The Hollow (if Hallowed) Center of American Politics

American mainstream media spends a lot of pixels and electrons (and even print) bemoaning political “polarization” and longing for the sheltering, comfortable “center.” The implication is that both far out “poles” (progressive and libertarian) are equally unbalanced. Where’s the golden mean? our more prominently cautious pundits and newspaper editors want to know.

This is what comes, I suppose, of invoking a political “left” and “right” as if we were talking about hands and feet. The excessively binary nature of American politics is aided by our traditional, duopolistic two-party system that does not allow much attention or money to be diverted toward smaller, fringe parties. It was not too long ago, however, that we were all talking about how similar Democrats and Republicans had become — Tweedledum and Tweedledee as Ralph Nader likes to put it.

What has changed? The Republican Party has gone from being Tweedledum to just really dumb (and dangerous, says Noam Chomsky), while Democrats have grown more vocal and more smart about defending economic democracy, that is, more progressive, at least regarding domestic issues. (Democrats have so far conducted the “war on terror” slightly less literally and brutally than Republicans.) Thus every journalist not part of the overtly progressive media or the overtly conserving-the-rich media are befuddled about all this political “extremism.”

For a representative example of the media’s hunt for the hallowed center, we can do no better than the NY Times’ columnist David Brooks. In a column entitled “Stay Sane America, Please!”, Brooks lumps Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, our “democratic socialist”, in with the demagogic, anti-intellectual, anti-reality likes of Republican candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz:

“America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are. According to the FiveThirtyEight website, Cruz has the most conservative voting record in the entire Congress. That takes some doing.”

It also takes some rhetorical doing and mental not-doing not to distinguish the essential difference between Sanders and the GOP candidates. The problem with placing politicians on a spectrum is that the “center” becomes a sort of mythic holy land where true democracy lives in a balance of opposing views. Call it the Realm of Bipartisanship which once upon a time was real. And so Sanders is said to occupy one pole, while Trump/Cruz occupies the other. More rational conservative pundits like David Brooks would dearly love Trump/Cruz to be an extreme anomaly rather than the logical consequence of “tea party”, libertarian, theocratic conservatism — the kind now in control. The GOP and its media supporters have created a monster and some conservative thinkers are suddenly horrified at what they have wrought.

There is a vast moral and democratic difference between the progressive populism of Sanders and the demagogic populism of just about all the GOP presidential candidates. In other words, Sanders is extremely right and Trump/Cruz/etc. are extremely wrong, but that is all the “extremism” they share.

It may well be that Hillary Clinton will prevail in the Democratic primary and the general election because she is not a fire-breathing semi-socialist like Sanders; she has a happier disposition and may ultimately prevail simply because she is a she rather than a he. Another Clinton in the White House will at least ease David Brooks’ mind. But political polarization is not something to be dreaded when one of the “poles” is generally speaking political truth (if not the whole, poetic truth) and the other pole has abandoned democracy in the name of “liberty” and pretty much abandoned any intellectual and humane foundation.

What Brooks and all of us should really be worried about is a politics whose heart and mind have been hollowed out, a government whose moral and intellectual center is aligned with greed, ignorance and war. Neither major party deserves blind allegiance or complacent journalism. But the democratic Democrats and Independents that Bernie Sanders (and more often lately Hillary Clinton) represents are extremely sane in comparison to the GOP’s unintentional political satire a good part of the nation, including our media establishment, fails to fully appreciate.