Secularism is supposed to be at the heart of free thought and expression, not an excuse to suppress them

Written over the door of the Faculte de Droit in Paris is the promise of liberty, equality and brotherhood from the secular state to its citizens, yet secularism still faces accusations of overbearing paternalism.

Secularism, at its most literal, means the separation of church and state. At the core of the principal is the idea that no religion - or any other formal, organised, set of beliefs - should play an integrated role in the governance or administration of civic institutions, so as to maintain their neutrality.

However, it is also intended to guarantee to citizens the freedom of conscience, and through that policy give support to freedom of thought. So as much as it means religion staying out of public administration, it also meant the state leaving personal beliefs, including religion, as a private matter.

How that principle is applied in practice, in modern times, has come under a spotlight in the past week thanks to the response of some to a rising fear in Europe of fundamentalist Islam. In France, local government in some areas have passed prohibitions against certain kinds of outward religious expression - the most notable result so far being the clamp down on 'burkinis' (Amrani, 2016).

One thing is absolutely clear. Issuing legal commands as to what women can and cannot wear does not convey "la légitime et saine laïcité", the legitimate and healthy secularity, or the guarantee of the freedom of conscience, promised by the French secularism that descends from the 1905 laws.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the world today is not the world into which those particular laws where issued. Listed amongst the laws of 1905, almost paradoxically next to the freedom of conscience, was the prohibition of public displays of religion.

The France that had the 1905 law applied to it was a country deeply entwined with the Catholic Church. The entangling influence of the church was deeply resented and the emergence of laicite came hand in hand with a history of anti-clericalism that pushed back and tried to wrestle society out of the grip of the clergy..

The Left bloc government that advocated secularism, formed by Radicals and Socialists, wanted in particular to end the influence of Catholicism over education - which had been traditionally provided almost exclusively by the clergy. Yet the broken clerical influence was simply replaced with that of the centralised state.

As much as laicite, and in particular secular education, was a republican and humanist project, it was also deeply nationalist. In early twentieth century France, secularism was at the centre of a broader policy of 'modernisation', that sought to establish and project the power of a centralised nation-state - seeking to make the civic state the centre of a society with a singular, integrated and unifying, language and culture.

In modern Europe, secularism has largely succeeded, yet it has done so alongside the advance of the centralised nation-states and nowhere in Europe has secularism and the nation-state been so heavily intertwined as in France - as to represent a major component of the 'national values' and national identity.

The rise of extremist and fundamentalist religion, and extremist and fundamentalist ideologies - that seek to play an active role in government to directly impose their values on citizens - do call for careful thought. The Nationalist Right's answers to these complex matters has been to call for a more strict imposition of 'national values' - and in France that has meant using secularism as the means to legitimise an overbearing policy.

This is a threat to the principles of secularism. The independence of the functions of government from any interest group is a worthy idea. The freedom of conscience is essential. As George Clemenceau - former Prime Minister of France, a radical and a contemporary to the 1905 laws - argued that you do not get liberty by fighting one tyranny with another tyranny.

Clemenceau wrote of his certainty that "apprenticeship in liberty can only be served through liberty" and that to "struggle against the church there is only one means - the liberty of the individual". Support for free thought, openness and tolerance are the progressive response to closed tyrannical intolerance. Stooping to the regulation of citizens' clothing just swaps one degrading paternalism for another.

Around the World: The Trump Insurgency

Donald Trump chose the Republican Elephant as the mount for his insurgent populist campaign that has ridden the divisive politics of the far-right deep into the American political system.

With the two main parties having settled - which might be an almost too painfully apt expression - on their respective candidates, it is now established who will stand, and for what they will stand, in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Hillary Clinton will face Donald Trump - but only on the surface will it be a contest between Democrat and Republican. Beneath the party façade the Presidential race reflects a struggle that is a clear pattern emerging across the Western world, seen clearly in most of the recent elections in Europe, between the mistrusted mainstream and a Far Right insurgency.

Whether it was the Brexit referendum or the French regional elections, in this time of crisis progressives have found themselves having to wrestle with a difficult proposition: whether to oppose an imperfect mainstream at the risk of inviting in the Far Right, or to stand with the hated establishment, itself struggling for legitimacy against authoritarianism and sectarianism.

