experienced in practice as exposure to cost, risk, or loss of control. Progressive politics often assumes that a simple explanation will resolve this tension. If we could just get the comms right, surely the country would be on our side! Increasingly, it is clear this isn’t the case.

One way of understanding this moment, borrowing from Fukuyama without inheriting his pessimism, is that contemporary politics is less about redistribution than about recognition, not because material questions have disappeared, but because material insecurity now shows up for people as a question of status. People experience economic and social change not only as loss of income or stability, but as loss of standing and of identity: of being listened to, taken seriously, or treated as a legitimate participant in the national story. We see this perhaps most clearly in the deindustrialised towns across the UK; former Labour strongholds turning towards Farage et al at an astonishing pace. Largely this is because when they lost industry they didn’t just lose jobs; they lost the sense of identity and pride that came with them, and they’ve never gotten it back. Reform speaks directly to that sense of misrecognition. Progressive politics often assumes it can resolve it indirectly; just one more regeneration programme and the problem will surely be solved.

This problem is compounded by the ideological evolution of the centre-left itself. The modern left has not simply become more educated; it has internalised a worldview in which education is treated as the primary route to justice and mobility. In that framework, inequality becomes something to be corrected through access; to credentials, to opportunity, to cultural capital, rather than through power or protection. Belonging becomes conditional. You can be included in our political process and institutions, but only if you adapt, become the exception rather than the norm.

Culture plays a crucial role here, and it is often badly misunderstood. Progressive politics has a habit of treating culture as something abstract or symbolic; as a secondary concern that can be overridden by good policy design. But culture is not an optional layer on top of material life. It is how people make sense of change, loss, pride, and continuity in ordinary terms. When cultural attachment is treated as trivial, or worse as dangerous, it is experienced not as a liberal moral enlightenment, but as erasure. Culture is ordinary, and it the identity it fosters belongs to ordinary people. That is precisely why it matters.

Reform’s growth has to be understood against this backdrop. Bale et als research shows that Reform members differ from progressive members not just in what they believe, but in how they relate to authority itself. They are far more likely to interpret criticism of their party as personal, to feel strong emotional distance from supporters of other parties, and to endorse leaders who promise to break rules in order to “get things done”. Their hostility to institutions is not incidental; it’s foundational.

Reform is therefore best understood not as a protest party, but as a permission structure. It does not merely aggregate grievance, rather it legitimises a particular response to grievance. It tells supporters who have felt cast aside from regular political process that their anger is rational, that elites are self-serving, and that the real problem with British politics is not incompetence or corruption, but constraint. Courts, regulators, civil servants, even democratic norms, are reframed as obstacles rather than safeguards.

This isn’t just a progressive problem; the Conservative party is haemorrhaging support to Reform at an incredible rate. And their members, unsurprisingly, are as removed from the median voter as those of progressive parties. Across the political spectrum, those of us who pay our monthly dues to political parties of all hues, who door knock, who canvass, bear a partial share of the blame for ever allowing this to become such an institutionalised problem. That blame, I should be clear, is not a fault we bear by virtue of caring about politics, or for wanting better for people, whatever we deemed the best route to ‘better’ to be. But that we never seriously stopped to look around and consider the fact that we were doing so in rooms full of identical people - graduate, urban, professional jobs - is a serious indictment of the work we did. That includes those of us who ourselves do not come from those backgrounds, but found ourselves comfortable in rooms full of those who do regardless.

What is striking in the data is how deeply affective this divide has become. Progressive members report feeling a stronger sense of distance from Reform supporters than from Conservatives. That distance is interpreted asymmetrically. Progressives tend to read it as moral, as evidence of righteousness. Reform supporters read it socially, as proof of their exclusion from the so-called liberal elite. One side experiences distance as clarity; the other experiences it as contempt. When politics reaches this stage, what is there left for it to do but collapse?

This also helps explain why so much contemporary analysis misdiagnoses disengagement as apathy. What we are seeing instead is alienation. Voters do not feel that politics is weak or irrelevant; they feel that it is active, powerful, and intrusive in their everyday lives; it’s just not responsive to their wants or needs. They do not believe nothing is happening. They believe it is happening without them. Or worse, frankly, happening to them.

This is Labour’s real bind. Its members are culturally closer to the Greens than to Reform. Its voters are not. The leadership’s caution is often dismissed as timidity, but it is better understood as an attempt to hold together a coalition whose internal logic is pulling apart. Member consensus is a poor guide to electoral reality when members are systematically more educated, more secure, and more morally confident than the country they seek to govern. We cannot govern as a serious party if we cannot close that gap.

There is a long-standing temptation on the left to treat politics as an extension of debate; as a space for argument, clarification, and moral refinement. But politics is not a university debate club, or a political seminar. It is a real and present struggle for those whom it affects, and should be treated as such. Forgetting this does not make politics more ethical. It makes it one-sided; the preserve of people who can afford to treat it as a game. No wonder those who are not afforded such luxuries opt out.

Decades of comparative research suggests that progressive parties win when they reconnect moral purpose to material protection; when they show not just what kind of society they want to build, but how they will insulate people from the costs of change. Voters do not reject progressive goals because they are hostile to fairness or sustainability. They reject them when they feel exposed, managed, or talked down to by the people supposed to be serving them.

Reform grows where people feel that politics happens to them rather than for them. Social media accelerates this dynamic, but it does not create it. The underlying driver is lived experience, of stagnation, insecurity, and loss of standing, combined with a political offer that replaces any attempt at explanation with permission.

Progressives tend to respond with attempts at moral clarity and policy detail. Reform responds with by recognising the anger of the disaffected and granting it licence. In an affectively polarised environment, the latter connects.

The deeper lesson is not that Britain is becoming more reactionary. It is that political conflict is increasingly organised around different questions. Progressives ask what kind of society we should become. Reform supporters ask who the system is for, and why it no longer for so long it has seemed not to include them.

The great tragedy is that in practise, Reform serves its client base - rich donors, monied interests, the millionaires boys club. And if elected, it is those interests it will continue to serve. But the very fact that that is true does not undermine the very real appeal they offer to those who have been marginalised by the political system for so long.

Until progressive politics can demonstrate that it can build a system that includes those voters, serves them, offers them something; until it can translate values into protection, and ambition into economic security, Reform will continue to grow.

Not because they’re right, or because they have the answers, or because the marginalised voters of Britain fit whatever perfect caricature you have of them in your mind.

But because it understands, more clearly than its opponents, what politics feels like when it stops working for people. And because it understands, fundamentally, how to make people feel like for once, someone is listening.