But we keep getting a very different type of would-be assassin: not the antifa militant from central casting, nor even the Proud Boy thug — but the deranged centrist.   

Thomas Crooks, the Butler, Pa., shooter, was a registered Republican who once gave $15 to the Democratic Party through ActBlue. Ryan Routh, who aimed at Trump with a rifle on a Florida golf course in late 2024, was a pro-Ukraine obsessive who had previously supported Trump. Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents Dinner attack, if the resurfaced online footprint is correct, is less Che Guevara than a #Resistance liberal with an online diet of posts from the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse.

Oops. The deranged centrist is a much more mundane and annoying figure. Noting the connection, the Lefty British commentator Owen Jones suggested that “centrists appear to be behind all three of the main assassination attempts on Donald Trump,” and that perhaps it was time to start talking about “centrist terrorism.” The term is absurd, which is why it works. Nobody imagines a militant cell emerging from the Abundance book club. There is no armed wing of the Brookings Institution. Chuck Schumer is not slipping coded instructions into someone’s “Melt the ICE” beanie at a No Kings rally.

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Will Stancil’s Revenge of the Nerd

By Ryan Zickgraf

“Centrist terrorism” is, of course, not a serious analytical category. Yet neither, in these cases, is the bogeyman trumpeted on the Right as “radical leftist terrorism.” In September 2025, Trump signed an order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. His administration is organizing an international summit this summer focused on countering what the State Department calls “the anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of antifa.” 

But where exactly have these antifa hard-liners been these days? They certainly weren’t battling ICE in Minneapolis in force; the top general playing 4D chess against ex-border patrol chief Greg Bovino was the dweeby center-Left pundit-cum-failed statehouse contender Will Stancil (who allegedly helped run an anti-ICE honeypot operation, in which local girls on Tinder would get inside information). Renee Good and Alex Pretti? A middle-aged mom and an intensive-care nurse, respectively.

Likewise, the men accused of trying to kill Trump didn’t emerge from among disciplined communist cadres. They aren’t Maoists arguing about whether Jacobin magazine is too Trotskyist. They look instead like loners from America’s vast political junk drawer: anti-Trump obsessives; Ukraine-war monomaniacs; disillusioned, lonely men marinated in online forums and animated by the belief that history requires their singular intervention.

This matters because the radical Left has become, in conservative discourse, a catch-all for everything the Right dislikes: Tim Walz, No Kings protesters, liberal prosecutors, suburban Biden voters, school administrators, Never Trump Republicans, trans activists, Justice Department lawyers, and anyone who has ever said “protecting our democracy from Trump” in a quivering voice — all treated as members of the same red-hued conspiracy. In reality, the anti-Trump universe isn’t one movement; it is a crowded room of mutually hostile tribes.

Just ask Trump’s would-be killers. Crooks produced a fog of clues but no coherent manifesto. His voter registration and tiny donation became ideological Rorschach tests. To the Right, the ActBlue donation proved he was a Left-wing assassin. To everyone else, the Republican registration complicated the picture. The more honest conclusion is that no faction could comfortably claim him, which didn’t stop everyone from trying to hang Crooks around the necks of their political enemies. Routh was stranger still. He supported Trump before turning against him. He tried to insert himself into a foreign war in defense of NATO and Ukraine. Calling him “the radical Left” would come as news to most Marxists, who aren’t usually known to be fans of the Western Alliance.

And then there is Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 and was promptly adopted as a folk hero by parts of the left. Mangione’s actual politics were what observers variously described as “new-tech centrist” — a Silicon Valley-inflected hodgepodge of libertarian instincts. He called Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? — essentially a centrist manifesto against political tribalism — “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century.”

As for Allen, some have tried to pin his attempt on the president’s life on the fiery rhetoric of Hasan Piker. But the inconvenient truth is that he was no fan of the controversial Left-wing streamer. Someone compiled a ranked list of the social-media accounts Allen had liked most. Topping the list were Stancil, Kruse, and progressive video-clip obsessive Aaron Rupar. Allen’s archived posts show him retweeting the argument that Palestine protesters are “functionally speaking, Republicans” and reposting Bill Kristol. Not exactly a Bernie Bro.

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Why the centre will not hold

By Yanis Varoufakis

Meanwhile, the actual radical Left is in New York City, smiling at Mets mascots and reading to kindergartners. I’m speaking of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist. The great scandal of his first months in office is that he has questionable tastes in housing czars and is annoyingly cheerful. No gulags have been planned for the Upper East Side.

This isn’t to say the Left is innocent of overheated rhetoric or hasn’t been guilty of violent acts — in the past or present. It’s to say, rather, that the troubled political mood in America is ambient; it gathers in the culture like black mold behind drywall.

But, just to be sure, we should start keeping a closer eye on people who go to all The Bulwark’s live podcast tapings. We need a list of all pundits who endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020. And if Trump insists on a counterterrorism summit this summer, for God’s sake, don’t forget to warn heads of state about everyone who smashed the like button on a Matt Yglesias post. The new Weather Underground isn’t underground at all; it’s all BlueSky ahead. 

Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerrilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

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The dark shadow of the Blairites

By Aaron Bastani

But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview —  so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “center” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual center only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the center has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fueled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

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Will Britain follow the Carney Doctrine?

By Aaron Bastani

All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

But while Wilders can comfortably fill a small venue with traditional working-class voters, young men in black, MPs and party stalwarts in this stronghold and fishing village north of Amsterdam, the question is whether he will do the same at a national level. This veteran of Dutch politics is leading in one of the polls, and is neck and neck with two other parties in another, with a snap election today. After a shock win in 2023 elections, his far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) party failed to pass its promised asylum laws, collapsed the coalition and has slumped from its current 37 seats to between 23 and 29 in the final polls.

Yet many continue to support the one-man party’s narrative about how asylum seekers — 12% of immigration last year and less than the European average — are responsible for the country’s housing woes, integration questions, and price inflation.

The Netherlands does experience real pressures: starting with demography. Like many Western European countries, it is dependent on immigration for its future prosperity. A state commission last year recommended “moderate growth” to 2050 — from 18 million currently to 19 or 20 million. It has an aging population and Europe’s shortest working week. In this rich land, a larger group of labor migrants and highly-skilled “expats” are essential to staff farming, distribution and meat processing jobs, as well as more high-tech industries.

As for the low-paid migrants who come in larger numbers from Eastern Europe, they typically face the worst housing and exploitation. Left-wing parties like Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft-Labour argue that cracking down on poor conditions and minimum wages is a better way of getting a “grip” on migration in Europe’s second-most densely populated country. Wilders, by contrast, proposes a “total asylum stop”, the army at the borders and stronger measures to eject people who are refused asylum or commit a crime — without discussing labor migration at all.

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The implosion of Geert Wilders

By Senay Boztas

Faced with a housing crisis — caused by a decade of stimulating property speculation, a rising number of single-person households, and a lack of building to keep up with population growth — views have polarized around immigration. Wilders blames the asylum seekers, who get priority for 7% of new social homes if they get a residency permit; Dutch media and progressive Amsterdam politicians criticize “rich” expat workers, who buy 1.5% of houses nationally.

Today’s election, therefore, is a turning point: will a centrist coalition (excluding Wilders) form an effective government in the 150-seat parliament, build affordable housing, solve an environmental crisis around excess nitrogen compounds and address affordability? Or will dissatisfaction only grow among disaffected voters, especially since the main parties have now erected a cordon sanitaire against the controversial, anti-Islam Wilders?

Certainly, Wilders manages to inspire a level of loyalty rarely seen in other parties, in this fragmented political culture.“Being a freedom party voter becomes a social identity, it becomes who you are,” says Bert Bakker, who studies political communication at the University of Amsterdam. “And just as supporters of Ajax [football club] remain loyal to the team even though it’s going through terrible periods of management, regardless of government, a core of the Freedom Party supporters will stay loyal.”

The fact that Wilders has not succeeded in government; that many of his ministers were accused of incompetence; and indeed that he walked away within 11 months, does not, Bakker says, matter to them. “We live in a very fragmented country,” he continues. “There’s just a strong group of voters who feel the country is moving in the wrong direction. And that a lot of that is tied to [beliefs about] migration and/or corrupt elites — that’s the populist part of it.”

People at the event on Saturday tell me Wilders truly hears their concerns. “He is going to save our country — I hope so,” says Astrid Arnold Harmsen, a special-needs assistant who hands Wilders a hand-written letter. “There’s a lot going wrong here. It’s impossible to get social housing, children can’t get a home, immigration is too high and we do too much for foreign [countries] instead of for ourselves.”

Do they have a point? While the Netherlands scores well on income equality — probably due to high income tax — wealth is spread far more unevenly. The richest 10% hold more than half of the assets, and a decade of housing-market stimulus has doubled prices: Europe’s second highest increase in the price-income ratio. Homeowners, 57% of households, still receive €11.2 billion in mortgage interest relief, while 17,000 more people are paper millionaires as property values soar.

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The death of the centre-right

By Wolfgang Munchau

The extent to which such problems are the fault of immigration, however, is open to debate. The UN special rapporteur on the right to housing last year said that foreigners were not responsible for the country’s general housing crisis. Steije Hofhuis, a postdoctoral researcher on migration at the Berlin Social Science Center, points out that settled asylum seekers take up just 12% of new social housing stock — if you don’t count people who have moved from one social home to another — while it has not been acceptable to talk about the “broken” asylum system, or neighborhood cultural issues in recent years.

No less important, while the Netherlands still has a comparatively high stock of social housing, the “free” private rental market is small and expensive. With a shortage of some 400,000 homes, that’s hardly surprising. This has downstream effects too, with surveys indicating a social divide between those with academic and vocational educations, even as the latter are not well represented in councils and parliament.

Wilders, in Hofhuis’ view, has no interest in solving these issues. “I’m afraid it’s a somewhat cynical model of Wilders,” he says, “and I do find it genuinely interesting why so many people are so eager to vote for him when it is so clear he’s not interested in solving any problem.” “I think the level of anger is just huge and he, of course, has a vocabulary that appeals to that and worsens it.”

Wilders’ offensive style does not preclude him from winning votes, even though he has a conviction for insulting Dutch Moroccans and proposes anti-constitutional laws and policies on Islam.

What might prove more damaging for Wilders, rather, is something as banal as the weather. “If the turnout of the voters is high, it’s likely that the PVV will profit from that,” explains Bart Koenen, senior researcher at the Verian polling research center. “There are a lot of PVV voters who, in reality, when it’s bad weather on Wednesday, look outside and say: ‘Oh no, I’m not going to vote.’ [Wilders is] very aware of the fact that he has to mobilize a lot of people who haven’t got that much confidence in democracy.”

The Netherlands’ longest-serving MP faces other challenges too. The Christian Democratic Appeal leader Henri Bontenbal has had a dramatic rise in the polls, with a message of competence and common decency. Young and dynamic D66 liberal democrat leader Rob Jetten looks to be enjoying a last-minute boost with a “yes, we can” (Het kan wél) campaign that also takes on issues around immigration, proposing to limit sectors with a high demand for low-paid labor, while giving refugees, who have a good chance of winning asylum, the opportunity to have language lessons and work from day one. Together with the PVV and GreenLeft-Labour, they are vying closely for first and second place.

At a campaign event in Amsterdam on Sunday, D66 supporter Henri de Haan says the Netherlands could represent a new dawn for European centrism, after the failures of the far-Right in government. “You see nationalism in France, Belgium, Germany, England,” he suggests. “Parties that play on these feelings. I think that in the Netherlands we are a bit ahead because we have seen that an extreme Right, divisive party, [the] PVV has exploited those feelings to win votes, they were the largest, they were in government and they have achieved precisely nothing.”

But in the meantime, says Koenen, it has become “more socially acceptable” to be far-Right. A recent anti-immigration demonstration in The Hague is a case in point: despite descending into violence, many protesters failed to cover their faces.

All the while, Koenen suggests that politicians across the European Union will be looking closely at the Dutch results. “It’s the first,” he says, referring to the fact that the Dutch, ahead of other European countries, will go to the polls to judge the success of the far-Right at the heart of power. “I think that there will be a change, that people will choose the middle parties, the center parties. But it doesn’t lead to less voting for the PVV.”

One might be tempted to conclude from this data that voters simply agree with Republicans more on the issues. The real story is more complicated. What Democrats are lacking isn’t so much the right policy package, but a demonstrated willingness to stand up to Donald Trump and his agenda in the second term. The issue, moreover, is less one of increasing Democratic unpopularity, than Republicans weathering a general decline in trust in institutions due to the unique connection Trump has with a significant minority of the country. Democrats cannot break this bond; they can only hope to mobilize the forces against it.

Consider polling about specific bills. Last month, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, the signature legislation of his second term thus far. On average, it had a net approval rating of -23, making it the second most unpopular major piece of legislation under consideration since 1990, only beating out the 2017 GOP health-care bill. In contrast, Biden’s infrastructure bill was at +39 when it was polled.

Put another way: When asked about specific pieces of legislation, voters prefer the Democratic approach of higher spending on infrastructure and social services to Republicans’ spending cuts that only partially offset tax cuts disproportionately favoring the wealthiest Americans.

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Gavin Newsom versus the Nimbys

By Richard Hanania

Nate Silver’s tracking of polls finds Trump’s approval rating to be underwater by double digits on inflation, trade, and the economy. Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, but even here, net approval is currently at -3. To be sure, the Journal poll shows Republicans to be more trusted on issues like immigration and the economy. Meanwhile, YouGov in May found nine issues where Democrats had an advantage, and 10 where Republicans did. It’s difficult to know what to make of polls showing that voters agree more with Democratic tax-and-spending bills than those favored by Republicans, while at the same time Republicans are more trusted on the economy as an abstract issue. Another contradiction: while Americans dislike Trump’s tariffs, and one would think that Democrats represent a return to the status quo, they still trust Republicans equally as much as Democrats or more on the issue. This shouldn’t be logically possible, and probably again reflects voters not thinking too carefully about their political attitudes.

Issue polling is, in short, a mess. Although we can draw broad lessons about which party owns specific policy areas, I would be hesitant to use it in order to make inferences regarding recent changes in how Americans view Democrats and Republicans.

So if not policy, what does explain the sorry state of the Democrats? It would be one thing if they were cratering with Independents. That would suggest that they are simply out of step with the majority of Americans. In fact, the party leadership is reaching new lows because it faces discontent among its base. In the CNN poll cited above, only 58% of Democratic-aligned adults have a favorable view of their party, compared to 76% of Republicans. Morris and Radcliffe point to a Strength in Numbers/Verasite poll showing that Left-wing Democratic voters are disproportionately unhappy: about 20% of self-identified “very liberal” Democrats now have an unfavorable view of their own party, far higher than the equivalent disaffection among “very conservative” Republicans, who are at 8%. If you factor out this Left-flank discontent, Democratic approval would rise by a net of eight points. In the Strength in Numbers poll, Democrats actually do better with Independents.

The Republican advantage, then, seems mostly or completely driven by very liberal voters not liking the current Democratic Party. Does that mean that, in order to match Republicans in popularity, all Democrats would have to do is move Left? Unfortunately for them, surveys indicate that their voters would like them to do precisely the opposite.

