Everywhere liberalism is in crisis. Populism of left and right continues to surge unabated across the West, and European cities burn in a conflagration long in the making. Here in England, we still cling to the threadbare rags of our once-merited sense of national exceptionalism. In the dystopian science fiction film Children of Men, a future Britain without children and bedeviled by ethnic strife indulges in this cruelly ironic pantomime — a propaganda film announces that as governments world over topple, “Only Britain soldiers on”, even as a civil war rages outside.
There’s something of this morbid post-modern reliving of the war-time spirit at work in today’s “radical centrists”. These are figures wholly detached from history and reality, whimsically bestriding such petty details as geopolitical crises or material conditions like so many weightless colossi. These are the sort of souls — the happy few — who cheered on The Economist’s endorsement of the Liberal Democrat party in 2017, in the name of “the pro-market, open-borders internationalism that has stood Britain in such good stead for the last few decades”. If this is not enough to induce bitter laughter, consider their excitement over “a radical centrist movement as has happened in France”.