The "Juridification" of Politics and the Centrist Outlook

Reading Jamie M. Johnson, Owen D. Thomas & Victoria M. Basham's argument about Keir Starmer's "juridification" of politics I did not find the word "centrism" or its derivatives (e.g. "centrist") anywhere in the piece. Still, the image of this kind of juridification can bespeak Starmer's centrism as much as the neoliberalism to which they point--in particular the centrist's centrist view of "the system" as not up for discussion, and its management a mere technocratic matter of minor adjustments, with democracy carefully bounded and not allowed to get in the way of what the elites think matters, such that a centrist party competing with the right mainly offers a promise of more competent conservative government rather than an alternative to conservative government.

So does it go with the real meaning of the "post-ideological" assumption of juridification that Johnson et. al. so ably unpack--the claim that ideological conflict has been settled forever in the end just a conservative flush with victory giving the brush-off to their challengers, a thing they have done again and again over the centuries, only to find themselves challenged again and again in ways they cannot brush off, then as soon as they feel confident that they have fended off the challenge, repeat the same argument to begin the cycle all over again. Indeed, while Johnson et. al.'s article discusses Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis at some length, considering that argument--which as of 2024 looks ever more like a relic of end-of-Cold War triumphalism than a really insightful statement about the post-Cold War era--one does well to remember that almost three decades before Fukuyama published his argument in its initial form Daniel Bell (a thinker who has been claimed for the centrists as well as for the neoconservatives) published The End of Ideology.