There Is No Vital Center
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in General PoliticsYou read it right. I deny the existence of the vital center, the radical middle. It doesn’t exist.
Oh, there are centrists, believers in the fighting middle who espouse centrist ideas. But there is no political reality behind these people and their thoughts. There is no coherent philosophy or charismatic leader. Centrism is an amorphous idea – a fervent wish.
Which is why I think us self-described centrists are so often labeled frauds. I mean, after all, we still exist and debate and live in the world of left and right. Sure, we can say “there is another way,� we can even offer up new ideas but, at the end of the day, we have no foundation. We centrists are all air and no earth.
We aren’t even definable. Some centrists are merely partisans who disagree with their party on one or two issues. Some centrists are elitists who use promises of unity and harmony to calm the passions of the unwashed masses. Some centrists are knee-jerk compromisers, frightened of conflict. Some centrists, like yours truly, are fed up with the whole damn system and are looking for bold new ideas and serious change.
The only thing all centrists have in common is an aversion to extremism and blind ideology. But we have no unifying ideology of our own. We don’t even have a unifying objective.
There are only two teams in American politics. Those of us who refuse to play for either side are left standing on the field alone. And what do you call those who are on the field but not part of either team? Referees. And that’s exactly what too many of us centrists try to be. We point and say “that’s a partisan foul. That’s a political trick. That’s ignorant thinking. That’s wrong. That’s bad. Now play nice.�
Oh, there’s certainly a need to call out the fouls of both parties. You can spend a lifetime doing so. But to what end? Centrist scolds have no real power. Our criticisms are taken not as the wise words of people above the fray, but as background noise in the political cacophony.
If there is indeed “another way,� we’ll never get there by pointing out that Ann Coulter is an idiot and Michael Moore is a fool. We know what we’re not. What we don’t know is who we are.
Centrist groups spring up all the time and declare a need for such things as “leadership before partisanship� while demanding an end to the manufactured disunity propagated by the two major parties and their media coconspirators. But what the hell is leadership before partisanship? What the hell is unity?
We don’t know because we centrists keep trying to build the ship before we’ve cut the planks or even felled the trees. No one will take us seriously until we have a defined ideology we can point to and say: that’s me, I believe in that.
I’m not talking platform positions, pro life or pro choice. Pro Iraq or anti-Iraq. I’m talking the fundamental ideas that drive decision making. The left is rooted in Marxism and the belief that the conflict between the haves and the have nots is the axis on which the world spins. The right is rooted in self-determinism balanced by Judeo-Christian traditionalism.
What is the centrist ism? Who are our intellectual guides? What are our texts?
You could argue that we don’t need any. That our ism is individualism and thus each centrist need not agree with any other centrist. You could argue that our strength is our welcoming of diverse ideas and honest disagreement.
But that’s not an ideology. That’s a temperament. Many people on the left and right also welcome diverse ideas and honest disagreement. We call them moderates. And while they tend to be less partisan than their party brethren, they nonetheless play hard for their team and buy into their side’s ideology.
If centrism is just a desire for moderation, then so be it. Centrists should join one party or the other and work to moderate it. But if centrism really is a yearning for a new ideology, then we need to stop trying to organize and start thinking. Seriously. You can’t create a movement unless you know where you’re going and what car you’re taking. Centrists know neither and that’s why our nascent efforts fail and will continue to fail.
So, this is the choice as I see it. Centrists who want to make a difference can either 1) suck it up, join a party and try to moderate it from the inside. Or 2) can find their ism or isms and build the intellectual framework and deep ideology necessary to form an important, rather than tangential movement.
What will I do? I don’t know. I’m not going to be the guy who writes the key centrist text. But I might be the guy who tells you about the key text once it exists. We’ll see. I may join one of the parties after this year’s election (once I see how it all shakes out). I may not. I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting to write this. It just kinda showed up in my head and it made a lot of sense.
Now that I’ve shared, I need to think.
Cross-posted at Maverick Views
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 and is filed under 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.
September 20th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Breath-taking clarity, ASC and one of the best, most intelligent, honest posts that I have read in a long time.
A bit ago, I swore off Donklephant after I read what I considered to be a patently ignorant & bigoted post. It wasn’t the “ignorant” or the “bigoted” part that pissed me off. I have written some ignorant and certainly bias things. What pissed me off was that it was written under the fraudulent, self-serving, and self-labeled banner of a “Centrist” or a “Moderate” — when in fact it was, as is the poster, nothing of the kind.
