Centrism: A Primer

We hear the word "centrist" tossed about a lot--but little about what it really means.

If you want a fuller explanation, supporting everything said here in great deal, to the point of having twenty-five pages of single-spaced endnotes attached, you can go here.

If you want the short version, just keep reading.

Simply put, centrism--certainly in the sense in which we use the term in the U.S.--isn't just middle-of-the-roadness, even if it overlaps with middle-of-the-roadness much of the time, or at least seems to do so. Rather this outlook can more usefully be characterized as classical conservatism updated for a society where liberal institutions have replaced those of the Old Regime which may be said. In line with that conservatism centrists take a dark view of human nature, and are pessimistic about the ability of human beings to rationally understand, direct, "engineer" society and its course. They are especially doubtful about the wisdom and goodness of the "common" man or woman--their ability to understand the issues, and to act rationally when they enter onto the political stage. This leaves them comparatively fearful of and hostile to societal change, especially when that change comes "from below." Instead they favor leadership by an elite able to use its trained judgment, for which they regard no substitute as existing.

However, the twentieth century is also not the eighteenth. As stated previously the feudal-agrarian world of the classical conservative has given way to a capitalist and democratic society, which is the form of life they are stuck with, and stuck with defending. All this being the case, if no lovers of 1789, it is 1917 that haunts them, and against which they define themselves. Thus they accept the fact of a democracy with universal suffrage and liberal rights like freedom of speech--but believe that democracy can only safely operate on very specific lines, keeping its politics "civil" and "pluralist."

What does this mean? It means that people check "ideology"--structured views of what the world is like, how it works, how to operate in it--at the door when they enter into the political arena. They do not raise the matter of how society is structured, who has advantage and who does not, what is right or wrong (much of which they regard as beside the point because of the uncertainties of social life in light of their epistemological doubts, and because they hold that in a liberal society power is so diffuse among voters and consumers that no one really has power over anyone else, for example, corporations against workers or consumers). Instead the practitioner of a centrist politics thinks of society as a plurality of interests, which they assume to all be equally legitimate so long as they abide by those rules in regard to ideology. These interests, within this arena, compete for support and negotiate among themselves in a process advised and guided by experts regarded as objectively treating of value-free facts, for the sake of preventing societal conflicts from escalating to a society-destabilizing degree--or, put more positively, the maintenance of "consensus."

Of course, all that said centrism has tended to embrace particular positions over time. In the mid-twentieth century centrism was for a defensive, containment-oriented anti-Communism in foreign policy, for the New Deal at home (if not necessarily enthusiastic about extending it), for the civil rights movement (in its moderate form), as against a right represented by figures like Barry Goldwater which took a still harder line against Communism (not containment, but "rollback"), sought a return to the nineteenth century with respect to government involvement in the economy, and opposed the civil rights movement as an infringement on the rights of lower levels of government (and not necessarily just on those grounds). Later in the century the ascent of the right (identifiable with Ronald Reagan, who succeeded where Goldwater failed) and other factors (the end of the Cold War, globalization, etc.) saw centrism move a long way to the right on key issues, becoming more like the neoconservative right in its foreign policy, and trading in the New Deal for neoliberalism. Its record in regard to the country's cultural conflicts seems a different thing. Still, it shifted away from a leftishly universalist civil rights movement in favor of a very different identity politics (which the right and many others characterize as "left" but which is readable as very much of the right in its premises, more Maistre than Martin Luther King).

Looking back it seems to me that this version of the center had its heyday in the '90s, when Bill Clinton's administration solidly established the Democratic Party's identification with it in office, governing as it did along these lines, while for the time being the prospect of great power conflict appeared on the wane in a world where Lexuses mattered more than olive trees, and it seemed to many (whether viewing the fact positively or not) that "political correctness" was inexorably in the ascendant. Since then this political vision has faced far more challenge, exemplified by the country's polarization through the twenty-first century--by the contested election of 2000, by the Iraq War and the general expansion of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, by a succession of economic crises (the tech boom's going bust in 2000, the inflationary energy crisis of the '00s, the Great Recession), by the more recent pandemic, by the escalation of culture war and identity politics, and so much else. In the face of it all thus far the center has generally stuck to its turn-of-the-century positions (partied like it's 1999, so to speak), with the Democratic Party's leadership and officials doing so even as their electoral base has shifted leftward, but it may well be that in the face of the multitude of conflicting pressures centrism will adapt yet again.