When The Center Cannot Hold
I’m a centrist. In theory, it’s an antidote to political radicalism. But here are 5 ways centrism risks falling apart.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—W. B. Yeats
Centrists are not very popular these days. To be sure, our baseline popularity was never high to begin with. But our current moment seems to reserve a special sort of antipathy for the centrist point of view.
For example, the two favorite portrayals of centrists by social media snarkmongers are as extreme baby-splitters, whose appraisal of the Holocaust would call for the deaths of not six million European Jews, but three million, or as “moderates” in the critical sense used by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail”: “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
It can be tempting, in the face of such critiques, to try to vindicate centrism by describing it as a heroic posture that is nothing at all like its critics say it is. I’m not going to do that here. I do think centrism gets mischaracterized — but fairness aside, the critiques do in fact convey what most centrists are talking about when we talk about centrism.
Centrists have a substantive aim, which is not about finding the geographic mean between left and right, but about resisting extremes. And we also have a procedural aim, focused on forming beliefs from a maximum of signal and a minimum of noise — in other words, to identify and filter out the sources of disinformation that plague partisan politics.
Holding these ideals, and identifying more strongly with them than with any political party or group — even if one’s actual policy beliefs align quite closely with a party or group — are what I consider the crux of centrism.
Yet the thing about people who don’t identify strongly with any particular political party or group is that they’re not generally motivated to identify strongly with not identifying with any particular political party or group. Their sense of ill-fit takes on a muted, passive character. They remain wanderers in a political landscape not built for them, a landscape more structurally suited for those able to find their place within the parameters of some group identity or other.
Centrists thus remain a diffuse, amorphous, demotivated lot. Except when they’re not. Consider the limitless energy members of the Intellectual Dark Web have spent beating back the suggestion they function more like a rigid movement than one that is politically diverse, like a film that spends ten times its production budget on marketing. Why do I bring them up? The IDW represents the biggest “brand” within shouting distance of centrism — with the publications most associated with them, or at the least most likely to publish them, being Quillette, Areo, and the one you’re reading now. (Berny Belvedere has graciously insisted I mention that Arc Digital’s self-described “omnidirectional” posture was partially borne out of formulations of centrism I was advancing online.)
The centrist community, such as it is, largely revolves around the above institutions and their social media echoes, including podcasts like the eminently popular Joe Rogan Experience, YouTube shows like The Rubin Report, and the Quillette article queue. There’s also an extended hinterland of individuals and platforms who take some and leave the rest.
Having resided in the centrist exurbs for the past few years, I’ve recently become disillusioned by a tendency within the community toward certain anti-centrist behavior. On this, I fear, the Twitter dunkocracy is starting to have a point.
Here are the five major ways centrism can go wrong.
(1) Tribalism
Centrism’s promise derives from maintaining an ongoing understanding of and resistance to the biases that tribalism injects into the process of forming beliefs. If centrism is cohesive enough to have an organizing principle, this is it.
Yet many prominent centrists behave in complete ignorance of this notion; they’re the high schoolers — we called them “goths” and “skaters” in times of yore — who give “conformity” the finger by dressing identically badly.
To be a centrist is to be one’s own ombudsman—both for the centrist’s own beliefs as well as for the beliefs of whatever group that, whether by choice or by recurring coincidence, our centrist overlaps with. Excessive tribalism frustrates the process by eliminating contrarian behavior altogether. But this is identitarian group purification, not a true commitment to genuine self-criticism.
When tribalism is in the very air we breathe, centrism can seem practically unlivable. The same pressures affecting everyone else affect the centrist as well, beckoning—more than that, more like actually dragging — him or her toward political rigidity. Centrists are not impervious to these pressures. But to give in to them is to give up centrism.
Increasingly, disagreeing with a fellow centrist, even just questioning a belief in order to jumpstart conversation, is becoming taboo and grounds for banishment. (While the ideal centrist wouldn’t be deterred by threats of exile, it turns out most of us are actual—i.e., non-ideal—people.) The IDW has been particularly lacking in this regard, behaving more like a marketing co-op, a political party, or an actual family of blood relations, than a roundtable.
(2) Orthodoxy Over Contrarianism
Orthodoxy is the substantive result of excessive tribalism, and it amplifies tribalism still further, creating a toxic feedback loop that suffocates authenticity.
On Twitter — again, with the help of centrism’s brand ambassadors — it’s becoming standard operating procedure to display centrist bona fides by claiming to be on or at least sympathetic to the policy positions and goals of the left, while vociferously criticizing the left’s excesses. As if devoting essentially 100 percent of your online energy agitating against “leftist excesses” is somehow consistent with centrism because you’re also—in some latent sense—“open to leftist ideas.”
Consider those who elevate the protection of “free speech” as a highest-order good. Defending free speech ought to be important to every centrist, as doing so enables ideas to be freely discussed, debated, and considered. The result is a discourse culture hospitable to truth. But a free speech orthodoxy, warped by tribalist impulses, will result in centrists supporting a distorted version of an ideal they’re supposed to hold dear. Forcing every topic to be viewed through the lens of free speech in its broadest sense, restricting the Overton window to the viewpoint that current First Amendment jurisprudence is either precisely and enduringly perfect or too restrictive of free speech, foisting that stance upon social media corporations and other private businesses, and agitating against social consequences to individuals as a result of their speech, seems a significant departure from a healthy commitment to the free speech ideal. Obsessive and excessive commitment to specific views on free speech is significantly hindering expression of free speech.
