CENTRISTS: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? – The Strange Death of Centrism and the Rise of Populism
What do we mean when we talk about centrism? its a hard definition to pin down, perhaps deliberately so. Centrism is essentially an attempt at political trans-partisanship, a means of becoming politically non-binary. Any attempt to pigeon-hole the centrist will therefore be resisted because if the centrist nails his colours to the mast he ceases to be a centrist, by definition. He is like the particles observed by quantum physicists who change position when observed.
This has unfortunately lead to the common misunderstanding that centrists have no firm principles, that they represent a mushy compromise between left and right, but this is not actually the case. Centrism is basically a form of pragmatism but pragmatism should not necessarily be seen as a synonym for cynicism. In the Pulitzer-prize winning ‘The Metaphysical Club’ (2001) by Louis Menand we learn that the philosophy of pragmatism emerged in the aftermath of the America civil war, largely in response to its senseless waste of human life and potential. The moral that pragmatic thinkers like John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes garnered from that war was that complete certitude leads to dogmatism and that dogmatism can lead to violence.
This moral also characterises the thinking of the modern political centrist after the disaster of 20th Marxism became fully apparent and impossible to ignore. This wisdom was best expressed by Isaiah Berlin in ‘A Message to the Twentieth Century’ in New York Review of Books (25/11/94)
Centrism then is an attempt to take the sting out of politics by removing its ideological edge. Reformism rather than radical change becoming the watch-word. The centrist candidate does not stake his claim to political office based upon the fact that he is a representative of any particular political ideology as such but instead based upon his level of competency.
Centrist politics therefore is essentially a *technocratic* form of politics. The competency of the centrist is indicated (in part) by his professionalism which, in turn, signals his *insider* status and, as a corollary, his continuity with the current way of doing politics. Centrism then, viewed correctly, is inherently a *conservative* form of politics, in the true sense of the word, as opposed to the party political sense. Reformism in theory can quite often become perpetuation in practice.
The bete noire of centrists everywhere is the populist. Populism flips the logic of centrism on to its head and exploits the centrist where he is most vulnerable. The centrist makes an appeal to the public based upon his *competency.* To this end he presents himself as slick, professional, media-savvy and polished. He looks and sounds just like you would expect a politician to look and sound like, without a sound-bite or a hair out of place.
Whereas, the populist, on the other hand, rips up that rule book and bases his appeal to the public instead on his *authenticity* – think of the uncombed hair of Bernie Sanders and Boris Johnson, the lack of a “proper suit and tie” (David Cameron’s words) in respect to Jeremy Corbyn, the cigarette-smoking and beer-drinking of Nigel Farage or the unusual language (for a politician) of Donald Trump – which serves to align the populist with the non-politician and assert his identity as a *common man.* This serves several more purposes, which we will now explore.
Firstly, the centrist candidate, as we have already discussed, stakes his claim to political legitimacy based upon his competency. How does he do that? Well, in part, he does it by signalling to the public that he is a professional politician *not* just an ordinary person. This involves indicating that he is, in some way, a political insider, by virtue of doing so he demonstrates his continuity with the current and established way of doing things.
The populist, to reiterate, signals to the public (via his authenticity) that he is an *outsider* to the current political establishment and the current method of conducting politics – which serves to align him with the non-politician and assert his identity as a *common man* – and this, in turn, signals his potential as a change-agent. Noticeably, the only successful centrist politician of the last few years has been Emmanuel Macron who positioned himself as a political outsider/anti-establishment candidate via the launch of a brand-new party.
(Taken from ‘The Problem with Populism’ by Cas Mudde, The Guardian, 17/02/15.)
The populist makes himself – to borrow a term coined by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his 2012 book of the same name – *anti-fragile* by virtue of the fact that attacks on him by his opponents only serve to make him more popular. The populist, as we have discussed, aligns himself with the non-politician and asserts his identity as a *common man* via his *authenticity.* The centrist, on the other hand, stakes his claim to political legitimacy via his competency which he signals to the public by his *professionalism.* This dichotomy allows the populist to easily cast the centrist as being part of an *elite,* neatly mapping onto the populist framing of society as consisting of two homogenous and antagonistic groups – the *pure people* and the *corrupt elite* – with the populist cast as representing the people to the elite and the centrist cast as representing the elite to the people.
One consequence of this framing is to make it appear that when the populist is attacked, his opponents (who, of course, represent the elite) are, in fact, *punching down* whereas when the populist (who, of course, represents the people) attacks his opponents he is, in fact, *punching up.* This is the essence of how the populist makes himself anti-fragile: the more he is attacked, the more popular he becomes, because those attacks validate the populist world-view of how politics (and society in general) functions, solidifying his unique selling point to the public as an outsider and a potential agent of change.
The centrist therefore has herself caught in a series of populist traps from which she is struggling to extricate herself. She has tried attacking the populist but it doesn’t seem to work, in fact it actually serves to make the populist even *more* popular. So what should the centrist do? Firstly, she has to identify her own weaknesses, first amongst these is her trans-partisanship. Trans-partisanship makes the centrist vulnerable because in lieu of an ideological pitch she tries to sell herself to the public on the basis of her competency but in order to do that she makes it far too easy for the populist to pigeon-hole her as an elitist of some kind. This is because in order to signal her competency she also has to signal that she is an *insider* in some way (read: *professional politician*) which, in turn, serves to emphasise her continuity with the current political establishment but unfortunately this diminishes her ability to sell herself as a change-agent.