Since, as you correctly point out, centrism remains undefined, it is vulnerable to highjacking for political purposes. Who ISN’T going to consider themselves a Centrist??? One gains power in a democracy by espousing their beliefs as more normative than the guy running against him. Centrism is by its definition A MOVING TARGET, a statement of relativism, only defined by its relative position to other policy and ideological preferences. Thus, when someone calls themselves a “centrist”, they are defining the placement of everyone who disagrees with them as being…ideologically extreme. It is just a political tool and NOTHING more.
Thomas Sowell has it right, just replace the word “anti-war” with “moderate” or “centrist”:
Anyway, thanks for the post ACS, keep up the honest thinking.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Nice piece of work Alan. I agree with every word.
I’ve never been happy with either word: moderate or centrist. I think we’re counterpunchers by nature, most of us. We define ourselves in opposition to what we see as extremes on either side. But yeah, we don’t have a set of ideas that goes beyond a pox on both your houses.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Wow, good food for thought and a bit depressing too. I don’t like the idea of having to embrace an ism in order to be relevant. I like even less the idea that I need to work to change the Democrats or the Republicans in order to make myself heard. The voices from the extreme ends of either party are so loud that saying to hell with it and starting somewhere else seems attractive by comparison. Even if that road leads to obscurity.
The unfortunate truth is your that you’re probably right, regardless of what I like. The primaries for the 2006 elections happened not too long ago and I couldn’t take part. Why, because I’m registered as an independent. So the Democrats and Republicans could both nominate complete assholes and I’ll have to choose the lessor of two evils in November. So think really hard, because otherwise I’ll have to decide in 2008 which party I want to be a small moderate voice in.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Good post. Empiricism and rationalism ftw?
September 20th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Sobering & unfortunately true…but don’t despair…get focused.
The rising tide of frustration within America must be seen as an opportunity to unite.
We can not allow the extreme wings of the Republicans & Democrats to continue to steer our country further and further off course. Voter dissent is close to an all time high because the past 14 years has produced a system that has drifted more towards the wings. Why… to cater to the special interests of power elites & to cater to the power base at the extreme wings.
There has been a 300% rise in Independent voters…folks are leaving the Reps & Dems out of frustration. But you accurately point out The problem is dissatisfied voters are “De- aligning� with the left & right instead of re-aligning in the middle under 1-banner. Complicating the problem is that both REP & DEM Blogs are attack “Centrist� blogs / positions because they know a unified Center would cripple both established parties. There is no centrist unity of effort…..yet.
Keep up the chatter & remember there is strength in unity.
M-P
September 20th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
Splendid, Alan.
This is a brilliantly honest description of political reality as it is right now. It doesn’t have to be that way forever. What is has to be respected, because nothing can be accomplished starting from denial. What is has a certain authority based on its materiality and momentum. But what is need not be worshipped, bowed to. Its authority comes from the past, and the past is passing fast. The frustration of voters in both parties comes from the sense that the existing political debate is fundamentally dead, it’s coasting along on inertial momentum. Maybe this always happens — the empty space and the aching thirst for new ideas is there before the ideas themselves rush in to fill and quench it. Ahhhhh.
Maybe a tiny start: partisans say or. Centrists say and (and sometimes nor).
For example, I was just writing about immigration for Unity08 (don’t know yet if or when it will appear there) and wound up saying leftists celebrate pluribus while rightists insist on unum. Each is half right, which makes them both wrong. A centrist would say we need to appreciate the cultures immigrants bring with them as contributions to the rich mix that is America, AND we have to insist that they become Americans. When I was growing up, immigrants had to feel bad about where they came from and try to shed it in order to become imitation white Americans. Now they don’t have to learn English or associate with anyone outside their insular enclave. Both wrong! The America I love is one in which white people dance like black people and the word “salsa” is regarded as English. Everybody has something to give to America. They have to know it will be welcomed, but they have to want to give it, not keep it, and they have to learn the basic rules and parameters of the game we play here (they have to come legally for starters, as the right says, which has to be made easier, as the left says) — and the bloody language!
