The major political events of 2016 gallop towards us at the speed of bolting horses, even if two of them – the EU referendum and the Trident debate – are running in weird directions at unpredictable velocity. How the left uses them is up to us. The London mayoral elections could turn into a referendum on housing: no other issue in any other city could unite so many people across such a fundamental question. What is the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands doing to the way you live, the future you can look forward to, the way your children will live? Do you see life getting easier or harder? Do you accept it as inevitable? And if not, what avenues for change are you ready to explore?

The EU referendum could, like the Scottish referendum, become a conversation about what a good Europe – and, by extension, a good United Kingdom – would look like. It could be a debate about the very purpose of international cooperation: what it could mean for wages and tax, privatisation and commonly held assets. Were we minded to discuss a post-capitalist sharing economy, in which renewable energy moved freely across borders and the fruits of technological advance moved beyond appropriation by monopolies, this would be the place to start.

Trident could trigger new thinking about foreign policy, if we could only allow ourselves to say out loud one blindingly obvious fact: that the cold war conditions that made the threat of mass annihilation look like a sensible compact between hostile nations no longer pertain.

This is, in short, a time when we could overturn sclerotic norms and replace them with genuinely modern, ambitious thinking. The left could do that. Or we could allow ourselves to be diverted down paths to nowhere, chasing sticks thrown by gleeful opponents: is Sadiq Khan as big a leftie as Jeremy Corbyn? How will they ever work together when they don’t think exactly the same thing? What’s the constitutional basis for a Labour coup? How can the left support an EU that stiffed Greece and has lost its humanitarian heart? If there is one thing easier than leveraging lefties’ natural anti-authoritarianism, it is opening up the fissures between them to turn them into chasms.

In 2003 Britney Spears said of George Bush: “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president and every decision that he makes, and support that.” I was fascinated by the remark, and remember worrying at it, like a scab, Googling it to check the wording (the search terms “Britney” and “Bush” led to a while in the wilderness, let me tell you). I thought I was interested in how good conservatives are at yielding to authority, but I was really interested in my own sense of revulsion. To support anybody in every decision that he made would, to me, be indivisible from being dead.

We need to find our own harmony that can accommodate audible difference

In normal times, the naturally subversive person never has to confront the question of whether he or she is capable of obedience, because the sort of person he or she would obey would never be in power. These are not normal times: Corbyn, avowedly anti-establishment, is the leader of the opposition. The prevailing convention is to pretend that he’s just a comical sideshow, and normal opposition will resume in due course. But sooner or later, reality will catch up with this self-styled “realistic” view.

Corbyn’s more pressing problem is that the only place he will find support is among people who far prefer to critique. How he deals with that – accounts of how long it takes him to fire someone, unable to do so until they’ve agreed that he’s right, point to a person who is less comfortable with authority than anyone – has been the subject of endless scornful commentary. Yet everyone on the progressive side – whether in the parliamentary Labour party, the constituency party or not a member at all, merely sympathetic to the ideas – needs to consider how we deal with it. Is a natural reluctance to cheerleading allowing us to be neutralised?

And without question, there are Labour MPs whose opposition to the leader is implacable, who disagree with him profoundly on matters of principle. Whether or not we call those people Tories or closet Tories or misdirected Lib Dems is irrelevant. The salient point is that they do not describe the full party range, which also includes MPs who agree with many of Corbyn’s ideas but worry about his electability, who cleave to the same fundamentals but worry about the delivery.

These are the MPs who worry about how it plays when Corbyn refuses to endorse shoot to kill, rather than considering whether shoot to kill is a large enough or pressing enough issue to divide on; MPs who support Trident because they don’t want to be associated with peaceniks, not because they are deeply wedded to weapons of mass destruction.

It is likely – indeed, I’d say it was a certainty – that there are Conservative MPs who oppose Trident but wouldn’t dream of making an issue of it. The ability of the right to gloss over its internal differences is, frankly, awe inspiring: in a recent debate about social housing, Cameron accused Corbyn of being a small-c conservative. That’s probably what most of his party has written on their CVs, and he was using it as an insult. Nobody uttered a squeak.

It’s impressive, but it’s inimitable: the left cannot mimic the obedience of the right, and nor can we copy their pursuit of unity for its own sake. We need to find our own kind of loyalty that doesn’t preclude critical distance; our own harmony that can accommodate audible difference. We are in a time of unique opportunity, brought not just by the new Labour leadership but a constellation of flashpoints that could light up politics. This doesn’t need all of us to agree; it just needs all of us to be in.