Why does the right keep on winning?
TetleysTLDR: The summary
The Right keeps winning not because it’s smarter or better, but because it’s disciplined, ruthless, and obsessed with power. Its factions hate each other but still march in lockstep. Its billionaires bankroll the think tanks, media machines, and dark-money networks that keep the whole ghastly project humming. The Left, meanwhile, tears itself to bits over purity tests, commas in decade-old blog posts, and internal moral debates nobody outside the movement cares about. While the Right builds institutions, the Left builds WhatsApp groups that collapse before lunch. While the Right uses the state as a weapon, the Left asks permission to touch the controls it’s elected to run. And while the Right doesn’t give a toss about being liked, the Left can’t bear to be disliked. The grim truth: the Right wins because it organises. The Left loses because it doesn’t. Until that changes, the bastards will keep winning.
TetleysTLDR: The long bit
The left's cause is just - equality, justice, fairness and not punching down - but there’s a grim little truth we all know but rarely say out loud: historically the Right wins and is currently gaining ground: not because it’s clever, or moral or bursting with better ideas. It's not any those things. It's winning because it knows how to organise and its foot soldiers are docile and devoid of the ability of critical thinking. It's winning because its people understand power in a way the Left still treats like a dirty word and every time the Left gets close to grabbing the levers that matter, some faction or other leaps forward to slap its own side’s hands away because the wrong shade of red touched the controls.
Meanwhile the Right moves with all the discipline of a well-drilled army: humourless, joyless, and utterly committed to the grim project of downward social mobility, but effective. They march. The Left debates. They execute. The Left agonises. They build institutions that last. The Left builds WhatsApp groups that implode before lunch and then we wonder, every five years, why the bastards keep winning.
And here's the elephant in the room. We keep losing because we are our own worst enemies.
The Right organises because it wants power. The Left organises because it wants to be right.
This is the whole thing, in one line. The Right understands politics as a blunt tool for shaping society to its own advantage. They don’t wring their hands over it. They don’t drown themselves in self-doubt. They don’t get lost in the ethics labyrinth. They want control and everything else is decoration. If a Right-wing project fails, they regroup and try again. If a Left-wing project fails, we write think-pieces about hegemonic fractures and fall into a decade of introspection like a bunch of teenagers breaking down after a GCSE exam. The Right does not, under any circumstances, care whether the people enacting its agenda are 'ideologically pure'. They don’t give a flying shit if their MPs are bigots, charlatans, con-men, public school pricks, grifters or full-blown foaming-at-the-mouth snake oil salesmen. In fact, they prefer it that way. It makes the cruelty go down easier. Meanwhile, on the Left, one misplaced comma on a 2012 blog post and your comrades will treat you like you’ve just kicked the family cat. The Right builds coalitions. The Left builds circular firing squads.
The Right has money, and it knows how to use It
Let’s get the obvious point out of the way: the Right is loaded. Its base is stuffed with billionaire press barons, hedge-fund parasites, landlords, aristocrats, and ‘entrepreneurs’ whose entire business model involves shoving public money into their own pockets. They pump endless streams of cash into think tanks, dark-money outfits, astroturf campaigns, lobbyists, media platforms and political networks. If a right-wing idea is stupid enough, dangerous enough or hateful enough you can guarantee there’s a lobby group willing to throw millions behind it. And those groups have infrastructure. They have offices, staff, PR firms, legal teams, researchers, and media channels. The Right never forgets that propaganda is an investment. The Left? Well, we’ve got a collection of GoFundMes run by knackered activists who've burnt themselves out by 29 and are still fighting HMRC over late filing penalties because they were too busy canvassing to remember their tax return.
The Right has discipline. The Left has opinions
The Right’s greatest asset isn’t intelligence, or moral clarity or even unity: it’s fat headed discipline. They don’t all agree with each other. Far from it. The neoliberals hate the nationalists. The nationalists despise the free-marketeers. The libertarians think both groups are disgusting statists. The One Nation wets think the lot of them have lost their minds. And yet, when the time comes to vote? They march in line like a choir of dead-eyed Stepford MPs. Why? because they know the project matters more than the personalities. The Left, on the other hand, treats disagreement like mortal combat. One policy divergence and half the movement behaves like the other half has committed ideological treason. The Right gains traction because its factions swallow their bile and march on. The Left loses because it is addicted to being morally correct in the moment rather than strategically victorious in the long term. You only need to look at the last decade: the original Corbyn coalition blew itself apart because the soft-left couldn't bear being in the same room as actual radicals, the radicals couldn’t bear compromise, and the union establishment treated the whole thing like a family court dispute. The Right simply watched, smiled and then re-colonised the entire political space while the Left was too busy screaming at itself to notice.
The Right owns the media. The Left owns… well whatever Twitter is these days.
Let’s not pretend otherwise: controlling the narrative is half the battle. The Right has the press. The Right has the broadcasters. The right has the alagrithms. The Right has the billionaires who bankroll those broadcasters. The Right has a direct line into every newsroom in the country, and they use it relentlessly. A right-wing scandal erupts? The papers bury it under a pile of 'woke gone mad' bollocks. A left-wing scandal erupts? They run it for six months, invent three new angles, and get a panel of retired colonels to rant about it on breakfast TV. The Left has social media, which is to say, a digital slumlord’s playground run by tech bros who would sooner boil trade unions alive than allow an actual organising platform to flourish. Twitter isn’t a movement-building tool anymore; it’s a brightly lit arena where the Left eats its own entrails for entertainment.
