Eternal Smugness Of The Centrist Mind
There’s nothing noble about claiming to be above partisan struggle
David Brooks makes it easy for his critics. His pompous moralizing is little more than conversational fodder for Wall Street and Innovation bros under the smug impression that they are Thinking Conservatives or Realistic Liberals — i.e. their callousness is justified by an ostensible ability to understand the way the world really is and articulate that with utmost calm. Yet, for that smug calm, they’re also very quick to clutch their pearls. Thus is the paradox of Brooks and the people who (somehow) find him incisive.
Lately, The New York Times op-ed section has taken the heat off him; the page in general has devolved into blatant intellectual prostitution and shameless attention-seeking, capped off recently by their gifting Erik Prince (of Blackwater fame) free ad space to hawk his mercenaries as a humane solution to the horrors of the Afghanistan War.
Brooks is comparatively tame — or at least historically so; his musings on manliness and fathers who leave their children suggest he’s willing to jump that shark. Still, his bailiwick is more writing what plenty of middle- to upper-class white people are already thinking about the world and putting it succinctly and in a tone suggesting evenhanded consideration.
In one of his latest columns, “What Moderates Believe,” Brooks lays down moral covering fire for everybody who simply wants to remove themselves from the reality of politics by proclaiming moderation — essentially that they are centrists, independents, people who can break through the tree line of partisan strife and into the peaceful blue skies beyond.
The way to defuse the problem of Trump is not more ideological combat, Brooks tells us, but the quiet appeals of moderates, the true saviors of the American Experiment: those who want to wait for all the facts to accumulate, realize that politics isn’t everything, seek compromise, and cultivate humility in themselves. Forget that this view is rarely actually humble and forget that Brooks’s main issue with Trump tends to be the president’s un-presidential bearing (as opposed to less objectionable things like policy and republican procedure). Forget that it’s little wonder with so many considering themselves moderate that mass public opinion so rarely influences policy outcomes across decades of American politics while special interests and lobbying groups hold undue sway.
Moderate politics or centrism is essentially premised on the fantasy that politics is a civil discourse in which ideas are weighed and rational outcomes can be brought about through picking and choosing a little bit from of everything. Centrists delude themselves into thinking they’ve concocted a lovely blend from the available single malts. This is even more of a fantasy than those held by Trump opponents waiting with bated breath for Il Duce’s “inevitable collapse.”
Centrists and moderates forget that politics is struggle, with battles waged at all levels of society. And like physical battles, it’s usually won by those with resources vast enough to shape the very terms of the debate. But centrists have little interest in admitting this — they prefer the supposed moral high ground of thinking they’re above ideology and sectarianism; forgetting that their political choices are a type of ideology, and one that essentially gets them used by whichever side can pull harder.
The Koch brothers have no interest in moderation as they fund research centers and advocacy groups across the entire country, laying siege to policymakers and electoral campaigns in state after state as they seek to unshackle the wealthy entirely from any obligation to support the community.
The Republican Party has no interest in moderation when it seeks to reinstate one-party rule across the South and Midwest by denying the vote to minorities and the working poor.
Brooks is right to say that politics is a limited activity — anybody who believes that the election of Donald Trump will spur everybody to get off their couches and knock doors and run in elections and lobby their representatives 24/7 for the next three years is flatly delusional.
Yet his position feeds the kind of sentiment you’ve no doubt heard from friends and family or seen splashed across your Facebook feed in a tone of indignation at all these extremists (or perhaps you’ve felt it yourself):
- Both sides do it!
- It’s these politicians that are ruining the country for us hard-working Americans.
- I don’t want any part of this.
- I’m not some partisan hack.
But let’s set aside the fact that political independents are much rarer than we’re led to believe. This kind of thinking is a lazy way of selling one’s American birthright (or acquired right, for immigrant friends) all too cheaply.
This is not to say everybody needs to storm out and become a card-carrying party apparatchik, blasting friends with unwanted invitations to donate and demonstrate while re-posting anything and everything from Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash.
But we all bear some responsibility — proportionate to our available free time, material resources, and emotional energy — for trying to shape the policies and institutions that govern our lives, determining who gets what, when, where, and how. Sitting back and complaining about how politicians aren’t doing things right, or that “people” are being unreasonable, or making it clear that you are one of the “reasonable ones” may sure make you feel better but does precious little to change the situation.
Below is Anthony Downs’s spatial model of voting, from his landmark Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). This is probably how David Brooks views the world, along with how anybody at pains to point out how moderate or middle-of-the-road they are. Most people cluster in the center, with a few clumps of extremists on either end — parties A and B move in to tackle that big tent of moderates, certain that those radicals waiting in the wings will come along so long as the parties themselves don’t swap places.
This is almost certainly what much of the Democratic Party’s leadership pictures when it thinks of how to pick up votes, whether we’re talking about 2013 or 2017. Moderate, lean toward the center, be the reasonable party, and the moderates will follow.
The GOP and its backers, in contrast, have invested considerable time and energy and organizational infrastructure in dragging that distribution over to the right, shaping people’s expectations of what it means to be moderate: question climate science, treat immigrants like enemy combatants, destroy social safety nets in the pursuit of market efficiency, all eminently reasonable positions for the voting citizen to hold.
Guess which party has been kicking ass at the ballots and which one hasn’t.
People will do what they want to do at the end of the day — the hard work of organization and persuasion to claw back any gains for the left-of-center in 2018 and 2020 will probably be the work of a dedicated minority rather than some mass-movement popular front. But the next time somebody shares some sanctimonious post proclaiming that they’re glad to be a citizen who can think critically, as demonstrated by their proud centrism and moderation, remember that they are as much to blame as the Tea Party for the rightward shift in the US. Let them know it, like an adult, not a deluded, haughty, centrist scold.
Andrew Leber is based in Boston.