In the US, Bernie Sanders and his supporters tried to capture control of the mainstream Democrats so that the Left might lead from the front. Having failed, they're now left struggling with what to do in the face of Trump's mirrored insurgency succeeding in its capture of the rival Republicans. Despite Sanders' endorsement of Hillary, many of his supporters remain unconvinced.

Trump's insurgency has increased the sense of urgency, if not yet panic, across the Centre and Left. With no hint of irony, despite the hyperbole, even moderate commentators are expressing genuine fears for the future of American democracy (Finchelstein, 2016; Noah, 2016; Collier, 2016) - perhaps a part of which is an attempt to motivate the Left to fall in behind Hillary by stressing the seriousness of the fight ahead.

Political sensibility suggests that moderacy will ultimately win out - that Trump will eventually, whatever his rhetoric, have to bow to political realism. But that sensibility is cold comfort.

The most dangerous thing Trump has done is to force the coalescence of a constituency, previously scattered and with no common identity, that is persuaded by and supportive of authoritarian values (Taub, 2016). Trump himself, whatever his reactionary verbiage, is less of a concern than what this organised political movement, given common identity, might yet be used to accomplish.

The Republicans, the Grand Old Party (GOP), had already been through the long slow process, from Lincoln's time onwards, of coming under conservative control. But since the 1960s, conservatives have decisively consolidated their control over the party - including inviting the influx of Southern Democrats spurned by the embrace of the civil rights movement by the Democrats.

The consolidation definitively moved the GOP away from the Republicanism of Lincoln toward something more resembling the Republicanism of Jefferson - a parochial populist anti-establishment, or rather anti-elite, politics, with a strict and restrictive adherence to the constitution. Recent decades saw that combined with a sectarian Nativism and a politicised Evangelism.

What Trump has now rallied about the Republican Party is support for a popular authoritarianism able to cut across the distinctions, separating members of the coalition headed 'Republican', with a methodology: signified by a language that is brash, abrasive and often violent.

It is not surprising in the face of Trump's rhetoric that people have drawn connections between him and fascism. The theme of violence against others, against opponents, violence and conflict as decisive social positives, was a crucial tenet of fascism and has been inherited by its more 'democratic' successor populism (Finchelstein, 2016).

The Left and Centre getting behind the mainstream to oppose the rise of these violent ideologies is only the first step. Defeating it at one election is not the end of the matter. It does not address the reasons why people would seek out an abrasive, anti-establishment, anti-elite, strongman leader in the first place. The concerns of those voters must be understood, contextualised and addressed with positive solutions.

The angry, authoritarian-supporting, voters who would back a man like Donald Trump are not the enemies of progressives. For the most part they're victims of economic conditions, looking with misguided hope to strength and might for deliverance. The job of progressives is to extend a hand, show a better way to build a society and to expose the Far-Right programme for the fraud it is.

Road to Super Tuesday: The US Presidential Primaries have so far been a tale of outsiders rocking the establishment

Texas, with the most delegates, will be the key battleground come Super Tuesday. Photograph: Texas State Capitol in Austin from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

Tuesday 1st of March marks a key moment in the long and winding US Presidential election. So-called Super Tuesday will see more than ten states, including key state Texas, declare their choices for Democratic and Republican candidates for the Presidency (Weiland, 2016).

Going into Super Tuesday, the primaries for both parties are much closer than previously predicted. The tight races are largely thanks to their being contested by the outsider candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are upsetting prior expectations and putting the old two-party system to the sword.

The 2016 US Presidential race was supposed to be a straight race between two clear favourites - one from each party. From amongst the Democrats there was Hillary Clinton, while from the Republicans there was Jeb Bush.

Hillary was a former First Lady, as wife of Bill, and in her own right Secretary of State and a long time Senator. Jeb is the son of one President and the Brother of another, with executive experience as Governor of Florida. The rest appeared to be a formality.

Contrary to first impressions, however, the supporters of neither party where in the mood for a coronation. There were, from the first, insurgent candidacies, but they were paid little heed and given long odds.

