PART 1
THE HORSE RACE
The racetrack and the equine athletes; the crowds in the stavnds and the rules of the game; the oddsmakers and their jargon.
CENTER (N.); CENTRIST (ADJ., N.)
Is centrism dead, as more than a few commentators have asked? Or is it still a vital force? Is it, as one pundit argued in 2018, even âsexier than you thinkâ?1
At the time, the midpoint of Donald Trumpâs presidency, many of the cherished talismans of Democratic establishment politics appeared to be in crisis. The celebration of âbipartisanshipâ that was de rigueur throughout the 1990s and early 2000s seemed both impossible and ineffectual against a figure like Trump. The radical Trumpist factions of the GOP scorned the idea openly. The experience of the Obama presidency, with its repeated failures to enlist Republican support for tepid Democratic proposals, had for many liberals discredited the valorization of compromise that Barack Obama had inherited from Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, the revival of the electoral left wing of the Democratic Party provoked some once-forbidden questions about that sacrosanct, treasured, arguably sexy beast, the center. Such as: Does it exist?
The metaphor of the center dates back to the French Revolution, along with the ârightâ and the âleft.â In the 1789 French National Assembly, the nobility sat to the right of the Chair, and the third estateâthe working class and bourgeoisieâsat to the left. Over time, these positions became respectively associated with conservative and more democratic views. The benches in the middle, meanwhile, became associated with political moderation. In nineteenth-century European Parliaments, some political parties embraced the name (such as Germanyâs old Catholic Centrist, or Centre, Party, broken up by the Nazis in the 1930s). The wordâs oldest example in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) captures a meaning that continues to haunt self-described centrists today: an 1872 report from Londonâs Daily News correspondent in France assailed âthat weak-kneed congregation who sit in the middle of the House, and call themselves âCentrists.ââ This association of centrist with squishy indecisiveness, fence-sitting, or opportunism has made it a reliable left-wing term of abuse. Vladimir Lenin used the word synonymously with âMenshevik.â Leon Trotsky regarded centrists as unprincipled operators given to politicking, always hiding their position. âCentrism,â he wrote, âdislikes being called centrism.â For most of its roughly 250-year history, therefore, where it has existed, the center has not been sexy. It was more like the porno room at an old video storeâa popular place to be, but an embarrassing place to be found.2
Nonetheless, it had its more forthright defenders. At the dawn of the Cold War, liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. celebrated political moderation as a vigorous âThird Forceâ in his 1949 book The Vital Center. Rather than left or right, he wrote, the truly decisive political conflict in the postwar world was that between the âfree societyâ and the forces of âtotalitarianismâ that promise solutions to an alienated, anxious, unequal age. Referencing Yeatsâs poem âThe Second Coming,â Schlesinger argued that the United Statesâ goal should be âto make sure that the Center does holdâ against fascist reaction and communism, to preserve democratic liberties against the temptations of revolutionary solutions. But the sixties convulsed the countryâs politics, disrupting whatever consensus had congealed around this liberal postwar center, and in the aftermath of the 1972 presidential electionâwhich saw the resounding defeat of the liberal candidate George McGovernâDemocratic elites moved to retake control of the party.3
âThe center,â first used by the left to deride the right in a moment of strength, then became popular as a way of marginalizing the left in a moment of defeat. McGovernâs loss remains a kind of Year Zero event for centrists today, a perennial warning against left-wing mobilization at a national level. After Richard Nixonâs big win that year, an organization called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) was founded by a group of labor union presidents, Democratic-aligned intellectuals, and moderate politicians hostile to the New Left, which it had blamed for the partyâs big defeat. Defined by a deep hostility to communismâand allied with those in the mainstream labor movement that shared this viewâthe CDM opposed itself to the New Left in an early manifesto coauthored by Norman Podhoretz (who would shortly become a prominent neoconservative). The younger generation of leftists, they argued, had âsneered at the greatness of America,â derided the labor movement, and undermined law and order. Taking aim at what some of its contemporary descendants might have called the far right and the âwoke left,â the coalition styled itself as a defender of rank-and-file liberals and aimed to maneuver between two of the partyâs major power blocs. âOur group feels very uncomfortable with either of the Georges,â said cofounder Ben Wattenberg, in a reference to McGovern, on the left, and the Alabama Dixiecrat George Wallace, on the right. By the late 1980s, though, Alabamaâs reactionary Georges were making their new home in the GOP, and Democrats chastened by Reaganismâwhich by then claimed erstwhile CDM cadres-turned-Republicans like Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Charles Krauthammer as leading ideologuesâembraced the label of âcentristâ as a way of moving the party away from its perceived dependencies on constituencies like organized labor. Ironically, of course, it was labor that had played a leading part in starting this march to the center in the first placeâproving that the center, rather than being a coherent position, shifts in ways that self-styled centrists are not always able to predict or control. But the centrist campaign inaugurated by the CDM could finally claim victory with the election of Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race. With Clintonâs victory, it seemed, pragmatism was in the driverâs seat and the âera of big governmentâ was over. The center had held, but it was not quite the same center as twenty-five years before. In any case, we avoided the grisly fate foretold in that one Yeats stanza about âpassionate intensityâ that every liberal pundit seems to have memorized.4
