If there’s one thing everyone agrees on when it comes to Jeremy Corbyn, it is that he is a divisive figure. Jo Swinson has said she cannot back him in a temporary arrangement to stop no deal because Corbyn is too “divisive” to get the support of Conservatives. On Sunday the Observer, in backing Corbyn’s play, still referred to him as “careless of division and widely distrusted”. Dominic Grieve, in a cautious not-quite-rejection of the plan, referred to Corbyn as a “deeply divisive figure”.

As criticisms go, it is a fair one. There have been few figures since Maragaret Thatcher who have polarised politics in quite the same way. Yet, as a criticism, there is something off about it. Should politics not be divisive? Is it not, when you get right down to it, a conflict of opposing forces trying to wrestle power from each other? How did we get to a place where “divisive” was seen as a criticism rather than a bald statement of simple fact?

Twenty years ago there was a feeling of consensus across the west’s elite thinkers. The big questions of politics had been solved; there was a right answer after all. Economic growth led to development; development led to the blooming of liberal values; more liberal and open economies were better for growth. The whole thing was a virtuous cycle that could be packaged and exported across the world. Yes, there was the occasional war, or massive terrorist attack, and yes global warming was a looming problem, but those were mere details. The future was bright.

And yet, it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Tony Blair tried to harness the dynamism of capital to fund a more equitable society, but without structural reform at its foundation the project was washed away like a house built on sand at the first sign of economic crisis. In 2010 the Liberal Democrats, supported by an army of voters who had been sold a promise of a more liberal alternative to Gordon Brown, tried to ally with the Conservatives to moderate them. Five years later those same voters punished them for their folly after the Tories proved inherently immoderable. As much as we believe we can cling to the tiger’s back, there is an inexorable logic to the power of capital that eventually consumes all our attempts to tame it.

The promise of the virtuous cycle was not broken by “divisive” figures – they have simply exposed it as false. Productivity growth and technological advancement have given us a society with an abundance of resources, and yet Iain Duncan Smith still comes out and tell us there’s nothing in the pot, and you all have to work until you’re 75. People are right to ask where all the wealth has gone, and why there’s nothing left for them. How can we be producing so much more per person than we were 100 years ago, yet still can’t spare any of that surplus even for our retirees?

Corbyn is a divisive figure, but so is Boris Johnson, so were Theresa May and David Cameron, so was Blair

The answer is that we could, but Iain Duncan Smith does not want to. He prefers to maintain a system where that surplus can be stashed away by the increasingly rarefied financial elite, even though they are already the richest humans to have ever lived. This position is not called “divisive”, even though it is surely going to prove immensely unpopular. Being divisive does not, under examination, mean causing division, but drawing attention to divisions that already exist.

Barack Obama, one of the most conciliatory moderates ever to hold the office of president of the US, was accused of stoking racial divisions. Why? Because his mere existence as a black man put a spotlight on the unhealed wounds and the festering white supremacy that people had chosen to believe were mere relics of the past. The New York Times has been accused of being divisive with the publication of its 1619 project, which examines slavery’s pivotal role in shaping American history, for the same reason.

To be divisive is to not let people look away. It is to turn and say to those who have been ignored for being inconvenient: “We believe you, you’re not making it up, it’s there and it’s real and it’s bad and it should change.” That upsets people who are comfortable with things the way they are – which is really what divisive means, when it comes down to it.

Corbyn is a divisive figure, but so is Boris Johnson, so were Theresa May and David Cameron, so was Blair. It’s just that the people who were divided away by them weren’t considered important. The poor, the “loony left”, the disabled, the foreign – none of them mattered and so the solid core of people who remained could say: “Look how unified we are, look how we compromise like adults.” But it’s a shallow kind of compromise, where you only ask the people who already broadly agree with you.

Corbyn’s divisiveness in this context is what underlies his appeal, and that’s why the calls for him to step aside for a more unifying figure are so tone-deaf. If he were acceptable to the current holders of power in this country, then he wouldn’t be any use to us.

Exposing division is not the same as causing it. Eventually we are going to have to stop saying “you’re dividing us” and start asking: “Which side do I need to be on?”

• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy