For three decades or more, politicians and pundits have been proclaiming the end of the left-right spectrum. The terms left, right and center, they say, are irrelevant or are rapidly becoming so. They are meaningless descriptions of ideas, policies and practices.
This has always been an exaggeration at best – concocted to serve the interests of economic and political elites intent on diminishing challenges to the status quo. The challenges that concern them come from the left.
For proponents of a “third way” – Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, for example, and other like-minded figures associated with historically leftwing or left-leaning political parties – blathering on about the irrelevance of the old spectrum was a more or less transparent subterfuge, part of a larger, generally successful, effort to shift politics to the right.