According to a February poll from Gallup, as of early 2025, only 22% of Democrats were content with the party’s current ideological approach — everyone else wanted change. Crucially, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents said the party should become more moderate, while 29% wanted it to be more liberal or progressive. Among Republicans, in contrast, a healthy plurality of 43% was satisfied with the party and wanted it to stay the course.

What this means is that Democrats might need to think twice before simply trying to satisfy the most extreme voices among their base. Otherwise, they may lose moderate voters in the process, as more of their supporters want them to take a centrist path.

There is nothing all that mysterious about any of this. No matter where the Democrats are ideologically, voters could disapprove of the party from either side. A very liberal Democratic voter and a moderate one might both have gripes, which you would expect in a large, diverse country with only two major parties representing the entire political spectrum.

Perhaps it is a mistake, then, to focus on Democratic unpopularity. Maybe the question we should ask is why Republican approval remains so high among its base, in an era where trust in institutions is collapsing. The Trump-era GOP has taken radically unpopular positions on taxing and spending policy. Yet the Republican base seems to shrug everything off and remains malleable, seemingly due to Trump’s unique charisma. A KFF tracking poll shows that while only 61% of Republicans approved of the Big Beautiful Bill in June, that figure had risen to 78% in July.

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Can middle-aged white guys save the Dems?

By Justin H. Vassallo

Republican politicians now regularly justify their actions based on the idea that they follow the will of Trump. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma was more explicit than most when he said that he fought against releasing Epstein documents in order to give Trump “cover,” arguing that Democrats would use any information that came out to target the president. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, when praising the recent trade deal with South Korea, urged his followers to “Trust in Trump”. A recent New York Times headline reads: “Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump,” showing that the president’s influence reaches down to what have traditionally been state and local issues.

The behavior of the current Congress has been downright cult-like. As the Associated Press reports, a raft of GOP proposals would allow Americans to “take the day off work for Donald Trump’s birthday,” receive “a $100 bill with Trump’s portrait on it,” and land at “Donald J. Trump International Airport near the nation’s capital,” among other similar measures.

It’s easy to feel contempt for politicians here. But we can assume that they are simply following their voters, who really love this man. Trump’s approval remains sky high in a party that was famous for turning on its leaders in Congress throughout the Obama era. Since 2023, researchers at Vanderbilt University have been asking Republicans if they consider themselves more supporters of MAGA or the traditional GOP. The first time they posed the question, 37% of respondents reported that they feel MAGA first. Today, the MAGA-first group is at 52%.

This is particularly interesting because MAGA is notoriously flexible when it comes to ideology. Those who consider themselves more intellectual Trumpists have no shortage of complaints about the president, from his bombing of Iran to his Medicaid cuts. A popular meme shows Trump implementing tariffs and being praised for it by a cartoon supporter in a red hat, who then turns around and declares “art of the deal” every time he removes the levies.

The story of falling Democratic popularity relative to Republicans is therefore only partly a story about Democrats. We are in an era of declining trust, which afflicts nearly all institutions, from the media to Congress to the medical system. Of course, the two major political parties are likely to take a hit under those conditions. Yet Republicans are buoyed by a cult of personality that is largely impervious to the effects of bad news or unpopular policy positions.

According to the Wall Street Journal poll, Republicans are currently about where they were in 2010 in terms of net favorability. Meanwhile, Democrats have seen an almost continuous decline. Thus, the notion that Trump is a drag on the GOP likely gets things exactly backwards. While his overall popularity might be underwater, what distinguishes Trump from other politicians is his ability to hold a base of support among a substantial and unshakable minority of the American people. This rubs off on the rest of the GOP, as long as lesser Republicans are seen to be doing the bidding of their leader.

That doesn’t mean all hope is lost for Democrats. While the party is indeed divided on whether it should become more moderate or liberal, there is greater unity on standing up to Trump. In a March poll that asked Democrats how they would grade their party’s response to Trump, 70% gave them a C or lower, with 21% giving an F. Only 17% said that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was doing enough to fight Trump; 61% felt he wasn’t doing enough. Democratic voters overwhelmingly support efforts like trying to block Trump’s actions through the courts and engaging in mass protests.

It follows that Democratic elected officials can likely shore up their own base of support by standing together against Trump’s political priorities. Would that possibly hurt them with Independents? One can’t say for sure, but given that Trump’s overall approval rating is underwater, it isn’t as if they would be going against the tide of public opinion. And Republicans are already extremely polarized against Democrats, and likely to stay that way, given their increasingly propagandistic media-consumption habits.

Trump’s role in the national psyche is so overwhelming that nearly every major political story is, at heart, a story about Trump. Republicans believe what they believe largely based on what Trump says and does. The Democrats are now a party that is ideologically divided, but united in opposition to Trump.

Given the fact that Trump’s base can’t be moved, Democrats might as well show life and pull out all the stops to oppose his agenda. On policy and messaging, it probably makes sense to moderate, rather than move to the Left. On anti-Trump opposition, however, the party must be resolute. In other words, Democrats need a centrism that fights. As the Republican Party becomes more and more enthralled to one man and his personal agenda, there is little to be gained by hoping to appease the other side.

Oppositional centrism would shore up the Democrats’ own base, and likely has the best chance of winning over the small number of Americans who are still persuadable. MAGAs will find a reason to be angry regardless. In order to thrive in the face of an increasingly unified opposition, Democrats cannot keep living in fear of the backlash that might result from standing up to Trump.

Existing citizens should be prioritized, he said: “We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. No more globalism, was the message: “America is not just an idea,” he told a rapturous audience. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

A year on, though, it’s looking more wobbly. Last weekend, Elon Musk, whose support helped propel Trump to victory, launched his new “America Party”, promising the American people that this will “give you back your freedom”. The party’s X account has since squared up to the Trumpian project, declaring: “MAGA is the past. Woke is a distraction. The middle is the future.”

Is there really political runway for a new, tech-forward, centrist party? Who knows. But the irony is that this is, in fact, what Trump is trying to create — while Musk’s project wildly misunderstands the actual terrain he seeks to influence. Combing through the ins and outs of the now seemingly defunct Trump-Musk bromance, we find that what precipitated the breakup is not Trump’s departure from “centrist politics”, but his efforts to create a new center, in seeking to balance the diametrically opposed interests of the two halves of his coalition, on the most politically salient issue of the election: immigration. And the surprising conclusion is that even if Musk’s new party seems unlikely to succeed, his anger is justified — because he got played.

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Bidengate is the anti-Watergate

By Mary Harrington

The Trumpian Republican Party has long since abandoned the previous version of “centrist” American conservatism, which embraced a bipartisan economic consensus that tolerated penalties to the American middle class and relatively high immigration, provided all contributed to GDP growth overall. But while Trump’s challenge to this consensus was controversial enough in the 2016-2020 term, it has been far trickier to navigate this time, because his 2024 coalition was freshly-bolstered by Silicon Valley tech bros who — if they aren’t precisely neoliberals — are certainly more in favor of high immigration than the MAGA base.

From the get-go, then, Trump 2.0 has been caught between Big Tech donors whose cultural affinities and business interests tend strongly toward enabling large-scale migration, and an electoral base for whom economic and cultural nationalism are the whole point of voting for Trump. This tension bubbled to the surface almost immediately following Trump’s election last year, via the totemic issue of H1B visas. This controversial program enables companies to bring workers to the USA from overseas, typically into medium- to high-skilled knowledge jobs in tech, engineering, and business. Critics allege that this visa route is used to undercut native wages and cut corners on employment rights. But especially to internationally-oriented, tech-forward employers in Silicon Valley, the potential H1B affords to scour the world for talent is obviously appealing, even as the same quality makes it just as obviously antithetical to the interests of native workers.

The conflict between Trump’s Silicon Valley backers and those relying on Trump to protect them from foreign competitors did not take long to surface. When erstwhile Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an ill-judged social media post blaming American culture for US firms giving preference to workers from overseas, the backlash to his statements was furious. It didn’t help that Ramaswamy himself is of Indian heritage, like many of America’s H1B workers. Ramaswamy had been tipped to join Musk at DOGE, Trump’s waste-cutting program, but backlash to his statements only died down once Trump’s qualified expression of support for H1B — a sop to his new tech-bro friends — was complemented by throwing Ramaswamy under the bus.

Even before Trump’s inauguration, then, a sense of suspicion already hung in the air. The interests of MAGA and Silicon Valley are so obviously orthogonal on immigration that this could hardly be otherwise. I have wondered for some time how he planned to square that circle; now, one way of reading the Trump/Musk break-up is as a tragic byproduct of Trump’s efforts to do so. Specifically, via the measures required to get Trump’s Congressional spending megabill over the line, including a massive boost to US border security funding.

The bill, referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, is a 940-page legislative behemoth. Fiercely opposed by a number of Republicans for the $3.9 trillion fiscal hawks estimate it will add to the national debt, and by most progressives for its swingeing healthcare cuts, reversal on renewables, and tax-cuts for the rich, the centerpiece of the OBBB is a staggering $170bn funding boost to ICE, to support mass deportations. The rest is a thicket of carve-outs, red tape, and special pleading, set to swell the US government deficit considerably, and furiously denounced by Elon Musk as a “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK”.

But what if all this pork has been accepted as the price of delivering Trump’s promise to MAGA, on immigration? The boost to ICE makes this department now bigger and costlier than most militaries, meaning that while Trump may have pivoted from his 2016 opposition to H1B immigration, in a clear sign of compromise with Silicon Valley, he’s still trying to make good on his pledge to cut the low-skilled and illegal kinds. In other words: Trump may be attempting to actually deliver the genuinely centrist “some immigration, but the high-skilled kind only” program that every political party promises, and none ever delivers.

Musk, then, may be trying to set himself up as the centrist alternative to MAGA. But in terms of the most salient issue in the last US election, and constrained by the proverbial political “art of the possible”, it appears actually to be Trump who is trying to carve out the center ground. Musk, meanwhile, is obviously furious and bewildered — and, also, possibly deeply betrayed.

And no wonder. He burned a third of Tesla’s share price and a great deal of his personal cultural capital on driving DOGE. This initially promised $2 trillion in US government savings; but Musk left DOGE in May, and the project seems not to have achieved anything like this in practice. Again, we might see this as hubris, failure — or alternatively as Musk having been used, by cannier political operators. For while DOGE never achieved the vaunted $2 trillion in savings, it was effective at kneecapping Trump’s internal political foes in USAID and the Department of Education — moves adumbrated in Project 2025, then realized with Musk’s help.

Was that always what DOGE was for? Was Musk simply used to deliver it? Key figures in Trump’s team have certainly read Machiavelli, even if Trump himself isn’t a books guy. In any case, having sacrificed so much net worth and personal capital on this venture Musk might be forgiven for expecting a little quid pro quo, such as cushy treatment for his business interests. And yet the OBBB has taken a chainsaw to renewables subsidies — including several that will directly impact Tesla’s bottom line, potentially to the tune of billions. Trump himself has alleged that these losses are the real reason for Musk’s rage at the OBBB.

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Donald Trump’s big, beautiful mess

By Frederick Kaufman

Reading past the sound and fury on social media, then, the picture that emerges is of Musk as a newcomer to politics: one who imagined it to be like business, where you hire smart people and they do what you ask them to do. Instead, he got comprehensively out-manoeuvred. He was deployed as a means of neutralizing hostile departments in the permanent bureaucracy, then just as abruptly retired when he took his ostensible duties too literally and his cuts started causing awkward headlines. Then he was dispensed with altogether, as it began to dawn on him that his government allies never really cared that much about cost-cutting, and that the aims were rather always political: namely, a wholesale reshaping of the American political behemoth.

Meanwhile, within the terms of what actually can be done in the world as it is, Trump’s regime seems to be consolidating. If the OBBB border security mega-splurge does what it’s intended to do, I don’t expect Musk’s party to get anywhere. (It’s already being mocked online as the “H1B Party”.) Especially if Trump holds to his alt-centrist stance on migration, permitting a measure of higher-skilled inflow to continue even as the deportations escalate, chances are he’ll keep enough of the business lobby onside, including in Silicon Valley. If Trump achieves this, while retaining the trust of MAGA and without bankrupting his country, he will be unstoppable. There will be no need for long-winded theorizing on what a nation is or isn’t, whether or how far America is made of immigrants or ethnic blocs or whatever. The messy reality will be good enough for enough of the electorate.

As for Musk, he is obviously an extraordinarily gifted and driven man in many respects. But if things continue to go Trump’s way, it won’t be long before everyone (including Musk) quietly abandons the “America Party”, and resumes making the best of the actually existing America, chaos and compromise and all.

Long ago, it was reasonable to hope that voters thinking of voting for a scary ultra-Rightist in order to annoy the centrists whose policies kept them down might come to their senses the moment that scary ultra-Rightist looked likely to win government. Something like that happened in France in 2002. Back then, middle-class socialists, young ecologists and working-class communists lined up at the polling stations alongside conservatives to give 82% of the national vote to Rightist Jacques Chirac so as to keep ultra-Rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen — the father of the French ultra-Right’s current leader — out of the Elysée. But this is not what happened in France 25 years later, or in Canada or Australia last week.

In 2002, six years before Western capitalism’s near-death experience, Chirac defeated Le Pen because the socialist and the communist parties directed their voters to him. Under the slogan: “We vote for you today, we oppose you tomorrow morning!”, voters who were at odds with the establishment voted for an establishment figure in order to keep a neofascist out. All the while, they retained their allegiance to parties of the Left. In contrast, Emmanuel Macron won by annihilating the parties of the Left.

Working-class voters, who were suffering the consequences of the centrists’ austerity policies, were incensed with Macron, a former banker determined to impose “green” taxes on them while giving tax breaks to his haute bourgeois mates. With nowhere else to go, these voters drifted en masse to Le Pen. Then something startling happened: Macron and Le Pen grew co-dependent, their mutual antipathy notwithstanding. The more austerity he imposed on the many, the deeper their discontent and the higher her support. And the higher her support, the better able he was to appeal to anti-fascists to hold their noses and vote for him in order to keep her out.

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Will Liberation Day transform the world?

By Yanis Varoufakis

As this dynamic co-dependency grew, the ultra-Right won a staggering 40% of the national vote in the June 2024 parliamentary elections. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest that this trend is unravelling. In this light, history may well remember Macron more as the liberal center’s gravedigger than its redeemer.

Cut to last week and the decisive defeat of the Rightist Canadian and Australian parties that tried, and failed, to ride the Trumpian wave. Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese won because President Trump made it impossible for them to lose. By threatening to annex Canada, and by slapping tariffs on an Australia that not only has never missed an opportunity to bend over backwards to accommodate Washington’s every whim but also runs a trade deficit with the United States, it is as if Trump was determined that his Canadian and Australian copycats lose last week’s elections. Nevertheless, under the surface of Carney’s and Albanese’s victories, it is not difficult to discern social trends similar to those that rendered Macron’s victory decidedly Pyrrhic.

