The problem is that so can they. They think white supremacism is common sense, while far off to one side is a bunch of effete eggheads who are conspiring to destroy the white race. What could be more extremist than that? What some see as obvious, others see as outrageous. Producing commodities may seem an obvious way to run an economy, but it didn’t feel like that to Aristotle. He approved of amassing goods which are necessary for the household, but condemned trade and exchange as contrary to human nature. The pursuit of profit for its own sake struck some medieval thinkers as perverted and unnatural. It was contrary to human nature, and would never catch on. An observer from Alpha Centauri, casting an eye over the mind-warping inequalities of the modern world, might well feel there was something to be said for this quaintly archaic opinion.

So does the truth depend on where you happen to be standing? Not necessarily. The world is full of mind-warping inequalities wherever you are. You might claim that they can be evened up, or that any other system would be even worse, but you can’t deny that Bono once bought a first-class aircraft seat for one of his favourite hats to be flown back from New York to London while others were rummaging in garbage bins for food. Nor can you deny that there are a lot of freaks and fruitcakes out there. It’s just that describing them as extremists doesn’t help, because condemning extremes implies that the moderate centre ground is always the right place to stand.

This is plainly ridiculous. What is the centre ground between racism and anti-racism, or slavery and freedom? Is moderate anti-Semitism permissible? Perhaps we should model ourselves on Bill Clinton, of whom it was said that when he came to a fork in the road, he took it. It’s a case of what one might call the extreme centre. What’s wrong with racists and fascists isn’t that they are a long way from the middle ground — so were the Suffragettes — but the nature of their opinions. “Far” needn’t mean “extreme”. Those of us who are on the far-Left happen to regard our views as entirely reasonable. That’s why we hold them. There are also those like the historian A.J.P. Taylor, who when asked by an Oxford appointments committee whether it was true he had extreme political views replied that he did, but that he held them moderately.

No doubt the allures of the middle of the road are part of the British tradition of compromise and moderation. It is said that if UK citizens ever switch to driving on the right, they will do so gradually. The origins of this spirit of compromise can be found not in the inherent decency and tolerance of the British people, but in the fact that a long time ago the English middle class decided not to confront the aristocracy over the barricades. Instead, they drew on that class’s prestige and authority in order to advance their own agenda and preserve the deference of the lower orders. We recently witnessed an example of that deference outside Westminster Abbey. At the same time, however, we witnessed the booing of the Prime Minister, which suggests that people who swoon over a little old lady can also recognise a shyster when they see one.

It’s hard for some liberals to accept that there are conflicts one side is going to have to win and the other is going to have to lose. They find this kind of talk intransigent, while postmodernists dismiss it as “binary” and so as uncool. Postmodernism first took off in the United States, where binary thinking is deeply entrenched, and represents a reaction to it among other things. A lot about the USA starts to make sense once one recalls that its Puritan founders believed that a small group of individuals were saved while everyone else was damned. “The good guys and the bad guys” is a common American phrase. The cowboy movie is based on such Puritanism, while binarism has governed US foreign policy from the Cold War to Isis. Even the cult of political correctness is an example of it, as the elect zealously scrutinise the language of the reprobate for its impurities.

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Consensus isn’t always to be preferred to conflict. There was much talk during the Jubilee of bringing people together, discovering what we have in common, binding up old wounds and settling ancient quarrels. The only problem is that this is a lot more acceptable to Prince Charles than it is to railway workers, who are going to have to fight if they are to keep their families fed. The goal of politics isn’t to paper over the cracks in society but to expose its divisions so that they can be repaired.

When in doubt, the liberal thinks of an equilibrium, but there are a great many issues on which we should throw balance to the winds. You can’t back the planet and the oil producers at the same time. There’s no middle way between rapists and anti-rapists. The point is not to accommodate the neo-fascists but to keep their hands off the levers of power. Behind the liberal’s addiction to balance lies the prejudice that conflict is bad in itself. But this, too, is surely absurd. It’s true that people shouldn’t be put in a situation where they have to fight. If the West hadn’t imposed colonial rule on other nations, those nations wouldn’t have needed to launch anti-colonial revolutions. If our ancestors hadn’t enslaved Africans, there would have been no call for slave uprisings. Given the circumstances, however, these struggles were entirely justified. Without them, apartheid would still reign in South Africa and Dublin Castle would still house a British Viceroy for the locals to take pot shots at. Finding conflict distasteful is fine for those whose interests are threatened by it.

There are, however, occasions when the middle ground is abruptly surrendered. The almost total exclusion of republican voices during the recent orgy of British self-adulation is a case in point. There are a large number of anti-royalists up and down the country, men and women who with the best will in the world can’t detect the slightest aura of mystery about Prince Andrew, but balance doesn’t extend to letting them speak. Instead, we have to make do with the views of a recovering royal, as conveyed to Oprah Winfrey.

