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The economist Simon Wren-Lewis reckons that this is a stage-managed, policy-free general election and compares the UK unfavourably with France, though he curiously illustrated his point by referring to the stage-managed mini-drama that saw Le Pen and Macron respectively "whipping up" and "calming" voters at a factory gate last week. But he has a point. The French Presidential election seems more genuine and vital, both in its presentation of ideas - the competing sirens of market and nation - and in the visceral engagement of the candidates. Much of the liberal media has been exercised by the possibility that some French leftist voters will abstain in the second round of the election, despite the actual evidence that the majority will tactically back Macron (Hamon has already explicitly endorsed him and Melenchon has implicitly done likewise). Some have predictably insisted that a vote denied to Macron is the equivalent of a vote for Le Pen. Strangely, few liberals have applied the same logic to the UK and suggested that a vote denied to Corbyn is the same as a vote for May.

You might counter that ours is not a presidential system, but that would be naïve. Despite our votes being cast for MPs, we have been tending towards a de facto presidential system since the early 20th century. This has become more pronounced over time, partly as a result of the Conservative Party's weakness for leader-cults, from Churchill to Thatcher, and partly because of the framing of the media, which values personality over policy. New Labour adopted this style wholesale in the 90s, which fuelled both Tony Blair's messianic fervour and Gordon Brown's paranoia. An important factor in Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader was a conscious rejection of this approach, but likewise an important factor in the media's hostility is Labour's lack of media cooperation (despite the heroic efforts of Jess Philips). The Tories' current strategy is a logical extension of these tendencies. The contrived photo-ops and relentless mantra of "strong and stable" are intended to construct a mythical Theresa May to compensate for her absence of personality. The framing of Brexit as an issue of sovereignty ("Brussels interference") allows debate on trade-offs and priorities to be avoided. In contrast, the routine questioning of Labour's legitimacy and competence has an almost quaint air to it.

Liberals tend to fetishise the electoral process, imagining that a technocratic fix could somehow improve the quality of politics, hence the obsession with proportional representation and even the idea of compulsory voting. This attitude increasingly extends to the epiphenomena of the election campaign, such as the televised leaders' debate. May's decision to avoid this shouldn't have come as a surprise. Not only is she visibly uncomfortable in such settings, but her strategy is to present herself as a national figurehead above the fray: a Daily Mail-friendly de Gaulle. In the event, liberals have been more scathing about Corbyn's decision to refuse participation unless May is present, suggesting that he is missing an open goal. This is disingenuous. Without May, the debate would turn on the other parties' desire to promote themselves at Labour's expense. Instead of debating the Tories' record, it would become simply a critique of Labour generally and its leader in particular. Unsurprisingly, the same people advocating a "progressive alliance" were prominent among those criticising Corbyn.

The desire of TV companies to establish a leaders' debate as a newly-minted tradition of democracy, like election night specials and swingometers, is not just transparent self-interest. It also reflects a conscious aping of US electoral practices and thus reinforces the evolution of the role of the Prime Minister as a quasi-president. Given the ample evidence from both the US TV debates last year and the Macron/Le Pen face-off earlier this week, you might have expected liberals to have second thoughts about the value of a contest in which policy is so easily marginalised by invective and smears ("you'd be in jail", you have an offshore bank account etc), but their weakness for "tone" is too great, leading the likes of Wren-Lewis to both critique the press for its obsession with personality and unimportant gaffes (e.g. Diane Abbott) while decrying the unwillingness of party leaders to engage in a literally stage-managed debate. Meanwhile, Corbyn's desire for face-time with "ordinary" voters is presented as self-indulgent when not Quixotic.

The Tories' avoidance of debate and the presentation of the election in terms of national interest have together increased the salience of British newspapers. While they may be facing a secular decline due to technology, the tabloids in particular are in rude political health, the near-death experience of Leveson now a distant memory. The suspension of Kelvin MacKenzie over the Ross Barkley incident should not be mistaken for a sign of weakness or moderation, any more than the man's crack about an immigrant knifing Corbyn was a gaffe. That was very obviously a deliberate plant, via an obligingly credulous New York Times, intended to indicate that both MacKenzie and Murdoch are unrepentant. While some liberals hope that an increased majority will embolden Theresa May to moderate Brexit, it's pretty clear that the rightwing press believes it can raise a reactionary mob at a moment's notice to prevent any back-sliding and it will have no compunction about undermining May in the same way it did Major and Cameron. What the non-deportable cat and the "go home" vans told us is that May as Home Secretary was addicted to the praise of the tabloids. It is hard to believe she has changed as Prime Minister.

Faced with the prospect of a Tory landslide and a hard Brexit, many liberals have taken to seeking a demographic explanation for the rightwing turn. The claim that "Britain is ageing, and the older it gets, the further to the right it’s shifting" is typical of the genre. Most people have fairly static views about the world, which are normally fully-formed by their early-20s. While a minority are open to change, the majority carry their beliefs and prejudices through life, even if they will modify the expression of them to suit contemporary norms (the one notable characteristic of the recently demobbed Prince Philip is that privilege allowed him to air the prejudices of a dim posho schooled in the 1930s without consequence). In contrast, society changes over time, largely because the minority who embrace the new tend to have a disproportionate influence over both public policy and the value-formation of younger cohorts. In terms of attitudes, society is dragged forward by "opinion-formers" and progress is reinforced by the young seeking to distinguish themselves from their elders.

Inevitably, any political party that can be broadly defined as progressive will exhibit a tension between the vanguard (party members) and the mass (the electorate), and that tension will roughly correlate with age, hence progressive parties do better among younger cohorts. Age is much less of an issue within the party because it is disproportionately made of up of self-conscious progressives. Contrary to the simplistic narrative, Corbyn's election as leader of Labour owed as much to energised pensioners as it did to social media-activated twenty-somethings. Much of the supposed cleavage between metropolitan Labour and its Northern heartlands is simply the reframing of this naturally-occurring and persistent tension as a specific disjuncture. The liberal turn to demography can be thought of as an interpretation that emphasises stock over flow: because oldies vote Tory, more oldies means more Tories. Behind this lies a pessimism about the intractability of prejudices, which is a way that liberals can avoid admitting the failure of their arguments to change minds. We saw this in the bitter denigration of white, working-class voters by Hillary Clinton's supporters in the US, and can see it right now in the dismissal of French leftists, unconvinced by Macron, as enablers of the far-right.

In fact, the current electoral shifts are better explained by a model of flow in which voters move between parties, and also between voting and non-voting. Though the full results aren't in yet, it's pretty clear from the local council elections that UKIP are on the verge of either disbanding or reverting to a BNP-like rump, while the long-heralded Liberal Democrat resurgence looks like being a damp squib. In other words, both reactionary and small-c conservative voters have decisively shifted to the Tories. Though Labour has lost seats and councils, this appears to be down to abstention as much as voters switching, emphasising that the party's prospects in June will largely depend on maximising turnout among its core supporters (its stock). While this simply means limiting the scale of a probable defeat, it also preserves Labour as the only viable opposition. Ominously, for Theresa May there will be every incentive to keep the anti-Brussels rage burning until 2022, as that will maximise her electoral stock. Against this, even a revived New Labour would be ineffective, suggesting that both wings of the party must hope for a government balls-up that would drive Tory voters into abstention or minor party protest. Unity at last.