In Canada, after 11 years of ruling, the Liberals failed to appeal to the large sections of the working-class who either abstained or voted for the conservatives. When the Liberals nevertheless secured a razor-thin majority, they did so by cannibalizing, Macron-style, the Left-of-center (the NDP and the Parti Québécois). In Australia, Labor’s landslide victory obscured the fact that it won with a historically low percentage of the primary vote. Although it won most seats in the working-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, Labor did so on second preferences, while continuing to bleed first preferences — especially amongst the immigrant communities which used to be the party’s most reliable vote reservoir. As in Canada, Australia’s centrists won by feeding off the only Left-of-center force, the Greens, but had no luck in unseating a significant number of Right-leaning independents (the so-called Teals).

So far, so very similar to the political dynamics in France. What makes these similarities so fascinating is that they have taken place in such different countries. France’s economy is joined at the hip to that of Germany and the rest of the European Union. Australia and Canada, on the other hand, are resource-based economies integrated into the energy-industrial-military complex of the United States.

Because of its location, Canada sells 75% of its exports to America, while also directly investing more of its capital in the US than the US invests in Canada. As for geographically isolated Australia, its economy is also deeply intertwined with US conglomerates, albeit indirectly. While Australian mining companies have long been in the business of extracting fossil fuels and digging up gargantuan volumes of the country’s red earth before shipping it all to Japan and China, this roaring trade with Asia’s two superpowers is predicated on the US sourcing two crucial resources from China and Japan: manufactured goods and savings.

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The death of the centre-right

By Wolfgang Munchau

This is why the political trends in Canada and Australia are similar to those in France. Despite their vast differences, the three economies are hooked into the same US-centric global surplus-recycling mechanism, whose deep crisis is steering their politics in a direction inimical to the centrists’ medium-term prospects. Politicians like Macron, Carney and Albanese may score impressive victories, but they have no plan for stemming the secular decline of their influence over their increasingly restive electorates. For years now, these electorates have been pummeled by the undercurrents of the global recycling mechanism — a mechanism that once drove their countries’ growth and stability.

The essence of this global mechanism (which I once labelled the Global Minotaur) is simple. Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”

Their proposed solutions may be wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy, but at least Trump’s team has identified the problem. Voters may not understand that these unsustainable imbalances are at the root of their plight, but enough of them have the sixth sense to intuit that Trump’s people are on to something, unlike the centrists who act like King Canute ordering the tides of discontent to reverse course.

Inexcusably, centrists treat Bessent and the rest of Trump’s economic team as Neanderthals. They forget that the people they celebrate as the architects of the globalized capitalist order, an order which they now mourn, had warned them in good time. On 10 April 2005, when no one was interested in bad news stories, Paul Volcker, the man who had helped design the devastating Nixon Shock and later headed the Federal Reserve during the formative years of the Dark Deal, foreshadowed everything Bessent is now saying:

“What holds [the US economic success story] all together is a massive and growing flow of capital from abroad, running to more than $2 billion every working day, and growing… As a nation we don’t consciously borrow or beg. We aren’t even offering attractive interest rates, nor do we have to offer our creditors protection against the risk of a declining dollar… We fill our shops and our garages with goods from abroad, and the competition has been a powerful restraint on our internal prices. It’s surely helped keep interest rates exceptionally low despite our vanishing savings and rapid growth. And it’s comfortable for our trading partners and for those supplying the capital. Some, such as China, depend heavily on our expanding domestic markets. And for the most part, the central banks of the emerging world have been willing to hold more and more dollars, which are, after all, the closest thing the world has to a truly international currency… The difficulty is that this seemingly comfortable pattern can’t go on indefinitely.”

Three years later, Wall Street crashed. Two decades of centrist denial followed, bought at the price of gigantic money printing for the few and harsh austerity for the many. With Volcker and his ilk sidelined by the governing centrists, the political center began to fragment across the West — with deficit countries like France, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (not to mention my country, Greece) closer to the eye of the storm. It was only a matter of time before someone like Trump would rise up, the inevitable outcome of the centrists’ refusal to acknowledge that the global surplus recycling mechanism, the Dark Deal, was dead in the water — just as its predecessor, the Bretton Woods system, was before President Nixon killed it in 1971.

Sure enough, Trump’s policies are unlikely to rebalance the world economy. While some manufacturing will return to America, automation will render this a jobless growth surge. Big Tech’s burgeoning cloud rents will further undermine any actual rebalancing. China will probably move on, gradually transforming the Brics into a Bretton Woods-style system anchored by the yuan. The European Union will fail to rebalance its internal macroeconomy, sinking deeper into stagnation. The planet’s climate will go haywire.

But, though Trump’s policies may not work in the US, France, Australia, Canada or anywhere else, his willingness to upend a broken global system is enough to garner political support for, at home, unprecedented authoritarianism; and abroad, a confrontation with China that casts doubt on our species’ long-term prospects. Meanwhile, centrists stuck in their delusion that the Dark Deal can be sustained are condemned to keep losing even when they win.

In his book The Inevitability of Tragedy (2020), Barry Gewen shows how Kissinger’s doubts about democracy ultimately accounted for his world-weary view of geopolitics. Likewise, the great philosophers of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance well understood that without the minimum virtue on the part of its practitioners, democracy, like any system, was vulnerable. That is why Arendt and Strauss were particularly unnerved by the ideological witch-hunts of the McCarthy era in the late Forties and Fifties in the United States. But at least back then there was the rectitude of presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to ultimately protect the system. Now, it is the occupant of the Oval Office himself who constitutes the mortal danger.

Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, the killer of Weimar. But he is a destroyer of institutions, of constitutional safeguards, and of the very demeanor of political life in America. He is the impresario of American political decline for a reason that is so obvious it goes virtually unnoticed: the loss of the center in American politics, leaving the system at the mercy of both Right- and Left-wing ideologies. The late Polish philosopher Czesław Miłosz, in surveying the pathologies of Cold War-era communism, noted that the great attraction of ideologies was a “fear of thinking” for oneself, so that the masses had extreme ideas prepared for them by others. We have reached a similar moment in today’s America, where the advancement of communications technology has produced social media mobs driven by simplistic messages and passion. And passion is the enemy of analysis. It is impossible to imagine Trump outside of the digital-video age.

It turns out that what protected America for so long was the more primitive technology of the print-and-typewriter age, which led to a deeper exploration of issues and generally avoided simplistic thinking, and was thus a barrier against mass ideologies. The print-and-typewriter age upheld America’s vibrant and stable democracy for most of its history. It is unclear whether American democracy can succeed as well in our new media era.

Another reason the center has vanished is the fact of globalization itself. Rather than unite the world, globalization has split countries down the middle. In the United States that has meant the creation of a cosmopolitan, wine-sipping, European vacation-oriented upper-middle-class intimately connected with the outside world, and a working-class stuck in the old nation-state. There is even a geographical basis to this divide, with the globalized half inhabiting the two coasts, as well as the urban areas and college towns in-between, and the non-globalized half living in that vast rural obscurity defined as flyover country.

Finally, there is a flaw in democracy itself that the Founders well understood. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison preferred a republic to a democracy: that is, he favored a limited democracy with elite safety measures. One could argue that America remained crucially a republic for as long as the party bosses chose presidential candidates. But that ended some decades ago, when the primary system was gradually established, allowing voters to choose their own candidates for the presidency. Because of low-voter turnouts in primaries, the new system favored the extremes who were more motivated to vote. In fact, the party bosses never would have chosen Trump in 2016; they would have preferred the boring but supremely competent Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who would have governed like his father and not like his brother. America is now a fully fledged democracy and the result is Trump.

Since mass democracies function best in the political center, it is worth exploring what the center and the loss of it has meant to American politics. For that loss is the real fruit of globalization and the digital-video era, justifying the fears of Kissinger, Arendt, and Strauss.

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China is ready for battle

By John Rapley

The center made Congress work, both as a balancer against the executive branch and as a producer of good laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. When the Republicans were a center-right party and the Democrats a center-left one, there was always a large philosophical overlap of senators and congressmen from both parties that got things done. That is no longer the case, as the Republicans have become a radical populist Right-wing party and the Democrats a radical progressive one.

The center also produced a vital unity in foreign policy, so that the party out of power in the White House generally supported the foreign policy of the party in power. Politics, it was said, stopped at the water’s edge, so that America spoke with one voice when it came to matters on the other side of the two oceans. That is long gone, too. Now America’s foreign policy oscillates by 180 degrees between one administration and the next, so that foreign governments no longer wholly trust the United States.

The center produced a dedicated and competent federal bureaucracy, including a Foreign Service elite that staffed the many dozens of embassies and consulates abroad: so that problems in a myriad of countries, especially in complex and troubled ones like Pakistan, Nigeria, and Colombia, were well handled before they reached the level of the secretary of state and the White House. The Trump administration is in the process of gutting this bureaucratic cadre which for decades kept American foreign policy far removed from both Left- and Right-wing ideologies. The so-called deep state, as I have written elsewhere, based on my own experience as a foreign correspondent for decades, is vastly superior in knowledge and common sense to the Right-wing ideologues who are now suspicious of it.

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Will America share Rome's fate?

By Robert D. Kaplan

Finally, and most profoundly, the loss of the political center has meant that elections have been invested with dangerous existential significance. Whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans who are in power, there is now the phenomenon of the tyranny of the majority, with the 52% who voted for the winner tyrannising the losing 48%. In normal democracies, elections don’t — and shouldn’t — matter so much.

The United States has experienced the same phenomenon and worse in its nearly 250-year history. There was the presidency of Andrew Jackson from 1829 to 1837, and the Civil War itself from 1861 to 1865. Jackson was a rather rough-hewn military commander from Tennessee, with much Native American blood on his hands, who scandalized the genteel Virginia and Massachusetts elites who had run the country up until then. It was a geographical factor — the country’s westward expansion — that brought him to the fore as a man from the frontier; just as it was a geographical issue — the question of whether new western states entering the union would be slave states or not — that instigated the Civil War. And it is, in part, a geographical issue — the encroachment of the outside world upon American shores through globalization — that is key to the country’s present dysfunction.

In each case, the country’s physical horizons have expanded, discomforting the elites. But the American West was ultimately absorbed into the body-politic of the nation in the late 19th century and a new political consensus arrived at, with all of its variations. Similarly, globalization, which despite the new tariff regime is inexorable in so many subtle ways, could absorb all of America and help lead eventually to a new consensus. But that very process could itself require new battles and upheavals. In any case, the German-Jewish intellectuals who had personally experienced the end of Weimar were right to worry about their newly adopted land.

In this adaptation of Julia Donaldson’s children’s book, an imaginative little fish is saved by the “tall tales” he makes up to keep him out of trouble. “I was lost, I was scared, but a story led me home again,” he declares. Donaldson describes her story as a celebration of childhood imagination, which encourages kids to lose themselves in their dreams. Yet it strikes me that there’s something deeper going on. Donaldson has written a modern fable of sorts. Across the West, we are more than a little lost. The stories we once told are no longer believed and those we need to tell new ones have lost their power of imagination.

The central conceit of much political analysis today is that there is something called “populism” which tells tall tales to gullible voters in order to win power. Opposing the populists, in this telling, are the “centrists” who deal in facts and figures. We might call this the Alastair Campbell account of modern politics. The irony of this view, though, is that it has become the very thing it thinks it opposes: a comforting but ultimately hollow fantasy.

In one sense, it is possible to understand 2024 as the year the hollowness of this centrist fantasy became so obvious voters couldn’t take it seriously any longer. In France, the story of Emmanuel Macron’s Jupiterian competence is no longer believable even for those who want it to be true. In Germany, meanwhile, the idea that Olaf Scholz could possibly lead a Zeitenwende looks just as ridiculous, as he clings to power desperately casting his opponents as warmongers. In the United States, meanwhile, the extraordinary reality is that Donald Trump cut the more substantive figure in their presidential election than his opponent by having actual policies. Has there ever been a more vacuous candidate in modern presidential history than Kamala Harris? Is anyone today able to say what she actually stood for other than her own ambition and the interests of the Democratic Party?

Here in Britain, meanwhile, the hollowness of our order is exposed by the simple fact that it is simply no longer believable that we are a well-governed country. The deterioration of living standards and public services are too obvious for anyone to be able to make this case with any degree of sincerity. However we define the status quo, it is surely failing. The last time there was a similar breakdown of the legitimacy in our governing order came in the Seventies when a series of crises exposed its failings. For Starmer and his government, the great fear is that the turning point in this story — the 1979 of our own era — was not the election in July, but the one yet to come.

Part of our current dilemma lies in the fact that our world no longer bears witness to the wisdom of the old solutions. On economic questions, for example, the idea of free trade in the era of Chinese industrial power looks increasingly sado-masochistic, especially when shackled to our drive towards Net Zero. There is real panic today in Whitehall at the prospect of imminent industrial collapse which risks fracturing the entire governing consensus around our decarbonising commitment — much as the post-Brexit immigration boom under Boris Johnson similarly robbed the Conservative Party of its legitimacy on that subject.

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The McSweeney Project

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Standing ready to benefit on both of these counts is Nigel Farage, the populist Grendel stalking Westminster’s imagination. Johnson was once the figure who was supposed to have slayed this Kentish monster with his promise to Get Brexit Done and “level up” the country, only for the hollowness of his commitment to be exposed, allowing Farage to return stronger than ever. Since then, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have come and gone, each slain by their own inadequacies, leaving Starmer with the sword of state tasked with defending the Mead Hall. But within a matter of months, his government is also in trouble.

With his noble missions as his guide, Starmer hopes to demonstrate to voters that he can deliver tangible improvements to their lives in a way that the populists Boris Johnson and Liz Truss never could. The strategy behind this is to paint Farage not as the solution to today’s crisis of government, but as a return to the populist chaos of the Tories. There is merit in this approach, but in the end, if a wave of car plant closures is blamed on Ed Miliband’s drive to Net Zero, the debates about Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and George Osborne will feel as irrelevant as the figure of Ted Heath did in the aftermath of 1979’s Winter of Discontent.

The danger for Starmer is that trying to defeat populism through “delivery” not only leaves him at the mercy of forces he cannot control, but also ties him inextricably to a system that voters have already rejected. This, in a sense, was the story of the American election, in which a party with an apparent record of delivery was defeated by an insurgent populist. To win, Starmer needs more than a spreadsheet with the figures moving in the right direction. He needs a story about what went wrong before and why his government is different. He needs a story about what his government is for, morally and ideologically.

Unfortunately for Starmer, there is a concurrent shift in attitudes across the Western world which Starmer also needs to contend with. As a senior diplomat put it to me, the mood in European capitals has dramatically shifted since Trump’s victory, embracing his power in a way that indicates a new and far more cynical Western zeitgeist. “So many have now embraced the world of Game of Thrones, Billions and Succession,” this official said. “A world in which power is the only currency and morality is most likely to be a flaw.”

In this view, to be seen attempting to play by the rules of the game while everyone else takes advantage of you is not noble, but contemptible. Having recently found myself invested in the TV series Yellowstone, this observation struck me as highlighting a key element of our modern psyche. In Yellowstone, the anti-hero is the patriarch of the family doing everything and anything to keep hold of his family ranch. Much has been said about Yellowstone’s distinctly conservative vision of America. Yet, in a more profound way, it is actually offering a vision propounded by the Left, which long ago rejected the idea of a noble America born in liberty seeking an ever-more-perfect union. Instead, America was cast — correctly in many ways — as a slave republic which came into existence through violent colonisation.