Trans-partisanship, also serves to blind the centrist to his *own* politics, causing a form of political anosognosia (a neurological deficit resulting in a lack of self-awareness.) This political anosognosia serves to hinder the centrist when it comes to learning from his losses, a prerequisite of adapting to the new political environment in which he finds himself. If ideology is to be kept out of politics (trans-partisanship) because it is potentially dangerous then what the centrist is really arguing for is essentially a technocratic form of politics. Not so much *left vs right* as *true vs false.* Pragmatic problem-solving without any hint of bias based purely on *what works* becomes the idealised form of politics.
In order to fully realise the aim of conducting politics along technocratic lines the public realm of politics needs to be reduced to a simple choice between differing styles of managerial competence and little more. In order to reduce the public realm of politics in this way it is necessary to de-politicise vast areas of politics itself, shutting the public out and delegating decision-making to technocratic experts.
By de-politicising vast areas of politics in this way – there is no alternative, remember? – the *thin* ideology of centrism can be hidden in plain sight. The problem being that it can also become hidden from the centrist himself making it harder for him to change course when necessary, which is exactly what has happened. The act of not picking a side *is* picking a side that is not picking a side. The tendency of not having a tendency *is* a tendency. A world-view committed to a non-ideological form of politics *is* a form of ideological politics in its own right, albeit a *thin* one.
If the centrist believes that politics isn’t about left vs right but instead merely true vs false it means that when the public rejects his style of politics – whether that be in the form of voting for Trump or voting for Brexit for example – it can appear to the centrist that the public has not just rejected his form of politics but turned its face away from truth itself. This has lead the centrist not down the pathway towards self-reflection but instead down a rabbit-hole named *post-truth* politics. For the political centrist it is clear that the disease which has affected our body politic labelled *populism* has been carried by the air-borne virus of post-truth politics and the vector of this pathogen has been identified by political centrists as *fake news.* Notably, the Oxford English Dictionaries named ‘post-truth’ as their word of the year in 2016 and a glut of books were soon rushed out to capitalise on this seemingly new phenomenon.
The idea of *post-truth* politics – in truth a modern update of the old Marxist idea of *false consciousness* – reinforces the political anosognosia of the centrist leading him to believe that the public have only voted against him because they were mislead, lied to or manipulated in some way. Instead of spending the necessary time reflecting upon his losses he is instead concerning himself with re-litigating his last defeat and in the campaign to censor the new forms of media to which he has attributed blame for his losses.
The paradox of centrism therefore is that a form of politics designed to avoid dogmatism has eventually calcified into its own dogma. By hiding its thin ideology in plain sight it has hidden it, to a large extent, from centrists themselves resulting in political asogognosia and a related inability to adapt to a fast-changing political environment with populist insurgencies coming from both left and right.
The Dutch political scientist (and arguably the foremost expert on populism in the world) Cas Mudde has described populism as a *thin-centred ideology* because it addresses only part of the political agenda. This leads to the requirement that it be paired with a *thicker* ideology to gain traction. I would argue that the same is also true of *centrism,* it also a *thin-centred ideology* that requires it to be paired with a *thicker* ideology.
(Taken from ‘Populism isn’t dead. Here are five things you need to know about it’ by Cas Mudde in The Guardian 07/07/17.)
Which *thicker* ideology would that be? Well, centrists view communism as being roughly equally as bad as fascism. In others words, centrism is anti-totalitarian, that is to say, it is a form of liberalism. The unique selling point of socialism is egalite, the unique selling point of nationalism is fraternite and the unique selling point of liberalism is, of course, liberte.
So, in summary, if the centrist wishes to extricate himself from the populist quagmire into which he has now sunk, he needs to do the following……
1. Recognise that trans-partisanship has left him vulnerable to populist candidates pigeon-holing him as an elitist which then allows the populist to become ‘anti-fragile.’
2. Make an explicitly ideological pitch to voters. The thin-centred ideology of centrism is not thick enough on its own to gain traction. The centrist needs to enter the foray of explicitly ideological politics and sell his brand of liberalism to the public. There *is* an alternative in other words. We are not witnessing the *end of history* as Francis Fukuyama prophesied. We *do* need to debate issues like globalisation.
3. Ditch the idea of post-truth politics and recognise it for what it is: a modern, liberal update of the old Marxist canard of false consciousness. Allied to this: recognise that obsessions with Putin’s Russia and also censoring new forms of social media are actually red herrings and counter-productive. If centrists want to find their biggest enemy they only need to look in the mirror.
4. Recognise that by de-politicising vast areas of the political sphere he has created an opening for populist candidates to re-politicise those issues and use them as a wedge to divide the electorate. De-politicising issues in this way does not work and helps rather than hinders populist candidates.
5. Finally, he needs to decide whether liberalism is a ‘thick’ enough ideology on its own to compete in the ideological market-place with socialism (left-wing populism) and nationalism (right-wing populism.) There are currently two critiques of liberalism doing the rounds. One is that liberalism is too *thin* because it doesn’t provide meaning or outline a common good. The second critique is that liberalism is too *thick* i.e pseudo-religious. If it is too *thin* then consideration needs to be given as to how to remedy that particular problem.
