Back in 2022 remarking Germany's announced infusion of cash into its armed forces I acknowledged the magnitude of the expenditure, which at a stroke made Germany a candidate for the rank of the world's third highest-spending military power. However, I also argued that the sums being talked about (2 percent+ of GDP for defense bolstered by a hundred billion euro "one-off") would not result in a very much larger or more capable German military force given inflation, the country's industrial troubles, the fluctuating exchange ranges relevant to the imports clearly part of the program (like F-35 fighters), the long neglected problems of those forces (like their reportedly unlivable barracks) and of course the extremely high cost of military power, even before the way one gets into the excellence of governments and military-industrial complexes at making a lot of money go a very short away.
I do not seem to have been wrong about that, with this underlined by how three years later Germany, militarily scarcely different from what it was before the grandiose claims of "Zeitenwende", the country joined the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in committing to a far higher target. This saw them abandon the 2 percent of GDP for defense that was the old target in favor of a defense outlay nearly twice as high--3.5 percent--by 2035, not counting the extra 1.5 percent to be spent on "infrastructure," which will (much as Germany's long
-neglected civilian infrastructure needs an overhaul) plausibly end up backdoor defense spending, effectively restoring defense spending to the High Cold War-era target of 5 percent. More aggressive still Germany's government has pledged to realize this goal not by 2035 but by 2029, with this facilitated by the earlier amendment of the constitution to exclude defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the "debt brake," and parliament's creation of a half trillion euro "infrastructure fund" also exempt from said brake, some months earlier.
It is also the case that this aggressive, drastic, fiscally enabled enlargement of German defense spending has been accompanied by what was absent in the wake of the Zeitenwende, specific targets for the enlargement of the forces, and massive orders of new equipment. The current plan seems to be to enlarge the German armed forces' standing component from 180,000 to 250,000+ personnel (a 40 percent increase) and the reserves from 60,000 to 200,000 (more than tripling reserves that had, like those everywhere else in Europe, been cut nearly to nothing in the wake of the Cold War reorientation to rapid-response and less conventional missions in faraway places), with the result a fully mobilized force not in the quarter-million but the half-million range. Meanwhile the German government is reportedly ordering as many as 1,000 new Leopard 2 tanks (as against the three hundred or so it now has) and 6,500-8,500 Boxer and Patria armored fighting vehicles, implying a fully mobilized mechanized force many times Germany's current force in size. A much more substantial project than anything discussed three years ago it seems fair to say that Germany has not undertaken anything to compare with this since the founding of the Bundeswehr (when the country established its 400,000-strong, twelve-division army). And of course this does not include the reality of the "Framework Nation Concept" which has turned the Dutch army's brigades into "plug-and-play" elements (insertable into German divisions), with Czechia and Romania partly ventured on this course, which would potentially mean still larger forces under German "leadership."
All in all this situation seems a reminder of how when the issue is the social needs of the public, or something else to which elites are indifferent or even hostile Authority wails about balanced budgets, admonishes to the hungry and homeless to be respectful of vested interest, offers homilies about "politics as the art of the possible," and warns them that those (rightly) contemptuous of its do-nothingism and desirous of actually solving a problem are crazy people fleeing from freedom into totalitarianism who will make an Orwellian hell of the world should they get their way. But when it's something elites care about suddenly the politicians become "men of action." Not very intelligent, competent, men of action, but men of action all the same, with all this underlined by how that amendment instituting the debt brake came along back in 2009, right after the Great Recession when Berlin was intent on austerity in the face of '30s-like crisis and everything else be damned, as we saw with German bridges collapsing--but didn't seem so important when events presented them a new chance for weltpolitik and corporate welfare.
Still, in spite of themselves the program will take many years to realize, with reversal not impossible. The geopolitical situation, the economic situation (Germany is not in a great way here, all as military Keynesianism, which ain't what it used to be, may not help much), may well throw some surprises at them in these coming years. Besides, the words "On time and on budget" simply don't exist in the vocabulary of contractors, with the military-industrial complex-types second to none here. Meanwhile, though you would never know it from the media cheerleading ("Who are the heirs of Julius Streicher?"), it is very probable that this program is much less popular with the public than the chattering classes. This is all the more the case as, as the collapse of the vote for the traditional leading parties shows, Germany's political Establishment is just as despised and mistrusted by its electorate as its counterparts elsewhere, career corporate lawyer and former Blackrock Germany board member Chancellor Merz is already warning the public that his warfare state requires sacrifice of the already austerity-battered welfare state, and the idea of the German government realizing its ambitious military manpower goals on a purely voluntary basis seems like pure fantasy. Aside from the aversion to militarism on the part of the German public generally, and its disinterest in military confrontation with Russia particularly, the well of manpower on which it can draw is more limited than one may guess from the size of its population, for where fertility and age structure are concerned Germany is practically in the same boat as Japan, such that having the kind of mobilizable force they want means a very high proportion of military-age German youth putting the best years of their lives into "service." If the German government really is staying the course on this one, conscription is returning to the country, and before very long--with this obvious enough that I would imagine (not that the media will rush to report it) a great many German young people are already thinking about how to avoid the draft, as the more activism-minded among them consider the prospects for a new campaign. In fairness, Germany's government seems less and less inclined to let democratic niceties stand in the way of its goals, but this too may mean surprises in store.
