Discussing Centrism

The indifference to clarity and precision in the use of political terminology by persons presented to the world as "experts" has long been a theme of my writing, mainly by way of the muddle they unnecessarily and unhelpfully make of a great many terms, with one particularly fraught case "centrism." Most of the term's users think it means middle-of-the-roadness, oblivious as they are to the extent to which it is a very specific, highly articulated way of looking at the world spelled out explicitly by a great many thinkers in a great many classics of history and sociology in the mid-century period that were read not just by academic specialists but the more alert members of the general public as well (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's The Age of Jackson and The Vital Center, Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, various works by "consensus historians" such as Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, etc.).

Of course, some will dismiss that theorizing as a relic of the past simply because of how far back in time it was, and how oblivious many in the present seem to be to it. However, American political culture at large, the content of the American news media, the conduct of policy and politics--the mainstream's notions of what views are allowable or not allowable in public, who is and is not an expert, how the news is to be presented, its apparent propensity for "both sidesism," etc., etc.--are explicable in terms of that mid-century theory, one reflection of which is how a great many persons in and out of public life who cannot even begin to provide a coherent explanation of centrism in the sense in which I am discussing it here nevertheless speak, act and give every sign of thinking like textbook centrists, the principles come to be so embedded in American political culture that without any exposure to explicit presentation of the theory they are sure of the associated prescriptions being correct, somehow. Indeed, they even speak the language of centrist theory--speaking of "pragmatism," "pluralism," "civility," "objectivity," "expertise" as good things, and "ideology" and "extremism" as bad things, even as they have only the haziest grasp of these concepts, let alone the larger thinking from which they are inextricable.

A reminder of how much power unconsidered ideas have over us, the result is that it seems well worthwhile to flatly explain what it is that they are talking about[LINK].