For thirty years, centre-left politics operated according to a seemingly immutable electoral rule: move towards the centre and you move towards power.
However, as I argued in Part One, that centre was never fixed. Thatcher and Reagan shifted the economic boundaries of mainstream politics; Blair, Clinton and the Third Way subsequently adapted centre-left politics to the world they inherited. What began as an understandable and extraordinarily successful electoral strategy gradually hardened into political orthodoxy.
But orthodoxies survive only while they continue to work.
Something is now changing
Across Britain and America, voters who have experienced two decades of weak improvements in living standards, increasingly unaffordable housing, insecure employment and struggling public services are being asked to accept that substantial intervention in the economic settlement would be dangerously radical.
Not surprisingly, increasing numbers of them appear unconvinced.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they are becoming socialist. The evidence suggests something potentially rather more disruptive to current politics: they may be becoming anti-settlement.
And if this is indeed happening, the great electoral assumption underpinning centrism begins to unravel.
The question is no longer simply whether moving away from the centre is electorally dangerous. It is whether remaining there (the centre) is becoming equally, or more, dangerous too.
This may explain the common thread running between places as different as New York, Michigan, and Makerfield. It isn’t primarily ideological. It is material. Simply put, our everyday stuff matters.
Housing costs too much. Childcare costs too much. Energy costs too much. Public transport costs too much. Secure employment feels less secure. Public services struggle. Younger generations increasingly question whether they will ever be able to acquire the homes and economic security enjoyed by their parents. Meanwhile, wealth continues to accumulate disproportionately at the top, while increasing numbers of households struggle on low incomes (World Inequality Report 2026).
For millions of people, the settlement defended by political moderates has therefore ceased producing outcomes that feel remotely moderate. Imagine being 30, spending an enormous proportion of your salary on rent, while being told that intervention in the housing market is “radical”. You might reasonably wonder who exactly the radicals are.
Is it the politicians who are proposing change?
Or is it those defending an economic settlement in which the price of an essential human need has raced away from earnings?
That inversion matters because centrism’s great political strength was always its claim to realism. It wasn’t necessarily inspiring, it didn’t need to be, it was sensible, responsible, electable. And publicly, at least, its promise was that asset owners and workers alike could share in rising prosperity.
But once the status quo itself starts producing outcomes people regard as unreasonable, defending the status quo ceases automatically to look reasonable.
Mamdani understood the question.
This is perhaps the most important lesson from New York. Mamdani did not win because hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers suddenly spent their evenings reading Marx. He made his brand of socialism remarkably mundane.
Can you afford your rent?
Can you afford childcare?
Can you afford to travel around your own city?
Can you afford to live where you work?
His answers – rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare, and greater taxation of wealth – were unquestionably left-of-centre. But the questions weren’t. They were simple questions about everyday life.
And his generational support is significant. Around three-quarters of under-30 voters backed Mamdani. That doesn’t establish that younger Americans have suddenly become socialist. Something more interesting may be happening. A generation which has experienced capitalism principally through rent, debt, insecure employment, expensive housing, and repeated economic shocks may simply feel considerably less obliged to defend the political settlement inherited from parents that supported this social model.
Their rebellion is therefore better understood as anti-settlement before it is understood as socialism.
And to a socialist that distinction should matter enormously. Because the left doesn’t have a monopoly on these issues.
Burnhamism without the label
This is why Burnham may ultimately be more interesting to British politics than a straightforward socialist revival would be. He offers a rejection of important centrist assumptions without requiring voters to describe themselves as socialist.
Before the Makerfield by-election, Survation found Burnham leading Reform by 51% to 23% among 18-to-34-year-olds, although the pollster rightly cautioned that this subgroup had a small sample.
Then came the actual election.
Labour’s vote increased by almost ten percentage points, Burnham took c. 55%, against Reform’s c. 35%, on an increased voter turnout. Perhaps most strikingly, this happened after Reform had beaten Labour heavily across Wigan in the preceding local elections.
Burnham’s political instinct is important here. His argument is essentially that Britain cannot spreadsheet its way back to prosperity and that government should intervene. It needs to:
Invest.
Build.
Improve transport.
Create housing.
Develop regional economies.
Use public institutions.
And make economic growth mean something tangible in places such as Burnley, Blackpool, and Blackburn rather than announcing an improvement in national GDP and then assume that people in the deprived regions of the UK will eventually notice or care.
This is not revolutionary socialism. Which is precisely the point.
If Burnham can construct an electoral coalition around a more interventionist social democracy, the threat to traditional centrism may be greater rather than smaller. This strategy would suggest to voters that they don’t have to become socialists to conclude the assumption of the past thirty years – that neoliberalism was working for everyone – has run out of road.
The paradox of electability
For decades, perhaps the most powerful argument deployed against the left has consisted of one word.
Electability.
You may believe in these things (socialism), the argument goes, but ordinary voters don’t. Better, therefore, to compromise before the election than afterwards, when abandoned promises can leave governments accused of dishonesty and opponents saying: ‘we told you so.’
There is considerable truth to this.
Political parties exist to win elections. A beautifully pure manifesto rejected by 80% of voters achieves precisely nothing. Blair’s defenders are entitled to point towards three consecutive general-election victories, including two landslides. But electability becomes intellectually lazy when yesterday’s electoral strategy is endlessly recycled as tomorrow’s immutable law.
What if the electorate changes?
What if the economy changes?
