Values shape meaning and legitimacy, but history is driven by organised power. Moral language only delivers change when it is backed by institutions, leverage and accountability.

We keep making the same political wager: that if we lean harder into values – morals, civilisation, trust, cooperation – we can drag the world toward the good.

Sometimes we can. But not because moral persuasion is the main engine of history. The world is organised by the power of capital and the power of the state, and increasingly by the tight coupling between them. Capital shapes investment, jobs, prices, and much of the media-made “common sense” about what is possible. The state shapes law, budgets, borders, policing and, crucially, the terms on which legitimacy is granted or withdrawn. Values matter because legitimacy matters. But legitimacy is not the same as power, and it is not nothing either: legitimacy is often the gateway through which power becomes usable and sustainable.

The long-run perspective highlighted by the recent Human TV series sharpens the point. Humans survived because we learned to cooperate beyond kin and small bands, and shared meaning amplified that cooperation – stories, norms, identities, and rules. We are the meaning-making species. That is our superpower, and it is also our danger. The same capacity that produces solidarity and care also produces propaganda, scapegoating, and “civilisation” stories that justify domination. Values can be a language of liberation. They can also be camouflage.

In the modern world, the crisis is not a shortage of values-talk; it’s an abundance of weaponised values – security, freedom, tradition, prosperity each attached to a power project.

That’s why the central limit of values-first politics (and values-first economics) is so persistent: moral clarity isn’t leverage. You can win the argument and still lose the decision. Capital can lobby, delay, rebrand, relocate, and outlast moral pressure. In competitive markets, firms that voluntarily internalise social and ecological costs can be undercut by those that don’t, unless rules level the playing field. The state, meanwhile, can slow-walk change through procedure, manage dissent, and – when consent frays – reach for coercion. This is how politics becomes theatre: stirring speeches, declarations, commemorations. Theatre is not useless; it can shift norms and prepare the ground. But it becomes a trap when it substitutes for institutional change and material follow-through.

When values do win, it’s usually because they stop being only words and become enforceable. Rights become real when courts, watchdogs, and civic institutions can defend them. Climate goals become real when budgets, regulation, standards, and investment plans rewire the economy. Integrity becomes real when transparency is mandatory and penalties are unavoidable. Cooperation becomes real when agreements are verifiable and incentives reward compliance. Morality has to grow teeth. But teeth are not metaphors: they imply coercive capacity. The question is never whether coercion will exist; it is whose coercion, under what control, for what ends, and with what safeguards.

This is where the classic traditions – conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism – remain useful, not as museum labels but as moral languages trying to solve the same problem: how to civilise power.

Conservatism, at its best, grasps the fragility of social trust and the need for restraint. It can defend institutions, continuity, obligations across generations, and the quiet social infrastructure that markets can shred. But it can also sanctify hierarchy as ‘civilisation’, moralise obedience, and treat property privilege as natural order – especially when confronted by demands for redistribution or decolonisation.

Liberalism, at its best, binds state coercion with rights and rules, protects plural lives, and insists that power must be answerable. But liberalism has often been reluctant to confront private power with the same seriousness as public power. It can end up building a beautiful house of rights on a foundation of oligarchy – freedom in principle, dependency in practice particularly when wealth concentrates, media consolidates, and political finance turns representation into a market.

Radicalism, at its best, names the structural truth liberalism often tiptoes around: that ownership, class power, and control of production shape what is possible, and that good intentions inside a bad machine won’t deliver justice. But radicalism’s recurring peril is to mistake the seizure of state power for emancipation itself, to gamble pluralism and rights for “the cause,” and to discover too late that coercion, once unleashed, rarely stays on a moral leash.

Each tradition carries moral resources. Each carries moral traps. The present moment pressures all three. Conservative rhetoric is easily pulled toward punitive nationalism and exclusion. Liberalism is strained by the scale of private concentrations of power and the hollowing out of democratic capacity. Radicalism, fragmented and often culturally isolated from mass constituencies, struggles to convert critique into governing coalitions without losing its democratic soul.

So what follows, if we refuse both cynicism and naivety?

The conclusion is simple but demanding. Yes, lean into values, because humans cannot cooperate without shared meaning and moral commitment. But do it as moral realism: values paired with organisation, material leverage, and democratic safeguards. Values can open the door and tell us what the door is for. Only organised, accountable power keeps it open – so that what follows is not just effective, but worthy of the name “good.”