Throughout the capitalist democracies political leaders are universally disliked
WHY???
The article below from Kuttner on TAP (January 7, 2026) explains in detail how the unfettered rule of capital is threatening even nominal democracy throughout the advanced capitalist world. Kuttner’s argument can be summarized as this: the last 45+ years of runaway inequality has driven down the working classes in the capitalist world to the point that they can’t be mollified by the occasional slops offered to them. It turns out that the “parties of the working class” have no more to offer them than do the reactionaries. As a result large numbers of workers are turning the most reactionary political parties who offer them a simple solution - get rid of the immigrants (and in some cases all non-whites) who are the source of their discontent.
Those of us who are familiar with that situation in the US (the Democratic Party’s total failure to provide any coherent program to challenge the continuation of runaway inequality, should understand that we are not alone. Kuttner lays that out with particular focus on Great Britain, but notes its universality on the continent.
The question becomes - WHY?
You might be thinking “because they can” and certainly there’s is something to that analysis. But to fully comprehend the capitalists drive to squeeze every penny out of the working class and their fellow capitalists, it is necessary to explore another motivation; “because they have to”.
Put briefly, the capitalist class is faced with the underlying contradiction of capitalism, the fact that capital accumulation increases faster than overall growth. This results in more capital searching for limited investment opportunities to make a profit, and by the law of supply and demand, we can see that this drives down the return on investment. Marx laid this out in the 1840s and it is as true today as it was then.
Then why hasn’t capitalism collapsed already. Because over the past 150 years, the capitalist class has found various ways to either open up new areas for investment (imperialism of the late 19th century) or has stumbled on ways to creatively destroy capital (wars and depressions being the most “productive”). The latter was particularly evident in the period from 1914 until 1945 (WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII).
For most of the period from 1945 until 1970, capital experienced a period of unmitigated growth (and even found it possible to share a tiny bit of the prosperity with the working class to keep them from turning to an alternative economic system), but that ended in the 1970s and since then we have seen the working class being squeezed more and more and still, the rate of profit continues to decline.
It is clear that the old is dying and the new is yet to be born. Perilous times.
Where do we go from here? I would hope my readers would offer some ideas as well as questions for future discussion.
From Kuttner on TAP (January 7, 2026)
How global capitalism destroys democratic politics
The universal rule of capital explains why national leaders can’t solve national problems—and end up being hated by voters as pathetic failures.
The other day, the Financial Times ran a piece pointing out that the current British prime minister, Keir Starmer of the Labour Party, is the most unpopular British leader in several decades, with approval ratings of an astounding negative 66. This is hardly surprising. Starmer has all the charisma of a clerk, and a tin ear when it comes to the suffering of ordinary people.
You’d expect this of a Tory prime minister, but not from Labour. Starmer’s approval rating is well below the minus 46 recorded by the COVID-partying Conservative Boris Johnson, or the negative 51 chalked up by his market-crashing Tory successor Liz Truss.
The approval rating of Rachel Reeves, the current chancellor of the exchequer (Brit-speak for finance minister) and enforcer of Starmer’s austerity agenda, is negative 60, the lowest ever for a chancellor. One pollster was quoted as saying, “There’s a real dislike, even loathing of Starmer and Reeves.”
But the most interesting part of the FT piece came when the story compared the approval ratings of British leaders with other European leaders. Starmer’s was among the lowest, but every single one was way underwater.
Mette Frederiksen of Denmark was highest, with negative 20. Spain’s relatively popular Pedro Sánchez got minus 26. Only France’s Emmanuel Macron was lower even than Starmer, at negative 70.
This got me thinking about why every single national leader is unpopular. It could be that there are heroic eras that produce heroic leaders, and ones that generate leaders who are mediocre at best and scoundrels at worst. Think of the leaders of mid-century Europe—Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, as well as the second-tier statesmen who created the predecessors of the European Union, such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman.
The last such heroic and widely esteemed leaders were Nelson Mandela of South Africa and the charming playwright/protester/president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel. But both Mandela and Havel left office more than 25 years ago. So what’s the matter with today’s leaders?
The matter, I think, is global capitalism.
Voters everywhere are frustrated by their worsening economic prospects. Thanks to the rules of hyper-globalization that have been imposed universally on democracies during the past three decades, it’s almost impossible for an individual nation to pursue a different path.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, austerity was the universal rule. Policy is reduced to ineffectual, marginal tweaks that transform no one’s life prospects.
The only people who prosper from this regime are the very rich. No wonder every national leader seems like a failure. And no wonder potentially transformative leaders are not attracted to politics.
Meanwhile, a nationalist backlash everywhere leads to parliamentary fragmentation and weak coalition governments, and makes it even harder for politics to make a constructive difference. So leaders are deemed failures, because they fail.
Yes, there are complicating factors such as aging populations that strain welfare states. But if the income distribution and tax structure were anything like that of the postwar boom, there would be plenty of money both for decent wage and salary earnings as well as social benefits.
This brings me back to Keir Starmer. With Reeves as his enforcer, Starmer has embraced the fatal premise that there is simply no money to invest in an economic transformation of Britain. He and Reeves have ruled out taxing the rich, as bad for the economy, since capital might flee. Instead, they cut social benefits.
Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “There is no alternative,” abbreviated as TINA. She meant there was no alternative to liberating capital. It worked very well—for capital. Not so well for ordinary Brits. But more than 35 years after Thatcher left office, her legacy of TINA still functions as a straitjacket—on a Labour government no less.
Starmer’s great predecessor, Clement Attlee, Labour’s first prime minister with a majority in Parliament, inherited a Britain whose economy lay crushed by the war. But instead of embracing austerity in 1945, Attlee built the National Health Service and the modern British welfare state. Then again, the rules of the system back then constrained capital and allowed much more latitude for nations to go their own way. (The question that Kuttner doesn’t address is why those rules were possible in the 1940s and 50s, but don’t seem to be possible almost anywhere in the capitalist world today. It’s is not simply a policy “choice” but rather the changing conditions that are reflected in what is happening.)
Ugly hyper-nationalism is no substitute for fixing today’s predatory capitalism, but it is pervasive as displaced anger. Scapegoating others does provide some psychic gratification for the masses, while global billionaires chortle all the way to the bank. That’s where Trump fits in. His approval ratings are a relatively impressive negative 17 percent.