Centrists have been left perplexed by Brexit and the rise of the right, and have decried the erosion of liberal values. But rather than kneejerk defensiveness, it’s time to embrace a radical ‘reset’ of politics

We know we’re living through a period of crisis, but it’s sometimes hard to know of what kind. The financial crash of 2007-8 seemed to mark the beginning of the most recent crisis of capitalism; 2016 brought news of a crisis of democracy, and the political and constitutional crisis created by Brexit marks its second act. Every day the climate crisis heats up. Crisis has become the new normal.

It’s often said that we are also witnessing a crisis of liberalism: liberal norms are being eroded, institutions are under threat, and across Europe, parties of the centre are haemorrhaging votes. Meanwhile, the critics of centrism are louder than they have been for years. Even many in the mainstream of British politics have begun to acknowledge that in the past decade centrists have been neoliberalism’s willing bedfellows, supporting policies to shrink the welfare state and crush unions. Liberal centrism has “left people behind”, and in its support for free markets and globalisation, created new forms of exclusion. More damning critiques are also gaining currency: that the “liberal” way of running politics was always bound up with imperialism and colonialism, sceptical of democracy and workers and a cover for capitalist exploitation. Even the Financial Times – the pinnacle of economic liberalism – recently argued that the capitalist model needs to be “reset ”.

So liberal centrists aren’t wrong that their institutions, parties and ideas are being challenged. But the problem may be a deeper one: that the categories of mainstream politics as we know it can no longer explain the world.

As an ideology, liberalism can be hard to pin down. It’s capacious and it has adapted throughout history. From John Locke to John Maynard Keynes, liberals have prioritised the values of liberty and equality (though they’ve disagreed about how much the latter matters to the former and what those values mean in everyday politics). They have supported the rule of law, rights and representation, as well as private property, markets and, for the most part, capitalism against socialism. During the cold war, liberals often defended the status quo, seeing a slide into totalitarianism behind every scheme for political change. There is a long liberal tradition of attacking the left to defend the centre. In the 1980s, a faction of Labour MPs left the party to found the SDP. In the 90s, as New Labour disciplined the party’s left wing, liberalism took the form of the Third Way. Today, many liberal centrists paint Jeremy Corbyn as an extremist on a par with Boris Johnson, and draw false equivalence between left and right.

At the end of the 1990s, there was one thing that many liberals shared: an optimism about the direction of history

Yet in many countries, Britain included, liberals also helped to build the welfare state and have used the machinery of central government to enact progressive reforms and benefit the poor – defending the NHS, civil and human rights, social equality, migration. Often, they aimed not to liberate workers but compromise with them, in order to minimise the risks individuals face. Social liberals have sometimes opposed economic liberals: the concern to limit inequality has trumped the defence of laissez-faire and capital markets. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown enshrined minimum wage laws but encouraged the privatisation of public services; they founded Sure Start but helped sell off the NHS.

At the end of the 1990s, there was one thing that many liberals shared: an optimism about the direction of history and about the fate of liberalism. Famously many agreed that history had ended, following the end of the cold war. All that was needed was steady incremental reform of the status quo. These 90s assumptions survived well into the new century. We now know that such declarations were hugely complacent. The biggest mistake of liberalism was thinking it was all over.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The end of history? Vladimir Putin inspects the Russian fleet in Kaliningrad, Photograph: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Today, few have properly come to terms with that mistake. Many are on the back foot, insisting that any move away from their ideas marks a step backwards into a far nastier history. Such defensiveness is not novel: liberalism has often been a negative sort of politics – a politics of second best that protects against worse scenarios. Liberals have been the first to prophesy new end times – the demise of democracy and the Pax Americana – and see in Brexit and Trump a slippery slope to war and fascism. Where conservatives look to restore a lost past, liberals defend the gradual reform of an established order and respond aggressively to any threat to it, whether real or imagined.

All this worry about values and norms makes it possible to miss the fact that liberalism as an ideology still dominates how we see the world. It does not just occupy a place between left and right; it cuts across both.

The liberal worldview frames politics as something that happens mostly in Westminster, and about which most voters care little, so it downplays the politics of everyday life in the home and workplace. On this view, the political realm is inhabited by powerful individuals whose decisions make a difference, and who operate in institutions that are neutral. Values conflict, but compromise is the aim – except where liberal values are deemed to be threatened; it can sometimes seem that liberals believe in the possibility of consensus, but only if the other side accept the basic facts that liberals hold as true. This can mean touting virtues in principle but refusing them in practice: the Liberal Democrats demanding compromise and cooperation while they reject a Corbyn-led coalition is a case in point.

