Politics & Power Quote by Evan Thomas

Evan Thomas is making a deliberately impolite analogy that’s meant to sting: not because the GOP and Britain’s Labour Party are identical, but because the trajectory he’s sketching is legible to anyone who’s watched a major party confuse ideological purity with political viability. The jab lands in the first clause - “I don’t think the Republicans would appreciate the comparison” - a neat way of acknowledging tribal vanity while pressing the knife in anyway.

The subtext is a warning about capture. Thomas isn’t arguing that “extremists” merely influence messaging; he’s describing a party that has ceded steering control, mistaking loudness for mandate. The phrase “straight down” is doing a lot: it frames the outcome not as a bad cycle or temporary backlash, but as a self-inflicted descent, almost gravitational once the internal incentives reward maximalism.

Context matters because “Labour in the 1970s” isn’t a neutral historical reference; it evokes strikes, economic malaise, and the sense of a party out of step with voters’ tolerance for disruption. The punchline is Tony Blair, shorthand for a painful reinvention: disappearing “for a while,” then returning with moderates who can win. Thomas is implicitly arguing that parties don’t get rehabilitated by doubling down; they get rehabilitated by rebranding, triangulating, and, crucially, disciplining their fringes.

It’s also a theory of time: that collapse is slow until it’s sudden, and that survival may require an intermission - electoral punishment severe enough to force adults back in the room.