The two wings of a warring Labour party have given up trying to change each other’s minds. In place of persuasion, both sides are aiming for destruction. The activists of Momentum call for the scalps of establishment MPs, while parliamentarians demonise those who have rallied to Jeremy Corbyn as an entryist rabble, and ask themselves what one described to me as “the only question: when will we get rid of him?”

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Where will it end? With MPs doomed because there is nobody to give out their leaflets; or activists’ hopes running aground because they are not willing or able to reach beyond the leftwing tribe? Either scenario is splendid for the Tories, which makes it incumbent on those in each Labour trench to try to make sense of what is going on in the other.

The rage of the parliamentary Labour party is not complicated. It looks back with pride on New Labour’s record in shrinking class sizes, rescuing children from poverty and eliminating long NHS waits. And it recalls Tony Blair’s great argument about how to make it all happen: before you can win licence to alter the country, he said, you must first alter the country’s perceptions about yourself, by demonstrating caution and competence. By contrast, Corbyn demonstrates no interest in changing preconceptions about him as a utopian daydreamer.

It strikes MPs not merely as maddening but as a form of madness when they read polls of Corbynistas saying that Labour should stick to its principled guns even if that means losing again next time. They simply cannot compute why any progressive could want to shirk the chance to change the country again.

What they are not reckoning with, however, is the activists’ frustration at everything that didn’t change in 13 Labour years – in particular Britain’s political discourse. Yes, many progressive policies were pursued, but instead of being won, progressive arguments were dodged around. The truth is that New Labour failed to change anybody’s mind about much apart from itself. The result is a frail legacy that is now being unravelled with extraordinary speed. And that is the context in which the activists are content to march down what may well prove a Corbyn cul-de-sac.

Think of the governments that have left deep marks on society – Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration in the US, say, or those of Attlee and Thatcher in Britain. They first challenged the inherited discourse, and then created institutions to cement a new one. Roosevelt, for example, confidently remade common sense in the Depression: “I assert that modern society … owes the definite obligation to prevent … the dire want of any of its fellow men or women.”

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He established a social security system that would become the lethal-to-touch electrified “third rail” of US politics, entrenching new ideas about entitlement in much the same way as Clement Attlee’s NHS. Margaret Thatcher’s privatised industries likewise established new economic facts of life, and cemented a new conventional wisdom.

Now think of the apologetic nervousness with which New Labour did great things. Within a few years of passing the Human Rights Act, Jack Straw found it expedient to begin rubbishing it – so today Conservatives can now sound respectable in proposing to rip it up. Gordon Brown goaded the Tories into voting for the abolition of child poverty, but because nobody outside of Westminster was engaged in that argument, the Tories can today move the goalposts by redefining a poverty measure just before the poverty rate surges.

New Labour’s tax credits dressed redistribution up as a tax cut. At the same time, the party indulged suspicions about welfare cheats with endless headlines about dedicated hotlines to dob in neighbours for swinging the lead, or lie detectors in jobcentres.

Such mood music matters: John Curtice crunched decades of British Social Attitudes data and concluded that voters as a whole – and Labour voters especially – swung to the right on benefits after Tony Blair declined to stand his party’s traditional ground. The Cameron administration can now press on with an assault on benefits that would once have been unthinkable. George Osborne’s spending review reversal on tax credits altered nothing but the speed: the destination is unchanged. The principled case for social security has rusted away from lack of use.

Some important achievements were kept so far below the radar that they went entirely unnoticed. New rights to union recognition, for example, smacked too much of old Labour for party election broadcasts. But after the chance was missed to tell a new tale about the value of workers standing together, the Conservatives can now pursue a trade union bill that will lock in the most restrictive legal settlement of modern times.

The New Labour mantra for the public services was “investment and reform”, and it found the resources to save an NHS that had previously stood in mortal danger. Some of the “reforms” were justified, but others welcomed in the private sector without regard for where this would push the subsequent politics. Both Michael Gove’s evisceration of English local education authorities and Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act were reassuringly rationalised as finishing off what Blair had begun. Now, slowly yet seamlessly, “reform and invest” is giving way to “privatise and starve”.

There are exceptions, where New Labour did move minds in a more lasting way. Civil partnerships were a transformative reform, albeit one peripheral to the original New Labour project. (The Blair Revolution, co-written by Peter Mandelson in 1996, floated state-subsidised loans expressly restricted to married couples setting up home – at a time before gay marriage.) Various important employment rights – such as statutory holiday entitlement – will be hard to snatch back. But several of these were facilitated by Britain’s now threatened EU membership, and another, the minimum wage, is today used as cover for George Osborne’s benefit cuts. One civilising New Labour legacy is the commitment to fund international aid at 0.7% of GDP. Blair and Brown took a rare risk in betting they could get Cameron to say “snap” to this as an emblem of Tory modernisation. They succeeded too, but I wouldn’t want to wager anything on this surviving a change of Tory leader.

In sum, New Labour never showed quite the same zeal for taking on the arguments of the right as it did for smashing the unelectable left. The 1997 landslide suggested a country that was open to new arguments, but it heard too few of them.

As they look on at shuttered Sure Start centres, pragmatic Labour MPs are understandably fixated on the imperative of winning back the power that got those centres built. The Corbynistas, however, reason instead that it is always going to be easy to pull the shutters down on achievements that rest on arguments ducked, instead of arguments won. And as Labour in parliament looks on in bewilderment at a voluntary party that appears to have lost all appetite for office, it should give some thought to the doctrine of power at any price, and the transient nature of its legacy.