Why centrism, the politics of zombies, must be killed

Centrism has, for all its recent failings, been sentenced not to death but to stalk the in-between lands forever. Perhaps this is apt. As a political movement, it’s no longer the beating heart of Western politics; nor, with the morphing of technocratic politicians into “managerial populists”, has it been wholly vanquished. Yes, Keir Starmer, the consummate centrist, is on course to win a landslide, but only by default, and he knows that in order to maintain power, he will have to commit Third Way heresy by dragging his party to the Right on immigration. The Tories, meanwhile, are imploding, as Cameroonian Blairites are outflanked by a Farageist Right-wing insurgency. The 1990s, with all their nasty middle-class lies and cheap money, are to the centrists what the 1950s are to conservatives. Such worlds are gone with the wind and, in a way, never truly existed – yet, for some, there’s no letting go.

It’s difficult to define The Centre Must Hold: Why Centrism is the Answer to Extremism and Polarisation, a new collection of essays by celebrity centrists from Tony Blair and Kathryn Murdoch (daughter-in-law to the media mogul). The book, edited by Israeli politician Yair Zivan, certainly isn’t a frank post-mortem, designed to probe how the juggernaut of populism flattened a liberal-Left brand of centrism that had reached its ascendancy in the 2000s. No: as the subtitle betrays, when it comes to diagnosing a cause of Western political volatility, centrists continue to lean towards populist derangement rather than (say) a systems implosion or leadership failure.

Nor, however, is this collection a call-to-arms. As its sheer scope suggests – it ranges from the philosophy and “methodology” of centrism to case studies of the creed’s triumphs and tragedies – centrists remain unsure how to chart a return to power in a world they decry as hopelessly Manichean and intoxicated by lies. The book makes a heroic attempt to move beyond what it claims are misguided bids to frame centrism as little more than a mere “waystation between political extremes”. But, as the various authors collapse into self-defeatingly binary politics (“hope” versus “fear”) and bizarre formulae (moderation plus heterogeneity equals centrism), not to mention tortured streams-of-consciousness on why the masses should “embrac[e] complexity”, their collective endeavours fall flat.

The Centre Must Hold is not without its mildly fascinating curiosities. It’s difficult to forgive the damage that centrism has wreaked over the last generation, not least its role in the alchemic mixing of socialism and laissez-faire to create stagnant “blob” capitalism. But what’s truly astounding – as epitomised, sadly, by this collection – is the centrists’ staunch refusal even now to understand themselves. Centrism is the political equivalent to the serial killer who, despite being restrained from his destructive rampages, is still determined to interpret himself as a maligned superhero in a mediocre world.

The triangulating politics of the Third Way – as opposed to the simple binary politics of elite rule over the enslaved masses, or the democratic dream of self-rule – is a modern phenomenon. It originates in the bourgeois reformism of the 18th and 19th century, as liberals sought to dismantle retrograde aristocratic privilege while keeping mass uprising at bay. And yet, tainted by that anti-democratic DNA, centrism is desperate to claim more organic, ancient roots. In a chapter here on the philosophical origins of centrism, Micah Goodman reaches as far back as Heraclitus.

There’s plenty of strained emphasis on centrism’s love of complexity and heterogeneity. This is bizarre, given that centrism came crashing down in part due to its gullibility, namely its rationalistic faith in the financial system’s claims, before the crash, that through the invention of derivatives, that system had all but eliminated risk. Think, too, of centrism’s suspect ties with managerialism, which has an equally rationalistic faith in humanity’s ability to fix problems using universally applicable tools and techniques; or consider the modern technocrat’s attachment to predictive models that reduce our infinitely complex world to mathematically interpretable data. On this, the authors maintain a stony silence. Perhaps acknowledging such a paradox would make their world view too complex.

To be fair, there are some breakthroughs. Ruth Anderson makes an impassioned appeal to her peers to respect the fundamental importance of free speech and academic inquiry, even if these yield views and revelations that those on the liberal-Left may may not like. Andres Velasco and Daniel Brieba take a more cautiously heretical approach, as they broach a new “common-sense” approach to immigration, which recognises that “not everyone who worries about the impact of immigration on the fabric of local communities is a racist or a xenophobe”.

And yet The Centre Must Hold fails to assemble this hodge-podge of belated realisations into a coherent vision of why centrism deserves to reclaim its hegemony. Only a couple of the contributors make a compelling case for discrete areas in which the cross-party politics of the middle lane can make contributions. In the end, the collection fails to grapple seriously with why any of us should believe that the “middle way” technocrats can solve the great existential problem of our time – not climate change, but our calamitous and mysterious technological stagnation.

True to form, in his contribution, Tony Blair colossally misframes our predicament, suggesting that the grand task of the 21st century is merely one of Third Way navigation: figuring out how to tap the benefits of the imminent AI revolution while neutralising its terrors. In reality, with even AI innovation stagnating in this, the Second Gilded Age of monopoly, the task is to ensure that the tech revolution arrives at all.

Interestingly, Blair’s contribution reveals himself as both unrepentant and born-again. As prime minister, he advocated prostration to the forces of free-market globalisation; today, he proselytises for the exhilarating potential of the “Strategic State”. This shift is as striking as his refusal to engage frankly with the dangers thrown up. But that’s always how centrism operates: it glosses over past calamities, dresses up its spiritual yearning for certainty as “sensible” politics, and ignores the tough questions of the day.

It’s this, ultimately, that makes centrism so inadequate. The future of the West hinges on the ability of our liberal-democratic institutions not to produce the “reasonable” politics of synthesised pluralism, but to compel countries to make tough choices and endure painful sacrifices – and, crucially, not just from working-class “deplorables”, but the risk-averse elites who now make more money from innovation-stifling rentierism than they do from production and trade.

Polly Bronstein unwittingly hits on the basic problem when she outlines the “centrist method” as “the politics of both/and, rather than either/or”. Because, as the magical thinking in these pages reflects, centrism continuously lies to itself and us, for the sake of power, that it is possible to have our cake and eat it. Haley Stevens, for instance, exclaims that centrists can “fix the goddamn roads” while building a green industrial economy; can go big on semiconductor manufacturing while also investing in quantum computing. Among the contributors, there’s disappointingly little engagement with the fact that taking on today’s challenges will, on the contrary, entail sacrifices – what some tentatively heretical technocrats have taken to calling “trade-offs” – not to mention the possibility of failure, and even the willingness to go to war with vested interests.

For a compilation that criticises Manichean thinking, The Centre Must Hold’s conclusion is starkly black-and-white. “The struggle,” writes Zivan, “between the politics of fear and of hope, between the extremes and the moderates, will define the future of democracy.” Yes, it will. And that’s precisely why Third Wayism – which denies the very need for the fight, and constitutes, in political form, the human impulse to evade, rather than confront – can only fade away.

The Centre Must Hold, ed Yair Zivan, is published by Elliott & Thompson at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books