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Another case in point is the war in Ukraine. This, to be sure, is a matter on which one should be properly prejudiced. Putin’s morally obscene adventure has won the world-wide execration it deserves. Yet certain issues get quietly buried in the support for Russia’s bombed and tortured victims. What, for example, do we mean by European values, which Putin is said to be attacking? Is this another case of civilisation versus barbarism, as with the West versus radical Islam, and at what point might the contrast begin to merge into a genteel form of racism?

European values include freedom and democracy, which on any reckoning are precious commodities. Yet there are countries at the heart of Europe today where they are in notably short supply, not to speak of past dictatorships (Greece, Turkey) which managed to stay comfortably beneath the Nato umbrella. Was the illegal invasion of Iraq an instance of Western values? The European Union’s disgusting treatment of a bankrupt Greece some years ago doesn’t inspire much faith in the fineness of its civilisation. The same can be said about shipping refugees to Africa. An alarmingly large section of the European population support far-Right politics or outright fascism. Among them can be numbered armed Ukrainian groups like the Azov movement, which was identified as lying at the centre of global far-Right networks in a major investigation by Die Zeit. Some far-Right paramilitary groups were integrated into Ukraine’s state security apparatus by the former Interior Minister. You won’t hear much about that on Newsnight.

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None of this justifies Putin’s murder of small children or his chauvinist fantasies of a Greater Russia. It just adds a little local colour. As for Russia’s nervousness of Nato, we are assured that the alliance is in no sense expansionist. It’s just that it keeps expanding. Like Topsy, it just growed. As in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, it creeps stealthily up on Russia until the nation swings round to try and catch it on the move, only to find it standing still wearing a look of injured innocence. It simply isn’t possible to view Russia’s bellicose nationalism outside the context of Nato’s increasing encroachment on its borders. When the United States felt threatened by the expansion of communism into Cuba, it invaded the island. It is of course by no means the only such adventure it has engaged in. Can we be sure that the barbarism is all on one side?

Nato presents itself as an association of equals, but it is in effect the military arm of the United States in Europe. This is why a former director of the CIA has described the war in Ukraine as a proxy war with Russia. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t be rooting for the Ukrainians. It means that viewed in global terms, this is not a confrontation between absolute goodies and unmitigated baddies, and that those who think it is are the victims of propaganda. Is this, then, a matter of standing in the centre? Not at all. What’s at stake isn’t some middle-of-the-roadism but an alternative world in which nuclear-armed superpowers would have ceased to exist.

In premodern England, processions were mostly connected to the liturgical calendar: events often both celebratory and of deep moral significance, marking saints’ days and Holy Week, accompanied with chanting, song or enactment of Bible stories. Perhaps the first monarch to use public spectacle as a political tool was our reigning Queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I, whose annual Queen’s Progress would see her take the whole court on the road over the summer, passing slowly and in great splendour through every part of her kingdom, where her subjects would put on pageants and feasts in her honour. She embarked on 23 in her 44 years as Queen, extending the glamour of her reign well beyond the narrow circle of her immediate court.

But what does a procession mean in the 21st Century? And who is it for? If Elizabeth I used pageantry to project her image and soft political power across her kingdom, the time between her reign and the arrival of her namesake, Elizabeth II, has delivered technologies that — in theory at least — render such efforts obsolete.

What’s the point of taking your entire court on the road, at vast effort and expense, when you can broadcast images of yourself everywhere with little to no effort? Meanwhile, for participants, the idea that your procession is being watched by journalists or TV cameras gives it a whole different set of meanings and potentials. No longer something you do with the other participants, it becomes something you do for an imagined audience, and whose meaning is outside the event itself.

If that sounds abstract, think about the idea of “peaceful protest”. This has been extensively used by progressive movements throughout the 20th Century, to effect political change with minimal violence by inspiring public sympathy for a cause. The Indian independence campaigner Mahatma Gandhi was a trailblazer in the format: between March and April 1930, he led a 240-mile march across India to collect salt from the coast, in protest against the 1882 Salt Act, a British colonial law which prohibited Indians from gathering or selling salt.

Gandhi was joined by thousands of his fellow-countrymen, some 60,000 of whom were arrested for their involvment. The march helped tilt public sympathy in favour of independence both on the subcontinent and – via newspaper reports – elsewhere in the world, and contributed to the movement for independence that came to fruition in 1948, four years before our reigning Elizabeth was crowned. Barely over a decade after that coronation, in 1963, Martin Luther King led some 250,000 sympathisers in another historic political procession in Washington, this time for racial equality: the scene of his “I Have A Dream” speech.

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Both these peaceful mass protests changed the course of history. But their political force relied on the presence of journalists to report on them. Before the mass-media age – that is, well into the 18th Century – any crowd of people with a political grievance was less likely to be treated as a noble political protest than as an incipient riot, not least because in most cases that’s what it was. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt didn’t sit about with placards waiting for the world to sympathise with their dislike of wage caps and the poll tax. They marched on London, where they massacred Flemish merchants and demolished John O’Gaunt’s palace.