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The irony here, though, is that this successful challenge to the foundational myth of America has given rise not to some pained wish to repent among today’s newly enlightened generation, but a deep cynicism about the nature of the world, which has only served the interests of the Right. If there has never been a moral mission in the world — if it is all just a made-up story — then why create one now? Might is right, after all. No matter how many people the patriarchal rancher must kill to keep his land — or what was done to win it in the first place — he remains the hero simply by dint of striving to keep what is his.

This story does not bode well for those like Starmer who are seeking to defend the decency of the old order. In this world, little is to be gained by giving away sovereignty in the Indian Ocean or sticking to your climate commitments. What voters want, it seems, is for someone to protect their inheritance; their prosperity; their country; their land. Of all the characters in British politics, the one who clings closest to the Yellowstone version of morality is, of course, Farage. The point about Net Zero, for him, is not who is to blame for climate change, but who is going to defend British prosperity.

If Starmer or, indeed, Kemi Badenoch, is to counter this story of modernity, then both will need a better story than the one they are telling us. It will need to capture the public’s imagination as much as Farage’s tale; to explain, in moral and ideological terms, what has gone wrong and why only Labour can fix it. It will need to explain the collapse of the old order’s legitimacy and work with the cynicism of our new age. Ultimately, it will need to be more political: to be for some people and against others. McSweeney and McFadden need a new story. It can be tall or otherwise, but it can no longer be as hollow as the one we have lost faith in, otherwise we will not find our way back.

And yet, the Eternal City didn’t fall. Under General Quintus Maximus Fabius, the Romans abandoned their formerly aggressive strategy, instead shifting to hit-and-run attacks. Though Fabius was roundly criticised for this cautious approach, and was promptly dismissed by his compatriots as a “cunctator” or delayer, Hannibal’s supply lines were soon cut, and the Carthaginians ultimately forced to leave Italy.

It is a dramatic story, but hardly ancient history. Adopted by Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the late 19th century, the old general’s pragmatism was revived as “Fabianism” — a form of socialism, but one framed by economic gradualism and respect for tradition.

And if, to quote one historian, the Webbs’ ideas were “perfectly suited to British prejudices” in their own sepia-tinged world, what Fabius understood remains starkly relevant now. As Keir Starmer has shown — and Kamala Harris proved in her debate with Donald Trump — remaining level-headed wins debates and often elections. More than that, practical Fabianism can be a salve for some of modernity’s most tender wounds, especially when compared to the dreamy utopianism so common elsewhere in politics.

We are living in an age of dogma. That is clear right across the political spectrum, from the Left’s extreme approach to climate change and gender, to populist demonisation of immigrants and other outsiders.

The specifics, of course, are different. But like their ancient namesake, the original Fabians found themselves in a fraught political climate. Faced with a complacent establishment that despised socialism — and the growing popularity of radical politics, epitomised by a spate of anarchist attacks from New York to London — they were forced to thread a path between the two.

How did they manage this practice? In a word: moderation. Though embracing a range of progressive economic causes, advocating for a national health service as far back as 1911, the Fabians were equally careful not to forsake capitalism entirely. For the Webbs, small businesses were to retain their assets, even as the movement’s leaders were broadly conventional in their personal morality. No less important, the Fabians also made their peace with Britain’s ancient monarchy, even as they preferred a professional civil service to the revolutionary vanguard.

As late as the Nineties, these ideas were successfully practised by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and even today most developed countries boast mixed economies and lively welfare states. All the same, recent years have seen caution and thoughtfulness replaced by emotion and zealotry, with disastrous results across a range of policy areas.

Consider climate change. While doubtless a major challenge, leading physicist Steve Koonin nonetheless suggests that current environmental policies are underpinned by implausibly catastrophic projections, including mass starvation and a huge rise in weather-related fatalities. To quote John Clauser, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics: “Climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudo-science.”

Prodded along by allies in the media — Associated Press and National Public Radio are two of the organisations to accept money from climate lobby groups — this extreme approach may yet prove harmful for regular people. Like Fabius’s opponents in the Senate, the climate lobby ignores inconvenient facts, instead preferring bold action, and a grim future encompassing smaller homes, less mobility, and worse diets.

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Apart from anything else, the science underpinning the pessimists is decidedly shaky. For one thing, net zero is a fantasy that can likely never happen even in the medium term, particularly given the rising energy needs of developing countries. That’s before you consider an even more essential problem: physics. Renewables suffer from low power density, which means they require much more material to work. As even the CEO at Siemens Energy recently conceded, economic realities are starting to assert themselves, despite massive and continuing subsidies for wind and solar.

Beyond the scientific folly of climate-change extremism, this zero-sum approach is bound to be unpopular. A recent Gallup poll shows that just 3% of Americans consider climate change the most urgent problem facing the country. Besides, adaptations of various sorts, from better flood defences to clever agricultural practices, have helped reduce climate-related fatalities dramatically over the past century, despite a massive increase in global population and higher temperatures. Why, in short, don’t we try things that actually work?

To be clear, this is not to suggest we should dismiss climate change as fake — the planet really does seem to be getting warmer, albeit more slowly than climate lobbyists suggest. But rather than clinging mindlessly to performative, ineffective and fundamentally unsellable policies, a more Fabian approach would embrace hybrids as opposed to less desirable EVs, or else invest in economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels, notably hydro and nuclear power. Placing your faith in wind or solar seems like a fool’s errand — and a good way to lose money.

If climate change is one area that could do with a strong dose of Fabianism, our attitude to race is another. Once again, it is clear that the current radical approach, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, is doing more harm than good. Current “anti-racism” ideology requires schools, companies and governments to use racial metrics in hiring and spending. Yet this approach has proved a massive failure. After making steady progress in the Fifties and Sixties, the relative economic status of African-Americans has largely stalled compared within other groups, including Latinos. That is even as inner-city problems remain as intractable as ever. The primacy of racial identity politics is also socially counterproductive, as we can see in the ethnic rioting in the US in 2020, in Britain in 2024, and in France almost constantly.

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It is understood, of course, that some on the Right are guilty of similar neuroses, especially when it comes to demographic replacement. But the multiracial reality of contemporary Western societies cannot be wished away. And besides, ideologues of both Right and Left miss a basic point: so-called “people of colour” are not monolithic, and often share little beyond not being white. That is apparent from the numbers, with the latest data from the US Census Bureau showing a wide disparity between different ethnic minorities. Korean-Americans, Indonesian-Americans, Taiwanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans all report higher incomes than whites. Among immigrants from Africa, females apparently do better than their white counterparts already. That’s even as Asians now constitute perhaps a third of leading tech CEOs in the US.

To put it differently, might it not be best to adopt a Fabian approach to race — both in terms of level-headed pragmatism, and in class and upward mobility? Fabianism, for its part, would avoid a racialist approach to public policy, instead adopting a strategy of general societal uplift, one less likely to stir resentment among white majority populations. There’s evidence, moreover, that this can work in practice: Denmark’s policy of integrating immigrants into the labour market has arguably seen the Nordic country suffer less ethnic strife than neighbouring Sweden.

Success there is echoed by the advantages of Fabianism for immigration policy. Once again, the radicalism of Left and Right has caused problems. A massive wave of immigration, embraced by business and intellectual elites across Europe, has in turn energised Right-wing populists across the continent, even as native workers (especially those on low incomes) face rising competition for jobs, homes and social services. Spurred by record numbers of people crossing the border with Mexico, American attitudes to immigration have hardened too — roughly 60% of Americans, and a majority of Latinos, support mass deportations.

These realities lead some on the Right to favour cutting off immigration entirely. Yet it will be extremely hard for Western societies to thrive without it. That’s obvious demographically: across the OECD, the so-called “dependence ratio” (those aged 65 and over as a proportion of people aged 20-64) will hit 46% by 2050.

At any rate, a Fabian approach to these challenges would acknowledge these facts while rejecting open borders. Robust controls are crucial here, with countries from Australia to Canada prioritising high-skilled migration until liberal activists and big business encouraged them to change tack. To put it differently, a Fabian approach to immigration is not only possible. It has actually been proven to work in the recent past — and the sooner nations rediscover it, the better.

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In the current environment, prospects for a Fabian revival may seem dim. Practicality is not a virtue much taught in universities these days, with the academy instead seeking to turn students into activists more than citizens. Social media tends to accelerate the ghettoisation of information too, meaning people get little exposure to ideas outside their presumed comfort zone. Then there are the challenges specific to Fabianism as an ideology: in an age of rampant inequality, to say nothing of general disgust for politics, can a softly-softly approach really succeed?

Perhaps not. Yet as Fabius so vividly proved, in difficult times societies need pragmatists not ideologues. One cannot expect either the current liberal oligarchy — nor Right-wing demagogues like Trump — to embrace such a rational response. But like Rome or the British socialists, success can only come by recognising political, economic, and social realities.

Today, in short, Fabianism provides an elegant route away from our current travails. Like the ancient Romans, we are past the point where dogma and vainglory can be afforded. In an increasingly divided, debilitated West, a shift towards greater realism therefore seems the healthiest alternative.

Manchin’s rejection of the Democrats has been a long time coming. His voting record is complex, diverging from the party line on numerous occasions. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Manchin opposed the more progressive elements of his party after Sandy Hook. And as one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, he has consistently voted in favour of restrictions on abortion access. Meanwhile, his support for the coal industry — an important economic driver in his home state and the industry that made him a millionaire before he entered politics — has often put him at odds with their green agenda. He was also the only Democrat to vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018, drawing the ire of many within his party, and he voted with Donald Trump more than 50% of the time.

Manchin’s ideology is consistent, though. It’s grounded in the history of West Virginia, a former Democrat stronghold that has become solidly Republican in recent years. And his conservative bent could be perceived as a survival strategy. After all, he is currently staring down a 55% disapproval rating in West Virginia, as he contemplates seeking another term in the Senate. His opponent is likely to be the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, a former conservative Democrat who switched parties. And one does wonder: why doesn’t Manchin jump ship to the Republican Party, given his voting patterns seem slightly more aligned with theirs? Trump, in 2022, actually suggested on Truth Social that Manchin be brought into the GOP.

But Manchin’s comments signal a desire to reject both major parties. In America, there is a large cadre of “politically homeless” voters: roughly 49% of the electorate according to some polling. Where once they might have been drawn to candidates who could see the other side’s point of view, these voters now seem disenchanted with party politics altogether, put off by the extreme fringes of the Republicans and Democrats alike. Manchin is appealing to them.

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While polls show dissatisfaction with candidates within both parties, Manchin’s potential candidacy would inevitably benefit one of them. He could appeal to a critical 1% or 2% in Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which would probably be enough to tilt the scales in favour of the GOP.

More broadly, his rhetoric is a sign of a shift in American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus decision-making, celebrated ideals for nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, have lost their lustre, ceasing to animate the base of either party. Marginal struggles currently define internal and external political battles. But Manchin and allies, such as former Democrat Krysten Sinema — now representing Arizona in the Senate as an independent — believe there’s still a silent majority to be found in the centre, one that is indifferent to the culture war that drives the loudest political engagement. 

Manchin’s paradox is that, while the most active voters are increasingly drawn towards the extremes of their respective parties, he is gambling on the centre. While his voting record paints a picture of a moderate Democrat — often erring on the conservative side — this suggestion of a third-party candidacy implies a critical redefinition of his political stance. Instead of being the swing vote within his party, Manchin would be a fulcrum between the two major political forces. Would he survive it?

Much of Manchin’s political career has been characterised by his unusual resilience in the face of the onrushing deep-red political tides in West Virginia. His endurance owes much to his somewhat unconventional stances, which resonate with a Rust Belt populace disenchanted by what they perceive as the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of working-class concerns relevant to their area, such as the protection of jobs in fossil fuel industries.

But is there a national appetite for this brand of centrism? The country is polarised. The Pew Research Center has found that twice as many members of the two main American parties now view their opponents unfavourably, compared to 1994. In a sociopolitical environment where labels — LGBTQIA, America First, MAGA, they/them — have become essential to the identities of young people, not to mention their self-marketing, will there be significant support for a “No Labels” campaign?

Third-party bids have gained some traction in America’s political history. Billionaire Ross Perot’s Reform Party campaign racked up some impressive numbers in 1992 and 1996. But while Perot aimed to transcend partisan politics in order to win, Manchin appears more focused on exerting influence to create a moderate shift in policy. If he runs, he’s more likely to follow in the footsteps of activists such as Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, remembered more for inadvertently tipping the scales in favour of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 than for his actual campaign. And since America today is even more polarised than in the Nineties, ultimately the implications of a third-party bid are more dangerous.

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The mooted “No Labels” party does seem like a hurried experiment in political transcendence, a far too simple answer to the broad discontent with the current political binary. But if Manchin wants to be remembered as the man who shed the shackles of partisanship, this move may tarnish the legacy he has already created for himself. His bold attempt to coax the country towards the centre could end up deepening the divisions he has exposed.

This has been the case with his prior attempts to preserve or create a “centre” on controversial issues. On gun control, Manchin co-sponsored the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which proposed expanded background checks for gun sales. Seen by much of the Left as an inadequate middle-ground solution, it failed to gain traction. As a result, the United States has been unable to make even minor changes related to background checks, and the two sides have only become more entrenched.

On energy policy, Manchin’s support for the fossil fuel industry is out of step with his party’s support for a progressive “Green New Deal”, while his reluctance to fully endorse the coal industry’s unregulated expansion has drawn ire from the Right. Manchin has recently joined with Republicans to oppose the climate legislation to which he had added a degree of moderation. But in general, seeking the centrist position in America does not lead to a union of the factions; rather, it leaves the centrist isolated, at odds with both sides.

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His campaign would simply highlight the structural flaws of America’s political system, in which centrism can empower extremism. Part of the problem is the dynamics of party primaries. Candidates often find themselves compelled to pander to the ideological extremes to gain the nomination, pushing them away from the centre. Even if they later shift, their original stances are remembered; in the long run, this discourages bipartisan cooperation.

Here is a lesson for moderates, if they really want to effect change: instead of conforming to extremism, they should look to their long-term influence on political norms and the policy-making process, as Manchin at least tried to do prior to signalling his frustration with the Democrats. They need to somehow communicate the importance of pragmatic governance, and the necessity of compromise in a democracy — ideally through political advertising that emphasises the value of bipartisan dealmaking over ideological purity, of “fighting gridlock” and “getting things done”.

It won’t be easy. Divide and conquer has always been a potent strategy for generating enthusiasm, and centrists such as Manchin are working in an atmosphere where both parties are cynically leveraging polarisation. Democrats have recently started funding extreme Republican primary candidates, whom they believe will be easy to beat in the general election. It’s a manoeuvre that, while it may yield short-term electoral gains, could backfire, by enabling candidates with more extreme views to gain power. And, if moderates abandon the major parties, they will only empower these extreme candidates, driving the Democrats and Republicans further and further apart. It would be an ironic outcome for Manchin, who claims to want the parties to come together.

