Thus you get populist shocks like Brexit and the election of Trump, you get figures like Corbyn or Marine Le Pen or the Sweden Democrats as important political actors … but then Le Pen gets clobbered in the runoff, Brexit ends up supervised by its former critics, and Trump’s own appointees take to the pages of this newspaper to explain how they aren’t really letting him run his own show. The center is hated, but whether overtly or covertly it finds some ways to hold.

The question is how long this situation can last. It might be that the current stalemate is just a transitional phase, a necessary step on the path from one order to another, and that at some point a group of politicians will figure out how to channel populist energy into a program or coalition that can make Western countries governable again.

This argument has been advanced frequently and shrewdly throughout the Trump era by the left-wing political theorist Corey Robin, who compares our age to the crackup of New Deal-Great Society liberalism in the 1970s, and argues that a lot of the angst over a supposed “crisis of democracy” is really just anxiety over the end of a particular consensus, a particular center — neoliberal-neoconservative, Reaganite-Clintonite-Blairite — that held for a couple of generations but can’t hold anymore.

“And as that happens,” he writes, “what we see is the founding of a new regime and the creation of new norms.” Robin fervently hopes that this regime will be socialist, and it might be — but it might equally well turn out to be some new right-wing form, of the kind suggested by the nationalists of Eastern Europe, the populist grand alliance uneasily ruling Italy (the one Western European country where the extremes have teamed up against the center), and the campaign but not the presidency of Donald Trump.

Or, for that matter, the new political regime might turn out to be more socialist in an increasingly multicultural America and more right-wing-nationalist in a mass-migration-troubled Europe, with the continents drifting apart ideologically instead of imitating each other.

But all this speculation assumes that the stalemate will end relatively quickly, that with a discredited establishment harassed by not-quite-ready populisms, something has to give. No iron law of history requires that to happen, and all kinds of structural factors in Western societies — our aging populations, our costly and complicated welfare states, our hysterical media environment, the veto points of the United States Constitution and the dysfunctional pseudo-federalism of the European Union — converge to make reform and realignment more difficult than in the past.

Moreover there are plenty of historical precedents for a situation in which a system stalemates or stagnates for generations, where revolts and reform programs founder again and again, where a disliked or despised elite holds on to power for a long time against divided and chaotic forms of populism.