The Case for Centrism

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing my politically-themed piece of the week, on centrism. I have a couple of recent pieces up at

Persuasion

. One, making somewhat similar points to this, is on the Democrats’ structural issues; the other is on the recent protests at Columbia.

Best,

Sam

THE CASE FOR CENTRISM

The other day I was asked to fill out a form including a question on my political beliefs. I’ve been dreading when something like this would come up since I don’t know myself what they are. Sometimes I feel like an old school liberal. Sometimes I feel right-of-center.

One of the boxes on there said ‘centrist’ — which I hadn’t known was a category — and it was a sort of thrill to check it and feel like I had a word for something I’ve found difficult to explain.

Centrist is different from saying ‘moderate’ or ‘independent.’ The point is that it’s in a different register. It’s not really about thinking through what one’s positions are — that’s a sort of separate topic — it’s about envisioning a place that can realistically be governed from.

The basic premise of democracy is the rule of ‘majority’ — a very uncomfortable idea, since, as often as not, one finds oneself in the minority and helpless. As the United States has evolved that has meant the seesaw of the two-party system — a surprisingly stable innovation — in which one side gets everything it wants for a number of years and then almost inevitably oversteps and then it’s the turn of the other side to mess up in the same way.

But the underlying idea of the two-party system isn’t so much that either would be right at the expense of the other but that they would ballast and cancel each other yet, that, in the end, rule would be from the dead center of the body populace.

These are the cunning principles, which are put forth for instance in Federalist No. 10. “Extend the [public] sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens,” Madison writes.

As Thomas Ricks puts it in First Principles, “A good part of early American history is Madison talking to himself.” What Madison was struggling with was the received wisdom of the ancients — that, given the prevalence of factionalism, republics were unsustainable and above all on a large scale. (And the struggles of America in the period of the Articles of Confederation seemed to fully bolster the ancients’ conviction.) But Madison, tucked away in his father’s house in Virginia, reading endlessly — and writing to Thomas Jefferson in Paris whenever he needed some new work of political theory — cracked the puzzle, discovering that the ancients had gotten it backwards: actually, size was its own strength and a bulwark against factionalism.

Little Jemmy Madison

A variant on this is median voter theory — a dull but common-sensical idea that David Brooks beautifully explicates in a recent op-ed. “The median voter rule says parties win when they stay close to the center of the electorate. Sometimes people on the left and the right pretend they can ignore it, but they usually end up paying a price,” Brooks writes.

The idea here starts to get somewhat spiritual, that the health of a society must come from the center, that politics must in some deep way reflect that center.

This is not to say that a ruling politician can only stick to the absolute center, has to follow the polls, etc. The center is a moving entity, just like anything else. People who have a gift for politics — FDR, Obama in the early period — have a way of shifting the center, almost without the center even realizing it. This is the art of political persuasion.

But there is another art, less glamorous but equally important, which is the ability to recognize where the body politic is and to stake out the rational middle ground in it. This is the particular effectiveness of the Biden administration — and also of politicians like Harry Truman and Bill Clinton.

Right now, we’re in an era of extremes, where the two-party seesaw is even more exaggerated than usual. The Trump-dominated Republicans have more or less just pulled out of the political process entirely — preferring, as Brooks again puts it, to make politics about entertainment value rather than governance. The progressive left has made itself a sort of mirror to Trumpism, convinced of the unshakeable evil of the other side, while the poohbahs of the Democratic Party have, largely through age, lost any ability to communicate effectively with the heart of the country. The Biden administration has itself been a shining light of how it looks to enact centrist policies (I would have trouble disagreeing with any significant policy of the administration’s) but the president’s age inhibits any ability to effectively communicate his accomplishments to the country-at-large.

The lessons for me from this very difficult period are, first, that electoral politics is theater — what matters, more than anything, is the charisma and personability of the figure facing the camera — and, second, that governance, to really work, must have an acute sense of the political center. The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations seemed, as often as not, to simply be canceling out the policies of the previous president. Biden has actually gotten somewhere in terms of antitrust, student loan forgiveness, etc — real structural issues that affect the lives of Americans. As easy as it is to score political points by tacking to the wings, I would hope that some of what the Biden administration has done will continue to rub off on politics down the line: in the end, democracy is built on majority rule and on a respect for the center. The center has to be where you govern from.