Commentary watching the Republican nomination race, in particular, found something between fascination and amusement in how long the list of candidates for the GOP nomination was becoming (Gabbatt, 2015). Where analysis fell on the respective lists in depth, some where given more credibility than others.

Early runner Scott Walker was one such candidate. The Governor of Wisconsin has a controversial record that has proven popular with fiscal conservatives in the GOP (Pilkington & Sullivan, 2015) - including spending cuts and confrontations with unions.

Walker's run for the Republican Party nomination certainly made a lot of sense. As one part of a Wisconsin trio, along with GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan and GOP Party Chairman Reince Priebus, that are trying to set the agenda for the modern Republican Party (Balz, 2011; Healy & Martin; 2015).

The Democrat's version was Martin O'Malley - who was famously the inspiration for the Baltimore-based TV show The Wire. O'Malley entered as the third runner alongside, and 'moderate' alternative to, democratic socialist Sanders and the scandal mired Clinton, clearly hoping to be seen as someone more acceptable to a broader middle ground of voters (Tabor, 2015).

However, all bets were upset by Trump and Sanders.

There is little to be said about Donald Trump from a progressive view, other than to note the apparent popularity of his brand of being offensive to people from almost every demographic group.

Bernie Sanders started the Democratic race with isolated support in only a few Northeastern states and lay nearly 60 points behind Clinton (Daily Kos, 2015). Yet by the Nevada caucus the Vermont Senator was just 5 points adrift (Lewis et al, 2016).

Yet both outside runners still face barriers beyond the Democratic-Republican establishment itself.

Trump's divisive message has kept him stuck in the mid 30s in the percentage polls - although in Nevada on Saturday he did break the 40% barrier (The Guardian, 2016). Meanwhile the more 'mainstream' candidates have together pulled in over 50% over numerous polls.

Coming from almost the opposite direction, Sanders has struggled to get his message out beyond his core of young and working class voters. South Carolina showed this with abundant clarity as Hillary Clinton won 74% of the vote and overwhelmingly with voters who were not white (Walsh, 2016). Clinton, backed overwhelming by the party elite, has campaigned smartly and is so far holding back the rising popular tide.

Regardless of the barriers in their way, the outsiders have none-the-less shaken up the establishment.

This is demonstrated most clearly in the Republican race where mainstream favourite Jeb Bush's campaign ended in complete failure in South Carolina (BBC, 2016), when he dropped out with little to show for millions in fundraising. Marco Rubio, the next to be annointed by the GOP mainstream, inherits a deficit to Trump that it will take huge momentum to overhaul (Stokols & Palmer, 2016).

Super Tuesday will give the first major indications of whether the insurgent candidacies will have the momentum to topple their respective party establishments. Even if the party elite see off the challengers, there doesn't seem to be a positive outcome likely for them.

At best for the Democratic-Republican establishment, it will likely see off a strong opposition run only to be fatally undermined. As seen elsewhere, like in France, the mainstream will limp on hounded by outside forces that sense weakness and opportunity. At worst, the two-party system that has governed the US will not have been broken apart, but rather hacked and hijacked.

Iowa Caucus: How did the establishment Democratic-Republican system lose control of the 2016 US presidential election?

Abraham Lincoln was the first President from the Republican Party. A liberal and a centrist, whose party believed in civic responsibility, individualism and a liberal reading of the constitution. Photograph: Statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

The Iowa Caucus, tonight, will mark the true beginning of the 2016 US Presidential Race as the point at which there will finally be some real data. So far the Presidential campaign has been a strange and controversial affair, with much to be set straight by the nominations process in Iowa.

On the Democratic side, there is now a two-way race where the nomination had looked like being little more than a formal hurdle for Hillary Clinton  (Jacobs, 2015). That was until Bernie Sanders, Senator for Vermont and a self-described democratic socialist, entered the race.

Quietly at first, starting some fifty or sixty percentage points behind Clinton, Sander's campaign has gathered momentum as thousands have turned out to hear him speak (Roberts, 2015; Roberts, 2015{2}). While support for Sanders - beyond a few high-polling constituencies - has been doubted, he has nonetheless been developing into the Democrat's anti-establishment candidate (Silver, 2015; Karp, 2016).

