Cri de Coeur from the Center
By amba | Related entries in Elections, General PoliticsEven the big guys are saying it now — Kurt Andersen, Tom Friedman, CBS’s Dick Meyer, Peggy Noonan — but check out this comment from a little guy at The Moderate Voice who says it as well as anyone [all spelling is 'sic']:
It seems like all the radicals on the faaaaaaaaaaaaar right and faaaaaaaaaaaaaar left are hanging on the edges of their one demensional flat worlds by their fingernails. If anything sucks its extremism in any form. [ . . . ]
Everyone should have noticed by now I debate from the middle whanging both the far left and right, and a few that have no clues at all.
If any of you watch and listen to C_SPAN’s early morning Washington Journal program you should have also noticed by now that the vast majority of the 100 or so callers every day, seven days a week are sick and tired of loggerheaded two party politics that hasn’t worked very well for at least the past 30 or so years. The real nasty tit for tat political backstabbing, “You got our guy so we will get yours” started back with richard nixon getting his hands caught in the cookie jar. [ . . . ]
The desire, according to the majority of C-SPAN callers seems to be the intitution of a third powerful political party…easier to say and wish for than do however.
So we must, for now, keep on voting for the lesser of evils out of the two parties in power now then cross our fingers after we vote. [ . . . ] or waste our votes voting for splinter group candidates that have zero chance of winning, or not voting, which I’m getting very tempted to do.
National Centrist Network, Unity08, those votes are out there and ripe for the picking, but it must not become business as usual. Let’s go back to the specifications Kurt Andersen laid down:
Why can’t we have a serious, innovative, truth-telling, pragmatic party without any of the baggage of the Democrats and Republicans? A real and enduring party built around a coherent set of ideas and sensibility�neither a shell created for a single charismatic candidate like George Wallace or Ross Perot, nor a protest party like the Greens or Libertarians, with no hope of ever getting more than a few million votes in a presidential election. A party that plausibly aspires to be not a third party but the third party�to winning, and governing.
Let the present, long-running duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats end. Let the invigorating and truly democratic partisan flux of the American republic’s first century return. Let there be a more or less pacifist, anti-business, protectionist Democratic Party on the left, and an anti-science, Christianist, unapologetically greedy Republican Party on the right�and a robust new independent party of passionately practical progressives in the middle. [ . . . ]
[O]ne of the core values will be honesty. Not a preachy, goody-goody, I’ll-never-lie-to-you honesty of the Jimmy Carter type, but a worldly, full-throated and bracing candor. The moderation will often be immoderate in style and substance, rather than tediously middle-of-the-road. Pragmatism will be an animating party value�even when the most pragmatic approach to a given problem is radical.
And here’s what John Hellemann said in the same issue of New York about the requirements for a candidate to win the trust of the fed-up center:
The candidate comes across, first and foremost, as not being completely full of shit. [ . . . T]he threshold act is candor. Our man (or woman) is blunt and plainspoken, allergic to cant, averse to obfuscation. [ . . . ] he delights countless voters who crave a leader capable of surprise. Who, upon hearing yet another of his forays into the realm of the impolitic, find themselves nodding, smiling, gasping, “I can’t believe he said that.� [ . . .]
[H]e’s recognizably human. His résumé is flawed, his family life imperfect; he’s made mistakes and keeps on making them. But unlike George W. Bush or either of the Democrats who ran against him, the candidate is able to admit his errors and explain how he’s learned from them. Confronted with a question to which he doesn’t have an answer, he utters a phrase�“I don’t know��that most politicians avoid as if it were synonymous with “I buggered the babysitter.� [ . . . ]
[H]is weapon of choice is subversive humor rather than populist rage [ . . . ] He’s more Jon Stewart than Howard Beale.
Yet the candidate’s critique is deeper and more nuanced than that. Behind the popularity of Stewart�and the rise of the Purple Party�is the simmering frustration with an increasingly polarized system that coughs up a series of false choices. As the academics (and former Clintonistas) William Galston and Elaine Kamarck put it in a recent paper, “Many Americans do not want to choose between a vigorous economy and a strong safety net, between individual liberty and national security, between social tolerance and moral tradition, or between military strength and international cooperation, and they resent a politics that forces them to do so.�
This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 and is filed under Elections, General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 12th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
As long as you trot out Lieberman or McCain as examples of this kind of candidate.
June 13th, 2006 at 6:08 am
Sickening. The idea that somehow being “in the Middle” is a morally superior position that makes you “above partisan politics” is laughable. You are confusing indecision with critical thinking. On the whole, if the left got everything they wanted or the right got everything they wanted, you would probably have a more efficient government either way.
However, mixing the two positions and taking the “virtue” of the middle ground, the compromise often lowers the overall effectiveness of the government. You can’t have a middle ground on abortion, either taking human life is wrong without justification or it isn’t. You can’t claim moral superiority by claiming that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare”. Either abortions should be legal only for cases of true life endangerment or legal for all reasons. Once you get into “the middle ground” of deciding what abortions are and are not permissible, you lose the value of either side. Either Life trumps all, Freedom trumps all, or you let the Government decide, trumping both life and freedom simultaneously in favor of government mandate.
Compromise is not the only means to solve problems, not by a long shot. This “middle” seems to exist on creating false dichotomies, such as those presented in your last paragraph. This “middle” only seems to exist if you can characterize both the right and the left as “extreme” and then assume that all forms of extremism are bad.
