From the US-Congress to the BBC: The spineless liberal leadership class
In the US it takes the winning Democratic Party one week to “snatch defeat from its victory” as one cynical observer has called the capitulation of eight Senators to the voracious wishes of Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom two top executives of the public broadcaster BBC resign after a leak about an editorial mishap in 2024 whilst the notorious liar in the White House calls the most trusted news service in the world “worse than fake news”. Welcome to the world of a spineless and helpless liberal leadership class on both sides of the Atlantic!
So, what has happened inside another tumultuous fortnight? Just when the US-Democrats had registered their first decisive wins at important gubernatorial, mayoral and local elections on November 4, just when the party seemed to have understood that you do not run campaigns on abstract policies and high moral principles but adapt message and messengers to local conditions, after the hitherto helpless opposition seemed to have turned tables on Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, eight Senators left the newly erected Democratic tent and walked over to the Republican swamp by voting for an end of the current government lockdown.
The federal government shutdown started on October 1st when the Democrats in Congress blocked the funding for the new fiscal year by taking a stand against the proposed cuts to various federal programmes, particular to subsidies which would have increased the health care costs to millions of Americans. As a result of the deadlock, about 800.000 federal employees were furloughed causing social hardship to the middle-class and more recently heavy disruptions in aviation traffic because of staffing shortfalls. Not to mention the termination of the so-called SNAP program of food assistance for 42 million Americans in need on November 1.
According to most opinion polls, the public have been blaming the ruling Republicans for the disruptions, at least more so than the legislation-blocking Democrats. Somehow most citizens seem to have turned against the Trump-Administration’s reckless and destructive actions of recent weeks: withholding food aid from the poor whilst running sleazy parties in Mar-o-Lago; sending soldiers into America’s inner cities whilst erasing the East Wing of the White House without permission. In the end, the conflict over the shutdown was as much about the social policies of the government as about the growing authoritarian actions of Donald Trump.
Thus, for the Democrats the tide seemed to have turned one year before the crucial mid-term elections. But into this rosy picture walk seven Democratic Senators and one Independent whose visions do not transcend their district, who do not want to see the context of a country sliding into autocracy, who cite moral reasons to help their troubled constituents but don’t give a damn about the changed political environment. We are talking about eight Senators, almost all beyond retirement age, who have not understood that the present fight is not like the fights of the past. As a result, Donald Trump could end the 43-day long shutdown on Wednesday claiming victory; whereas Democrats are left with nothing but the promise of another vote on health subsidies in two weeks’ time which they are sure to lose. One week after their encouraging election victories the Democrats were back in disarray and back to the old divides.
The helpless capitulation has divided the party’s generations. Never have young Democrats despaired as much about their gerontocratic leadership as after this defeat in Congress. On social media Millennials and Generation Z called the dissenters “Turncoats”, Chickenshits”, Quislings” and “Fuckers”. And never has the rift between the party’s base of engaged voters and activists and the party’s apparatus and leadership been so obvious to friends and foes. Where Democrats outside of Washington, D.C. expressed their outrage about the defections, the party’s leadership tried to fudge the differences by dressing up the political disaster as a tactical success. No surprise then that the freshly elected centrist governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, defended the dissenters and their short-term tactical reasons. Whilst the future “socialist” Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani rejected those arguments. So much for the week-long unity inside the Democratic tent.
What has become clear during these tumultuous days is that the Democratic Leadership Class lacks the ruthlessness of their political opponents. It still adopts ordinary methods in extraordinary times. Its members do not seem to understand that in Donald Trump and his acolytes the Democrats are encountering not a regular political opponent but an attempted “counterrevolution”.
Over to Europe
Crossing the Atlantic to the United Kingdom you can detect the same lack of combativeness, the same helplessness and blindness in the actions of the leaders at the BBC capitulating to the right-wing attacks on public broadcasting. What has been happening here?
On November 3 the right-wing Daily Telegraph published a 20 page-long internal memo by the BBC’s editorial advisor Michael Prescott who complained about the broadcaster’s refusal to deal with his list of editorial mishaps, management failures and examples of an allegedly biased coverage: the misleading edit of a Donald Trump speech in the “Panorama” Programme of October 2024; “worrying systemic issues with the BBC”; and other problems the author had with the BBC’s coverage on the issues of Gaza, gender and racial diversity.
Indeed, BBC journalists had cut Trump’s “fight like hell”-speech the morning before the storming of Congress by his MAGA followers on January 6, 2021, in a way that made the President sound as if he was literally inciting the crowd to violence, which he was not. Yet the general gist of the program that Trump was encouraging the crowd to protest the election results if not directly storm the US-Congress, was correct. The insurrectionists knew what he had meant between the lines.
The wrong edit was a mistake that everybody who ever worked in a newsroom knows can happen, particularly at a broadcaster reaching almost half a billion people every week and in a news section which has been cut by 30 % over the last few years. But instead of apologising for this mistake and confidently responding to the complicated question of “impartiality” on contested subjects in a continuous culture war, the leadership of the BBC prevaricated. The director of news had prepared a response, but the board did not agree. When BBC chair Samir Shah did not speak out in time director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness decided to stand down. As happened with the eight US-Senators, these two leaders of the Britain’s Public Broadcaster capitulated and handed a victory to their attackers from the right.
Taking a closer look at the mechanism behind the self-inflicted crisis at the BBC two things become clear. Firstly, like the double-Presidency of Donald Trump the turmoil at the BBC has not been accidental but is the result of continuous and systematic attacks on state agencies and public bodies – if you like, of a 40-year right wing march through those institutions. The critique of so-called political correctness and biased reporting have been practiced by the political right for decades and has become part of traditional politics and media criticism in the US and the UK. What has changed by 2025 is the new media environment which easily lifts local politics to the national, even global level, which escalates every political conflict into a crisis of culture, and which has been exploited so adroitly by right-wing populists like UK’s Ex-Premier Boris Johnson, the de-facto opposition leader Nigel Farage - and by an US-President who knows no legal, moral, democratic or even national bounds.
Looking at the personnel featuring in the BBC’s most recent crisis you notice a cabal of conservatives. Michael Prescott, the author of the leaked memo, is a Tory and friend of board member Sir Robby Gibb, a man appointed to the board by Boris Johnson and known for his conservative crusade against “wokeness” at the BBC. Featuring in the saga and driving its dynamic have been several board or standard committee members who had changed from journalism into public relations under 14 years of conservative rule. Today proper journalists have become a minority on the bodies running the public broadcaster. Professional journalists have been replaced but by professional turncoats to the political right who are trying to establish their own understanding of “impartiality” at the BBC. No matter if 80 % of experts agree on the existence of climate change, you’ll only have one of them and one climate change denier appearing on your “impartial” programme. No matter that 90% of veritable economists thought Brexit was a bad idea, in your talk show it will always have to be one on one.
Secondly, the editors and liberals left in the management of those weakened and undermined bodies seem to have no guts to fight back and defend those institutions against the steady and orchestrated attacks. Instead of the journalist responsible for the editorial mistake two management figures resigned after the affair had been blown out of proportion by the now-columnist Boris Johnson and Reform Party boss Nigel Farage - and finally by Donald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for 1 billion Dollars plus. Instead of going on the offensive the BBC’s chair hesitated and its director general, exhausted by too many “scandals”, just gave up. Only belatedly BBC Chair Samir Shah has now stood up against Donald Trump’s threat of litigation.
It would be an interesting question if the leadership of German centrist parties or of the public broadcaster with its even more complex federal management structure would be better placed to withstand similar right-wing assaults. The recently successful campaign against the appointment of a supposedly too leftist candidate for the constitutional court suggests otherwise.
One can read the chronology of the crisis at the BBC as something close to a conservative “coup” as the editor of Prospect Magazine, Alan Rusbridger, is insinuating in “The Observer”. But it would be much more useful to distinguish the ideological part of the memo’s analysis of the inner workings at the BBC from its more sobering parts where Prescott describes the structural flaws in the BBC’s independence, the tardiness and the tepid management style without which the whole affair would not have blown up at all. A (self-)critical study of the memo, a quick excuse for the wrong edit, and a confident refutation of its politically motivated accusations could have saved the BBC a lot of damage. Belatedly, at least, the BBC chair has now stood up against Donald Trump’s threat of litigation.
Be it in the US-Congress or at the top of the BBC – if the risk-averse, prevaricating, defensive and cowardly members of the liberal leadership class don’t know how to fight self-described “counterrevolutionaries” then right-wing populists will move into the vacuum of the long undermined and weakened democratic institutions. I guess that is what Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labour Robert Reich, himself an avowed “liberal”, meant when he was tweeting about “the disappearance of the leadership class”.