End of the Middle
Tariq Ali’s The Extreme Centre: A Warning
By John Foster
Tariq Ali’s 2015 book The Extreme Centre: A Warning makes a strong case for a new systemic order.
Ten years later, we’re witnessing the debut of such an order, but it is a different from the one that Ali and others expected a decade ago.
This is not a criticism of Ali’s book—quite the contrary. The Extreme Centre provides perhaps the most precise and clear-sighted analysis of how a neoliberal consensus was consolidated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Analysis at the macro level is always fraught, especially when it tries to see the future in the past.
The paradigmatic case for this is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, a more interesting text than its bowdlerisations suggest, but one that is still conservative and Pollyannaish in retrospect.
In The Extreme Centre, Tariq Ali argues that a decade ago, Western liberal democracies had entered a state of ideological stagnation in which mainstream political parties promoted the same neoliberal agenda, regardless of their nominal alignment.
This convergence represented a hollowing out of democracy. Elected governments had ceded power to corporate interests, financial institutions, and technocratic bodies, leaving the electorate disillusioned and powerless.
The centrist consensus would promote endless war, austerity, and privatisation while excluding dissenting views. This would foster political apathy and the rise of populist forces on both the left and right.
From this perspective, the “extreme centre” did not delimit a moderate middle ground but a radical project to entrench capital's dominance.
Ali’s critique stands in stark contrast to Fukuyama’s The End of History, which famously posits that liberal democracy had triumphed as the final form of human government after the Cold War.
Fukuyama sees the consolidation of liberal capitalism as a sign of progress and stability. Ali interprets this same convergence as a crisis, closing off political horizons and suppressing alternatives.
Whereas Fukuyama welcomed the post-ideological age, Ali worried that it would be dangerously undemocratic, deepening inequality and global instability.
In 2015, Ali imagined a future in which the dominance of the extreme centre would provoke more volatile forms of resistance. And this is what happened, except the resistance in question came from the right.
The Extreme Centre delineates a political order in which the ideological distinctions between parties in Europe and North America are folded into a singular, functional entity.
That was a reasonable assessment of the trendline in 2015. But it failed to account for a general shift to the right. Rather than merging with more liberal groups, the rightward edge of the party structure split off to undertake its own political project.
Ironically, given the populist sentiments being sold by the radical right, the political order to which they aspire dares less democracy, not more.
While the late capitalist right acts as though it heralds an upsurge in popular fervour, its success actually derives from a hollowing out of the formal structures of democracy.
Ali’s analysis of a decade ago foresaw this hollowing out as part of a larger process that would obliterate meaningful ideological differences between centre-left and centre-right parties.
In his optimistic account, the resulting order would be disconnected from the vast majority of people and unresponsive to their needs. Although this could have radicalised people in a leftward direction, the reverse has happened.
Or rather, the reverse has apparently happened.
There has been radicalisation but at the upper rather than the lower end of income distribution. This radicalisation is not an authentic response to the rise of post-democracy. Instead, owners of capital have weaponised hostility to the extreme centre to rid themselves of the minimal restrictions imposed by postwar liberal democracy.
Ali is certainly correct in emphasising the capitulation by parties of the centre-left in creating the extreme centre. Right-wing billionaires have seen this failure as an invitation to pursue a more thorough reconfiguration of the system.
Viewed in this light, the populism that has apparently been driving the lurch to the right in Europe and North America over the past decade is largely a mirage.
To be sure, there was definitely an upsurge of populist anger following the massive redistribution of wealth that followed the crisis of 2008. But the initial tendency of this anger to inspire a critique of capitalism has been redirected into a critique of formal democracy.
We can thank the libertarian right for this shift. Its commitment to liberty is refracted through the lenses of race, gender, and wealth. The perception that ordinary people drive this movement is the result of media-assisted astroturfing, not any widely held popular sentiment.
Over the past six months, the United States has taken the lead in this process. The new Trump Administration has targeted the career civil service for massive cuts. The president and his associates believe that government officials, committed to the smooth and predictable operation of the system, derailed his endlessly touted efforts to “drain the Swamp” during his first term.
This process has also been amplified by a growing tendency to ignore existing law, justified by reference to substantive democracy. “The president was elected by the people!” Donald Trump’s supporters declare, ignoring the fact that only a third of eligible voters chose him.
The fact that Trump won the election would be irrelevant in a functional democracy, where nobody is too powerful to be held accountable for lawbreaking.
Looking back at The Extreme Centre, it’s clear that Ali was right about the leftward edge of liberalism’s capitulation to global capitalism. This has left the parliamentary left with little or no traction with the electorate.
In light of this, it is unsurprising that Keir Starmer recently came out in public mouthing lines from British fascist Enoch Powell. After all, where else does he have to go? Since Labour’s only selling point is that it will make the dysfunctional British economy a little less dysfunctional, he needs something else to talk about.
This is the situation across Europe and North America in microcosm. The political right creates chaos, shifting the goalposts to refashion every failure as a victory. Meanwhile, the centre-left either curses in constipated rage or proffers a somewhat saner version of the xenophobic libertarianism dominating the right.
Although some of The Extreme Centre’s predictions did not come true, its diagnosis of what was happening in 2015 is quite accurate. Ali didn’t see how far off the rails things would go or how quickly they would do so. But he understood that the mainstream centre-left would fail to provide meaningful resistance to this process.
It is strange to recognise that we might be better off today if conditions had remained the same as they were in 2015. As bad as things had become then, they are vastly worse today.
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Photograph courtesy of Gary Knight. Published under a Creative Commons License.