The Right rewards loyalty. The Left rewards dissent
You can be the most mediocre, uninspired, morally vacuous lump of flesh the Right has ever produced, and they will still give you a job if you’re loyal. Look at our MPs. Look at the donor lists. Look at the think-tank alumni who keep getting recycled through government like radioactive waste. If you serve the machine, the machine looks after you. But on the Left? Christ. If you show too much loyalty your own comrades treat you like you’ve become a cultist. If you compromise, you're accused of selling out. If you stay consistent, you're ignored. If you do well, you’re resented. If you fail, you're mocked. Right-wing loyalty produces a functioning (if horrifying) political bloc. Left-wing scepticism produces a movement where every victory is treated like a betrayal.
The Right doesn’t fear power. The Left fears responsibility
This one cuts deep. The Right revels in power. It enjoys the cruelty, the domination, the ability to reshape society in its own sneering image. Tory MPs practically salivate at the idea of slashing public services, flogging off hospitals, deporting refugees, and grinding the poor into dust. Power is the point. The Left, meanwhile, carries a centuries-long psychological burden. It wants to fix society but worries constantly about doing it the wrong way. It wants to uplift the masses while panicking about whether the process itself replicates oppression. It wants victory but recoils from authority. It wants transformation, but apologises for holding power. It's like watching someone try to make a sandwich while being violently allergic to bread. And so the Right charges forward unopposed, like a bull let loose in a school canteen, while the Left spends years debating the ethics of matador culture.
The Right has a shared enemy. The Left has a shared anxiety
The Right is fuelled by hatred: immigrants, minorities, unions, activists, environmentalists, benefit claimants, youth, the working class itself. It is a politics of scapegoats and strong-arms, and that clarity, however brutal, is organisational gold. The Left is fuelled by hope, but tormented by doubt and as any organiser can tell you, doubt kills movements faster than any opposition. The Right doesn't spend time obsessing over whether its arguments are internally consistent, but the Left does. The Right doesn’t fret about offending marginal factions but the Left builds political strategies around not offending marginal factions. The Right doesn’t agonise about whether its activists are sufficiently representative but the Left sometimes averages five meetings before agreeing on a collective email signature.
The Right thinks in generations. The Left thinks in election cycles
Every major right-wing victory of the last half-century: Thatcherism, neoliberalism, Brexit, the austerity project, the culture war machine has been seeded decades before it actually bloomed. They nurture their ideas in the long grass until they can be unleashed with maximum impact. The Left, by contrast, has the attention span of a man trying to read Marx in a Wetherspoons on a Friday night. By the time a Left-wing idea has gathered momentum, someone else in the movement has declared it outdated, problematic or insufficiently intersectional. The Left has never built a decades-long ideological pipeline because it struggles to maintain the same email address for longer than a year.
The Right Uses the State. The Left Asks the State for Permission.
The Right sees the state as a weapon. When they take power, they immediately set about turning every lever, every office, every quango, every department into an extension of their project. The civil service becomes a battleground. The judiciary becomes a target. The media regulator becomes a bludgeon. The police become a guard dog and they do it all without shame. The Left, absurdly, treats the state like something sacred, something to be respected, obeyed, and approached with extreme caution. Even when in government, the Left governs like it’s on probation. It apologises for using the machinery it’s elected to run. The Right, meanwhile, storms in and rewires the whole thing by lunchtime.
The Right is ruthless. The Left wants to be liked
This is the killer blow. The Right doesn’t care if people like it. It just cares whether they submit. It will lie, cheat, demonise, brutalise and gaslight the electorate without hesitation, and if the public hates them, so what? They still win. They still govern. They still reshape the country. The Left wants people to approve of it. It wants to be the better person. It wants to be the adult in the room. It wants to prove that politics can be decent and gentle and collaborative. The Right looks at that and laughs. The Right weaponises resentment. The Left tiptoes around it. The Right thrives in conflict. The Left avoids it. The Right picks a target and goes in for the kill. The Left writes a letter to the Guardian.
And So the Pattern Repeats
Every decade, the Left gets a surge of energy. A leader. A movement. A manifesto. A moment. And for a brief, shimmering instant it looks like it might break the cycle… until the familiar forces resurface:
- infighting
- sabotage
- media obliteration
- retreat
- despair
- fragmentation
Meanwhile the Right, with its dead-eyed discipline and its ruthless unity and thick as pigshit footsoldiers walks back through the front door and resumes burning the furniture.
But here’s the truth the Right doesn’t want you to know
The Right wins because it organises, but it also organises because it is terrified. Terrified of ordinary people. Terrified of democracy. Terrified of what real social justice would mean. Terrified of losing its wealth, its status, its inherited privileges, its grubby little networks of power. If the Left ever did get its act together, even briefly, the Right’s whole lumbering edifice would crack like a biscuit. They know it. We know it. The only people who haven’t realised it yet are the ones still arguing about wording on a motion at conference while the world around them burns.
The final word
If the Left wants to win, I mean actually win, it needs to stop behaving like a fucking sixth form debating society and start behaving like a movement. It needs to learn a lesson from the Right. Heaven forbid it does but it needs discipline, strategy, organisation, and the ability to tolerate imperfection. It needs to accept compromise and that others in its movement aren't the Borg - they don't all think the same, and this should be celebrated, not stamped on. It needs to build power, not protest it. It needs to stop playing nice while the Right swings a wrecking ball through society, because until that happens, we’re stuck watching the same grim play on repeat: an organised Right crushing a disorganised Left because one side is chasing power while the other is chasing moral brownie points.
And until the Left drops the purity tests, the self-harm, the endless internal rows and the insistence on being the cleverest person in the room, the Right, with all its grifters, bigots, public school pricks, and slimy little opportunists, will keep beating us. Not because they deserve to. but because they’re organised, and fundamentally, because we aren’t.
Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK. A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.
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