For a while, it seemed that “centrism” was back on the agenda. In the US, Howard Schultz, the “burnt coffee magnate”, was considering a run for Presidency and was only one of a long queue that included Beto O’Rourke and Michael Bloomberg (who has decided not to run). In Britain, renegade Labour and Tory MPs founded The Independent Group, designed to coral a fragmented anti-Brexit sentiment in into a movement, replete with the usual platitudes about a “new type of politics”. Every centrist potential presidential candidate is feted by the media as an answer to Trump and AOC; the TIG has actually had success in forcing policy changes from the Labour Party. It seems that, three years after the events that led to 2016, and two decades after the Third Way of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, sensible politics was hoisting itself back into the public consciousness and relevance.

But here’s the problem: people don’t actually want “centrism”. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have taken onboard the very real desire for non-partisanship and somehow mangled this interpretation into support for centrism which is about as far from reality as they could be. It is unclear whether this misunderstanding is at least rooted in good faith about what ordinary people want, or whether it is part of a more sinister move to hijack the non-partisan agenda into something more appealing to those who only ever considered Trump and Brexit as aberrations. Indeed, from some parts of the spectrum supporters of these centrist trends are even preparing themselves for failure, by raising the red herring of “polarisation”. According to this, it is the public’s problem – they are too polarised these days to accept the logic of centrism. Shame on them.

There are two principal reasons why centrism is destined for failure, and none are the problem of the electorate. They are rooted in the two things which centrism stands for. First is compromise. There is some truth to the idea that the electorate is too polarised for compromise today; but this has always been the case. In politics, compromise has rarely been highly regarded since it inevitably results in the worst of all worlds, and usually are a by-word for kicking the can down the road. The Missouri Compromise or “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” come to mind for US history. The Barnett Formula, the EVEL answer to the West Lothian Question, and even the British opt-outs at Maastricht in 1992, are cases in point for Britain. The fact is that compromise is rarely satisfactory and tells of an inherently unstable equilibrium which as yet still needs to be resolved. Voters are quite tired of this given the questions thrown up by two decades of globalisation, automation and the 2008 financial crisis, and compromise is not going to answer them.

The second reason is that “centrism” above all (be it consciously or surreptitiously) is about defending the status quo – the exact opposite of popular opinion today. Whether Schultz or the TIG, advocates of the new politics are effectively trying to preserve a now discredited consensus around major issues of the day including free trade of the sort we have come to know, liberal immigration, a focus on GDP, the pursuit of “growth” and exports, keeping interest rates and inflation low and above all the protection of large corporates rather than SMEs. But that is from a pre-2016 world. Today the electorate, having been woke by the events of that year want something quite different – in a weird way, what they want is not centrism but extremism at both ends. Yes, they want to break the deadlock of existing parties, but they don’t want to return the consensus of old. Yes, they do not want the old “Left” vs “Right”, but neither do they want the compromise and consensus of the old “Centre”.

I have previously referred to what I call the Physics and Philosophy paradigm, and it is perhaps worth explaining more here. The problem with studying physics and philosophy is that each seems so different at the beginning and none of it makes sense until the loop completes at the end. Nothing makes sense until everything makes sense – whether in academia, business or anything else.

Politics, too, is like this. At the beginning, one only sees things labelled for us as “Left” and “Right”, and the expanse of the political firmament is limited by lines of sight from traditional perspectives. Hence, at the beginning of 2016, this is what the American political world imagined it was seeing:

What we do not see at first glance is how these two ostensibly opposed directions may link up again at the other end of the circle. Yet if we tilt the planet up to peak behind, it is revealed what the political firmament had become by the end of the that year:

Trump and Sanders were not, at the end, all too far away from each other in many of the crucial questions being posed on a number of areas such as trade, international companies and overseas cash-piles, and even infrastructure and healthcare. Both had moved right around the planetary orbit until they almost met again at the other side – the dark side of the planet invisible to the conventional commentariat sitting comfortably on the light side. And in that dark side are all the commonalities which are so hard to digest, principally amongst them the sense that the starting point for policy had to be the domestic and national, not the trade or people beyond the borders. In a sense, Trump and Sanders were in the “centre”, but a “centre” a world away from the “centre” prescribed by Bloomberg. The old centrists are wrong: their centrism was not being rejected due to cultural, regional and partisan polarization – it was not because the two sides were too different, but rather because they were too similar.

And this, ultimately, is where we are today. The TIG’s polling numbers have dramatically collapsed in the face of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, declining from the mid-teens to low single digits since the party’s inception earlier this year. Bloomberg never ran. Howard Schultz has been non-committal about a presidential campaign and Democrats have been begging him not to run; the likes of known centrist Amy Klobuchar are failing to gain traction whilst complete outsiders like Andrew Yang are doing so. Yang, if anyone, is the 2020 heir to the 2016 dark-side-of-planet movement.

“Centrism” is an idea of a bygone age, one where the recent past was a story of success, where defending the status quo seemed like common sense and where just a small amount of compromise would be enough to navigate through foreseeable difficulties. But politics has changed in the last few years. Whether you are for or against Brexit, or whether you are for or against Trump or Sanders or Andrew Yang, the stasis engendered by the old “centre” is as irrelevant as defeating Communism or the Nazis. Although much of the mainstream media remain seduced by the familiarity of what was, voters on both sides have moved on; and most of them have now marched so far around the unseen side of the planet that only candidates who themselves see the future, will be positioned to reap its rewards. Centrism is dead; long live the Dark Side!