Received wisdom in Westminster and Fleet Street often misreads the public mood and underestimates the political opportunities for the left.
August's riots exposed Britain's deep divisions on attitudes to law and order. Liberal-minded, Guardian-reading types recoiled at the long sentences handed down by magistrates. Meanwhile majority public opinion wanted even tougher justice. Was this just the intellectual left being hopelessly out-of-touch, as usual?
On crime perhaps, but not more widely. Most of the time mainstream opinion is not instinctively right-wing. In the last edition of Fabian Review we introduced the concept of the 'Daily Mail collectivist' - a large group of Conservative supporters who oppose deep cuts to the welfare state.
To that I'd add the 'Daily Mail egalitarian' - centrist, middle-income voters facing up to the financial squeeze, who see the huge gulf opening up between themselves and the very rich.
Mainstream progressive values are too often sidelined by the group-think of Fleet Street and Westminster, where the right-leaning commentariat tries hard to ascribe its own views to the population at large. The debate on the 50p tax rate is a fine example. Too many in the media act as if earning £150,000 was an imminent proposition for most of their audience, when in truth the new top-rate of income tax kicks in at six times the median wage.
Some of this is just political rough-and-tumble, but the herd mentality of the Westminster world has consequences too. Inside the London 'beltway' Ed Balls's fiscal plans have been cast as dangerous denial, even though they are solidly in the centre of international economic thinking and British public opinion. As the economy sickens, George Osborne himself may come to regret how successful he was in persuading the establishment that on fiscal policy there was no alternative.
The bubble finally burst this summer for another truth the British political classes held to be self-evident: the power of Rupert Murdoch and News International. The Sun's 1992 election day headline was New Labour's foundation myth. Triangulating to the Murdoch press became an instinctive part of Labour's political practice in government.
For a short window at least the spell is broken. The left must seize the moment and speak directly to the instincts of middle-of-the-road opinion, not some caricature formed from the right's attempt to reflect and shape the public mood in its image.
That does not mean Labour can ignore some of the hard truths the polls and focus groups throw up on public order, immigration and welfare. But where public opinion is closer to the left than it is to the new establishment orthodoxy, Labour needs to use that to its advantage - by finding language that cuts through to people, resonates with their sense of fairness and is hard to emulate from the right.