In his determination to deliver Brexit “do or die”, Boris Johnson is planning to launch an election campaign that will pit “the people” against “parliament”. He promises to take sovereignty back from the political elites – and return it to “the people”. The announcement of these tactics has caused alarm among those who fear democracy will be threatened by a “populist” politics of polarisation between “us” and “them”.

But this fear of populism reveals something troubling about how we currently understand democratic politics. What most people seem to find shocking about Johnson’s strategy is that it involves an “us v them” confrontation – as if democratic politics could avoid conflict between irreconcilable political projects.

Since Thucydides and Machiavelli, we have known that politics involves conflict and antagonism and that it has, by definition, a partisan character. In politics, therefore, we are always dealing with an opposition between “us” and “them” – which means it will always be necessary to draw a political frontier between the two sides.

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This is still the case in a democracy: contrary to what is often asserted, democratic politics is not defined by the absence of such a frontier. In fact, what characterises a liberal pluralist democracy is the way this line is drawn – so that the “them” are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries engaged in a confrontation between competing conceptions of the common good. When it is formulated in terms of an opposition between left and right – rather than in religious or ethnic terms – this frontier is crucial for democracy, because it provides the necessary framework for a confrontation between two legitimate positions.

With the advent of the third way in the 1990s, it became fashionable in some quarters to declare that the adversarial model of politics was now obsolete – so categories of right and left were no longer needed. But even the champions of a post-political consensus cannot avoid drawing a frontier between themselves and their rivals. Since they refuse to draw it in an adversarial way, they create a moral divide, which does not permit a true agonistic debate. Tony Blair pitted the modernisers against the traditionalists; for Emmanuel Macron, the frontier is between the progressives and the conservatives.

As traditional social democratic parties were converted to neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s, this non-adversarial conception of politics – which was deemed to be progress for democracy – became dominant across western Europe. Centre-left parties convinced themselves there was no alternative to the hegemony of financial capitalism, and implemented the policies favoured by finance capital – which have led to an exponential increase in inequality and the emergence of new forms of subordination, not only among the working classes, but also in significant sectors of the middle classes.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, however, there has been growing resistance to an economic order that has produced a new class of oligarchs and a growing precariat. After decades of “post-politics”, during which citizens were deprived of a voice in the way they were governed – under the pretence there was no alternative – we are now living through a populist moment. Political frontiers that were said to have vanished are now being reinstated, in the name of recovering democracy and popular sovereignty.

This is the context in which we must understand the recent success of rightwing populist parties. By repudiating the centrist consensus, and redrawing a political frontier between “the people” and “the establishment”, they have promoted a challenge to the status quo that resonates with the feelings of many different constituencies who have been negatively affected by the consequences of neoliberal post-democracy.

In Britain, much of this resistance was given shape by the Brexit vote in 2016. The great success of the leave campaign was to link the grievances of a number of disparate groups by articulating anti-austerity and anti-establishment sentiments with a nationalistic flavour. The slogan “Take back control” provided a rallying cry for these various demands. By blaming the EU for the deterioration of social and political conditions in the UK, Brexit became a hegemonic signifier – one around which a new “people”, identified as leavers, has coalesced. These are the “people” Johnson pretends to represent and whose will he accuses parliament of disregarding.

How can we respond to such an offensive? We must not be tempted to counter Johnson’s populism with a return to centrist politics. It is precisely such a centrist politics that is at the origin of the current democratic crisis in western Europe.

Similarly, we should not demonise all Brexiters as deplorables, or dismiss them for being unable to recognise the intellectual and moral superiority of the European project. The campaign to leave succeeded in part because there was a democratic kernel at the core of these demands – which reflected a widespread discontent with post-democracy.

In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the way to answer the rightwing populist offensive is the construction of another “people” – through the articulation of a project that can link together various demands against the status quo. A project in which both leavers and remainers could feel that they have a voice and that their concerns are taken into account. One signifier for such a project could be a Green New Deal – which articulates multiple environmental and economic struggles around a demand for equality and social justice.

To be sure, such an “us” will never include everybody. It does, of course, require a “them” and the drawing of a political frontier. But we can have a frontier that makes democracy more radical – one that pits the people against the oligarchy, and the many against the few.

• Chantal Mouffe is professor of political theory at the University of Westminster