The “Moderate Center” Isn’t and Won’t be

So Ryan Lizza has a piece in the New Yorker highlighting the statements of Jim Webb and Joe Biden bemoaning the departure of the American Center, and the curious absence of a moderate “center” within U.S. party politics. I’m sure Ryan Lizza is a crackerjack of a person (Biden and Webb, given their voting records, not so much) but this argument troubles me for a few reasons.

The first of these is simple: by characterizing both Democrats and Republicans as “extremes,” treating them as equally valid and taking a hands-off approach, critically speaking, to the position of the rightward extreme, it legitimizes the rightward extreme. This is a problem in part because the “extreme” of the Republicans is correctly, globally speaking, categorized as being on the extreme right, while the “extreme” of the Democrats falls somewhere near the center of a global political spectrum divorced from insular focus on the United States. I get that the piece is looking at U.S. partisan politics, but painting these extremes as equivalent is untrue. The relatively mundane union-busting, pro-war stance of the democratic mainstream, while by no stretch progressive, is not by any means the same kind of “extreme” as the carnival, bloodthirsty fascism of the U.S. right and its attacks on reproductive choice, collective bargaining rights, social welfare, and more.

The relatively mundane union-busting, pro-war stance of the democratic mainstream, while by no stretch progressive, is not by any means the same kind of “extreme” as the carnival, bloodthirsty fascism of the U.S. right and its attacks on reproductive choice, collective bargaining rights, social welfare, and more.

Another reason this piece troubles me: it doesn’t seem to provide any basis for accepting the candidates’ implied or express statements that the vast majority of Americans who do not identify as Democrats or Republicans are somehow in the middle of these two center-to-right-leaning parties. Lizza’s conclusion — that independents are Democrats and Republicans who are declining to wear their parties’ “hats” for whatever reason, is not necessarily correct. Party identification perverts ideology — polls of people’s views on questions like universal healthcare suffer from partisan skew when identified to polling respondents as associated with a party or candidate… in the abstract, the United States populace is simply more leftward than state and national government representation would suggest. It is also likely that many have simply written off politics, having been let down by the lack of choice in America’s sadistic electoral system.

It is also likely that many have simply written off politics, having been let down by the lack of choice in America’s sadistic electoral system.

Lizza cites a report from the 1950s showing public desire for internal consistency among the parties, and while his piece doesn’t endorse this, the later conclusions about what is making a U.S. center “out of reach and anachronistic” suffer from the common U.S. delusion — that there is nothing to the left of the Democratic party. We can cite the by now dead-horse polls about the youth’s preference for socialism over capitalism, or point to the outsize rule of capital over U.S. elections to throw doubt on this idea. On a final note, I’m not certain that the gap between the right of the Republican party and it’s “moderate” wing (in quotes because the party is nearly without exception thoroughly and completely immoderate, if not fanatical) is less than the gap between Democrats and Republicans (though that gap is not as great as Webb and others would make it).

The answer to this garbage reality is fairly simple, though unlikely to happen tomorrow. It’s to get rid of the electoral college and winner-take-all congressional elections in favor of proportional representation and a parliamentary democratic system. If Webb and Biden, and whomever else, feel strongly about the loss of choice for U.S. voters, they should support that instead of skipping with the old order into the void.