Thursday, August 28, 2025
On Germany's Armor Orders
At this stage of things it is difficult to say very much about the Russo-Ukrainian War now dragging into its fourth year. The plain and simple truth of the matter is that an ongoing war, with its "fog," secrecy and deception, is a far harder thing to analyze than a past one in even the best of circumstances--and these are not the best of circumstances. Everything that has happened in this conflict has made it very clear that those experts with any sort of platform from which one can address the broad public have been profoundly lacking in insight. They did not understand either Russia or Ukraine, not just their armed forces, but also their economies and their societies and what they would and would not be able to bear up under the strains of a war like this one. (Remember how for almost three years now Russia has been on the verge of totally running out of ammunition, but it just never happened? How one side or the other has always been about to collapse, but here they still are, fighting?) But then where "Establishment expert" is concerned (and it is this which the media gives us) the accent is on the Establishment part, not the expert part, all as having understanding to impart to the public is not likely to be a requirement of their job. To go by the results that would seem to be giving the public the "mushroom treatment," which is the real "skill set" of these "experts," and a not uncommon mission for them, which they consistently fulfill with zeal.
Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.
Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).
What could the German government's planners be thinking here?
One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)
The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.
Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.
Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).
What could the German government's planners be thinking here?
One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)
The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.
Of Neoliberalism's Contradictions--and the Democratic Party's
First encountering the Roosevelt Institute report titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism" I was intrigued by its promise of a comprehensive treatment of the implications of neoliberalism at a cultural level--precisely because really rigorous work on neoliberalism is so scarce and so potentially valuable for those interested in the subject, with this going double for the realm of cultural studies (floopy postmodernism having had its deeply unhealthy effect on such work). And initially the report appeared quite interesting, with its discussion of neoliberalism's ultra-conformism and insecurity's encouragement of atomization, alienation, isolation, "self-commodification," and self-blame in those who have problems, and its categorization of responses by individuals to neoliberalism's stresses and failures in a quasi-Mertonian way (describing, alongside those who do seek the sense of community the system deprives them of in some fashion, not always with happy result, the rugged individualism of "strivers, self-help and wellness" culture, "dropouts," and "rebellion").
However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.
This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).
In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.
However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.
This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).
In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.
The Contradictions--and Consistencies--of Centrist Thought
While one can spend quite a bit of time discussing centrism's complex intellectual lineage, it is the conservatism of the centrist that is paramount in their broad conceptualization of the world, their intellectual responses to its concrete problems, and the actions they espouse--more specifically their embrace of classical conservative thinking, attachment to a conservative-liberal social system (more attached to capitalism than the democracy it sees as having to be limited if it is to be preserved), and the capital A Anti-Communism inseparable from both.
Thus it is the case that if the centrist is famously "anti-ideological" and "anti-extremist" and insistent on "objectivity," all of which claims only hold up when one abides by their special definitions of the terms, which are again subordinate to their Anti-Communist conservatism. As is the case with conservatives generally, they identify ideology as principally a sin of the left, obtuse to how in the end everyone is ideological, not least the centrists themselves. In thundering against extremism their hard line against "extremism" on the left (which often extends to hostility to anything-but-extreme liberals) is unmatched by an equal alertness to and stalwartness in the face of the extremism of the right, as in fact they downplay any such threat, not least by all but defining the term "fascism" out of existence. (Indeed, Irwin Ross, reviewing when that book was new Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center in Commentary--the very Commentary that soon came to be the neoconservatives' flagship publication--was to remark "that Schlesinger actually seems to have little fear of reaction," not the first time such a thing would be said of those in the center.) Meanwhile in the centrist's usage "objectivity" means the absence of ideology--or rather what they would recognize as ideology--which is to say that they reduce the meaning of the word objectivity to one's sharing their prejudices.