On the Republican side, they too are experiencing an anti-establishment insurgency. With an initial list of more than a dozen candidates, the process of holding debates was complicated enough (Gabbatt, 2015). Yet Donald Trump's candidacy quickly turned the nomination race into something not far short of a farce.

The potential candidates have struggled for air time, even split across two debates in the shape of an undercard and a main contest (Taylor, 2015). As the so-called moderates have struggled, Trump has stood out as the loudest and clearest candidate - even if he has been repulsive and offensive (Lewis, 2015).

Trump represents the toxic stew that the Republican Party has become, with the extreme Religious Right seeming less offensive by comparison with Trump. So deeply have the Republicans become embroiled in acquiescing to their own loudest and most deeply partisan supporters that, as put by one of the early establishment favourites Jeb Bush, it might almost be necessary for a Republican to lose in the primaries in order to win the general election (Mishak, 2015).

For both parties, insurgent figures are upsetting what was supposed to be a slick machine. Yet the fact that the United States' Democratic-Republican establishment is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of the political system, as to be virtually unshakeable, seems to have invited this situation.

Various movements, unable to muscle in alongside those two elder statesmen, seem intent on seizing control of those parties themselves first as an entry point. The big question is, what opened the establishment's back door in the first place?

The Party of Lincoln

Photograph: Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

From its founding, the Republican Party dominated American politics, right up until the New Deal coalitions of the 1930s. For most of that period Lincoln's party, in European terms, where Liberals. They stood for individualism, free markets, a constitutionalist stance consistent with the liberal belief in the rule of law, public education and were brought together as abolitionists, wishing to bring an end to slavery (Wheare, 1948). They also carried an interest in state action in the form of tariffs and public investment, inherited from their Federalists and Whig predecessors.

As a result, their members and supporters were a diverse group. From African-Americans, both free and liberated, to businessmen, small business owners and factory workers, to the white working class (Cornwell, 2016) - of a number of backgrounds including protestants and Germans who had come to the United States following the defeat of the radicals, republicans, suffragists and revolutionaries in Europe's Springtime of the Peoples uprising in 1848 (Rapport, 2008).

But the party of Abraham Lincoln were also centrists. Lincoln in particular believed deeply in civic virtues. His party leadership and Presidency were typical of those values, as he sought balance and compromise between progressive and conservative positions, between the popular will and individual rights, in order to hold together his party's divergent factions - ranging from radical abolitionists to constitutional conservatives.

Yet when Lincoln was murdered, only ten years after the founding of the party, the equilibrium was lost. The radicals sought to punish the South and pressed on with reconstruction, enforced by the military, while the conservatives sought a swift reconciliation. That internal divide came to an end with the diminishment of the radical faction due to corruption, splits, an economic depression and a disputed election that led to a tawdry compromise - ending reconstruction and abandoning the South, along with many freed former slaves.

The party then settled down to supporting business with high tariffs, encouragement for industrialisation and modernisation and investment in infrastructure like railroads. Yet the party was never far from the latest row between progressive and conservative factions - such as on prohibition, which drove less pietist Protestants out of the party, or Theodore Roosevelt leaving to found the Progressive Party, which proposed forward-thinking reforms like women's suffrage and comprehensive social security.

The New Deal Coalition

What must have seemed like a clear run to the Presidency, has become for Hillary Clinton a complicated game of placating popular discontent from her position within the establishment. Photograph: Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally at UW-Milwaukee by WisPolitics (License) (Cropped)

The Great Depression brought the era of Republican dominance to an end. It also signalled the beginning of a dramatic shift for the Democrats. Over the next thirty years the party would go from being dominated by deeply conservative, nationalist and sectarian - to outright segregationist - forces in the South, to the new home for all progressives, from liberals and centrists to social democrats and trade unionists.

In order to provide a positive and interventionist response to the Great Depression, Franklin D Roosevelt assembled a grand coalition that combined the Democrats' core support - white, southern and conservative and including many extreme nationalists, with whom the New Deal did not rest easily (The Economist, 2013) - with many groups. At the heart of it all, though, where the working class (The Economist, 2011).