Please, don’t give me a party of Lieberman’s and McCains. I’ve been following McCain in particular and the man can’t seem to make up his mind on anything, he resembles more and more a pandering snake-oil salesman with each passing day. He is not “moderate”, or “centrist”, he simply lacks principles and his beliefs cause numerous double-standards.
June 13th, 2006 at 6:24 am
Brian says: “On the whole, if the left got everything they wanted or the right got everything they wanted, you would probably have a more efficient government either way.”
We have experienced these sorts of “efficient governments” in the past century and they were called the CCCP and the Third Reich respectively.
June 13th, 2006 at 6:38 am
Pete, how was the Third Reich in any way conservative? Hitler nationalized everything and had complete government control over everything. NaZi stands for Nationalist Socialist.
You know what the difference between Fascism and Communism is? Communism killed more people.
The extreme ends of the political spectrum are one and the same. In that manner politics is like a circle. You have a “left side” and a “right side”, but at the top and bottom, the two look exceedingly alike. If you used the Y axis as a measure of authoritarianism, then at the top you have complete authority and at the bottom you have a muddled mess that may fall into anarchy.
June 13th, 2006 at 7:44 am
Funny that a majority of the country is right where Brian says they shouldn’t be. The moral complexity of an issue like abortion is well understood and appreciated by most people. Brian seems to have a low tolerance for the ambiguity of life. It is probably true that some people welcome absolutism as it resolves the painful and frustrating tension of complexity.
June 13th, 2006 at 9:30 am
It is probably true that some people welcome absolutism as it resolves the painful and frustrating tension of complexity.
Belmont Club recently had a thread that touched on this same theme, as it pertains to the war in Iraq. One of the commentators there summed up the problem neatly in one sentence: “We became a nation that cannot abide moral ambiguity.”
June 13th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
If the idea that “somehow being ‘in the Middle’ is a morally superior position that makes you ‘above partisan politics’ is laughable”, does that imply that not being in the middle is superior?
This confuses being in the middle with being ambiguous/undecisive, and implies being left or right is an example of critical thinking (or I am sure Brian would think being left is a lack of critical thinking)–this kind of absolutism is an example of exactly what is wrong with the left and right.
Compromise is a dirty word for absolutists, but here’s a word that means more and is what the middle is about–cooperation. The problem with the left and right is their respective leaders have driven them so far apart with rhetorical nonsense that the idea of cooperation is impossibe, but cooperation is exactly what this country needs. Cooperation requires an ability to see beyond absolutism.
June 13th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
It’s funny that you guys should bring this up because lately I’ve been thinking that the nation could benefit from the formation of a strong centrist third party. I think the majority of Americans are fed up with partisan bickering and just want to address the issues that need to be addressed. That is why I have decided to form the Union Party.
The name for this party comes from the name of a party that President Lincoln temporarily formed during the election of 1864 for the purpose of bringing together Republicans and War Democrats.
The party would only focus on solely political issues, meaning that it wouldn’t even touch issues like gay marriage or abortion or whatever. As for the party’s stances on politcal issues, they would be formed from compromise between slightly left-of-center Democrats and slightly right-of-center Republicans.
It is my hope that if the Union party grows large enough, it can gain support from centrists like Senator John McCain or Senator Chris Dodd.
Anyway, I need someone to answer me this: How do I go about making the Union Party official? I understand there is a petition involved, but I’m not sure how the whole process works here in Florida. Thank you all for taking the time to read this message.
P.S. gerryf: You are absolutely right. Now more than ever, this country needs cooperation, and I hope that through the formation of the Union party, cooperation will come about.
June 13th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
I’m not sure I agree that what we need is a third party. I think what we need is a way to engage the political process outside the party structure.
Both parties are really just marriages of convenience between multiple interest groups with agendas that don’t always fit. I think the disaffection alluded to here comes from people who don’t so much want to start a new party as develop network-based approach to political power. That is, one that’s less hierarchical and (seemingly) permanent and more based on temporary coalitions of complementary issues and appealing candidates.
June 13th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
The ‘third party’ thing is just another cooperation game which is reducible to a form of prisoner’s dillema (I can never spell that word right, how’d I do?) – there is a severe disadvantage to ‘moving first’ if you are a just right or just left of center type – in a way I think the 92 and 2000 elections demonstrate why this is so to a degree (more 92 than 2000, perhaps)
June 14th, 2006 at 8:26 am
It’s funny (odd funny and haha funny) how some folks think that being moderate equates to indecision.
Brian said:
Part of the incongruent madness is this assumption that the right or left has a definable “way”. Which right, one wonders, should get what they want? Would that be the Conservative Coalition? Or the more traditional conservative position of smaller government? And which left? The redistribution of wealth left? Or the more traditional liberal position of creative problem-solving?
Many – even most – of the moderates I know prefer a more conservative approach to government, including size, controls on federal power (you know, those pesky Constitutionally defined limits…), return to the clear separation of church and state, and more decision-making and policy-enacting at the state and local level. At the same time, these moderates see (and have long-since internalized) a social and human responsibility to fellow citizens who, for a variety of reasons, have less.
Undecided? Hardly. Uncritical thinkers? *Guffaw*
July 9th, 2006 at 5:56 am
The Purple Party has landed at http://www.PurpleParty.com