The left’s top priority: know thine enemy

I come not to bury Johnson but to praise him. For all the thousands of words I have written criticising this ruthless, amoral being, it is stupid not to recognise what he has achieved. This is the bit where you call me a Tory, but I am not. I just happen to think moping is not a strategy for opposition. Saying nasty things about the prime minister is easy; effectively combating him requires analysis and agility – qualities clearly lacking in the dregs of the Corbyn project.

We don’t need self-serving arguments about authenticity. Wake up! Leadership now is not simply a matter of authenticity, but often its opposite: what the University College London professor Ken Spours, in a paper for the thinktank Compass, calls shapeshifting. Johnson is a chameleon, and modern conservatism is opportunism presented as modernisation: it has an ability to meld wildly different views, and adapt.

This new Tory hegemony is not a rerun of Thatcherism or Cameronism, though it has absorbed those things. The left’s response that it is simply a retread is an insult to voters’ intelligence. It is also a refusal to deal with the present. Shouting about austerity and neoliberalism may have felt righteous, but it was never policy.

Jeremy Corbyn’s essential pessimism was easily outshone by Johnson’s faux optimism. After years of stasis, it was easy to see why. Was Johnson winging it? Sure, but he is part of the realignment of the right. Austerity has been shown to be a purely ideological tactic, so now he will splash the cash for his new voters.

The left will say that some Tory spending is not enough, but we don’t yet know how this will pan out. The Theresa May era now looks like a transition between two kinds of rightwing politics. Will Johnson turn out to be more socially liberal than his predecessor? It’s possible. Again, parts of the left and the remain crew really misunderstood the pull of Europe. There are the holidays in Tuscany – and there is the Europe of the far right and mass youth unemployment. Even the laudable Erasmus scheme really only involved tiny numbers of people. The EU never meant to one constituency what it did to others.

If Johnson’s deregulated Brexit will not deliver, then other ways will be found to keep his new voting cohort on board. Labour cannot be flat-footed about this, with its emphasis on centralisation and its allergy to making cross-party alliances. These are impure thoughts for the left. It will twist in its virtue while it fades away.

Will the right mobilise anti-immigrant feeling and further embrace racism and misogyny? Undoubtedly. And those who thought that the public would not accept a prime minister who couldn’t tell us how many children he had were wrong.

Morality, in this new Tory ideology, is a movable feast. While the left keeps returning to Hannah Arendt’s observation that fascism is an alliance of the elite and the mob, I feel wary – because not everyone who voted Tory is “the mob”. Talking down to voters really doesn’t cut it.

Brexit won’t be “done”; it will be an eternity, and deathly dull. The current emphasis on how the next Labour leader must be someone who can spook Johnson in prime minister’s questions is a preoccupation of the Westminster cult. More of us are probably interested in metal detecting than watching PMQs.

What the left has to do, then, is be optimistic, visionary and inclusive instead of just ranting slogans about how awful everything is. It has to be quick on its feet, and responsive: all the things that the lame-duck leadership is clearly bad at. It has to speak a language that is comprehensible. Again, does anyone outside the bubble even understand the voting system in the leadership contest? It is immensely complicated and at some point the ties between the unions and the party will have to be rethought. Heresy, possibly.

The crash of 2008 did not result in some huge left consciousness-raising but in a rise of reactionary forces. Our future may indeed lie in generational and demographic shifts, in a revulsion about allying with Trump, and in a proper understanding of nationalism.

If Brexit is a way of ensuring that capitalism bordered in one small island is achievable, then only alliances with other small nations are relevant. There is a way back to what Spours calls “radical decency”, but it’s a long way off.

For any of this to happen, one has to know one’s enemy as one knows oneself. As the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear … but if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” After such a huge defeat, it would be progress if the supposed opposition began even to know itself. Only with this knowledge can it fight back.

•Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist