Centrists attack the left, but they are the true ideologues | Owen Jones

If a new so-called centrist party is to be set up, why not call it Denial, or perhaps Hubris? Self-described centrists believe that they are the besieged remnants of political sanity in a world gone mad. To be a centrist, so this story goes, is to be above ideology: pragmatic, focused on “what works”, being grown up. They are the moderate stabilisers, or according to this narrative it is their marginalisation that has opened the way to the extremes. In this centrist worldview, the xenophobic, racist or indeed fascist right are deemed to be politically and morally equivalent to the radical left.

The centrist Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott is among those who has previously savaged an “alt-left” straw man of his own creation. Last November, the comedian Trevor Noah warned anti-Trump protesters not to “become the hate that you’re protesting against”, as though anti-Muslim hatred and the passionate repudiation of it were somehow morally comparable. As the Anti-Defamation League’s Mark Pitcavage has put it, the word “alt-left” was created to create a false equivalence between far right and “anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like. It did not rise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network.” But lo, the “alt-left” bogeyman of the self-described centrists has been appropriated by Donald Trump to apologise for, shield and legitimise fascists and Nazis.

“Centrism” is a misleading term which should be abandoned, though a viable alternative term is lacking: bearers of the “centrist” flame regard “neoliberal” or “Blairite” as abusive rather than descriptive terms. Centrism implies non-ideological moderation, and given “left” and “right” are meaningless abstractions for most people, it is a seductive label. But centrists aren’t pragmatists, they’re ideologues, extolling a blend of market liberalism, social liberalism and – more often than not – a hawkish military posture. Claims of moderation in a British context do not readily sit with helping to unleash the murderous, never-ending bloody chaos in Iraq and Libya, it should be said. But it is the economic order centrists defend that produced the insecurity and stagnation which, in turn, laid the foundations for both the ascendancy of the left and its antithesis, the xenophobic right.

I can hear the cries already: to lump the Blair and Cameron era together is as inaccurate as it is offensive. Labour’s progressive achievements – such as the minimum wage, public investment and LGBT rights – should be both defended and extended. But the failure of Labour centrists to regulate the financial sector, to build the housing Britain needed, to adequately reverse the social destruction of Thatcherism – all this sowed seeds of the coming cataclysm. Four years before the crash, wages began to stagnate for the bottom half; for the bottom third, they began to decline, while it remained boomtime for Britain’s triumphalist elite.

Despite their shamefully unchallenged later revision of history, the Tories backed every penny of Labour’s spending until the financial calamity. But then came the Osborne-Cameron-Clegg era of austerity, while Labour’s centrists demanded the party commit to cuts in the name of “fiscal credibility”. Ed Miliband recognised that this consensus was no longer viable, even if he was unable to definitively break from it. The centrists loathe and fear Corbynism, but they were its midwives. Similarly, without a toxic fusion of economic insecurity and xenophobic scapegoating, rightwing populism would have remained confined to the online rants of frothing keyboard warriors.

What is striking about these so-called centrists is they offer little evidence of self-reflection about their plight. Their decline isn’t due to their own failures, but the irrationality and madness of others. They are the grownups, and infants on a sugar-high of populism have taken over. Hillary Clinton lost to a candidate widely dismissed as less likely to win the presidency than an asteroid crashing to Earth. But no blame was attributed to her political outlook: it was all Russian intervention and misogyny, and nothing else.

In Britain, there is growing chatter about a new centrist party. This, at a time when more than 80% of the electorate voted for a left-led Labour party or the Brexiteer Tories, the two parties’ highest combined share of the vote for nearly half a century, in an election in which the anti-Brexit centrist Liberal Democrats flopped.

It is revealing that the disgruntled centrists offer virtually no clues about their vision other than opposing Brexit. The remain cause is a political life raft: it allows them to present an image of political insurgence, of radicalism, rebellion even. Because Labour has pledged to honour the referendum result, they can promote the fiction that Corbynism and rightwing Toryism are a unified cabal leading Britain to national ruin. Those who voted for remain but feel it is politically impossible to overturn Brexit are portrayed as traitors.

It is a convenient crutch to conceal their lack of answers to any of the insecurities and injustices that led to their downfall in the first place. Will they raise taxes on the rich and major corporations to end cuts? Will they abolish the burden of student debt? Will utilities be brought in to public ownership? What evidence is there that they want anything other than a return to the world that existed until 2015, a world they thought would last forever until its dramatic implosion?

The traditional centrist caricature of the left was this. We blamed our political marginalisation on the “false consciousness” of the masses. We are dogmatic and purist, obsessed with the past, unwilling to compromise, and we are more interested in looking for traitors rather than converts. Does this not increasingly resemble the outlook of many of today’s self-described centrists? Would it not be worthwhile holding a postmortem that examines their own failures, instead of blaming their weak political position on an electorate succumbing to unreasonable populism? Would it not make sense to debate answers to the insecurities and injustices that led Britain to a political moment which is a source of such despair for centrists?

It is my own view that centrism has no answers, and that if the left fails, the vacuum will be filled by a populist, hateful right. It was the extremism of the economic order that centrists defended – not its moderation – that led Britain here. Centrists will dispute this, and find it almost inconceivable that they have been thrust into the political wilderness once inhabited by the left. But until they come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again.