Thus it is the case that while one can speak of centrists as "pragmatists" their pragmatism is highly qualified indeed--for if the pragmatist creed may be summed up as "I can't be sure what's real or why it happens I know what 'works' and will go on that, until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" they drop the "until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" part. The result is that they are quite happy to embrace the pragmatist's skepticism of knowledge claims in favor of "practicality" and "experience," they are also sure they have eternal truths in their philosophy and their system and their enmities--indeed, a Schlesinger or a Bell loudly announcing their adherence to millennia-old belief in sin and evil and tragedy as they show themselves rather more resistant to change than a "go with what works" pragmatist has any business being.
Thus it is the case that if they are bearers of the Progressive tradition with its reform-mindedness one notices that where the Progressive was desirous of honest and efficient government the centrist is comfortable with the grubby play of interest that, especially in its seeing the public interest consistently lose to the rapacity and the intrigues of the powerful, looked to them like plain and simple corruption. Indeed, the centrist defends that play as "just the way the world works" as they smile condescendingly at the Progressive whose objections to such things seem to them childish. Not unrelated to this is how the centrist makes much of their respect for experts, as they sneer at the Know-Nothingism of those who disagree with them, but stop listening to experts when their findings are ill at ease with their conservative aversion to change--as seen in how they insist on giving a platform to such Know-Nothings when indulging climate deniers who undermine the experts' position on the matter, cynically helping to deflect political pressure to support public intervention in the economy of a kind and on a scale they reject out of hand.
Thus is it the case that if the New Deal was important in centrist thought, there is no question that the centrist found it easy to set the measure of social democratic reform they had stood for at mid-century aside in favor of what seemed to them an embrace of neoliberalism--less aggressively and stridently than their counterparts to their right, perhaps, but the difference only one of degree, while the move is not the great stretch it may seem given the essential conservatism of their economic thought from the start. Indeed, given how the "pragmatic" center has stuck with neoliberalism even as it yielded economic and social failure, a stoking of extremism, and electoral defeat, one sees that if, ultimately, the centrist promises a more flexible, forward-looking conservatism than the avowed right, it is conservatism nonetheless that prevails over the tools they invoke as their way of making their conservatism a success.
All of this is reflected in the significant misapprehension many have about centrism, centrists themselves often included, as seen when people see the center rolling over for the right. Quite the contrary, far from flinching in the face of its duty to stand up to extremism it is realizing that duty as it understands it--by "pragmatically" dealing with a powerful right it excludes from the category of ideologue and extremist the better to hold the line against that threat from the left it has never forgotten, because however much they may have sung hosannas over the "end of history," it never truly went away.
Thus it is the case that if the centrist is famously "anti-ideological" and "anti-extremist" and insistent on "objectivity," all of which claims only hold up when one abides by their special definitions of the terms, which are again subordinate to their Anti-Communist conservatism. As is the case with conservatives generally, they identify ideology as principally a sin of the left, obtuse to how in the end everyone is ideological, not least the centrists themselves. In thundering against extremism their hard line against "extremism" on the left (which often extends to hostility to anything-but-extreme liberals) is unmatched by an equal alertness to and stalwartness in the face of the extremism of the right, as in fact they downplay any such threat, not least by all but defining the term "fascism" out of existence. (Indeed, Irwin Ross, reviewing when that book was new Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center in Commentary--the very Commentary that soon came to be the neoconservatives' flagship publication--was to remark "that Schlesinger actually seems to have little fear of reaction," not the first time such a thing would be said of those in the center.) Meanwhile in the centrist's usage "objectivity" means the absence of ideology--or rather what they would recognize as ideology--which is to say that they reduce the meaning of the word objectivity to one's sharing their prejudices.
Thus it is the case that while one can speak of centrists as "pragmatists" their pragmatism is highly qualified indeed--for if the pragmatist creed may be summed up as "I can't be sure what's real or why it happens I know what 'works' and will go on that, until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" they drop the "until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" part. The result is that they are quite happy to embrace the pragmatist's skepticism of knowledge claims in favor of "practicality" and "experience," they are also sure they have eternal truths in their philosophy and their system and their enmities--indeed, a Schlesinger or a Bell loudly announcing their adherence to millennia-old belief in sin and evil and tragedy as they show themselves rather more resistant to change than a "go with what works" pragmatist has any business being.