So what is Manchin really trying to achieve? He has been a self-avowed independent within the Democratic Party for years; his last-ditch embrace of a potential “No Labels” movement, then, could be characterised as an act of egoism. At the age of 75, Manchin is probably not seeking political longevity. Rather, “No Labels” feels like a legacy move. Manchin might just be looking back at his long career of crossing party lines, and making a final, and perhaps sincere, plea for American politics to move back to the centre. 

Then again, if he is against the erosion of collective solidarity by personal politics, there would be an irony in him launching a highly individual campaign. There’s no point standing in the ideological centre if you’re there all by yourself.

Where exactly is home for Labour? The answer was decisively revealed this week by the leader’s conference speech: home is an Islington townhouse in the year 1996. What a time to be British! Hugh Grant is shagging Liz Hurley. Princess Diana is sparklingly alive. Football means Skinner and Baddiel, not Heysel and Hillsborough. Damon and Noel are the new Mick and John. Somehow, Ian Hislop is actually quite funny.

Bonkers, barmy, grotesque Tories in pin-stripe suits dusted with dandruff are going mental over Europe. But on the telly, inspiring Tony and pragmatic Gordon are preparing, as smoothly professional as stockbrokers, for power. Things can only get… better.

Starmer did not have to mention Blair on Wednesday. The spirit of Tone was lurking underneath every word, dressed in greasy overalls, wrenching every rhetorical bolt into place. Tough on crime? Absolutely. Education? Say it three times baby.

More important than anything Starmer said was Peter Mandelson’s remark to Seumas Milne: “We’re back in control.”

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Speaking of figures from the past who consistently ruin the breakfasts of Daily Mail readers, Gina Miller is back too. New New Labour was not the only centre party to stagger on to the scene in the last few days.

“The True & Fair Party” is her new political vehicle. Miller said: “This government needs to be held to account. Voters deserve better than the current politics of incompetence and self-interest.”

The party’s policies are yet to be announced, but they will be a homecoming for Miller as well. You have to imagine that they will be Rejoin-ishly pro-EU and described everywhere as “centrist”. Like every middle-aged product of British centrism, whether it is a political party, or a newspaper columnist, True & Fair would be better named: Let Down & Fed Up & Really Quite Tired.

Miller is, at least, about a thousand times more interesting than Sir Keir. In the long 2016 era, when the British middle-class were lost in a prolonged and anxious freak out, she was easily the most charismatic and exciting Remainer personality.

The others were lame. Elsewhere there was only terrible hair (A.C. Grayling), or needling over-familiarity (Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis), or sad, sullen machismo (Bob Geldof, James O’Brien, David Aaronovitch), or… Femi.

Miller was their antidote and foil. She intrigued in all senses. She was a cigar-smoking sports racer, and a parachutist. Her background was pure 1980s, pure Thatcherite graft. After her family lost its fortune, she chewed her way back through the class system, from hard-luck indigence to a £7 million Chelsea villa, by way of the City. She was serious and respected. A lawyerly battle axe. Joan of Arc to Remainers; the Terminator to Brexiteers.

She took flak, both of the legitimate and grimly racist sort. Her most intelligent profilers wondered whether her high-wire legal challenges to Brexit were motivated by “an extreme sense of civic duty” or the chance of another adrenaline rush.

The same question hovers over her new party. In a sense though the answer doesn’t matter. Like Starmer’s zombie centrism, True & Fair will fail, because there is no market for this politics anymore. Barely months have passed since the last attempts to rebuild the centre.

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During the Brexit years, centrist fever dreams rolled above the land like rain clouds. In 2017, a Twitter-famous tax lawyer called Jolyon Maugham wanted to launch a new party called “Spring”. His plans were big, massively big. According to the Guardian: “He would hold a 28-day festival at the football stadium in Maidenhead, [Theresa] May’s constituency. Each day would be dedicated to the national dress and cuisine of a different EU member state. For the finale, Maugham planned to announce that he was standing in Maidenhead as a Spring candidate.” That sounds like satire written after a long, drunken seance with the hooting spirit of Auberon Waugh, but apparently it’s true. In the end Maugham “decided he didn’t have enough time to go ahead with it”. A wise choice!

There were smaller, but no less Partridge-into-a-dictaphone visions that year. Former George Osborne aide James Chapman called for an anti-Brexit party called ‘The Democrats’ in a Twitter meltdown, which only ended after he’d demanded — sad machismo again — that Theresa May personally debate him outside parliament. Even PR Week (not exactly Guido Fawkes) was moved to call this “an extraordinary rant”. A few months later, the then Economist writer Jeremy Cliffe proposed setting up a party called “The Radicals” — pro-tech, pro-Europe, social-liberal — and ultimately, anti-ever amounting to anything.

The biggest centrist bubble blown and pricked was Change UK. Or was it The Independent Group for Change? Or the UK’s Independently Grouped Change? Or the UK Group’s Independent Change? Nobody — not even lead member Anna Soubry, who called the party “Change.org” in the Commons — was very sure. (The only Change UK question anybody really wanted to know the answer to was what moisturiser Chuka Umunna used. Sadly, he never told us.)

Formed by 11 MPs fleeing Labour and the Tories, and born in Nando’s, Change UK died in bathos when every single member lost their seat at the last general election. But for me, Change.Independence.UK only really expired for good when its former MEP candidate Gavin Esler was booted off Celebrity Masterchef this summer after serving a dessert condemned as “incomplete” by John Torrode. The judge’s cruel reception of this pudding, which was also compared to “soup”, exactly mirrored the British public’s reaction to Change UK, namely: “WTF is this supposed to be lads.”

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Anyway, by 2019 the public was done with soup. They wanted cake. At least Esler reached the Masterchef quarter finals — Change UK didn’t make it past two elections.

How many centrist parties have to get Hindenburged before this all stops? The strangest thing about Miller, and Starmer-Mandelson is that they can’t locate the centre ground at all. If there is a centre ground today in England, it is enormously unpalatable to those who self-identify as centrists. They would not vote for the “Hang the nonces, fund the NHS party”, but that’s where the centre is now.

The centre wants nationalised railways and birched criminals. It wants its borders closed and its healthcare free at the point of access. It is fear and loathing, and charity and kindliness; a truly mutant hybrid of Paul Dacre and Jeremy Corbyn. Pundits would love the English to be the stout and sensible strivers described in Orwell’s The Lion and The Unicorn; sadly, I fear the reality is that they are more like the suspicious and cruel folk described in Chesterton’s The Secret People.

And they’re getting stranger all the time. England is weirding. David Icke has never been so adored. Football fans descended on Nuneaton to defend a half-forgotten statue of George Eliot from BLM; no, they had not read Middlemarch. Parents style their children as Captain Tom. Sports mascots become ultra-large poppies every November. Jackie Weaver publishes books. There are candlelit vigils or protests on a seemingly daily basis.

The mood is jittery, not only in the petrol queues. The writer Clive Martin calls it “Radical Normal”. Gina Miller and Keir Starmer probably don’t know much about Radical Normal, but it has more to do with the future of British politics than they do.

But for someone like me, a conservative social democrat reconciled to Brexit, there is an interesting paradox at play: to make Britain safe for moderate social democracy, you really have to lend your vote to the flamboyant metropolitan Conservative Boris Johnson (or at least hope he wins convincingly).

The Brahmin Left cannot see this, though, and believes the future for social democratic politics over the next decade is “dire”, as Will Hutton put it in the Observer.

But the logic is plain. If Johnson wins a decent majority, it will only be because a sufficient number of mainly lower income voters in the North and the Midlands has switched from Labour to Tory. If this happens, it will shift the voter base of the Tory party and thus the interests that the party represents.

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Of course, the party will still also represent a solid block of the most affluent in the South and elsewhere, but why have the 2017 and 2019 Tory manifestos been so relatively quiet about the free market and tax cuts and so noisy about investing in public services? Brexit has forced the party to seek a new segment of the electorate and, contrary to all the talk of lurching to the Right, this strengthens the hand of One Nation Tories who are happy to see the party becoming more like a cross-class Christian Democratic alliance — minus the confessional attachment.

The party will remain in favour of the market economy and enterprise, but it is no longer going to be the party of small government, because its new voter base wants quite high public spending and plenty of redistribution. As Daniel Finkelstein put it in the Times: “If you win Bassetlaw or Hartlepool, you have to become the party of Bassetlaw and Hartlepool.”

You remain the party of the shires and the affluent suburbs too, and this will no doubt create interesting policy conflicts over the coming years — over housing for example — but the Left’s de-regulatory, small-state caricature of the Tories is going to look increasingly unbelievable.

Apart from getting Brexit done, the only other Johnson slogan that I have noticed, particularly evident at the manifesto launch, is that decent public services and public infrastructure underpin a successful market economy — and isn’t that almost a definition of market-friendly social democracy?

There are, of course, many Conservatives whose economic instinct remains more Thatcherite, and who tend to see the public sector as a sort of necessary evil, but they are a political hangover. And incidentally, although there is still a highly disproportionate number of Tory MPs who were privately educated, the proportion has dropped from 75% in the 1970s to 45% now (and possibly below 40% after the election) — so many more will have been dependent on public services most of their lives. Tory candidates look and sound more like the voters than ever before.

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By David Goodhart

There is a second leg to this story about making Britain safe for moderate social democracy: it is the breaking of the hold of the true-believer socialists who currently control the Labour party. A thumping victory for the new Tory party described above is a necessary condition for that outcome.

This change will not happen swiftly and could entail a more complete break-up of the Labour party than the minor splintering we have seen so far. How swiftly exactly will depend on many imponderables, such as how serious the defeat is, which Labour MPs are left standing, and whether, after a second defeat (and maybe a heavy one this time), the Momentum surge might start to lose momentum. This itself might also depend on the medium term socio-economic fate of what one might call the ‘educated just about managing class’ — people with degrees from non-Russell Group universities who end up in jobs not so different from those of their parents.

In any case, a big victory for Johnson surely increases the chances of the sensible centre-Left either recapturing the Labour Party, or leaving it as a hard-Left rump party and establishing a new (Brownite) centre-Left party. This new party would be a few notches to the Left of the new Tory party on economics, and several yards to its Left (if that is the right word) on social and cultural matters.

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So here is the second paradox of this election: at least in the medium term, it will shift UK politics in a European direction, with two cross-class “peoples’ parties” (like the CDU and SPD in Germany) with similar approaches to economic management, but with the Tories representing the more socially conservative strands of the electorate and Labour (or its successor party) representing the more liberal strands.

That will also mean that the most free market of the big European countries does not have a party that enthusiastically represents the free market (it is hard to see the social democratic Liberal Democrats filling that gap). But the free market can probably look after itself for now, and if Britain becomes too statist, the electorate will sense it and reshuffle the pack at some point in the future.

One doubt that some people, especially on the Left, will have about this thesis is whether a modest increase in NHS investment and a slogan or two about public infrastructure really amounts to a social democratic shift in the Tory party.

It is true that the Tory manifesto in the end was more modest on public spending commitments than I had hoped, and implicitly less redistributionist than I had wanted, with the promise not to increase any of the main income related taxes. The lack of a proper commitment to a partial socialisation of adult care costs, while understandable politically, was also a disappointment.

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So is the Tory party just putting on a more centrist mask to appeal temporarily to the Brexit-voting lower-middle and working classes? I do not think the world works like that. Even for our short-termist, adversarial political culture, that would be an impossibly cynical move. It also ignores the fact that the party has almost certainly lost a section of the middle class over Brexit that needs to be replaced — and not just for one election.

No, from my own observations (and I work part-time in a centre-Right think tank and meet plenty of Tory MPs), I would say that the party — thanks to Brexit — is going through another of its great evolutionary shifts. My own think tank Policy Exchange recently produced a major piece of work calling for the socialisation of adult social care costs (with a supportive forward by that well known 19^th century mill-owner Jacob Rees-Mogg).

The last Tory party conference had a mantra of three policies for post-Brexit Britain: sort out social care, build a lot more houses (including public ones for rent) and invest more in non-university, post-school education for the 60% who do not go into higher education. If this is the plan for de-regulated, race-to-the-bottom Britain, it is very craftily disguised.

So why are so many Tories so passionate about leaving the EU if it is not to loosen protections that their new voters are strongly attached to? No doubt there are some who are keen to see the back of the Working Time Directive and so on, but de-regulation and autonomy are here too often confused. The moderate nationalism that Brexit appealed to is the localism of our more globalised world.

Brexit now allows us to make our own choices about immigration, about farm subsidies, about regional aid and state subsidies, about contracting out rules in the public sector, about VAT levels, about the future of our legal system and much more. In many areas we will stick close to EU rules, in other areas we will diverge, and pay some economic price for doing so, but it will be our choice.

Is all this just the grumpy rationalisations of a privileged 60-something who flirted with leftism in his youth and is now returning to his Conservative/conservative roots? Well, I was a member of the Labour party for about 35 years and continued to vote (and sometimes even canvas) for them right up to 2015. I voted Tory in 2017, largely on Brexit grounds (as a Remain voter who wanted the decision implemented), and I might vote Liberal Democrat as an anti-Corbyn tactical vote in 2019. So to the extent that beliefs are expressed through political acts, I think I can now claim a pretty sound centrist record.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose“

Attributed to the 19th-century writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it loosely translates as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”: perfect for a worldly-wise 900 words on why the latest brand new thing isn’t so new after all.

Now that the internet has turned comment journalism into a blood sport, world-weariness and using French words is, I regret, passé. And yet Karr’s epigram is as relevant as ever.

Last week, the MPs that formed the breakaway Independent Group announced the creation of a new party, Change UK. The irony, as many people have pointed out, is that the party’s purpose is to undo change – by keeping Britain inside the EU and by refloating the wreck of Blairism. Perhaps, as good Europeans, they should have called themselves Plus Ça Change UK.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

It’s not as if renewing New Labour is even a new thing to do. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he promised a “new kind of politics”. When, just three years later, Ed Miliband became leader, he dropped the ‘New’ from New Labour, but claimed to represent a “new generation” with “different ideas, different attitudes” and a “different way of doing politics.”

Five years later, the Labour Party was bored with that and turned to an old leftie, Jeremy Corbyn. But even he promised a “new kind of politics” – a “kinder politics”. By the start of this year, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and the others could take no more of their comrades’ kindness and left to form The Independent Group – recalling the events of 1981 when the ‘Gang of Four’ quit a leftwing Labour Party to form the SDP. Plus ça change…

*

Though we seem to be stuck in an unending cycle of confected newness, a genuinely new kind of politics is tantalisingly close to breaking through.

It comes in several varieties and therefore has different labels attached to it – ‘communitarian’, ‘Blue Labour’, ‘Red Tory’, ‘hard centre’, ‘post-liberal’. Some or all of these have caught the attention of the mainstream political parties. For instance, Tony Blair flirted with communitarianism, as did Ed Miliband. The Conservative Party had its ‘Big Society’ moment under David Cameron, with related ideas influencing the early part of Theresa May’s leadership (i.e. when she was still popular). However, in each case it soon became clear that the party establishments were only after a fresh semblance of ‘newness’. Once it all got a bit too challenging, the same old same old reasserted itself.

So is the post-liberal agenda an ideological mirage – a vague set of ideas that appear on the horizon of politics only to vanish as one gets closer?