The perhaps obvious point of this history, which is routinely lost on professed American centrists, is that âthe centerâ is a relative termâitâs only defined by what itâs in the center of. This is why radicals have routinely regarded it as an unreliable, even craven position. But while the center is made by the positions on its edges, it is routinely described as a stable, coherent place, a place for tradition and âthe average guy,â as CDM cofounder James OâHara had said, or where most voters are, as we are reliably told.5 This makes centrism, as itâs often used today, synonymous not exactly with moderation, but with popularity, or at least the perception of popularity. The consequence of this is that Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden are all, in the sense of mainstream popularity, in âthe center,â if only because they all earned many votes in close elections. While âleftâ and ârightâ can plausibly be evaluated according to certain external criteriaâopinions on socialism, capitalism, and social class, for example, or positions on issues like abortion rights, public education funding, and so forthâcentrism is a political ideology built on a tautology. The center is wherever the center is.
This basic problem makes it hard for centrists to define themselves in anything but negative termsâthat is, in terms of who theyâre not. Many centrists, such as todayâs Third Way think-tankers, deal with this problem by framing bipartisanship in rhetorically affirmative terms as ânewâ and âdigital,â rather than ârightâ or âleft.â âWeâre not trying to move the Democratic Party to the center,â reasoned the editors of the Democratic Leadership Councilâs house organ, the New Democrat, in 1991. âWe want to move it forward.â âOur ideas must be bold, but they must also fit the age we are in,â said Third Way president Jon Cowan at his groupâs 2018 conference. âBig isnât enough. If itâs bold and oldâ itâs simply old.â It was a declaration of fresh thinking tailor-made for 1991.6
Other centrists address the problem of definition by turning to a language of feelings and values. Moderation is as much emotional as it is political; dullness is a mark of virtue. At that 2018 conference, Jim Himes, a Democratic representative from Connecticut, warned members of his party against surrendering to âemotion and anger.â Where their opponents are âwild-eyed,â centrists use âcommon senseâ; where their enemies want pie in the sky, centrists like âpragmatic solutions.â âReason and logic and common senseâ are at the heart of centrism, says Nick Troiano, executive director of the centrist PAC Unite America. One scholar, Bo Winegard, writes in his âCentrist Manifestoâ that âone should not seek a âconservativeâ answer to poverty or a âliberalâ answer to immigration. One should seek the best answer,â as if deciding whatâs âbestâ is somehow not a political question. Unite America has published a five-point program called the âDeclaration of Independents,â calls upon followers to use âcommon sense,â âthink for ourselves,â and âmake logical decisions.â Charles Wheelan, author of his own âCentrist Manifestoââwhy are centrists so unironically committed to that most immoderate genre of political writing, the manifesto?âasks a question as a sort of test: âAre you empathetic to other peopleâs views, are you willing to compromise?â7
Compromise here means a lot: itâs a tactic, a strategy, and a baseline emotional state. Again, the whole business follows a circular logic: compromise is one of the values centrists seek, and itâs also the way they seek it. Are you a pragmatist who almost never raises your voice, except in defense of ânormsâ? Will you compromise on most things except compromise? Then Unite Americaâs âDeclaration of Independentsâ might be the five-point program youâve been patiently, quietly, calmly waiting for. As James MacGregor Burns and Georgia Sorenson pointed out in Dead Center, a contemporary critical assessment of Clintonâs presidency, the ideal of centrism demands not coherence, but flexibility. âWhat worksâ isnât what is just or what is good, nor even always what is efficient, but what is thought likely to win. A little privatization here, some means-testing there, community policing over hereâthese short-term, malleable measures of âeffectivenessâ are unmoored from a long-term vision of what is necessary, or what should be.8
Centrism has always come to prominence in moments of crisis, which sometimes consume it (as in the case of Germanyâs Centre Party) or, eventually, create the conditions for later success (as was arguably the case with the Clinton ascendancy). It may be too soon to tell whether we are witnessing centrismâs death throes or its resurgent, sexy loin-girding. The challenge of Trump was both a boon and a challenge to centrists. In response to Trumpâs bombast and rhetorical weirdness, centrists offered a return to ânormalcyâ and national prestige. On the other hand, the centristâs grasping defense of ânormsâ offers a kind of politics in which the only things left to argue about are the tone and volume with which we argue. Outside of the horse race, it is less clear what the politics of the âradical centerâ have to offer. American centrism is a strange political ideology that does not ask, much less answer, the old and urgent political question, What is to be done? Instead, it announces in a carefully modulated tone of voice: whatever should be done should be done.
DEMOCRACY (N.)
Raymond Williams writes that âthe most striking historical factâ about democracyââgovernment by the people,â according to the OEDâis the dramatic fluctuation in its fortunes and meaning. Most of these fluctuations have to do with who the people are, and how capable, or unruly, they are thought to be. Until the nineteenth century, democracy was an unfavorable term, synonymous with mob rule and disorder. Since then, however, most political parties around the world claim to believe in it. Its nearly universally favorable meaning today makes democracy an easily manipulable concept, and just as often misleading as clarifying about a political system or a policy. The âpeopleâs democraciesâ of postwar Eastern Europe, for example, considered âthe peopleâ as an economic class in whose name the government ruled, supported by closed elections and repressive states. The anticommunist US client states in the Americas of the same era, ruled by military cliques who orchestrated phony elections to demonstrate popular support, were âtotally dedicated to democracy,â as Ronald Reagan notoriously said about the Guatemalan dictator General EfraĂn RĂos Montt in 1982.9 And the actually existing democracy of the twenty-first century United States, with a fairly free system of individual rights (to assembly, speech, and so forth, as long as your employer doesnât have a problem with how you exercise them, and the local police approve your permit), also maintains a massive prison network and an electoral system that is, even by a generous reading, unrepresentative and corrupted by moneyed interests. Democracy has careened from a challenge to all that is politically decent and orderly in human societies, to the very definition of progress and order, to various styles of pantomimes of the same. It can be bewildering, therefore, to sort out what it means and, given the cynicism with which the word has been used, whether it can be honestly said to mean anything.
Through the nineteenth century, democracy had a radical meaning, suggestive of what we might now call âdirect democracyâârule by the majority of the people over the organization and administration of political life, without the mediation of state bureaucracies. James Madison characterized democracy as an invitation to âturbulence and contentionâ in the Federalist Papers, advocating the election, by the people, of wise guardians to administer their welfare and ensure peace and respect for property. The necessity of these representatives was, for the third US president, a reflection of the irreducible inequality of human societies and the inevitability of their tendency to rivalry and disorder. He argued that democrats have âerroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.â In England a half-century later, the Chartist movement tested Madisonâs theory. The London Democratic Association, a radical working-class organization, tempted the scorn of Britainâs conservative elites and its respectable reformers with its name: âdemocraticâ signaled its commitment to both political and economic equality, by armed insurrection if necessary. Heirs to both Thomas Paine and the French Jacobins, LDA members regarded the franchise and the rights of the citizen as inextricable from economic equality. âThe great object, end, and aim, of this association,â read the founding charter, âis the destruction of inequality, and the establishment of general happiness.â Their methods, moreover, were made clear on the membership cards: âHe that hath no sword let him sell his garment and buy one.â10
The socialist movement inherited the legacy of democracyâs scandalous revolutionary meaning, which equated to popular powerâthe rule of the people, âa state,â Williams writes, âin which the interests of the majority of the people were paramount.â Meanwhile, in the liberal tradition, democracy has often come to mean the institutions of representative government in a political state that protects free speech and guarantees open elections. Today, uses of the term swim in both these currents. Some, informed at least in part by the socialist variant of democracy, associate proper democratic government with the preservation of social and economic equality, against the threats to these posed by bigots and concentrated wealth; others identify democracy with the legitimacy of the institutions of representative government. But it can also refer to the mere formality of electioneeringâor to a combination of all or some of the above. Because everyone claims to believe in democracy, it can often seem like a word to avoid if you are trying to argue in good faith and in clear terms: it obscures and deceives as much as it reveals. As Williams suggests, it might be easier to have an honest discussion of democracy if it still had more of its older, scandalous meaningâbelieving in that, at least, committed you to something.11
Take, for example, âour democra...