In the wake of the First World War and the Anglo-Irish War that immediately followed it, the renowned Irish poet, William Butler Yeats penned a poem he titled The Second Coming, which deservedly has become one of the most celebrated and most frequently quoted in the English language. It’s rich allegorical imagery is unforgettable.

That things fall apart naturally is captured by the concept of entropy which relates to degradation or a trend to disorder or the measure of disorder in a closed system. The second law of thermodynamics relates to entropy — that the disorder in an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time, as it will evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium. So, yes, things will fall apart as they must without additional energy.

But the centre holding is a more challenging concept. As we lose control — as the falcon cannot hear the falconer — the peaceable centre will give way to the louder, more rambunctious, more violent, extremes. The result? Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. In Yeats’ telling, violence is unleashed and we lose our earlier, peaceable innocence to the destruction resulting from the clash of the violent extremes.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Re-reading that line recently resonated so strongly with the current climate of political polarisation that I have not been able to shake the comparison.

Can the centre hold? Should the centre hold? What is the centre? What would be the consequences of things falling apart?

The centre of politics is a multi-layered metaphor for the position between left and right, referring to the location of the antagonistic parties relative the president de l’Assemblé at the time of the états generaux in France in the latter stages of the reign of Louis XVI, just prior to the 1789 revolution. It is represented in electoral terms by the statistically mythical median voter.

In practical political terms, the centre has been the contested arena of electoral politics within which the dominant parties have fought. Electoral maths — or, more technically, psephological statistics — have determined where that contested ground has laid over time. In the US, in has been defined by the political settlement emerging out of the Roosevelt’s New Deal in the early 1930s to combat the effects of the Depression following the Great Crash of the US stockmarket in October 1929. That centre largely held until the emergence of the fiscally- and socially-conservative Republicans responsible for and encouraged by for the rhetoric of Reagan, such as Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. It morphed again, post-Gingrich, in to the Tea Party and, following the defeat of the McCain-Palin ticket to Obama & Biden in 2008, under John Boehner, Paul Ryan then Kevin McCarthy, extended Gingrich’s combative partisanship in Congress to the public arena by encouraging increasingly extreme and reactionist news and social media which has thrived on the controvery of partisan conflict. Demonstrating the political power of popular name recognition, that has allowed a conservative Republican Christian nationalism to coalesce, bizarrely, around the decidedly impious Donald Trump since 2016.

In the UK, the Atlantic Charter (as it became known) — or entente between Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941 and the resultant British welfare state that emerged from the report of Churchill advisor, LSE economist William Beveridge, in 1942, the centre has been the ground occupied by the more moderate aspirations of Conservtive and Labour parties, whether in government or in opposition, and the incrementalism each has encouraged. It has been the common ground, the field of trade-offs, compromises and incremental changes.

While it is tempting to see the Reagan and Thatcher reforms and, subsequently, constitutional refoms under Tony Blair’s premiership, as breaks with earlier paths, the changes were more rhetorical in the first case, unavoidable though calculatedly confrontational in the second, and poorly conceived and partial in the third.

In both countries, the second Iraq War, the debacles of military commitments in Afghanistan and the global financial crisis that followed the collapse of mortgage-based securities in 2007, have sapped the legitimacy of government and citizens’ lived experinece of economic performance, in contrast to GDP data, which has masked as a political issue the massive increases in income inequality that characterise the last 15 years.

The result has been the increasing electoral attraction of political extremes. As these have grown, they have given licence to increasingly extreme rhetoric and positions; that is, previously extreme positions have become normalised. Our politics has fractured around the previously dominant field of contest, the previous centre.

All across sands of the deserts of the West, beasts have emerged with the body of a lion and the head of a man — the Wilders, Haiders, Le Pens, Orbans, Kaszyinskis, Weidels and Farages.

Sadly, we know what beast with a blank gaze and pitiless as the sun slouches towards Bethlehem; it is the realisation of the mutation of earlier, liberal intentions of the US Founders — the Jeffersons, the Madisons, the Franklins, the Adams, the Jays — in to a vainglorious, narcissistic, mendacious man-child who emphasises fealty over competence. or imagination; certainly over integrity or intellectual hoesty.

In the UK, the most recent realisation had a striking mop of dishevelled blond hair. Rightly, he was deposed. But his spirit and that of Trump is alive and well in the corpus of Nigel Farage, leader of Reform, whose acolytes plead for anything but reform. Reform’s results in UK local elections in May 2025 suggest a strain of ennui and recalcitrance in parts of the UK electorate that mirrors the widespread dissatisfaction that has propelled Trump to electoral success in the UK. This is backed up by the 2025 findings of the ever-excellent Edelman Trust Barometer, which describes “a generation of institutional failures erupting (sic) into grievance.” The results describing the levels of grievance in the UK make for sobering reading.

If unaddressed, over time, that prevalent popular dissatisfaction, that sense of grievance, will become endemic and inevitably destructively rebellious. This suggests that, perhaps, the traditionally-perceived centre should not hold; that it needs to adapt, move or be moved in order to avoid a subsequent conflagration of the delegitimised, discarded carapace of electoral democracy that would accompany a prosepctive withdrawal of the ‘consent of the governed’. Change through adaptation or signficant, even radical, reform (not the rhetorical Reaganesque or Farageist, ‘capital R’ variety) seems essential. But what would such change look like? How would it happen? Who and what would conceive it and initiate it? These are the some of the principal questions (and questions of principle) that Futuresphere is designed to address.

In Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, just after the end of conflagration following that which had so stirred Yeats, Hannah Arendt stated:

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

What the result of that entropy, that degradation, the collapse of the centre, will look like we cannot know even if we may imagine, but we cannot say we have been not been warned.