THE best thing I can say about 2016 is that it’s over. It’s been a miserable year for the politics of hope and a bumper year for the politics of fear. The hard right have earned huge bonuses for their year’s work; the broad left have cancelled the Christmas party for an emergency staff meeting. Chauvinist nationalism is thriving in Europe and America, and despite the horrors of the first war on terror our dear leaders are returning once again to the so-called “clash of civilisations” between Christianity and Islam.

Of course, Islamophobia in the West isn’t new; this certainly isn’t the first year that self-serving politicians whipped up fear of the Muslim Other to justify crackdowns on civil rights. But the depressing feature of 2016 is that it seems like we’ve learned nothing from recent history. We’re repeating mistake after mistake. We’re back to square one, only with added stupidity. It feels like we’re living in a Groundhog Year.

The sense of culture collapsing is everywhere. Film commentators are wondering if 2016 is the year when movies finally died as an art form. And according to the BBC, 2016 has been a record year for celebrity deaths. Yes, perhaps the world will go on spinning without Paul Daniels, but the same can’t be said for Leonard Cohen, Harper Lee, Prince, Caroline Aherne and Alan Rickman. There seems to be a cultural zero point coming where all celebrities will be reality TV stars.

The media, too, faced an unprecedented existential crisis in 2016. Tabloids have published “fake news” about immigrants and royals for decades. But even they find themselves swamped by the sheer volume of internet-generated, for-profit, deeply reactionary “fake news” stories spread by an army of oddballs with laptops. In a desperate bid to shore up flagging sales, career commentators ramped up partisanship to logic-defying levels. The tabloids screamed for a full English Brexit; The Guardian and The Independent screamed for a second referendum that simply won’t happen.

This time last year, I thought maybe we’d turned a corner. When three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s dead body washed ashore after he’d drowned in the Mediterranean, even ultra-conservatives seemed to shift gears from caps-lock hatred into compassion. Public pressure actually forced David Cameron to announce that he would let in more refugees. This wave of sympathy seemed to leave traditional racism in tatters.

But leftism never rose to the occasion. Instead, at a time of anger and depressed living standards, the traditional centre-left parties offered up unappealing political insiders like Hillary Clinton or Owen Smith. True, Britain’s Labour Party has taken an unprecedented turn to the Left. But while the membership has managed to barricade Jeremy Corbyn into the leadership office, he’s essentially a prisoner of that office, perpetually embattled by the corridor plotters and creepy careerists that we call the PLP.

Meanwhile, broadly left-wing commentators have been scared by the growth of racism. In response, they’ve taken an increasingly uncritical stance towards the European Union and the backward-looking politics of the Clintons of the world. Radical voices on the left have been crowded out. A bland liberalism has risen to fight the rise of racism. And, frankly, it isn’t working.

2016, above all, has been about failing to learn lessons. Populations, politicians and pundits in the West failed to realise that all-out ideological “war on terror” is meaningless and self-defeating, and will only undermine the remains of Western civil liberties. We’re 15 years on from 2001, with only disaster to show for it. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Fear is winning the psychological battle.

Economically, 2016 repeated the same old policies that redistribute wealth to the rich. Certainly, there’s now a growing, pessimistic consensus that these policies won’t work for the majority. But rather than radically transforming the economy, politicians simply came forward with the same old offer: we’ll restore your jobs by shutting the borders to families fleeing persecution or poverty.

Politicians are educated enough to know that shutting borders won’t work. But their job is to get elected, not to improve living standards. So they serve up the slop. If 2017 looks the same, and we fail to learn the lessons, then we really are living in Groundhog Era. So how do we escape this horror?

The centre-ground has no answers, and we shouldn’t cling to its outdated formulas. Globalisation in its last form failed. If globalisation continues to mean freedom of movement for business and capital, it will fail again. As it stands, we’re facing decades ahead of economic punishment with no end in sight. Hence the genuine nostalgic appeal of returning to the world “before change”, the idyll of the 1950s or whatever decade you choose.

We can’t defend an open, tolerant and multicultural society from its right-wing enemies unless we’ve got an economic answer. And that answer has to be radical. We can’t cling to the fantasy that the European Union and similar institutions have worked economic wonders for the poorest in society. They’ve institutionalised some of the worst policies and made them compulsory for all governments. And when the policies don’t work, the European Commission is just as prone to racist policing as any national government.

To escape the Groundhog Year the left in 2017 needs to rediscover its purpose as a critical voice of change and a tribune of the oppressed. Last year, seeking comfort against the tide of racism, we huddled into a bland liberalism best epitomised by the Clinton consensus. It didn’t work. It won’t work. It can’t work.

Unless we’re brave enough to admit it, the horror is going to play on loop for some time yet. Thankfully, though, I still believe that our destiny is in our hands.