For liberal remainers, Brexit is either a giant misunderstanding or a mistake: it has been brought about by voters’ lack of knowledge, or by party misjudgments and the rightwing media; it has been prolonged by Rasputin-like advisers (whether Dominic Cummings or Seumas Milne). Undoubtedly, centrist thinkers, with their focus on institutions and those who control them, can provide answers to important questions: how the common law relates to the constitution; how EU regulations and the referendum dilute parliamentary sovereignty. At a time when we are meant to have had enough of experts, it is ironic that expert knowledge is in extremely high demand in public institutions – in the civil service, parliament, the courts, and the press. But it’s easy to mistake symptoms for causes. Though Brexit will surely have disastrous consequences – hurtling us towards a neoliberal, deregulated and depressed Britain with an empowered right on the rise – that doesn’t mean the liberal diagnosis tells the full story.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) staff vote to go on strike in a dispute over pay, October 2019. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Hampered by the need to defend the EU as a site of cosmopolitanism in the name of stopping Brexit, many remainers have framed any opposition as a threat to a political order that has no need for change. The rightward drift of the Lib Dems as they look to rebuild their vote by becoming the party of remain illustrates this bias to the status quo. For all its references to history (particularly to the totalitarian threats of the 1930s), the current liberal vision is often quite ahistorical: we don’t hear much about Britain before the referendum. Even the most radical version of liberal centrism has only a partial diagnosis: it points to rising inequality and a growing generational and educational gap. Liberals may focus on defending norms, but norms themselves are only how particular political settlements are made legitimate. They don’t tell us much about the limits of the settlement itself.

The view of Brexit and Trump as a crisis of institutions, norms or civility, and the focus on the narcissism or hubris of political personalities, is too limited. The alternative is not merely to accept the narratives of the right – that Brexit is about a defence of sovereignty or kicking it to liberal elites. Both of these inhabit the conventional terms of debate. By slipping into a kneejerk defence of the status quo, we risk not understanding where the threats come from and how they can be fought. By focusing on individuals, we ignore how classes are changing. By looking to reason and forgetting ideology, we miss the pleasures of resentment and commitment, and how new political forces have developed to capitalise on those pleasures – in particular how the Conservative party has reinvigorated itself by building new class alliances and using a heady mix of Thatcherite, nationalist and colonial tropes (a strategy that is haphazard but may well prove successful).

If we define politics too narrowly and dwell on historical parallels, we miss our own history and the social and economic changes that have paved the way to where we are now – a situation where the institutions and infrastructure of British public life are dysfunctional, where productivity, investment and wages are low, where the public sector has been hollowed out and the steady job all but disappeared. If we worry only about the breakdown of parliamentary checks-and-balances, we miss that this gives the lie to the liberal dream that certain institutions are neutral and beyond politics. When we see the rise of the right in terms of a crisis of civility, we fail to ask what resentments the veneer of civility masks, as well as who it benefits and harms. When we focus on constitutional crisis, we risk forgetting how Brexit manifests deeper disruptions and social instability – and that the coming election is also about our prospects for fixing these.

We risk forgetting how Brexit manifests deeper disruptions and social instability

These alternative diagnoses have major implications. The end of the liberal dream of neutrality opens up a view of the world where politics is found in new places – the courts, the market, the workplace, the home – and where political analysts take seriously arguments that have long been made by those outside mainstream politics, who have been marginalised by class, race, gender, geography, immigration status and age. This may be unsettling, but it can point us away from the old divisions of parliament versus the people, so easily deployed by the right and point to new battle lines: not between norms and their violation, or Brexit and its reversal, but to what we want for the future of the UK.

Crucially, these diagnoses can also show us where the deeper political crisis lies. The lasting damage to Britain may not be caused only by the constitutional chaos, but by the long-term collapse, defunding and decay of our public institutions – the NHS, legal aid, our underfunded schools. Paradoxically, it was the stability of such institutions that made liberal centrism make sense as a way of thinking about politics. With public institutions dysfunctional and liberal democracy hollowed out, liberalism no longer looks like an ideology that can explain the world: its basis falls away. Liberal political thinking is stuck. It can no longer give a convincing account of politics, except to describe what’s happening as an assault on itself. What would help liberalism make sense again is the rebuilding of those public institutions. It is an irony for liberals that this is precisely what the Labour party today is proposing.

What is needed is a longer and wider view than the liberal vision of politics allows – one that enables us to see how social, economic and ideological changes intersect with and shape personality and procedure. This is why elements in the press have started to listen to the left once again, discussing “resetting” capitalism in the context of inequality and climate crisis, and engaging with talk of interests, class and ideology that has for so long been labelled as irrelevant. Now liberals also have to choose: to stay where they are and try to squeeze new developments into old paradigms, or to recognise these limits. Instead of a revival of liberalism, we might need a reckoning with it.

• Katrina Forrester’s In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy is published by Princeton.