Another example: A social safety net for people who desperately need it AND an ethic of personal responsibility that makes people turn to the safety net only when they have to and get off it as fast as they can. An easily accessible social safety net and excuses for resorting to it makes for a culture of dependency. An increasingly shredded social safety net means it’s not enough to be a responsible hard worker: you must be a driven success just to survive, and an illness or job loss can be a catastrophe.
Specific “and” solutions are challenging to design because they involve a delicate balance, but “balance” is the essence of the center — it’s the fulcrum that integrates the best of the wings.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
How do you square that statement with the fact that the only democrat leader in the time period you nominate was a looonnnnggg way from an extreme lefty? To take the issue brought up by the next poster, Clinton’s welfare program (post 96 when he rounded some of the harder edges) sounds exactly like what amba was saying a centrist’s plan would look like.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
Jeremy,
America didn’t vote in Newt & Co becasue they thought the Clinton Administration was on-track.
Clinton’s first two years were so far Left they ushered in the “Republican Revolution�.
He lost control because he went too far left early and then had to spend the remaining six years convincing folks he was really in the middle.
September 20th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Agreed — that Clinton’s successes came when he acted like a centrist.
Bush’s too. Bush is actually a centrist on immigration, probably because he has Hispanics in his family. His base gives him hell over it, but on this issue, he is right.
September 20th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
If there was one person I’d believe could formulate a coherent centrist ideology, it’d be you, Amba. The ideas you list are the kind of thinking I’m talking about. And you do it all the time and link to others who do it all the time.
I’d like to add, ideology is not a bad thing. It CAN be a bad thing when misused (much like religion which, after all, is simply spiritual ideology). But I think most of us here believe in free speech and democracy and other such political ideologies. So when I say centrists need an ideology, I’m not talking about a rigid set of rules, I’m just talking about a collection of basic assumptions and moral/intellectual guideposts that are the framework upon which new ideas can be built.
September 20th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Wasn’t the point of the national centrist’s meeting to try and back candidates from both parties so that the political landscape would be more centrist? Backing more moderate candidates of either political persuasion will most likely bear more fruit in the short term, and so that’s where the focus should be.
Say what you will about centrists, moderates, independents, etc., but they are the majority. And as much as each party’s philosophies change and shift over the years, so too does centrist ideology.That’s just the long and short of it.
DP! Glad to see you back! Hope you continue to post your reasonable and even handed comments which only try to advance the dialogue.
September 21st, 2006 at 12:18 am
Agreed � that Clinton’s successes came when he acted like a centrist.
That was kind of my point. Regardless of where he was for the first, what, 2 years of his term, his overwhelming legacy is one of slightly left-leaning centrism (no doubt aided and abetted by the fact that he had a hostile congress) which makes the statement “the past 14 years has produced a system that has drifted more towards the wings” seem unsupported to me.
September 21st, 2006 at 9:29 am
I’ll take that last part of advancing “the dialogue” as sincere, since you reiterate my point (of course in a reasonable and even-handed way):
This is exactly what I wrote in my initial comment (in an unreasonable and uneven handed way), to wit:
Beware of a “circle jerk” dressed like like an “advancement of dialogue”, JG.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:56 am
Justin,
Supporting moderate candidates from both parties is certainly a legitimate effort. But, more and more, the choice between moderate and not-so-moderate doesn’t happen in the general election, it happens in the primary. And, a lot of times, moderates simply don’t run because the system doesn’t support or advance them. So the effort is a lot more complicated than it looks and almost HAS to be undertaken from within the party structures themselves.
And, it is true that most Americans are “centrist” if, by centrist, you mean that most American’s are not absolutists on policy and aren’t fond of the divisiveness we see in politics. But once you get any sampling of that centrist majority in one place, you quickly learn that they agree on very little outside of a broad “extremism and divisiveness is bad” sentiment.
The reality is, the great middle in America cannot be mobilized because so little ties them together. Now, certainly one great candidate can win most of the middle votes — but those voters cannot be coalesced into a greater movement because, while they might share similar temperaments, they do not share ideologies.
