The Center is the New Right
Everybody who’s ever been in an election that I’m aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there.
— Hillary Clinton (Feb 2016)
We have this phenomenon where [Bernie Sanders] is taking positions that would have been considered pretty mainstream during the Eisenhower years, that are supported by a large part, often a considerable majority, of the population, but he’s dismissed as radical and extremist. That’s an indication of how the spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period, so far to the right that the contemporary Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. And the Republicans are just off the spectrum.
— Noam Chomksy (Apr 2016)
The tectonic shift points to the rise of what might be called the “new center.” During the neoliberal era of roughly the last 40 years — characterized by deregulation of big business, privatizations of everything from schools to prisons, undermining and co-optation of unions, tax cuts for the wealthy, “all-of-the-above” energy solutions, trade deals written by and for transnational corporations, ever-expanding war, all under a bipartisan consensus — being a “centrist” Democrat like Clinton has meant following the same core principle that Republicans follow: give the corporations what they want. In Margaret Thatcher’s famous words, “there is no alternative.”
For a “centrist” Democrat, following the simple principle in no way conflicts with being a “progressive.” You can “stand up” for social justice — as long as “standing up” doesn’t cost your corporate backers a penny. You can (belatedly) decide that nothing should stop gay marriage because it doesn’t challenge the bipartisan corporate agenda. (Indeed, many queer and transgender rights activists on the left argue convincingly that marriage is fundamentally a conservative, Western-colonial institution that serves to buttress capitalism.) Only occasionally will social movements mount enough pressure to push you leftward to mildly redistributive or emancipatory policies. Shifts in establishment rhetoric regarding the fight for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the movement against mass incarceration are recent examples.
There’s never been a time when corporate elites were content to fairly distribute the fruit of the national labor. But whereas labor unions and social movements once offered a serious challenge to corporate power, now, after decades of bipartisan union-busting and lip service to social justice, establishment Democrats’ relations to the working class — including the poor, the mal-/unemployed, all of the oppressed — across each election cycle are well known: vote for us, or else this ultra-right-wing monster will be elected; trust us, we “feel your pain;” now look the other way as we close your neighborhood school and, if you’re lucky, replace it with a privately run charter school staffed by lower-salary, non-union, white college graduates hailing from elite oases.
Lewis Powell, who went on to become a Supreme Court justice, would be proud to see how far the corporate project to control both major parties has come since his groundbreaking 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce. In the capitalist call to arms, Powell declared that “the American free enterprise system is under broad attack” not just by the expected minority of communists and socialists. Rather, “the most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” He was reacting to the organized activism that had given birth to the Environmental Protection Agency and other landmark environmental, health, and consumer protections. The memo called Ralph Nader, who was instrumental in this activism, “perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business.” “Thanks largely to the media,” Powell continued, Nader “has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”
Powell wrote that “business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups … that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” Powell instructed business leaders to organize with each other to promote capitalism on campus and in media and to “penalize politically those who oppose it.”
Forty-five years later, corporate lobbyists sprout like mushrooms on Democrats and Republicans alike, and Beltway debate is confined to the range between the unabashedly capitalist, conservative Heritage Foundation and the “capitalism-for-everyone,” liberal Center for American Progress (founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta). These limits of the acceptable discourse help explain why Citigroup recently concluded that after the election, “the probability of the status quo continuing for U.S. politics seems high.” Which would of course be good news for the bank; as USA Today put it in 2013, “since stocks bottomed in early 2009, financials have been one of the best-performing sectors in the market.”
The results of “centrist,” pro-business politics of the neoliberal era are readily visible in the United States to the one-fifth of children who live in poverty, to the one-third of Black men who (if trends continue) will be imprisoned at some point in their lives, and to the average worker, whose compensation, from 1973 to 2013, increased only 9 percent even though her productivity increased 74 percent. As for who has benefited, from 1979 to 2013, very-high-wage workers saw a pay increase of 41 percent, while middle-wage workers’ pay increased only six percent and low-wage workers’ pay decreased five percent.
Meanwhile the wealthiest have seen their tax rates plummet. And the wage gap between white and Black workers as well as between white and Hispanic workers has increased.
Globally, the “centrist” neoliberal era has had an unsurprising impact. Recently The Guardian noted that “in 1960, at the end of colonialism, people living in the world’s richest country were 33 times richer than people living in the poorest country. That’s quite a substantial gap. But then by 2000, after neoliberal globalisation had run its course, they were a shocking 134 times richer. And that’s not counting extreme outliers, like small oil-rich kingdoms in the Middle East or tiny offshore tax havens.” And this year Oxfam reported that the world’s richest one percent now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined.
Contrary to the idea that global poverty is everywhere in decline, Trinity College professor Vijay Prashad has pointed out that “the number of impoverished people in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 376 million in 1999 to 414 million people in 2010, a far steeper rate of increase than that of population growth.” Looking at official claims that India has drastically reduced poverty during its period of rapid growth, Prashad points out that, in reality, “in 2009, almost three quarters of the Indian population consumed less than 2,100 calories per day. This percentage is up from 64 percent in 2005 and 58 percent in 1984.”
Focusing on the United States and Great Britain, where global neoliberalism was incubated, the democratic socialist magazine Jacobin prefaced this year’s spring issue (“Up from Liberalism”) by describing the entrenchment of “centrist,” Third-Way policies that have brought us to this point:
With traditional social democracy off the table, [Bill] Clinton, [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair, and other Third Wayers pushed a new centrist program: reform the bureaucracy and state programs to make them run more like the private sector, abandon full employment to render labor markets slack, weaken ties to organized labor, and move closer to business.
The shift wasn’t to a smaller state necessarily, but a different kind of state — one less focused on directly providing social goods and economic security and more interested in using government to create markets and competition where there had been none.
For the poor and working classes, the results have been disastrous. Stuck with stagnant wages and an indifferent state, they tried to pad their living standards with consumer debt even as they were more exposed to life’s vagaries.
Meanwhile, center-left parties were undermining their own basis of support. Workers increasingly stayed at home, seeing little point in voting for or being active in formations that now resembled their center-right foes. The mass struggles that provided the basis for both reformist and revolutionary left politics seemed like a thing of the past.
Recent years have brought some stirrings of an alternative. The emergence of Jeremy Corbyn represents an unexpected opportunity to fight for socialist ideas within the [UK’s] Labour Party. And in the United States, the popular reception to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign shows there is a hunger among many for a politics with substance, a politics in their class interest.
Poll after poll captures that hunger. The Progressive Change Institute’s 2016 poll of likely voters reveals that a litany of left political objectives deemed “unrealistic” by today’s centrists are in reality deeply popular, even among “likely voters,” a pool that slants to the right, given the overrepresentation of disenfranchised or disillusioned left leaners in the general public.
To examine just one issue more closely: in May, Gallup found that a majority of Americans — not just Democrats and those farther left, but all Americans — would prefer to replace the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded universal healthcare system. The United States pays by far the most for healthcare among the 35 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development due to a higher cost of goods and services. Meanwhile, single-payer systems that, in Hillary Clinton’s words from February, “go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means,” in reality deliver better results for cheaper.
No amount of rhetoric—out from behind closed doors—about “taking on special interests” or “cracking down on Wall Street” can erase the readily observable record of the neoliberal “center-left to center-right.” No amount of branding can make this “new center” something other than what it is: a bipartisan consensus for the benefit of capital. There is no major U.S. party of the left, and Clintonian “centrists” will do all they can to keep it that way. But the more it sinks in that today’s “centrists” are yesterday’s conservatives, the sooner their depressing political theater will end.
