Be warned Joe Biden – centrism is no longer a safe haven in politics

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, wrote WB Yeats a century ago in, “The Second Coming”, his dark vision of a looming apocalypse. 

Joe Biden loves Irish poetry and would do well to adopt this warning as a cautionary mantra when he returns to the west wing in January; the very future of liberal democracy may depend on his ability to realise that this time around, the pedestrian politics of centrism aren’t going to cut it.

 The centre used to be the fiercely contested strategic position from which elections were won. With the biggest popular vote in history, Biden might be tempted to think that conventional wisdom still holds. But the narrowness of his victory margin is chastening. 

This Democrat administration must deliver a radical “new deal” for “left behind” Americans or risk losing them to a second coming of Trumpism – or perhaps, something even darker and more disturbing in 2024.

Safe, centrist policies will not deliver material changes to ordinary people’s lives. In fact, history will see Brexit and Donald Trump as symptoms of  the entrenched structural inequalities produced by centrism’s previous failure to stand up to wealthy corporate elites.

Joe Biden has vowed to reverse Trump’s tax cuts, curb Covid-19, revive the economy and limit fossil fuels, but with a Republican Senate and divided Congress, the odds are stacked against him. Gridlock may well combine with his naturally conciliatory temperament to thwart the radical agenda that America desperately needs.

In the UK, Keir Starmer has more time and space to manoeuvre before deciding where to pitch his tent on the new political continuum. Now that the pandemic has shifted the centre of gravity so far to the left that Rishi Sunak is starting to look like Che Guevara, it’s clear that this disorientating new landscape will take time to settle.

For now, Starmer is making all the right moves by standing back and exuding an air of professional competence while the government flails its way through the crisis. But with the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey and the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn, he’s also shown that he’s capable of making calculated decisions with tactical precision.

And soon he will need to make a stand and set out a bold strategic vision that demonstrates how a Labour government can transform the life chances of ordinary people. Starmer’s position is very similar to that faced by Clement Attlee in 1945 and radicalism is likely to be the safest route to power.

The centre is no longer a safe haven from which to play the percentages  and anyway the Conservatives will already be there as their starting point before rolling back the emergency state aid plan they’ve been forced to create. That’s exactly the confused, ideologically compromised  position from which Churchill’s stunned Conservatives lost the post-war  election of 1945.

Like Attlee and in contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer has the one  natural advantage that all truly era defining radicals need: he doesn’t look like one. He is ideally placed to define the terms of battle for the post-pandemic debate. Only a truly redistributive wealth and income tax policy where corporations pay their fair share will rebalance society and curb the inequalities that have allowed a dangerous populism to thrive on both sides of the Atlantic.

If the Democrats are tempted to spin Biden’s win as a triumph for mainstream normalcy they will be ignoring the new political reality where middle of the road politicians get flattened by the traffic coming from both directions. Ironically, a deadly virus has provided a slender lifeline to liberal democracy; it’s an opportunity they can’t afford to squander.

Just as Attlee’s legacy of the NHS and the welfare state saved us from post-war social unrest, only a radical agenda that raises living standards by pulling its citizens from a deflationary ditch will save liberal consensus politics from a second wave of populist demagogues.

Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” warns that when the centre collapses “anarchy is loosed upon the world”, and that’s when something truly unholy starts “slouching” towards the centre of power.