What if the consequences of the policies voters once accepted change?
And, most importantly:
What if remaining in the centre becomes the electoral risk?
Mamdani demonstrates that policies conventionally described as dangerously left-wing can become electoral assets when attached to problems voters actually experience. Burnham suggests something similar can happen without adopting the socialist label. And recent Democratic primaries suggest dissatisfaction extends beyond either man. Associated Press analysis following victories by El-Sayed and Flanagan – including the defeat of socialist Francesca Hong – concluded that Democratic voters may be expressing something broader than a uniform ideological shift: they want change.
That change may prove much more disruptive to the orthodoxy of centrism than a straightforward socialist revival. But there are warning signs.
This is where anybody preparing the celebratory banners for the socialist revolution should put the marker pen down. Wisconsin Democrats have just selected Milwaukee County executive David Crowley over democratic socialist Francesca Hong for governor. Crowley is a moderate.
He narrowly defeated Hong despite the wider progressive momentum elsewhere in the Democratic primaries. And that result matters enormously to this argument. Voters aren’t participating in some neat historical migration from centrism to socialism:
Sometimes they choose Mamdani.
Sometimes El-Sayed.
Sometimes Flanagan.
Sometimes Burnham.
And sometimes they choose Crowley.
Centrists can, and will, continue winning elections. But that isn’t the same thing as centrism continuing to define the boundaries within which everybody else must operate.
What may be dying isn’t every centrist candidate – it is centrism’s monopoly on electability.
The right understood the revolt first.
There is another uncomfortable problem for the left. If voters are rejecting the settlement that comes with centrism, there is, self-evidently, absolutely no guarantee they will reject it towards the left.
Trump and those around him very much understood the exhaustion with establishment politics long before most mainstream Democrats. Farage understands it here in Britain. Their diagnoses are radically different from those offered by democratic socialists. But they begin with precisely the same observation:
Something isn’t working.
The insurgent left attributes failure principally to the distribution of economic power; the insurgent right attributes it substantially to immigration, globalisation, cultural liberalism and political elites.
Centrism too often reflects both that the system basically works but simply requires better management, some refining of policy, a tweak here, a little adjustment over there and then before you know it, the sunlit uplands of prosperity for all will be before us.
This view from the centrists is an increasingly difficult proposition to maintain when, within the lived experience of many, the system itself seems to be the problem. This is why describing younger voters simply as “moving left” misses something fundamental.
They may instead be becoming anti-centrist. And the political battle now emerging is over who gets to explain why the settlement failed.
The centre cannot define reality forever.
None of this means neoliberalism produced nothing worthwhile. Globalisation generated enormous economic gains. Markets remain extraordinarily effective mechanisms for organising large parts of economic life. New Labour redistributed income, reduced child poverty, introduced the minimum wage and invested heavily in public services.
The neoliberal revolution also changed the distribution of economic and political power from a broadly matched balance between left and right to one where the right gained far greater ascendancy. Hence left-wing parties became centre left, as they confronted that new reality and adapted themselves to it. That adaptation became the Third Way. The Third Way became centrism. And eventually centrism forgot that it had been an adaptation at all.
It simply became the way serious politics was done.
But political settlements survive because enough people continue receiving something from them or at least are convinced enough that they are. Britain now has a generation whose economic prospects increasingly depend upon parental circumstances. The great property boom has amplified wealth inequalities between families and transmitted some of those inequalities into the next generation (IFS – How do house prices affect social mobility).
Meanwhile, millions of working-age families have experienced two decades of extraordinarily weak improvements in living standards. (Resolution Foundation – Lifting Living Standards)
Eventually people are entitled to ask what exactly they are being asked to conserve. And that is when something dangerous happens to centrism.
It loses its historic right to define what counts as reasonable.
Public investment suddenly doesn’t sound especially radical.
Building public housing doesn’t sound revolutionary.
Stronger workers’ rights don’t sound like 1970s nostalgia.
Making buses cheaper doesn’t sound like Marxism.
And taxing accumulated wealth to fund services starts sounding less extraordinary to people who possess little of it.
Not because everybody has become socialist.
Because the definition of moderation is moving again.
So, is the centre dead?
No. Wisconsin should prevent us writing the obituary. But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Centrism arose as the centre-left’s successful adaptation to the age of neoliberalism. What happens to that centrism when voters stop accepting neoliberalism’s outcomes?
Mamdani offers one answer.
El-Sayed and Flanagan offer variations upon it.
And, regrettably, far-right populists do too.
Burnham offers something potentially more consequential for Britain: an economically interventionist social democracy capable of attracting voters without asking them to identify with democratic socialism at all. And Trump and Farage provide the warning. If the centre cannot answer economic dissatisfaction, somebody else will.
For thirty years the left was repeatedly told that challenging the neoliberal settlement standpoint would make it unelectable. But a generation has now reached political maturity with less property, weaker economic security, slower growth in incomes and a diminishing confidence that tomorrow will necessarily be more prosperous than today.
And they are beginning to ask a rather awkward question.
Unelectable to whom?
The centre isn’t dead. But the political-economic settlement which created the modern centre may finally be losing its grip.
And if that settlement continues failing to provide material progress for enough of the people living within it, centrism may discover that the greatest threat to its electability no longer lies to its left.
It lies in remaining exactly where it is.
Is the political centre dead? Pt 1
Why the politics that replaced post WWII socialism appears to be running out of road – Pt 1: How neoliberalism...
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