The Political Center and the Double Election of July 2024

Centrism is a conservative, elitist, ideology, one in respects abstruse, with a view of democracy as a thing best carefully delimited and intensively managed so as not to upset the status quo. Where the centrists' own policymaking is concerned they are pessimistic about and not really interested in getting to the roots of issues and solving problems--that is the dangerous behavior of "ideologues" and "extremists" in their view--but rather keeping problems from threatening the "consensus" in favor of the aforementioned status quo (if only by sustaining the hope among those desirous of action that they might yet get it, rather than actually doing anything for them).

Centrists, who are squeamish about ideology generally and in denial about being ideologues themselves are disinclined to spell all this out, the more in as it is just not very attractive intellectually or emotionally, to such a degree that it has a very limited popular base, how limited is evident in comparison of the center with the more avowedly conservative right with its nationalistic appeals and culture war-mongering, and the left with its demand for a freer, more just, society. What enabled centrists to win elections was, especially in a context where the center (in collaboration with the right) succeeded in blocking the left, delivering a certain amount of actual reform. However, the centrist embrace of neoliberalism ruled that out (and made the hope on which centrists expect the politically frustrated to live look increasingly empty).

The result, of course, has been a tough time for the center, underlined by the elections in Britain and France this past month. If Anne Applebaum crowed about the Keir Starmer-led Labour as a triumph of the center over populists and extremists to his left and right, the reality was not a Labour triumph but a Conservative collapse substantially due to challenge from further right as the third party vote generally surged--enabling Labour to win the election with the support of just three-quarters the proportion of the electorate that Jeremy Corbyn commanded in 2017 (when he lost). Meanwhile in France, to the evident shock and dismay of a news media not so secretly looking forward to reporting a far right victory (they do so love to "troll the libs" and "punch the hippies" with large, splashy, images of rightists exulting in a triumph at the polls), the left-leaning New Popular Front came in first in an election that had, in contrast with the record-low turnout seen in Britain, a very high turnout bespeaking the force of opposition to the far right coalition led by the National Rally--and leaving France in a situation of unprecedented crisis since Macron did not get the majority for the center that he was counting on (Macron's Ensemble coalition getting less than 25 percent of the vote, and a mere 161 of the 577 seats in parliament).

No reasonable person can look at those two elections and think that either was an affirmation of the center by the broad public, testimony to the wisdom of its leaders, or source of "lessons" for how to enable the center to hold in these times.