I wonder if a map would help. If we were to triangulate from the familiar points of the political spectrum, might we find the post-liberal promised land? Perhaps, but the traditional Left-Right political spectrum (past its sell-by date anyway) is of no use. If post-liberalism fits anywhere along the line, it is somewhere in the middle. Blue Labour would be a bit to the Left, Red Tories a bit to the Right – but overall they’d occupy the space as, er, the liberals they disagree with.

Further reading

Vanilla liberalism is past its sell-by date

By Peter Franklin

Maybe we need to add another spectrum. The first is reserved as a spectrum between the economic Left and the economic Right – partisans of public ownership and state planning at one end and fans of the freemarket and laissez- faire at the other. The second spectrum is about social and cultural issues. This would run from support for constraints on individual action (e.g. drug laws, immigration controls) through to opposition to such restrictions.

The intersection of the two spectrums creates the familiar ‘Political Compass‘ chart, which is divided into four quadrants – representing the socially conservative and socially liberal tendencies of the economic Left and economic Right. At first sight this would appear to solve our problem. We can put liberals in the bottom right quadrant and post-liberals diametrically opposite in the top left. No more occupying the same space. Meanwhile we can put conventional conservatives in the top-right quadrant and their ‘progressive’ opponents in the bottom-left. Nice and neat.

*

But there’s a further problem. In fact, several further problems.

The first problem is that mainstream parties of the centre-Right and centre-Left aren’t quite as distinct from one another as they would seem. Basically, they are all liberals on economic and social issues alike – meaning that what they’re mostly interested in is individual freedom of action in both spheres. The main thing they disagree about is to what extent the state should get involved in order to facilitate that freedom of action. In general (though not in every case) the liberal Left favours a bigger, more active state, while the liberal Right a smaller, less interfering one. For instance, the former emphasises redistribution to give the poor economic agency; while the latter emphasises the right of people to keep the fruits of their own enterprise.

This is not an insignificant difference in perspective; until recently it was the defining issue of politics. However, it boils down to an argument over means not ends – the ultimate and shared objective is the maximisation of personal autonomy.

The second problem is something I’ve written about in more detail here. It’s to do with the mismatch between where most people place themselves on the political compass and where the political and cultural elites place themselves. The latter are heavily biased to the bottom-right liberal quadrant – though the leftier ones spill over into the neighbouring progressive quadrant. In some countries, especially America, the conventional conservative quadrant also claims a corner of the establishment – think Fox News and the Republican National Convention.

Further reading

Can we tame democracy's demons?

By Adrian Pabst

However, when the Voter Study Group asked the American public to place themselves on the chart, a very different distribution was revealed. There were a load of people in the progressive quadrant and unsurprisingly most of them voted for Hillary Clinton. There were another bunch of voters in the conservative quadrant – almost all of whom voted for Donald Trump. The liberal quadrant was mixed but there were very few people in it – and most of those tended towards the centre of the chart. But the real surprise was the much larger number of people in the fourth quadrant – those who were neither economically nor socially liberal. In 2016, Trump won significantly more of these votes than Clinton, which proved crucial in the swing states that won him the Presidency.

It is remarkable that such a large and important group of voters have no elite institutions to speak for them – no newspapers, no broadcasters, no think tanks, no mainstream political parties. It’s therefore unsurprising that in country after country we’ve seen populist movements sweep in to claim them for their own.

Which brings me to the third problem – which is that identifying post-liberalism with the fourth quadrant associates it with populism, especially national populism. Furthermore, by defining this quadrant against social and economic liberalism, the conclusion that some people will draw is that post-liberal is just a euphemism for anti-liberal. And yet to any fair-minded person it should be obvious that Blue Labourites such as Maurice Glasman and Red Tories like Phillip Blond are not of the same ilk as Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini.

What, then, separates post-liberalism from crude populism?

*

Let’s start with what liberalism means in this context. It is not mere support for individual liberty, because almost everyone (except those on the furthest fringes of politics) could sign up for that. Rather, liberalism is the belief that the maximisation of individual liberty is the main and perhaps only purpose of politics. It’s not that liberals don’t believe that other things are important in life, but that they see these things as matters for the individual, and free associations of individuals, not politics.

Post-liberals, like liberals, are pro-liberty; but unlike liberals they do not believe that the maximisation of personal freedom is the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Other things are important too – like family, community, nation, fairness and beauty – and therefore there are balances to be struck and conflicts to be resolved as an essential part of the democratic process. Post-liberals therefore believe that individuals have rights and duties. Moreover, duties aren’t just about obeying the law as a mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between individual freedoms; people also owe a duty to the common good, which can be defined and justified on grounds other than the maximisation of liberty.

For instance, we should defend free speech not only because it is an important freedom, but also because truth matters and people should be able to speak it (even if they don’t agree on what it is). Another example is environmentalism – the main reason why we should protect an endangered species is not because our children and grandchildren should have the opportunity to see it, or because it plays an important role in ecosystems we rely on, but simply because we have no right to destroy it. Consider animal welfare: the reason why we should punish cruelty to animals is not primarily because it upsets people, but because to inflict suffering on a sentient being is objectively evil.

There are very few absolute liberals. To varying extents, most accept the idea that duties exist alongside rights and that freedom, while precious, isn’t everything. However, post-liberals would go further – recognising a growing imbalance between the goal of furthering liberty and the other things on which a good society depends. Indeed, they diagnose it as the primary cause of our 21st-century malaise. ‘More balance!’, not ‘more freedom!’, is the post-liberal rallying cry.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

Therefore, we need to re-draw the political compass – instead of economic and social spectrums that run from liberal to illiberal, they should run from ‘maximising liberty’ to ‘balancing liberty’. This pushes the worst of the populists – those with undeniably totalitarian, anti-democratic tendencies – right off the chart. However, that still leaves post-liberals sharing a quadrant with the less extreme kind of populist, which for reasons I describe here is far from ideal.

*

The solution is to add a third spectrum to the chart – one that clearly distinguishes post-liberalism from populism. To my mind, it should revolve around the principle of human dignity – which is the idea that every person, without exception, is of infinite worth and must be treated as such. It is, therefore, incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism – because we can only achieve our full personhood in relationship to others. Though of infinite worth, we are, in this life, finite in our capacities. As such, we cannot owe the same duty of care to all – and therefore owe more to those relationally closest to us, starting with our families and extending outward to community and nation.

However, what we can do without limit is to recognise and respect the dignity of all people, no matter how close or distant our relationship to them. There are no good reasons for not doing so – just the dark motivations of prejudice and the cynical politics of divide and rule. It is on this spectrum that post-liberalism can be distinguished from populism, lifted not only into another quadrant, but onto a higher plane.

But, actually, that’s just a little too simplistic for the more sophisticated centrist. You see, one must allow for the fact that ‘to govern is to decide’ – and therefore that one must have options to decide between. In a democracy, that means giving voters a choice between two main parties or blocks – usually one of the centre-Left and one of the centre-Right.

Obviously, the after-the-hyphen tendencies of each block need to be kept in check; and unless some kind of national course correction is required, the centrist politicians of each party should be the ones in the driving seat.

Suggested reading

Would Frank Field fit in? The test we should apply to any new party

By Giles Fraser

Absolute centrists who’d rather not dirty their hands with direct participation in party politics can hold themselves above the fray – commenting on events from their perches in the ‘quality’ media.

These are the ultimate rationalists, taking a pragmatic view of the expediencies of democracy in action, but also conscious of what would ideally be done – if only everybody were as reasonable, knowledgeable and unprejudiced as themselves. Should they experience the occasional twinge of self-doubt, all they need do is behold the spectacle of life beyond the fringe of polite opinion. The absolute necessity of their continued moderating influence will be made abundantly clear.

And indeed, the most obvious weirdos tend to be out on a limb. Anyone who for any reason (or lack of reason) is fundamentally unhappy with the status quo is likely to find themselves off-centre in some fashion. After all, ‘eccentric’ literally means ‘out of centre’.

The favourite prey of the sophisticated centrist is the unsophisticated ideologue – preferably a politician or pundit who’s screwed-up a statistic or misinterpreted a bit of history. Setting their phasers to ‘patronise’, the sophisticates then charge in – mocking the minor error of inaccuracy to expose the major error of strongly-held belief.

Suggested reading

Would Frank Field fit in? The test we should apply to any new party

By Peter Franklin

But can they be so sure of their own inerrancy? They may regard themselves as unideological, but there is no such thing as a neutral worldview, no self-conception of rationality that doesn’t depend on irreducible assumptions. Just look at the ‘received wisdom’ of the past. Is there a single era of history in which the intellectual middle ground wasn’t convinced of things that we now see as nonsense?

This raises two further questions: How did these past establishments get away with it? And are we any different today? The answer to the first is that though the mainstream view may have been nonsense, it was at least high-functioning nonsense. Even when objectively wrong, it nevertheless served a practical end – such as not upsetting powerful people by disagreeing with them.

As to whether we’re any different today, in all likelihood we’re not. There are things that all the ‘right people’ say and think in the early 21st century that will seem utterly demented in fifty or a hundred years time.

All of which brings me, in a good way, to Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post, who argues that the mainstream media is too mainstream. She attacks the “smarmy centrism that often benefits nobody, but promises that you won’t offend anyone”!

“Who is the media’s middle-lane approach actually good for?

“Not the public, certainly, since readers and viewers would benefit from strong viewpoints across the full spectrum of political thought, not just minor variations of the same old stuff.

“But it is great for politicians and pundits who bill themselves as centrists.”

She mentions the lavish publicity received by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz for his possible Presidential run – on a “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” platform. And also the moderate Republicans snapped up as commentators by the likes of CNN and CBS:

“You see it, too, in the supposedly daring, supposedly against-the-grain hires made by magazines and by newspaper op-ed pages. In their quest to run the full gamut from center-left to center-right, they are already well-equipped with anti-Trump conservatives.”

What’s the problem with this? It’s not the mere fact of being anti-Trump. Nor is there anything wrong with the journalistic ethics of fairness and rigour. As long as the mainstream media practises these virtues as well as preaching them, then that’s all to the good.

The problem though comes when balance becomes blinkered. As Sullivan puts it, “impartiality is a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage… but you don’t get there by walking down the centre line with a blindfold on.”

The great failure of the mainstream media is not its failure to give voice to Trumpism now, but its failure to see Trumpism coming. And how could it have, since it was staffed by people ill-equipped to have imagined such a thing, let alone understand it?

Suggested reading

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Ultimately, the fatal weakness of the centrist punditocracy is not its elitism, but that they’re just as human as anybody else – and, just as anybody else would, they’ve found it hard to internalise the extent to which their people screwed-up in power.

Populists succeed when establishments fail. That’s why it’s vital that the media draws upon a wide range of perspectives, not just those that take the establishment’s wisdom for granted.

Haddad, for his part, looks hopeless. On Monday, his own campaign event turned against him, as a planned endorsement from the Democratic Labour Party candidate Ciro Gomes spun into a diatribe about Haddad’s failings. “You’re going to lose the election, and it’s your fault,” Gomes shouted.

Bolsonaro’s spectacular rise raises key questions about the appeal of authoritarianism – in Brazil and around the world. Who constitutes Bolsonaro’s base? Why are they turning toward such violence and bigotry? And what can it tell us about new populist movements emerging in advanced democracies today?

To make sense of these questions, I revisited the data from the World Values Survey (WVS), collected in over 60 countries between 2010 and 2014. Focusing on the sample from Brazil, I examined the relationship between respondents’ self-placement on a left-right spectrum — ranging from 1 to 10 — and their support for democracy.

Further reading

Is Brazil about to vote for its very own Trump?

By Daniel Hamilton

The main finding? It is moderates, not extremists, who are most excited about authoritarianism in Brazil.

I began my analysis by looking at general attitudes toward democracy. The survey asks: “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically?”

Plotted against the Left-Right spectrum, the responses form a striking V-shape. People who identify at the extremes of the political spectrum are far more likely to value democracy than those who identify at the centre. While 56.4% of the far-Left and 60% of the far-Right view democracy as “absolutely important”, only 37.5% of the centre agrees.

Source: WVS

But perhaps this question is too abstract: respondents may not know what it means, exactly, to be governed democratically. To address this possibility, I turned to a more concrete question about democratic governance. How important is it, the survey asks, that “people choose their leaders in free elections”?

Here again, we find that support for democracy caves at the centre. Compared to 67% at the far-Left and 69% at the far-Right, only 46% of the centre believes that free elections are an “essential characteristic of democracy”.

Source: WVS

Finally, I turned to respondents’ attitudes toward authoritarianism. What do Brazilians think of “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections”?

Once more, it is at the centre where authoritarianism finds its strongest support. A total of 76.6% – over three-quarters – of self-identified centrists view “strong” leadership as a “very good” or “fairly good” way to govern their country. In other words, these respondents are not just critical of democracy – they are actively enthusiastic for an authoritarian transition.

Source: WVS

On the topic of strong men, however, the differences between groups are significantly smaller. Seventy-two per cent of the far-Left support a strong leader, and 70% of the far-Right. Even among respondents who sit at centre-Left and centre-Right, overall support does not dip below 60%.

Such widespread support for strongman politics is staggering. Compare Brazil’s numbers to the United States, where less than 28% of respondents view this system of governance favourably. In Brazil, just one-tenth of all respondents believe that a strong man who does not bother with parliament or elections is, in fact, “very bad”.

Source: WVS

These figures provide an important clue to Bolsonaro’s success and the trends are backed up by more recent evidence. Nostalgia for Brazil’s military dictatorship is on the rise: according to a 2017 poll, 43% of Brazilians support bringing it back, compared with just 35% a year earlier. Their nostalgia heavily favours Bolsonaro, who has long considered himself a torchbearer for Brazil’s dictatorship. “Voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing!” he screamed back in 1999. “Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do.”

The data on democratic attitudes, of course, cannot tell the whole the story. Bolsonaro’s candidacy has also been bolstered by a general wave of anger toward the political class. According to one recent survey, roughly a third of Brazilian voters were planning to cast a null vote in the presidential election. Bolsonaro – who has positioned himself as an outsider, railing against the corruption of Brazil’s political establishment – feeds from their negative partisanship. There, are, then, both push and pull factors at play.

Further reading

How Latin America's Pink Tide turned

By James Bloodworth

But the findings from the World Values Survey suggest that Bolsonaro’s is not a coalition of crazies – lashing out from the margins of society – but one of “sensible” people. Election polls paint this profile in striking detail: Bolsonaro voters are on average wealthier, better educated, and more urban than Haddad’s.

In other words, he is consolidating precisely the constituency that most commentators in advanced democracies like Britain believe to be the backstop against authoritarianism. This is one of the key takeaways from the Brazilian election: our faith in the middle class is misplaced. Strongmen often find support among middle-class moderates, who trust them to advance middle-class interests against the redistributive preferences of the poor.

Even before taking office, Bolsonaro is rewarding them for their support: the stock market soared after his first-round victory, and Brazil’s business community is “rallying around” his candidacy.

Further reading

It's not just the economy, stupid. Cultural factors and disdain for politicians also drive "populism"

By Matthew Elliott

In Brazil, we are reminded that capitalism and democracy have no inherent compatibility. Above all, markets love stability, and authoritarians love to promise it. In this sense, the Brazilian story is not so far from the American one. In the election of Donald Trump, we saw a radical candidate convince millions of moderate voters that Right-wing authoritarianism was the best bet for their policy priorities.

From one angle, this looked like the radicalisation of the centre ground. From another, though, it was a revelation that the centre ground was never committed to moderate principles in the first place.

The primary difference between these cases, then, is historical context. The Trump presidency, for all its madness, has not been able to undo two and a half centuries of democratic consolidation: the roots are simply set too deep for such sudden change.

Brazil’s democracy, by contrast, is in its infancy: it is less than 30 years since its constitution was ratified. If elected next week, Bolsonaro may well rip these shallow roots from the ground, inaugurating a period of darkness, violence, and political repression across the country. Whether by cluelessness or conviction, Bolsonaro’s base is bringing Brazil to the brink.

Further reading

Why do some countries have strong populist movements but not others?

By Peter Franklin

Read part one of this essay

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it has always had its limitations. Most obviously, it is one dimensional, making no allowance for the fact that the positions that people and parties hold on different policies don’t always align in a uniform way. For instance, one member of a political party may be middle-of-the-road on economic policy, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative on social issues and a resolute anti-interventionist in foreign affairs; meanwhile, another member of the same party could be a gung-ho free marketeer, a dripping-wet liberal in the social sphere and an enthusiast for military intervention on the world stage.

Clearly, the left-right spectrum can’t represent these multi-dimensional permutations. Then again, it doesn’t have to. Given that elections are about basic choices, mostly economic, a single dimension gets the job done.

However, what works for clarifying electoral politics doesn’t always work for classifying political ideology. For instance, where do we put the various kinds of populism currently disrupting conventional politics – especially those described as rightwing populism? Do we place them to the right of the mainstream conservative parties, as is physically the case in the European Parliament? The problem with that is that populist economic policies are usually to the left of what conservatives advocate and sometimes far to the left.

And where does libertarianism go? Should we tack that onto the right end of the spectrum too? Not if it means lumping it in with authoritarian ideologies to which it is diametrically opposed.

To try to resolve these contradictions, various attempts have been made to change the way that we classify politics.

Sorry libertarians, but it’s not all about you

One approach is to add a second axis to the conventional left-right spectrum – the two axes intersecting at right angles to create a two-dimensional continuum. Examples include the Nolan Chart and the Political Compass.

Typically, one axis is about how much or how little government should intervene in economic matters, while the other is about how much or how little regulation there should be of non-economic matters. Essentially, both axes are about (personal) liberty versus (collective) authority and therefore, unlike the conventional political spectrum, they do a good job of clearly separating libertarians from conservatives, the liberal left and various kinds of authoritarian.

Further reading

The idea that liberals aren't represented by the party system is the opposite of the truth

By Peter Franklin

However, this way of thinking about political differences does rather revolve around libertarian assumptions. The value of freedom is elevated above all others – and, furthermore, defined in direct opposition to the role of the state. The idea that government, or other sources of authority, might be an enabler of freedom is designed out from the start.

But perhaps the strongest argument against concepts such as the Nolan Chart is that real-life politics refuses to organise itself in any such fashion. Though libertarian parties exist in many western countries, very few have had a significant impact on mainstream politics. Indeed most are on the fringes, not even qualifying for minor party status. 

The populist surge currently disrupting conventional left-right politics is not a libertarian revolt. Admittedly, it is not a demand for less freedom either; but that only underlines the fact that the current realignment of politics is about something else completely.

Sorry centrists, but it’s not all about you either (whoever you are)

A different solution to the limitations of left-right spectrum is to stick to a single dimension, but to stop visualising it as a straight line. A straight line maximises the distance between extreme left and extreme right, but if you bend it into a horseshoe shape, then the extremes curve back round towards one another. Shaped in this way the greatest distance between any two points on the line is between the centre and either extreme.

The horseshoe model of politics has a lot going for it – not least in reflecting the commonalities between extreme left and extreme right. It seems especially applicable to French politics where a centrist candidate (Emmanuel Macron) defeated opponents on the hard left (Jean-Luc Melenchon) and the hard right (Marine Le Pen) to win the Presidency. It also help us visualise how a great deal of the National Front’s voter base defected directly from the left,[1. Andrew Knapp, Parties and the Party System in France: A Disconnected Democracy?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, page 118] without going on a political ‘journey’ via the centre.

However, like a real horseshoe, this model of politics is full of holes. It strongly implies the existence of a second and more important political axis running between centrism and extremism, but doesn’t say what it is. Who are the centrists, anyway? Metropolitan liberals? Localist communitarians? Technocratic pragmatists?

Further reading

A new party could save politics from the extremes

By Ian Birrell

The only firm definition of political centrism is that it lies between the extremes – and yet the whole purpose of the horseshoe is to bring those extremes closer together. As a model of political opinion it is incoherent and paradoxical.

We can’t even identify centrism with the strongest support for democracy. The weakening of such is a worrying long-term trend identified by Yascha Mounk and others.[2. Amanda Taub, ‘How Stable Are Democracies? Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’, New York Times, 29 November 2016] One might logically associate it with the growing polarisation of politics. And yet recent research suggests that the loss of faith in our democratic institutions has gone further among self-identified centrists than among those on the Left or the Right. The same research found that “support for a strong leader who ignores his legislature” is also strongest among self-declared centrists.[3. David Adler, ‘Centrists are the most hostile to democracy, not extremists’, New York Times, 23 May 2018]

The most plausible explanation for these perplexing results is that it isn’t just political moderates who claim the centre as their home, but also their temperamental opposites – people who are fed-up with the political establishment and everything about it – including conventional categories of Left and Right.

Leaving aside the special example of France, it seems clear that centrism is no more useful a reference point for the new politics than libertarianism is.

There is, however, a much much stronger candidate for a new political spectrum.

How open-and-closed got its start

Ruth Davidson is the young and charismatic leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. She is a confidante of the Prime Minister Theresa May and widely tipped as a future, if not immediate, successor. Interviewed in Vogue earlier this year, she was asked whether she worried about the “Tory brand becoming re-toxified.” Her answer was full of significance:[4. Decca Aitkenhead/Ruth Davidson, Vogue, 31 January 2018]

“My worry is actually much greater than that… My worry is that we’re about to head into a culture war around the world where it’s not a question of left versus right any more – it’s a question of open versus closed. We’ve spent a long time believing there was a consensus about the idea of freedom and interaction and breaking down borders, and then suddenly they’re all being built back up again. That’s what I think the fight is going to be about, and I’m damn sure going to take part in it.”

Further reading

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

Where does the concept of open-versus-closed come from and what exactly does it mean?

One of the earliest and best references comes from the opinion pollster Stephan Shakespeare. This is what he said in the Guardian at the time of the 2005 UK general election:[5. Stephan Shakespeare, ‘They seem to be campaigning for the sake of it’, Guardian, 17 April 2005]

“…there is a new line which separates one side of the electorate from another: recent YouGov research suggests that we no longer range along a left-right axis, but are divided by ‘drawbridge issues’.

“We are either ‘drawbridge up’ or ‘drawbridge down’. Are you someone who feels your life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies, spongers, asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we could all open our arms and embrace each other? Depending on which side we take, we regard ‘drawbridge up’ people as unpleasant, or ‘drawbridge down’ people as foolish.”

He didn’t actually use the terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ – but they’re clearly equivalent to “drawbridge down” and “drawbridge up.”

A year later, Tony Blair, then British Prime minister, gave a speech to the TUC annual conference, in which open versus closed made its political debut:[6. Tony Blair, ‘Prime Minister’s address to Congress 2006’, TUC, 12 September 2006]

“There is a debate going on which, confusingly for the politicians, often crosses traditional left/right lines and the debate is: open v closed.

“Do we embrace the challenge of more open societies or build defences against it?”

The year after that, following his resignation as Prime Minister, Blair devoted a whole speech to this concept:[7. Tony Blair, ‘Tony Blair speech at Blenheim Palace’, Office of Tony Blair, 1 October 2007 accessed via Wayback Machine]

“the real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left [and] more to do today with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed.”

Though thoroughly biased towards the open point-of-view, the speech had its prescient moments:

“….you’ll find the open and the closed on either of the traditional political categories of right and left. And it has got some fascinating implications, actually, for electoral calculations.”

Of course, by the time the speech, Blair was out-of-office and out-of-favour with fashionable opinion. His thoughts on open-versus-closed were largely ignored over most of the following decade.

Further reading

Corbyn is natural response to Blair's political and personal failings

By Douglas Murray

In that time, there were many indications that populism was growing in strength.  For instance, the arrival of Five Star as a major party in the 2013 Italian general election and the results of the 2014 European Parliamentary elections. However, these could be dismissed a protest vote against the financial crisis and its aftermath.

One of the few commentators to realise that something more important was going on on was an UnHerd contributor, James Kirkup. Writing for the Daily Telegraph in 2014, he argued that left-and-right were of diminishing relevance – especially in describing the distinctions between the parties of the political establishment and their populist challengers:[8. James Kirkup, ‘From immigration to trade and the NHS, politics is about open vs closed’, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 2014]

“…the terms ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ are becoming meaningless.

“After all, if those labels were useful, they’d tell us how people who carry them would think about particular subjects. Left-wingers, for instance, would be hostile to free markets and big business, while Right-wingers would embrace them. It’s a nice, clean theory, but the reality is much messier.”

Referring to a proposed free trade agreement between The US and EU, he said that open-versus-closed would be a better to guide to the politics of the future:

“So keep watching TTIP. Dry and dusty it may be, but the way our politicians deal with it will tell you much more about them than any label putting them on some meaningless left-right spectrum.

“Forget Left and Right. The real political division of the 21st Century is the same as it was in the 19th. Should we be open or closed?”

Further reading

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

From concept to reality

He didn’t have to wait long to be vindicated. 2016 was the year that the vote for Brexit redefined British politics and the election of Donald Trump redefined American politics. In 2017, Marine le Pen reached the final round of the French Presidential election, gaining a third of the vote.

Anti-populists took heart from the fact that her centrist opponent got twice as many votes. They were also encouraged by a disappointing result for Geert Wilders’s PVV in the Dutch general election (his party having lost a clear opinion poll lead to come in a poor second).

However, hopes that the surging populist tide of 2016 had been turned back in 2017 were soon to be dashed. In last year’s German general election, the AfD doubled its vote to become the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag – forcing a weakened CDU and SPD into yet another reluctant coalition. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s Austrian counterpart, Sebastian Kurz, won the legislative election by taking his party to the right on immigration. He then turned right again – selecting the Freedom Party as his coalition partner. Over the border, Victor Orban won a crushing victory (the third in a row) in this year’s Hungarian general election.

Further reading

U OK Hun(gary)?

By Peter Franklin

In any case, the fact that ‘open’ sometimes wins doesn’t alter the reality that open-versus-closed is displacing left-versus-right as the most important political divide.

This year’s Italian general election was an especially symbolic moment. Italy has a large number of parties, but traditionally they organise themselves into two main blocs – one on the centre-right and one on the centre-left. The names of the two blocs and their precise membership changes from election to election, but each time it amounts to much the same thing. Or, at least, it did.

The first blow to the old order came from the emergence of the populist Five Star Movement as powerful force unaligned to either bloc. The second blow has come from the rise of the League – a populist party of the hard right. The League fought the 2018 election as part of the centre-right and was expected to follow the lead of what had been the biggest party in the bloc: Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Except that, as UnHerd’s Henry Olsen predicted,[9. Henry Olsen, ‘Il nuovo, dolce vita per Italia?’, UnHerd, 6 March 2018] things turned out differently. Five Star won the election, but the League came second – and well ahead of Forza Italia. In the subsequent negotiations to form a government, the League dumped its centre-right partners to form a coalition with the other big populist party – Five Star.

Not for the first time, the organising logic of open-versus-closed is proving to be more powerful than that of left-versus-right.

After Brexit, after Trump, after Italy, there is no more ignoring the new reality. Left-and-right is not dead yet, but open-and-closed is nevertheless redefining politics. Therefore there’s a lot riding on what is actually meant by open and closed. 

The battle to define that is what we turn to next.

Further reading

Test article

By Henry Olsen

It’s not that everyone’s gone full fascist all of a sudden. However, the research does indicate that popular support for democracy is not as solid as it used to be.

Given the rise in support for populist parties of the right and left, one might assume the problem is one of polarisation. Voters drifting towards either extreme of the political spectrum are embracing ideological absolutism at the expense of democratic give-and-take.

Suggested reading

Tough on Trump but let's be tougher on the causes of Trump... our failing democracies

By Chris Deerin

However, in a fascinating piece for the New York Times, David Adler argues that disillusion with democracy appears to be most severe at the centre of the political spectrum:

“I examined the data from the most recent World Values Survey (2010 to 2014) and European Values Survey (2008), two of the most comprehensive studies of public opinion carried out in over 100 countries. The survey asks respondents to place themselves on a spectrum from far left to center to far right. I then plotted the proportion of each group’s support for key democratic institutions…

Respondents who put themselves at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, according to several survey measures…”

This is counter-intuitive, indeed Adler calls it the Centrist Paradox. So how do we explain his findings?

It could be that liberals and moderates are so appalled by their fellow voters’ recent choices that they’ve lost faith in the democratic process. Over the last year, we’ve seen self-declared liberals seeking to overturn the Brexit referendum; entertaining overblown conspiracy theories about foreign interference in election campaigns; turning a blind-eye to Spanish police violence against Catalan voters; and showing extraordinary disrespect to Italian voters this week.

However, I’m not sure that that Adler’s findings can be entirely blamed on elitist disdain for the restive plebs. For a start, his data was collected before the big populist shocks – Brexit, Trump, Italy etc. Moreover, if this was all about liberal anger at electoral success of populism, then we would expect centrist opinion to be even keener on things like civil liberties:

“What about support for civil rights, so central to the maintenance of the liberal democratic order? In almost every case, support for civil rights wanes in the center. In the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy.”

Adler also found that “support for a ‘strong leader’ who ignores his country’s legislature” was especially strong among self-declared centrists. Clearly, a big part of what’s going on here isn’t a backlash against populism, quite the opposite in fact.

Things become less confusing when one realises that the political centre ground isn’t just home to latte-sipping liberals. Centrism is also a default position for those who don’t much care for party politics (‘a plague on both your houses’) and for those whose economically leftwing, but culturally conservative, views don’t fit easily into conventional party systems.

Suggested reading

The idea that liberals aren't represented by the party system is the opposite of the truth

By Peter Franklin

When the governing establishment was still delivering economic progress and cultural cohesion, the contradictions of centrism somehow held together. Protest votes went to third parties that were, if anything, more liberal than the dominant parties. But with the breakdown of confidence in our politicians, the centre-ground has become a battleground – between establishment and anti-establishment factions. Neither see themselves as ideological, which is why they both recoil from the confused and fractious state of our politics and, by extension, democracy itself.

By contrast, those who readily identify as either left-wing or right-wing have, by definition, picked a side – and thus recognise there are arguments to be had and settled at the ballot box. They are, therefore, better disposed towards democracy in a time of deep divisions. 

