The Political Centrist

Introduction:The Center Holds

1 Introduction: The Center holds The IdeA ThAT PolITICAl ideologies can be placed along a continuum that runs from left to right is a legacy of the French Revolution. Delegates to the 1789 French national assembly were seated according to the interests they represented: the conservatives, representatives of the nobility and the church, were seated to the right while the representatives of the common people—those whom we would call “liberals” and “democrats” today—were at the left. The rise of socialist and anarchist theories and movements in the nineteenth century opened up the further reaches of the spectrum to the Left, while the counterdevelopment of authoritarian and fascist ideologies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries expanded the spectrum on the political Right to its current contours.1 Yet there is something of a paradox underlying the idea that the Left-Right distinction tracks some particular set of political principles or criteria. While there are indeed deep and fundamental differences that distinguish the Left and Right and that place liberalism to the left of conservatism, socialism to the left of liberalism, and so on, it is also true, as Hannah Arendt and F. A. Hayek observed, that the totalitarian Left and the totalitarian Right resemble one another considerably more than either resembles the political Center.2 As George Orwell put it, a left jackboot to the head is every bit as painful as a right jackboot. In the United States today, the mainstream political spectrum runs from left liberalism to some form of paleoconservatism. Yet about half of us reject both the “liberal” and “conservative” labels. According to recent polls, fewer than a quarter of all Americans define themselves as “liberals,” while only slightly more than a quarter call themselves “conservatives.”3 This leaves most of the rest of us, who define ourselves as politically moderate or centrist, in a kind of limbo. The political centrist’s positions are often caricatured as a halfway house between liberalism and conservatism. “The only things in the middle of the road,” claims populist author and activist Jim Hightower, “are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” The positions of the political centrist do not fall at the center on every issue, however, even if we could be certain where the center lies on particular issues. The centrist is not merely a pragmatic difference-splitter or political Solomon who believes that the best solution to any given problem is to sever the baby in two. Misconceptions about political centrism trade on the idea that the centrist is perpetually in search of the political center of gravity—either in terms of his general political orientation or as a way of approaching particular issues. Yet ironically this charge has been made against virtually every political creed by some proponent of a still more radical position. The author of The Conservative Mind, traditional conservative Russell Kirk, denounced those “middle of the road” thinkers who follow “the way of the temporizer, pluming himself on having attained the Golden 2 The Political Centrist Mean when in actuality he has only split the difference.” The “middle course will lie,” he argued, “wherever one extreme or the other decides to assign it.” Kirk, however, was not writing about political centrists but about neoconservatives and other modernist conservatives whose politics he characterized as “the conservatism of mediocrity.”4 Others have indicted conservatives such as Kirk on exactly the same charge. Libertarian F. A. Hayek repudiated conservatives as “advocates of the Middle Way” who have been willing to follow modern liberalism, though at a safe distance, embracing bigger government, the New Deal, and social welfarist policies of the twentieth century—all things conservatives once denounced. “With no goals of their own,” Hayek insisted, “conservatives have been guided by the belief that the truth must lie somewhere between the extremes—with the result that they have shifted their position every time a more extreme movement appeared on either wing.”5 There is something to this charge, as we’ll see in Chapter 3. Both liberalism and conservatism have moved significantly leftward over the course of the past two centuries. Today’s conservatives are yesterday’s liberals, and today’s liberals are yesterday ’s socialist democrats. Even those on the Far Left have been charged with being unprincipled compromisers . Among U.S. intellectuals, few consistently take positions further to the left than Noam Chomsky. Chomsky considers himself a “libertarian socialist” and has routinely maintained that contemporary America is a police state.6 Yet Chomsky’s views...