When The Center Cannot Hold
Why politics is falling apart
T o fix the morbid state of American politics, the Democratic Party is urged by its left wing to move more left. Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus, Tea Party, and their ilk attack any GOP drift from extreme right-wing positions as betrayal of campaign promises.
But extremists of the left and right cannot solve the problem of political malignancy— because they are the problem.
The 40% of the electorate that is independent and does not embrace either big party has been increasingly disenfranchised as both parties have become more dominated by extremists. The resulting polarized government is ever more dysfunctional. In the poet Yeats’ ominous phrase: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” They fall apart because the center cannot hold.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is one who is working to heal the divide by promoting open primaries and eliminating gerrymandering. He told broadcast host Michael Smerconish:
I believe very strongly in what Eisenhower said, that politics is like the road, the left and the right is like the gutter, and the center is drivable…. And I believe that the action is in the center, and I hope that the politicians wake up one day and just decide that they want to do the people’s work rather than the party’s work. Because the way it is right now, it doesn’t work. Nothing is getting accomplished.
There are some tentative but hopeful signs that the center is reasserting itself. The Netherlands’ prime minister, Mark Rutte, won a solid victory over nationalist-populist (anti-Islam) challenger Geert Wilders in that country’s recent election. Rutte, whose VVD party won 33 of the parliament’s 150 seats, then set about assembling a centrist governing coalition.
The leading candidate in France’s coming presidential election is Emmanuel Macron, who left the shipwrecked Socialist Party to start a new, centrist movement, En Marche (which shares its founder’s initials and roughly translates as “Let’s go”). In the Guardian, Hopi Sen describes EM as “a home for voters longing for a politics unburdened by party history, sectional interest or past disappointments.” Sen ponders whether Macron might be France’s Alexander Hamilton.
There have been too many rude surprises in the past year to presume the outcome of elections. But Macron is widely expected to ultimately win after the second round, defeating the principal challenges from neo-Nazi Marine Le Pen and conservative François Fillon, who has attempted to compete with Le Pen by veering even more extremely to the right.
It will be more difficult to assemble a centrist coalition in America’s broken two-party system than in a multiparty parliamentary system. A major party realignment may be needed of the sort that occurred in the 1850s — when the anti-slavery movement extinguished the Whigs and some other parties and gave rise to a new Republican Party.
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Copyright 2017, Lewis J. Perelman
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