My point isn’t to delegitimize centrism or claim it is a failed idea. My point is to recognize the political reality and the steep, steep climb centrists have ahead if they want to do more than merely scold the two parties.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
ASC,
I think you’re on target when it comes to moderates being marginalized by both parties, but I’m a bit more optimistic about a unified center. Examples of previous gaps between political “power parties� and governed populations have led to shake-ups in the status quo in the past. Those shake ups led to the creation of new political parties, both here and abroad. Our Civil War saw the rise of the Republican Party because former Whigs, Free Soilers, & Democrats came together to oppose slavery and modernize the United States. Republicans wrestled power away from Whigs & Democrats to form a 3rd Party then…why not now? Republicans came to power then because voters were dissatisfied with Whig policy, but saw no viable option with the Democrats either. Voter concerns and the inability, or unwillingness, of the existing parties to address their concerns back in the mid-1800’s, are very similar to what exists today. Change is in the wind…you can smell it.
More recently we saw the birth of the Kadima Party in Israel. The Israeli population became dissatisfied with the vision of both Likud and Labor because they leaned either too far Right or too far Left. Likud & Labor failed to cater to the “centrists� of Israel. Arial Sharon identified the gap & created Kadima to cater to centrists. Even with Sharon incapacitated due to his stroke, the Kadima concept soared to success because Israeli voters grasped Sharon’s vision. Lastly, we have the example of our friends up North in Canada….they have a viable centrist party…why can’t we?
I guess in my very simplistic view of the issue it boils down to: This is America…the “land of consumption�. If we want something we go out & get it. If we can’t find what we’re looking for at one location, then we move on to the next, but the bottom line is we go out and get what we want. If we want a centrist government, and the Reps or Dem’s don’t want to give us centrist candidates…then it’s time to form a viable centrist party that will cater to the majority.
Hey, I’m a Mets fan….ya gotta beleive!
September 21st, 2006 at 8:12 pm
The difference between the left/fight and center is that the left and right look at their ideologies as absolutes, that their philosophies have all of the answers to the problems of society. We in the center see the complexity of things, and know that no ideology has all of the truth. Different ideologies have elements of truth, it is the application and modification of these philosophies on government in the real world that works. So, no, we don’t have an ideology to guide us or even define us, unless you consider practicality and the ability to deal with the real world an “ideology�.
September 22nd, 2006 at 11:09 am
[...] Am I serious? Probably not. I’m a deep-dyed independent and anti-partisan. But I’ve been affected by Alan Stewart Carl’s rueful, truth-telling rant that at this political moment, at least, there is no viable, vital center, or at least no robust institutions there — it’s a vacant lot with a lot of vague plans to build something, someday — so if you’re a centrist you should get involved in one of the parties and try to steer it towards the center. [...]
September 24th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
I am sending money to centrists/moderates of both parties: Chaffee, Webb, Lieberman, etc.
For me Centrism isn’t so much about policy as it is about process: Bi-partisanship, cooperation, collaboration. I trust that the best policy comes out of reconciling major points of view.
My aim is to support those who support election reform such as redistricting, open primaries, lobby reform, transparency…
September 28th, 2006 at 10:18 am
The Centrist Party was established to: break the stalemate between the left and right; enable solutions that work now and in the future; bring balance to the field of American politics; and give voters and politicians in the center a strong foundation not weakened by left/right arguments.
The Centrist Party provides the foundation for voters and politicians in the center to express their views. Without it, any attempt at maturing the political environment would likely fall short. In the current political environment, politicians can claim to be centrist and after they are elected meander back to their special interest base in the far left or right, where their funding comes from. Creating a centrist foundation significantly strengthens the integrity and ability of politicians to campaign on, and maintain a centrist political view.
Mission Statement
To achieve common sense solutions that have at their heart, a tone of balance and fairness. To create a strong foundation for mainstream America that is not prone to undue influence from left/right arguments. To move away from character assassinations and toward solution oriented campaigns. To empower people, and the vote, with a strong position not confused by one-sided agendas, or special interests. To formulate policies and solutions that regard short, medium and long term considerations at all levels.
Bringing together the best ideas and meeting in the middle
Many Republicans, Democrats and Independents believe Centrist views will allow America to achieve solutions that work for the nation. The Centrist Party allows for a position not torn between partisanship and polarized agendas. The overviews outline considerations and are indicative of Centrist reasoning. Centrist candidates will present their own platforms and perspectives on issues.
We need to break out of the two party system and build a bridge between bias and reason. The Centrist Party will span the distance between the left and the right, and address the scope of the nations needs from Americas mainstream point of view.
http://uscentrist.org/
April 15th, 2007 at 8:13 am
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