For the various kinds of centrist – whether they see themselves as uninterested in, unrepresented by, or somehow above, the argument – democracy is not much fun right now. Which is why some of them wish it would all go away.

That’s a question that every election strategist has to answer.

In 2016, Donald Trump had a plan – i.e. ignore the coastal elites and go for the rust belt – and he pulled it off. In 2015, Ed Miliband had a plan – i.e. play it safe, win 35% of the vote and get the minor parties to put him into government – and he didn’t pull it off.

In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn had a plan – don’t play it safe, unite the Left and inspire large numbers of habitual non-voters to turn out. His enemies, particularly those on the centre-left, snorted in derision, but he very nearly pulled it off. Contrary to all expectations, he deprived Theresa May of her majority and achieved the highest Labour vote share since 2001.

As much as it might pain those who deplore the hard left takeover of the Labour Party, on electoral strategy Corbyn was right and his critics were wrong.

Flyover London

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

But has that strategy now hit a wall? The result of this year’s English local elections would suggest that it has. Labour did make significant, though not spectacular, advances in London; but outside the capital – in the kind of seats the party needs to win to get a majority – it stalled, and in some places went backwards.

In the Independent, Tom Peck suggests that some Corbynites realise that a course correction is necessary:

“That Labour lost control of Nuneaton council in Thursday’s local elections was a gentle political earthquake. Hours later, the journalist turned Corbyn campaigner Paul Mason made a startling admission: ’Progressives can win if they make an alliance,’ he said. ‘To win swing seats in the Midlands and Southern England, Labour needs to get even more outside its comfort zone and fight for centrist votes.’”

“… it would seem even Paul Mason is aware that Corbynism might have reached its psephological limits – and that the old rule, about winning from the centre, might just still apply.”

Peck is right about Corbyn needing to win, or win back, England’s flyover country, but is this really the same thing as ‘winning from the centre’?

The idea that elections are won from the centre is known to political strategists as the Median Voter Theorem, which is based on something called Hotelling’s Law or the ‘ice cream seller’s problem’. This how Tom Peck describes it:

“That old rule, by the way, is often best explained via an old lesson taught at business schools about two ice cream sellers on a beach. If a beach is four hundred yards long, it would make sense for the two sellers to position themselves a hundred yards from the middle and a hundred yards from either end. No one would be more than a hundred yards from an ice cream.

“However, in the end each seller inches towards the middle. Those to the outside of him can be taken for granted. Those in the middle are there to be fought for. And so the two ice cream sellers end up side by side in the middle of the beach.”

Applied to British politics, the two ice cream sellers are Labour and the Conservatives, the customers are the voters and the beach is the Left-Right political spectrum.

So, given the return to a two-party system, does this logic determine the plan for the next general election – i.e. a scramble for the middle ground? Are the liberal centrists, who currently find themselves on the margins of UK politics, set to be vindicated?

Actually, no – because the assumptions that underpin the median voter theorem no longer hold.

Firstly, two-party politics cannot be guaranteed. In this new era of populism, taking heartland voters for granted is a high risk strategy.

Secondly, politics no longer limited to a single left-right dimension. It is, at a bare minimum, two dimensional – with a social or a cultural spectrum intersecting with the economic spectrum. Metropolitan liberals may see themselves as occupying the middle ground, but culturally they’re out on a limb.

Recommended reading

The idea that liberals aren't represented by the party system is the opposite of the truth

By Peter Franklin

Thirdly, the median voter theorem assumes an even distribution of voters across the political spectrum. However, there’s good evidence to show this isn’t true – and that what the liberal elites imagine to be the centre ground is pretty much deserted.

Last, but not least, the analogy to ice cream sellers on a beach breaks down, because in politics your location changes your product – indeed, to a large extent, it is your product. The once-popular centrism of the Tony Blair and Bill Clinton years is now seen as damaged goods. After the financial crisis, and everything that’s happened since, vanilla liberalism is past its sell-by date and the punters want a change.

Whether Corbynism is the particular change that enough voters are looking for remains to be seen. But in today’s world, the key to electoral success is difference not similarity.

Recommended reading

Why does a new middle-of-the-road party have to be a liberal one?

By Peter Franklin

For instance, in America, a liberal Democrat is someone on the centre-left of the more left-wing of the two big parties. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats are the main conservative party (and the natural party of government). In Russia, the Liberal Democrats are an ultranationalist party, permanently in opposition. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats are a centrist party of protest that joined a Conservative-led government – and are now, very firmly, back in opposition.

According to a poll from ComRes, 47% of British voters believe there is a need for a new centre party. There is, it is reported, £50 million in funding lined-up for anyone who can do to British politics what Emmanuel Macron did to French politics.

‘En Marche UK’ would be anti-Brexit, pro-immigration and socially liberal. Rather like the Liberal Democrats, in fact. The main difference is that the new party would be new. This would, apparently, change everything.

Adrian Wooldridge of the Economist (writing as ‘Bagehot’) is awake to the absurdities:

“Those who say the mooted new party would be different point out that it is garlanded with big names. But the names are the very opposite of what you want in a disruptive party: fallen Goliaths rather than plucky Davids.”

He is dismissive of the potential British Macronistes – such as David Miliband (“Davos man incarnate”) and Sir Nick Clegg (“a titled throwback to the Cameron years”).

Wooldridge wonders why, in an age of disruption, the British political system seems so hard to disrupt. I would argue it has been disrupted, but from within the established party system (it’s a similar story in America).

Disruptors can only disrupt with a genuinely new product, but the much-discussed ‘new’ centre party only serves to repackage an old and dilapidated one (which, by the way, is much better described as liberalism than centrism):

“At the start of the century, centrists were convinced that they had a winning formula: a free market in morals as well as economics, and a determination to use the proceeds of growth to help the poor. This philosophy colonised all three main parties. But today it lies in ruins. The financial crisis has destroyed the centre’s reputation for economic competence. The concentration of wealth in London has undermined its claim to stand for social justice…”

Wooldridge posits a centrist split between “fundamentalists, who dismiss criticisms of the old model as manifestations of closed-mindedness, if not outright racism; and reformers, who recognise the need to fix the model’s weaknesses.”

So what is it that centrists need to fix?

“How do you remain in the sensible centre while leading a revolution against Britain’s new oligarchy, the clique of second-rate people in both the public and private sectors who have got rich by sitting on each other’s boards and marking each other’s homework? How do you address technocratic questions about the wiring of capitalism (stock options, public listings, takeover rules) while fashioning a compelling vision of a capitalism that works for everyone?”

That’s a great list, if not an exhaustive one. As an agenda for action, there really is room for a new centre party here – but not a liberal one.

This is for three main reasons:

• Firstly, as I’ve explained before, liberalism – i.e. the maximisation of economic and social freedom as if nothing else matters – is not centrist. It is extremist.
• Secondly, the problems on Adrian Wooldridge’s to-do list are the consequence of liberalism; more of the same cannot be the solution.
• Thirdly, the idea that there is a better, stronger form of liberalism to be had is a delusion – akin to the old lefty excuse that ‘real socialism has never been tried’.

That doesn’t mean that Wooldridge’s reformist project is a waste of time, just that it will, if faithfully pursued, lead to something other than liberalism.

Ensuring that the post-liberal future is not anti-liberal is what matters now.

Recommended reading

The political centre is not where liberals think it is

By Peter Franklin

For those of us who self-identify as centrists – call us Blairites, moderates, melts, whatever – these are barren times. There is nowhere to go. Most of us are anti-Brexit on the basis that it’s a bloody stupid idea and watch the self-serving pivots and shimmies of Davis/Johnson/Fox etc. with something close to contempt. We cannot vote for this incarnation of the Tory party, even if we found a decent number of policies to praise over the course of the Cameron administration. Labour are still worse: led by a stomach-turning ragbag of Trots and chancers who have mounted a hostile takeover of their party and its machinery and watched gleefully as the internal opposition tossed its weapons away and hit the deck in abject surrender.

That leaves Britain’s Third Party (I’ll leave the SNP out of it, on the basis they’re not great fans of Britain). If you’ve ever been to a Lib Dem conference and spent time among the membership, you’ll understand why this is something of a hard sell. Your inner voice nags away at you: ‘I didn’t avoid the grave for this long just to end up voting Lib Dem’. Still, if not now, when? One girded one’s innards and sought to approach Cable’s speech seriously and with an open mind.

He blew it. Of course he blew it. He’s a Lib Dem. He’s Vince Cable, a lab-grown synergy of Richard Briars and Mr. Spock. There are the obvious and easy complaints. It was a dull speech of bad jokes (Brexit is ‘the product of a fraudulent and frivolous campaign led by two groups of silly public-school boys reliving their dormitory pillow fights’ – sigh) and preposterous boasts he would be the next PM. Within a minute, he was banging on about the ‘illegal’ Iraq war. There were some rather desperate attempts to win back the student vote that fled in the wake of the tuition fees u-turn. In summation: meh.

It all adds up to an unmissably obvious conclusion: Vince and his mob aren’t – can’t be – the answer to what ails us. They lack the credibility to inspire, unite and dictate the terms of a new politics. These are not the centrists we’re looking for. The challenges are too great, the times too combustible, the Lib Dems too smoke-stained and careworn, too pious and limp. No, the only solution is a new party.

Centrism, due to its very nature, is a thing of pragmatism, compromise, a distrust of ideology, an openness to innovation and fact. It all too often lacks the swagger that comes with the quasi-religious certainties of left and right. Nick Clegg and the now distant era of the Orange Book is probably the closest the Lib Dems have come to providing us with a champion and a credo, but even Clegg was a bit, well, Lib Dem.

The arguments against the establishment of a new party are familiar and of course have merit. It would have little chance of winning an election; the sentimental tribalism of our politicians means they would rather stick with what they have; voters anyway seem to be drifting back towards the big two. Creating something new would be hugely risky, enormously expensive and, hey, remember the SDP?

But still. We are living through the most radical transformation of society and of our way of life since the industrial revolution. The existing parties were set up in and for a different world – Labour, especially, even down to its name, is a strange anachronism. They are Heath-Robinson contraptions, held together by sticky tape and moist-eyed emotion, that seem constitutionally unable to cope with the pace of change, to offer sensible, convincing policies that can ease us through the necessary adjustments. They are hamstrung by history, dogma and tradition. They are holding Britain back.

British politics and our public space would benefit from a party formed specifically to deal with the challenges and opportunities of the 21^st century. Free from the constrictions imposed by history, legacy and special interest loyalties, it could aggressively get to grips with intergenerational unfairness, the rise of AI and its impact on lifestyle and the workplace, devise a sustainable model for funding public services, develop a grown-up conversation about immigration, and the rest. It could do so honestly and in a language that explodes the carefully calculated jargon that so envelops and strangles our debate.

Further, in time we need to move on from a First Past the Post voting system that does not offer the variety of choice and diversity people are used to in practically every other aspect of their lives. The Labour and Conservative vote rose in 2017, but when your choices are so limited there’s nothing surprising about this. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition was largely a good, measured government and stands as a good example of how collaboration can iron out the wrinkles on both sides. We’d be a better nation if this were the norm rather than the exception. A proportional voting system would allow the electorate to slip the chains that currently bind them to just a couple of deeply unsatisfactory options.

A new, modern party of the centre would have its work cut out, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It would give many of us a cause to champion over the long term. It could be something to be proud of – a muscular, liberal centrism that makes its case with all the swagger of its rivals, and that is built – and fit – for the 21^st century.

But what exactly is centrism? The simple answer is that centrism is the opposite of extremism. However, that covers an awful lot of ideological territory. Is it possible to be more exact?

For liberals, centrism is another word for liberalism; but liberalism – whether in its economic, social or cultural dimensions – is rarely to be found on the centre ground of an argument, but firmly on one side or the other. It is only on the extent of state intervention that they take a middling position, guided by practicalities rather than principle. Otherwise, it’s all about maximising individual autonomy – as if that were the only thing that mattered.

In a must-read essay for the indispensable Quillette, Bo Winegard proposes a more exacting definition of centrism – one that’s distinct from contemporary liberalism:

“Understood properly, centrism is a consistent philosophical system that attempts to guide political and cultural systems through change without paroxysms of revolution and violence. The centrist, in this sense, believes that political and cultural progress is best achieved by caution, temperance, and compromise, not extremism, radicalism, or violence.”

Liberalism, while mostly non-violent (leaving aside the violence delivered by a military drone from 20,000 feet), isn’t averse to the more peaceful kind of paroxysm. On issues from modern architecture to educational theory, immigration to family structure, liberals are relaxed with – or actively work towards – profound and experimental departures from traditional belief and practice.

It’ll be fine, they say, because all that human beings need to flourish is more freedom. “Damn braces, bless relaxes” as William Blake once wrote. Liberalism, in other words, is supremely optimistic – and thus stands in contrast to Winegard’s conception of centrism:

“Like the conservative, the centrist begins with a pessimistic observation about human nature: It is flawed (or, in religious terms, it is sinful). Humans are not infinitely flexible or perfectible. They cannot use reason to transcend fully their basic impulses and prejudices… humans are ‘designed’ to navigate a small-scale society; and that they are limited, parochial, biased, prone to violence, status competition, and nearly inescapable tribalism.”

So much for liberalism; how does Winegard distinguish his definition of the centre from conservatism?

“This sounds like a modern version of Edmund Burke’s political philosophy. But, there are two great differences between the centrism here conceived and conservatism: (1) Centrism does not loath change and (2) it does not accept a transcendental (religious) moral order.”

Naturally, this is where I take issue with his argument.

Conservatives do not loathe change. In making his point, Winegard brackets Edmund Burke with the likes of Joseph de Maistre. In fact, only the former is a conservative while the latter is more accurately categorised as a reactionary. On the question of change, the extremes are reaction (anti-change) and radicalism (indiscriminate change); the moderate position is conservatism (cautious change).

Indeed, more than mere caution, true conservatism is about the necessity of both change and continuity, and rejects the idea that the two are necessarily opposed.

On to Winegard’s second distinction:

“The great conservatives of the past also believed in a transcendent moral order, a divinely sanctioned social structure whose ultimate correctness was determined by God. Modern conservatives are, on whole, probably less certain of a transcendent moral order, but most would still endorse some version of a divinely guided or inspired social world. The centrist rejects this as fanciful.”

This ignores the long history of centrist politicians who did appeal to a “transcendent moral order” – for instance Abraham Lincoln, William Gladstone, Abraham Kuiper, Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi.

Indeed, western civilisation itself (which, in a further contrast with contemporary liberalism, Winegard says “should inspire awe and reverence”) is rooted in the truth claims of Christianity. It was not born fully-formed at the Enlightenment.

Finally, Winegard’s claim that “the social world is not tied together by transcendent values, but by secular laws” and that “our best understanding of human nature today comes from the evolutionary sciences” represents a complete break with most of western history (including the Enlightenment). As such it constitutes a revolution in thought and action that is surely inconsistent with the moderation that Winegard recommends elsewhere. Note that this is not an argument against science as a source of understanding, but against science as the only source.

Despite these points of disagreement, I welcome Winegard’s essay. It brilliantly defines a distinct and legitimate ideological position – one with which conservatism should be allied in the defence of western civilisation. But while conservatives should be willing to share the centre ground, we must not surrender our claim to it.