Roosevelt, by reaching across political boundaries, started a shift that opened up the possibility of the Democrats reaching new voters which broke the party out of their dependence upon their narrow conservative base (Jenkins, 2003). That in turn would make the Civil Rights Act feasible, as the Democrats could afford to alienate and effectively cast out the toxic political support of the white, racist, Southern Democrats.

Embracing the role of a progressive party is, however, not without its drawbacks. It comes with high expectations. And like elsewhere in the world, mainstream progressives, like the social democrats in Europe, have often faced criticism for being too tight with the establishment and too slow to bring about reform.

While part of that is surely the logjam that is the American political establishment, there is plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democrat's failure to argue for a better alternative for America (Jones, 2016). Those disappointments lead to disaffection, which can lead to anti-establishment movements.

As a big tent, with little alternative for those seeking change, all of those hopes and all of that energy is funnelled through the Democratic Party. So when a candidate like Bernie Sanders emerges to give those frustrations a candidate and a voice, the traditional party hierarchy has to start trembling - as happened with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party leadership, where the establishment backed candidates struggled to inspire with their calls for practical politics in the face of a hopeful and optimistic message from an insurgent candidate to enthused supporters.

Much as Corbyn's opposition were seen as the heirs of the New Labour establishment, Hillary Clinton, as the partner of a former President, a long time Senator and Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, is undoubtedly - despite being a woman - seen as a member of the establishment (The Guardian, 2016). Finding a way over that hurdle will likely come to dominate her Presidential campaign.

The Southern Strategy

The struggling campaign of the so-called moderate Jeb Bush is symptomatic of a Republican Party hijacked by narrow, hard right interests. Photograph: Former Governor Jeb Bush speaking with supporters at a town hall meeting at the FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa by Gage Skidmore (License) (Cropped)

The success of the Democrats in shaking off, with affirmative action, the chain around their necks that was a history of association with slavery, segregation and the suppression of rights, would become the roots of the problems for the Republicans today.

Seeking short term political advantage, the Republicans sought to appeal to those voters and interests who felt they had been abandoned by the Democrats over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Nichols, 2014). The Republicans isolated, alienated and drove out most of their remaining liberals to open themselves up to be the party of reaction.

That move has, after a century of the conservative faction attempting to assert its control, instead left the Republican Party as little more than a hollowed out shell. When the Republicans sought to pander to extreme, southern Christian Nationalists, welcoming them into the party in leadership positions, they killed off what little was left of the legacy of the Party of Lincoln.

Conservatives, in their short sighted pursuit of electoral gains, allowed the Religious Right, Christian Nationalists, to hijack the party in the long term, using the party's credibility and colours to promote their extreme causes. That extremism has begotten extremism, stoking up anger and division - only for candidates to then have to satisfy it later for the right to stay in office - driving the party ever further to the Right (Frum, 2011).

The result has been moderates, who are not really that moderate, struggling to even get a hearing at debates. Jeb Bush, for example. His immigration policy has shades of his moderate father's call to bring people out of the shadows, to stop making it illegal for decent people to work hard within the law or to have their children educated (Bush & Bolick, 2013; Lee, 2015).

But so-called moderates like Bush, or Marco Rubio, are outflanked and forced into a race to the bottom by candidates like Ted Cruz, a member of the Religious Right who has called for a bombardment of the Middle East (The Economist, 2016), or Carly Fiorina, who with no political experience and a questioned business acumen has compared herself to Margaret Thatcher (Lewis, 2015). All this does is force Republican candidates to put the narrow interests of party before the broader ones of the country.

That approach didn't work for Mitt Romney. As Barack Obama's challenger in the re-election year of 2012, Romney won soundly amongst the conservative and Evangelical Christian base of the modern Republican Party (Rove, 2015). Yet his narrow focus on helping the wealthy over the rest, his focus upon the party base over the country, dropped him short of the line (Scheiber, 2012).

The 2016 Election

Bernie Sanders is the heir of the Democrat's shift to embrace progressive politics through the 1930s and 1960s, and of modern progressive discontent with the establishment. Photograph: Bernie Sanders speaking at Hec Edmundson Pavillion in Seattle by Tiffany Von Arnim (License) (Cropped)

The Republican Party have turned a long way from the civic republicanism of their origins and it has helped fan political extremism - which looks likely to leave the established order in American politics weak and threatened. Not least from Donald Trump who looks likely to leave the Republican Party in the dirt just soon as he's done with them, having levered the party apart in the process.