By the same token, who cares about some people walking 240 miles to get salt, unless the world at large reads about it in the papers and understands the symbolic meaning? And as for 250,000 people gathering near the seat of government in a country of (then) 189 million people, unless the press is there to record the stirring speeches and report on its orderliness, that’s not a peaceful protest, it’s merely a public order problem. As it was, these events proved pivotal at a time when mass media was becoming increasingly important.

The digital age has changed the calculus again, though. On social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, you can get a sense of which ideas, causes or moods are swirling across the collective consciousness by seeing which hashtags are popular. Meanwhile, protests like those led by Gandhi and King have increasingly given way to something more nebulous and feel-good: the physical manifestation of a trending hashtag.

These such events may gesture at concrete political change but (like the clicktivism they mirror) often land instead on something far more nebulous: emotional gestures of “standing with” some oppressed group, or “raising awareness” of the most broad-brush issues, with very little in the way of concrete policy attached.

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In this view, political voice isn’t something individual; it’s weilded collectively, by a swarm. That is: if you want to be heard, you need to make sure the imagined observer can see that there are lots of you. And to achieve that, you have to ensure the hashtag trends, and add your body to the physical swarm of people all gathered in one place to support that cause.

But the trouble with trending-hashtag approach to mass politics is that, much like hashtags themselves, such physical gatherings are markedly less connected with concrete political action than their 20th-Century forebears. Gandhi wanted an independent India; King wanted equal legal standing for all Americans regardless of skin colour. Both achieved their aim. But since the turn of the century and rise of the internet, this has steadily broken down: in 2003, a million Not In My Name marchers did nothing to deter Tony Blair from invading Iraq.

The 2017 Women’s March, meanwhile, took place across some 600 locations and 81 countries – itself impossible without social media – and had an estimated 3.2 million participants in the US alone, making it the largest single-day protest in US history. It was hailed as transformational; but it’s far less clear what the march as a whole was for, let alone what it achieved.

It swiftly became roiled by anti-semitism scandals, and saw participants falling away to more issue-specific campaigning. And if 3.2 million Americans in pink hats marched in outrage at the election of a pussy-grabber to the White House, it appears the weight of their numbers has had little impact on The Donald’s reported determination to have another crack at the US Presidency.

For what might such a swarm campaign do after its collective voice has been heard? This reflects, maybe, the parallel rise of an ecosystem one commentator has called the “NGOcracy”: a body of non-governmental agencies concerned with driving social change, in line with how they have chosen to interpret popular opinion as seen in trending-hashtags. That is: in the digital age the job of mass processions is simply to emote.

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Processing alongside my flag-waving daughter on Thursday evening, though, I found myself wondering: is that all it can be — an emotional pressure-valve for a politically defanged public square whose claim to agency has been colonised by professionalised NGOs? One of the most striking criticisms I saw of the Jubilee celebration seemed to me to map nationwide Jubilee events, large and small, onto this social-media-age paradigm of hashtag activism. Based on the turnout of supporters at the Mall, this commentator suggested, the Queen is not popular nationwide. And, furthermore, anyone who really cared about the monarchy could easily make the journey into London to add their body to this single swarm in the Queen’s honour.

Implicitly, in this view, none of the local processions was meaningful unless it added to the royalist body-count visible in drone footage of Central London. But does this make sense? I struggle to imagine another cause that could turn out a thousand small-town citizens of Bedfordshire, of all ages, after dinner on a Thursday night. I also know that other processions of a similar kind took place all over the country. I imagine very few of them were filmed by drone, so their body-count couldn’t be evaluated by media commentators for trending-hashtag status.

Does it follow that each of these events was meaningless? Only if you believe that the value of a gathering, event or procession lies in its ability to make a contribution to the trending-hashtag emotional life of the nation as a whole. But what I found hopeful and heart-warming about my modest local celebration was the reminder that great swathes of the country really don’t care much about what’s happening on the internet.

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For me this was salutary. Especially in the face of in-person interactions mostly banned or tightly constrained during lockdown, and ever more of our public life accordingly forced online, it can feel difficult to escape an increasingly noisy, divisive and overheated digital public discourse. And it’s this discourse that prefers to emote en masse, whether online or in the real world, via the kind of hashtag-protest we saw in the Women’s March. Last Thursday reminded me that away from all the shouting, plenty of communities still gather with and for one another, and with only the faintest of nods to the noisy and increasingly self-absorbed parallel universe of digital-era mass politics.

It’s too early to tell whether such events will persist once Her Majesty is gone, and with her, our last national tether to the 20th Century. As for those ritual moments of collective moral communion that are all we have left of the political protests of yore, perhaps we need to stop thinking of them as protests. Instead, we can call them what they are: liturgical events more akin to the medieval processions that pre-dated Elizabeth I than anything between her age and Tony Blair. Religious gatherings, in praise of new (or perhaps long-forgotten) gods whose outlines we’re only just starting to discern.