Orthodoxy and tribalism can also combine to create the illusion of centrism. The fact that everyone agrees on core issues — that is, “free speech” and resistance to “identity politics” —masquerades as evidence that proper procedures have been followed.
(3) Reactionary Thinking
Centrism has also fallen prey to an orthodoxy of sorts about as-yet unidentified issues: reflexive resistance to anything that changes the status quo. Society is portrayed as teetering on the precipice of infinite slippery slopes, where our current laws, norms, and institutions function like the fundamental constants of physics, only allowing for life on Earth when calibrated just-so. Should anything change, chaos will be sure and swift to follow, as if legislators and administrators write rules and regulations with Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine.
A recent stark example of reactionary thinking among centrists came in response to The College Board’s announcement of an Adversity Index to accompany the transmission of students’ SAT scores to colleges. Despite near-unified opposition to the current largely race-based system of affirmative action, and despite the Adversity Index being comprised of color-blind factors, the centrist consensus was to reject the Index out of hand. Prominent IDW members and highly respected non-IDW centrists immediately presumed, not that the Index appeared to be a more moderate version of a currently problematic system, but that the system would be so heavily gamed as to be counterproductive, or that it would be fraudulently operated purely as a proxy for race.
Unchecked and uncriticized, the anti-“Social Justice Warrior” mentality among centrists can become indistinguishable from an anti-social justice mentality, a position more at home on the far right than the center.
(4) Excessive Signaling
Part of the allure of reactionary thinking comes from what it signals. Criticism generally comes across as more circumspect than praise, and dissent reinforces one’s position as an iconoclast. Because the average centrist is more likely to aggravate a broader swathe of the populace on a given day than the average partisan, signaling equanimity, fairness, and intellectual honesty is more important to a centrist than anyone.
When communication becomes more about signaling than substance, true discourse degrades into cosplay. Centrists, quick to accuse the far left of “virtue signaling,” can end up spending more time advertising their own centrism than advancing it. They can find themselves ignoring their substantive views entirely in lieu of procedural platitudes that ring hollow without application to concrete examples.
In a marked departure from “virtue signaling,” centrists often get the most wattage from “villain signaling”: expressly defending in a specific instance someone who — as the centrist is always clear to note — is generally wrong about everything, or otherwise known to be a loathsome individual. Humans being social creatures, villain signaling leads to villain friendship, which leads to centrists defending bad ideas under centrism’s own flag. It’s nigh impossible to effectively communicate one’s stated beliefs purely via villain signaling, which is one reason some centrists and centrist institutions are struggling to match public perception with their privately-held beliefs.
(5) Formalism Over Pragmatism
Villain signaling is one way centrists can find themselves ignoring the actual effects of their actions, and this can subvert their own objectives. Witness the zeal with which some centrists will defend and even promote social media’s pariah of the week—and anyone on the “wrong side” of this episode, from their vantage point, will be seen as insufficiently committed to the proper norms of discourse. It’s worse than that, actually: Criticizing a centrist for promoting a bad actor is seen as logically fallacious. By this logic, it doesn’t matter whether the net effect of persistent villain signaling is more power to the villain; if others mistake an isolated defense for full-throated support, that’s their problem.
Conversely, it’s becoming centrist canon to portray the left as pushing its members rightward, a phenomenon presented as both inevitable and inherently justified, while the inverse — the right pushing its members left — is denied or ignored. This hearkens back to the centrist’s overemphasis on “free speech” and anti-“identity politics”: Too many centrists derive their political identification from the tone and tenor of their Twitter mentions, ignoring — or never even thinking about — foreign policy, immigration, taxes, health care, the economy, the environment, education, social welfare, criminal justice, civil rights, abortion, and other policy issues.
Similarly, reflecting a larger trend on the right, centrist discourse often regresses into a debate-style game of “name that fallacy,” where identifying a false move is substituted for open discussion. Not coincidentally, fallacy-spotting is how one gets the most disputational mileage out of the least amount of knowledge and expertise.
Along these same lines, centrist overfocus on “reason” and “truth” to signal intelligence and political independence has led to the overvaluing of “known knowns” over “unknown unknowns.” A fact in the hand — any fact — is worth an infinitude of information in the bush. This is a form of the bias known as the “streetlight effect”: searching for something only where it’s most easily found — i.e., directly beneath the light. But while the drunkard in the classic example merely searches for his lost keys in the light’s glow, centrists are behaving as though whatever’s illuminated is what they were looking for all along. Intellectual curiosity, in theory one of the cornerstones of centrism, is increasingly absent from it.
As the biblical Serpent, given voice by George Bernard Shaw in the play Back to Methuselah and paraphrased by various Kennedys, once said, “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’”
Too often, the centrist sees things and says “No!” — and then dreams things that never were and says, “also No!” If centrism is to provide a unique antidote to radical partisanship, it needs to avoid falling prey to the same pitfalls that have poisoned discourse on the outer edges.