In the Democrat camp, Clinton is hard pressed by the popular support for Bernie Sanders. Sanders is the only candidate in the race standing for a truly progressive alternative, earnestly wanting to create a more just, more equal America, in a country which is not open to such ideas. That is worthy of tremendous admiration. Yet it will also no doubt frighten the hard right.

For Clinton to top the polls in Iowa would be business as usual, crisis averted for the establishment. Likewise if a moderate candidate is able to step up for the Republicans. For a progressive alternative to break through the establishment, and get past hard right partisanship, would be a tough ask. As elsewhere around the world, the Presidential race looks like ultimately being a struggle between the establishment and an insurgent far right.

When the Centre is discredited only the Right benefits - the Left has no shortcuts, it has to build and engage to move forward

The advance of the far right Front National in France has given rise to fears for the future of European Unity. Photograph: France and EU-flag, somewhere in Dunkerque by Sebastian Fuss (License) (Cropped & Flipped)

Earlier this week, Marine Le Pen's Front National (FN) took a, sadly not entirely unexpected, lead in the first round of the French regional elections (Chrisafis, 2015). While by no means emphatic, with 28% of the vote, to 27% for the Centre-Right Republicans and 23% for the Centre-Left Socialists, the Far-Right party nonetheless holds a lead that is no joke - thanks to the majority bonus awarded to the leading party in each region.

It will be a cold comfort to progressives that Front National's success has been largely laid at the feet of the parties of the Centre (Nougayrede, 2015). The rise of FN has been described seen as the product of the failures of the parties of the political centre. Those parties are struggling, discredited by their failure to address France's long term problem of unemployment and the impact, and narrow rewards, of globalisation.

The transformist Centre parties, with their "conservative and social democratic modes of liberalism", have come to be seen as a 'complacent', 'insulated' and elite 'caste', and having laid the foundations for themselves to be supplanted by the Far-Right's more emotive and simplistic alternatives (Behr, 2015).

"No two countries have exactly analogous politics, but common threads run across Europe. The unifying dynamic appears to be the interaction of financial insecurity and the cultural detachment of governing elites from the governed... politicians of the technocratic centre are perceived as a caste apart, professionally complacent, insulated by hoarded privilege from the anxiety provoked in electorates by economic turbulence and abrupt demographic change..."

The fact that the Far-Right sit now on the doorstep of the establishment, so close to power in one of Europe's largest and most influential countries, has sparked fears of what the Centre's failure will entail for the broader European project (Betancour, 2015). The European system, a symbol of the time and effort required to build progressive institutions that break down borders and bring people together, was decades in the making - but appears now to be only years in the unravelling.

What is notable is that, as the Centre has collapsed, only the Right has really benefited. Meanwhile the Left has made few, if any, gains. In fact, in France, FN have largely made their initial inroads into the traditional heartlands of the Centre-Left Socialists (Nardelli, 2015). So the big questions for progressives are: Why? And, what can be done?

In France, the first steps taken in response by the scrambling Centre were to close ranks (Willsher, 2015). France returns to the polls for the second round today and in districts where Socialists trail in third place, the party has withdrawn candidates - falling back on tactical voting to ensure the victory of the least worst alternative (Chrisafis, 2015{2}). It also made the remarkable, though unrequited, suggestion of forming a Republican Front - uniting Centre-Left and Centre-Right - to hold back the rise of Front National.

From the perspective of those on the Left, it might be a lot easier to pour scorn on such a project than to become embroiled with discredited establishment's attempts to save their own necks. Yet becoming involved is precisely what some have proposed.

In an article based on a lecture he gave in 2013, before his adventure into political economics as Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis argued that only the Right ever benefits from breakdown and disorder (Varoufakis, 2015).

"If my prognosis is correct, and we are not facing just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome, the question that arises for radicals is this: should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come."

