It’s confusing times for us all, with strange political coalitions emerging (Trump as anti-nuclear firebrand anyone?). The liberal centrists know why this is – this all ‘proves’ what they always said, that the left and the right are basically the same monster. This is known as ‘horseshoe theory’. And like most liberal theories it is bollocks.
So one more time let me explain that liberalism isn’t ‘the absence of ideology’ but rather a dogmatic and deeply ideological political pursuit which has been in power so long it just looks like a law of nature. Now that has been disproved, things are no longer in the neat boxes the centrists claimed they were.
There are three fundamental ideologies of social progress in western politics and they are not arrange left to right on a linear spectrum with one of them conveniently in the middle but rather they are arranged round the three points of a triangle. Each has its own theory of how things get better.
First we have the ascendant right. This isn’t soft Cameron/May liberal conservatism but full Osborne/Trump/Farage right wing. The right believes in progress through competition or conflict. If you put everyone in a room and say ‘get on with it’, whomever comes out alive must be the best so putting people in rooms and making them fight each other to see who wins is the best way to sort out the strong (who create progress) from the weak (who inhibit it).
The left believes in progress through cooperation. For the left it is axiomatic that we can achieve more if we work together than if we fight each other, that pooling resources is more efficient and that higher levels of equality lead to better social outcomes.
The last lot are slippy; they are always renaming themselves. They used to be called the aristocracy, but when that became unfashionable they rebranded as ‘meritocrats’ and called themselves variously liberals, centrists, moderates, technocrats or even managerialists. These, as with so much in liberalism, are purely word games to disguise what is going on.
Liberal centrists believe in progress through order. The best way forward is to have an oligarchy, a ruling class which ‘knows’ how things work and so runs it on behalf of the rest of us – who in turn ‘know our place’ and are thankful for what we get. The ruling class can only govern if the rest of us are orderly and stay in line, so they call what they create a rules-based order (even though they break their own rules at the drop of a hat).
There is little fundamental difference between any of this and feudalism. Aristocracy literally means ‘rule by the best of us’ and the liberal centrists genuinely believed that it was self evident that they were the best of us. And to make sure of it they kept a very, very firm grip on their power.
The so-called Overton Window is a prison policed by guards, not an inevitable facet of human nature
None of these ideologies doesn’t recognise that there are aspects of the others which clearly make sense. None of them don’t recognise that some kind of stable social order is necessary for progress. None of them don’t realise that we’re going to have to cooperate on some things. None of them don’t accept that there is a place where competition really does bring out the best in us.
But the emphasis is very different and all of them are completely different ideologies. And if you frame history in this way it makes things clearer – for example, Hitler is very clearly fundamentally committed to conflict as the means of social progress but in reality was Stalin more interested in control and order or sharing and collectivism? So is Stalin actually more of an authoritarian technocrat than a communist? Probably.
The point is that the right seldom takes power in western democracies (though Thatcher and Regan were probably legitimately of the right and now Trump certainly is) and the left never does, or at least only did once, briefly, via Atlee. Both of them are basically condemned by the ruling class to do no more than try and nudge the dial left a bit or right a bit from outside the political power centres.
Once you understand this it becomes much easier to navigate current affairs. What you have to remember is that while the centrists have mainly owned the media (ceding to the right increasingly over recent decades) and have wholly owned the government, their positions are deeply ideological and in no sense are they ‘universal truths’.
Or put it this way; it is pretty well literally only the liberals who believe in Nato. No-one ever says it, but Nato it is the military wing of centrism, imposing technocratic rule across the western sphere of influence and preventing ‘infection’ from outside ideologies.
Make no mistake, liberal centrists have interfered in the sovereign democracies of other countries at a rate and volume which makes Putin look small beer. We just never talk about it, while making the usual hysterical drama about every Russian-influenced social media posts. They have overthrown governments again and again and replaced them with tame clients.
They have bullied the world using their rules-based order and the world had no outlet for complaining. Many senior military figures don’t really support the UK having a nuclear deterrent, not least because they know there is no threat it actually deters, because they know they don’t even control the Trident system and because it siphons enormous resources away from their actual military priorities.
But liberal centrism holds to nuclear bombs like they are essential to the functioning of democracy, which they are not and never have been. It’s all patent nonsense. Centrism enforces free market capitalism and uses global institutions to police that through aggressive lawfare. And for the rest of us the only rule is that we get what is left over when the technocrats have done running the country in ‘the only way a country can be run’.
This was all given a name. The name was ‘the Overton Window‘, the narrow ideological space in which a politician becomes ‘electable’. Except it was never a window, always a prison. This wasn’t the space people naturally gravitated towards, this was the space which, if you breeched it, the ruling classes would come down on you like a ton of bricks.
Look at what happened to Corbyn. He was not a victim of the ‘Overton Window’, he was a victim of a vicious campaign by the ruling classes. It is a prison policed by guards, not an inevitable facet of human nature.
Centrism and what we think of as ‘the way things must be’ has parted to show that it was only ever one choice in a sea of choices
Now it is all coming falling down. The ruling classes really, really got above themselves. They went from being an aristocracy to being a kleptocracy. I doesn’t matter where you look in the media-industry-military-political complex, they all twisted the rules-based order to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
So now we get the backlash, the far right. The liberals are gnashing their teeth. They believe that the fact that neither the left nor the right want to create a global empire which they police on their own terms untouched by the democracy of others which they impose through violence (abroad) and legal and financial coercion (at home) is proof of their illegitimacy.
There is endless criticism that can be made of the left. I make plenty of it myself. And the current far right is pretty disgusting generally. But the fact that on some issues our views coincide is nothing to do with our moral failure and everything to do with the fact that dissent of this nature was all but banned and certainly aggressively marginalised. It was always more widespread than it seemed.
There have always been signs that the Overton Window wasn’t real. To pick one example off the top of my head, right now there is one UK newspaper which is bucking the general trend and growing strongly and consistently and actually making money. It is reaching millions of people every month from a ‘provincial’ position. It is The National and it is making that ground because it is virtually the only newspaper in Britain which has chosen to write from outside the UK media consensus.
It’s coverage of Palestine means that The National is getting picked up widely right across Britain and the much wider world. We are not all bought into militarised centrism and we never were – opposition to the war in Iraq was neither marginal nor random. It’s just that, having marched, the ruling classes made sure you couldn’t vote for change.
They’re still doing it. Keir Starmer is through the back with his superglue trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, not least by acting as a human shield protecting Britain from any kind of voting reform. And he’s virtually the least popular Prime Minister in British polling history.
It is going to take time for us all to absorb this. It turns out that, like the sudden shifts from a Europe run by the Vatican according to medieval theology to Adam Smith’s new world of ‘rational trade’, centrism and what we think of as ‘the way things must be’ has parted to show that it was only ever one choice in a sea of choices.
No, what is happening really isn’t that complicated. One dominant ideology has failed and frankly failed to a startling degree. It has blocked out all the light and now suddenly we’re blinking into a new dawn without realising that the way things have been wasn’t forever after all.
The question isn’t whether we can rebuild that era. It is over, and over for good, one way or another. The question is what we build next. Until our minds escape this god-awful Overton Prison and we are ready to face a changed world without the extreme ideology of the free-market Natoists, we will continue to be far too confused to get on with the rest of history.