Responding to “Centrism is Dead”
Constructing a shifting, straw-man centrist, Teryn Norris declares:
What is required now is broad recognition that centrists cannot resolve our deepening crisis. Structurally, they are too dependent on the Washington party system and its false equivalency. Intellectually, they suffer from a poverty of imagination. Philosophically, they have few core commitments. And temperamentally, they are too milquetoast, lacking one of the most essential traits for such a moment: political courage.
Norris uses “bipartisan” and “centrist” interchangeably in this piece, and defines centrism more or less as a compromise position with no actual beliefs except the average of two extremes.
But those two things aren’t the same at all and “rebuilding the left” only matter if in the process you create an electoral majority. But “the left” is so far from doing that nationwide and at the state level, that “rebuilding” makes it sound simpler than it is.
“Centrist” can mean anything because any two “centrists” can differ from party lines in almost limitless permuatations. And certainly if it means someone who is not liberal on this issue and conservative on this—in other words, if it means someone who is literally right in the middle on every issue, then of course they are manipulable my moving farther to the extreme.
But that manipulation only works in the long term if the electorate has gone with it. And if they have, and you don’t go with them, you won’t win in a democracy no matter how correct you are about everything.
There may be a few politicians here and there who fit the Platonic ideal of centrist and they probably are the convictionless milquetoast intellectual dolts Norris talks about. They are mostly irrelevant.
But that’s not the same thing as saying more moderate politics doesn’t work. In fact, it actually takes more commitment to long-term goals to be willing to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good in order to win and retain power. A winning electoral coalition that was 55% “correct” but won almost all of the time would do more good for America than constantly losing to one that is almost always wrong. Yet that is where we are.
The cancer that had taken over a lot of liberal though leaders again, and one that was common 15 years ago, is that we have to do what the Republicans do. This is true to a certain extent. Understanding how to wield power would be good. But thinking that a diverse party with a huge unruly coalition can be expanded by playing only to its hardcore base just like the Republicans is wrong. Thinking that a groupthink echo chamber and propaganda machine would be good because “they” have one and it works is wrong, and just as likely to lead the left into a reality-disconnected world as it is anyone else.
So, no, we ought not to compromise on every issue with the extremists of the other party, but that hardly means we ought to adhere to our own orthodoxy either. We’re not always right.