What Varoufakis touches upon is that progressive politics depends upon building things - like a free and open civic space, or the infrastructure for broadly available healthcare and welfare. These things that cannot be easily made or remade, but are all too easy to tear down. In contrast, social or institutional breakdown benefits the Right because it drives itself with simpler, emotive, even instinctual, constructs. Traditionalism, moralism, nationalism: these have the advantage of being old and familiar, and already deeply rooted in the identity of the audience.

For Varoufakis, when the Centre fails, the Left needs to acknowledge its weakness and take up the task of responsible government - including propping up elements of the old establishment, in order to save past progress and to have something left to reform.

"Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative."

Alexis Tsipras, Radical Left Prime Minister of Greece, has described any politician setting foot upon that road as needing to be pragmatic about what can be accomplished in government (from Horvat, 2013).

"I believe that today 'radical' is to try to be able to take responsibility for the people, to not be afraid of that, and at the same time to maintain in the democratic road, in the democratic way. To take the power for the people and to give it back to the people."

Yet Tsipras' approach, this pragmatic radicalism, has its critics. On the one hand, it plays an exhausting game with democratic institutions that can be easily become fatigued (Patrikarakos, 2015). On the other, buying into the game in order to achieve practical things comes with a risk of succumbing to its pressures and ultimately conforming (Anthony, 2015). Another concern with Tsipras' pragmatic approach, is that the line of thinking can very easily lead to the temptations of Blairism.

Just this week, Tony Blair himself took to the pages of The Spectator to offer a defence of the 'Blairist' approach (Perraudin, 2015). He was quick to point out the 'flaw' in his critics' thinking.

"In particular, significant elements of the Party saw the process of governing with all its compromises, pragmatism and embrace of changing times as implicit betrayal of our principles."

Blair's defence of his direction focusses tightly, as his defenders and successors often do, on being willing to make 'hard choices' in order to be in power - placing value on "aspiring to govern" over being a "fringe protest" (Blair, 2015).

Yet that attitude also features a dangerous obsession with basing practical politics in "reality". On the face of it, this is a call for rational politics, taking the world as what it is rather than the utopia you might wish it to be - to base policy, and the political moves used to achieve them, on the 'reality' of the world as you find it. The trouble is that, beneath the surface of this approach, what it really means is engaging in a deceitful game of playing on, and to, often incomplete or outright wrong public perceptions (Jones, 2015).

For those who feel New Labour wandered too far to the political Right, a big part of the problem was that they had become anchored to 'reality', largely purveyed by a conservative media, and played to popular prejudice in search of an easy route to power. In the process simply turning the Centre and Left into a vehicle for the popular conservatisms of the moment.

The danger of that course is, however, that if you keep playing to conservative perceptions you are only going to reinforce them. The result will be more citizens who interpret the world through conservative perceptions, and so make their decisions accordingly - ultimately making it more difficult to propose progressive policies in the future.

European politics, and in particular politics in France, have seen an expansion of this problem. Technocrats have spent decades quietly implementing the rules and regulations to bring about European unity - at least in the technical sense. Yet they have spent too little time on the engagement, debate and education in the civic space that promotes and spreads the values behind them, and creates the 'values consciousness' amongst the public that parallels institutions and builds a bridge between them.

In the UK, the Liberal Democrats stand as a cautionary tale. The Lib Dems spent decades rebuilding, offering a progressive alternative but where brought low in just five years when they failed to meet the expectations of their supporters - decades in the recruiting - trying to meet the popular expectations of a 'party of government'.

In order to build a lasting progressive politics, there needs to be a long term, concerted social project - for hearts and, particularly, minds - that develops and promotes a form of compassionate, rational, government (Clark, 2015). Progressive parties have to be engaged with the political tasks of spreading ideas and changing minds required for the construction of a progressive social consciousness.

To that end, simply sneaking into power by pretending to be conservative isn't enough, and it never will be. That doesn't mean that the Left shouldn't seek to be practical, like Varoufakis suggests, and, as in France today, be willing to be practical in its compromises with the Centre and the establishment to prevent much worse outcomes.

But the Left has to be about more than just words. It needs to act as well, to actively live its values and promote their means and purposes. Progressives cannot be afraid to govern, but they cannot sacrifice the necessary work for easy access to power. There is no trade off to be made. Trying to do the former without the latter will only lead to failure, compounding more failures to come.