I took the kids to a music workshop at the weekend. We all sat around in a circle being creative. After a while, one boy got bored and started stomping around the room, singing loudly. His mother didn’t tell him to sit down, and neither did the “facilitator”. She said: “Can I just ask you to be a tiny bit quieter, please?”

We live in a post-authority culture. Adults no longer seem able to issue straightforward commands to children. In schools, non-hierarchical techniques such as “flipped learning” and teaching from the back of the room are in vogue. Pedagogical guides for lecturers recommend replacing the sage on the stage with the guide on the side. Every opinion is valid. All must have prizes.

Deference, we are constantly told, is dead. “Over the years, a revolution has been taking place,” says Robin Ryde, a consultant and author of Never Mind the Bosses: Hastening the Death of Deference for Business. “It is best described as a consistent decline in the level of deference paid to authority.” Politicians, too, have been knocked off their pedestals.

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Issuing as it so often does from the mouths of rightwing populists, management strategists and tech moguls, iconoclasm is neither radical nor empowering. It is rhetoric that serves to conceal obscene inequality and the abuse of political power. After all, if deference is really dead, why are so many TV gameshows structured around supplication to a panel of judges? Why are “job creators”, “the markets” and ratings agencies treated with such reverence? And what accounts for the rise of Trump, Putin, Orbán, Modi et al? Alongside the tongue-tied paralysis of parents and teachers, pupils are subject to a Gradgrindian testing regime, and strict discipline is on the rise in academy chains. Kenneth Clark’s patrician lectures in Civilisation, the landmark 1969 BBC series on western art, may have been supplanted by the more diversely presented Civilisations, plural, but the white male still presides over most of us.

The right were once the upholders of high-mindedness in politics and the arts alike. But while they have become Maoist modernisers, taking to the promotion of a virulent compound of economic elitism and cultural populism, the left is failing utterly to make the case for positive forms of authority.

Progressives coyly avoid defining what is true and good. The bottom-up, the grassroots, and the ultra-local are popular buzzwords. Nobody is supposed to be in charge, at least on paper: leftist meetings these days work as if Jo Freeman’s seminal essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which skewered the cant and inefficiency of apparently “horizontalist” organisations, had never been written. The same old mansplainers dominate, and there’s no clear plan of action. A lack of structure is the reason why the Occupy movement fell apart. Without leadership, it’s impossible to produce coherent, lasting change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn at the Brentry children’s centre, Bristol. ‘Nobody is supposed to be in charge these days: at least on paper.’ Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

To shift the status quo, political challengers must stand up for their beliefs. At his best, Jeremy Corbyn is ideologically explicit, but he also often bottles it, posing as a populist and deferring, at prime minister’s questions, to Lorna from Luton. If the left is too embarrassed to even call itself leftwing, we remain saddled with a rightwing ideology that poses as commonsense realism, or “the concerns of ordinary voters”. I am constantly told that “out-of-touch liberals” need to start listening, but we on the left need to stop internalising this tabloid projection: it is a cover for anti-immigrant sentiment.

Even social democrats now seem wary of defending the state, as if it smacks of top-down socialism. Labour MPs Liz Kendall and Steve Reed have argued that too many services assume a parent-child relationship with their users, and many Corbynites are even worse, dismissing the state as a condescending relic of the last century and insisting that care be “co-produced”. But the principle of a social safety net does not position adults as children; it acknowledges that, throughout our lives, we vulnerable humans need looking after. In her 1954 essay The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt argued that authority was not patronising; it indicated that someone was taking responsibility.

When I went into labour with my first child and asked the midwife if I could stay on the ward, she told me about how great it was to be in charge of my own labour, and that I should go home, take two paracetamol and get on with it. But when I came back into hospital with a serious complication, the doctors were suddenly – and thankfully – in control.

Expertise isn’t exclusive; it’s enabling. At my comprehensive school in the 1980s, knowledge-based approaches were already being replaced by trendy roleplay and transferable skills. I wanted to learn about coastlines and rock formations, but instead I had to imagine I was the operations manager of a power station. I didn’t know enough for such an exercise to be of any use. If we “liberate” ourselves wholesale from the authority of teachers, scientists and elected representatives, pupil exclusion becomes routine, climate change is a matter of opinion, and constituency surgeries are toothless.

Authority should be earned, maintained and scrutinised, not blindly bestowed by birth, wealth, or tradition

I’m not calling for a return to the unquestioned deference that allowed priests and teachers to abuse children. That abuse occurred because there was insufficient accountability and protection: the essence of authority when it is working properly. Authority should be earned, maintained and scrutinised, not blindly bestowed by birth, wealth or tradition.

The populist right is aggressively anti-system, turning citizens against the Westminster bubble and the “Washington swamp”. Yet for all its faults, politics is the only means we have to shape a fairer world. It is true that many politicians hail from a narrow, privileged demographic. Democracy is not functioning as it should. But the left is making the fatal mistake of confusing political institutions themselves with their recent corruption by financial lobbying, the corporate revolving door and four decades of neoliberalism.

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The death of deference has fallen out in the worst possible way. The right has mutated, and the left has lost its nerve. It is time to make a new case for good authority in private and public life.

The problem for parents and politicians alike is that we have stopped regarding authority as legitimate. The challenge for the left, therefore, is to re-establish this legitimacy. We need to disentangle authority from privilege, and find new ways to ensure that authority is constituted of knowledge, experience and conduct – and judged as such by a sceptical public. It’s children, not politicians, who need to learn to listen.

• Eliane Glaser is author of Anti-Politics: On the Demonisation of Ideology, Authority and the State, published on 19 April