Thus it is the case that if they are bearers of the Progressive tradition with its reform-mindedness one notices that where the Progressive was desirous of honest and efficient government the centrist is comfortable with the grubby play of interest that, especially in its seeing the public interest consistently lose to the rapacity and the intrigues of the powerful, looked to them like plain and simple corruption. Indeed, the centrist defends that play as "just the way the world works" as they smile condescendingly at the Progressive whose objections to such things seem to them childish. Not unrelated to this is how the centrist makes much of their respect for experts, as they sneer at the Know-Nothingism of those who disagree with them, but stop listening to experts when their findings are ill at ease with their conservative aversion to change--as seen in how they insist on giving a platform to such Know-Nothings when indulging climate deniers who undermine the experts' position on the matter, cynically helping to deflect political pressure to support public intervention in the economy of a kind and on a scale they reject out of hand.
Thus is it the case that if the New Deal was important in centrist thought, there is no question that the centrist found it easy to set the measure of social democratic reform they had stood for at mid-century aside in favor of what seemed to them an embrace of neoliberalism--less aggressively and stridently than their counterparts to their right, perhaps, but the difference only one of degree, while the move is not the great stretch it may seem given the essential conservatism of their economic thought from the start. Indeed, given how the "pragmatic" center has stuck with neoliberalism even as it yielded economic and social failure, a stoking of extremism, and electoral defeat, one sees that if, ultimately, the centrist promises a more flexible, forward-looking conservatism than the avowed right, it is conservatism nonetheless that prevails over the tools they invoke as their way of making their conservatism a success.
All of this is reflected in the significant misapprehension many have about centrism, centrists themselves often included, as seen when people see the center rolling over for the right. Quite the contrary, far from flinching in the face of its duty to stand up to extremism it is realizing that duty as it understands it--by "pragmatically" dealing with a powerful right it excludes from the category of ideologue and extremist the better to hold the line against that threat from the left it has never forgotten, because however much they may have sung hosannas over the "end of history," it never truly went away.
Conservative Liberalism: Some Thoughts
I have remarked the sloppiness of most people, professional commentators most certainly included, with political language--even that political language which has well-established, very lucid definitions almost universally accepted by those educated in fields such as political science (something those commentators tend not to be, no matter how much elitism-mongering idiots will jump up and down pointing to their Ph.ds and J.D.s from so-called "good schools"). This is the more important because a nuanced vocabulary is essential to discussing anything illuminatingly, with politics no exception.
Considering those politics it seems to me that one term that merits wider understanding and usage is "conservative liberalism." One may speak of this as an ideology which is conservative in the fundamentals of its political philosophy, but (in its particular way) accommodated to and defensive of a liberal societal structure. Those conservative fundamentals are to be found in their pessimism about "human nature," and the potential of reason to be of use in understanding or managing human beings and their affairs, and going with it an inclination to a view of society as an "organic," naturally hierarchical entity, and respect for traditional institutions and values--against the liberal's confidence in human rationality, egalitarianism and skepticism toward tradition and readiness to change existing arrangements in line with their values. However, they accept the societal arrangements classical liberalism is credited with producing, with their stress on individual right assured by the "rule of law" and representative institutions.
In this combination of conservative theorizing with liberal institutions the former has a shaping effect on the design and operation of the latter. The adherent of conservative liberalism is likely to be in earnest that liberal rights and institutions should not upset a social order that is anything but equal. They are thus likely to stress some rights over others--rating the right of the property holder more highly than other human rights (a tendency at its extreme in the defense of slavery on the grounds of respect for the property rights of a slave's owner in pre-Civil War America). The conservative liberal is also likely to desire a limitation of representative government as a necessity for preserving (acceptable) representative government, as by limiting the franchise to exclude those who might be thought likely to vote "irresponsibly," and also limiting the consequences to votes that would appear to them "irresponsible" when and where they do happen, most obviously procedurally, but also by attempting to put the most important areas of life "outside politics" so as to make them untouchable by such "irresponsible" action. Thus do they support qualifications for the franchise that will exclude the most threatening elements in the population (e.g. with a property qualification that excludes the propertyless), support checks on the actions of elected politicians (for instance, checking a popularly elected legislative body with a more senior legislative body not directly elected by the public, and the legislature as a whole with judicial review by an unelected judiciary), and favor limits on government's sphere of competence altogether (for instance, via legislation or interpretation of the law so as to constrain rather than enable government, particularly with respect to its authority over property holders), thus sharply reducing the chances of the kinds of change that would be threatening to the social order--most obviously keeping the poor from using their votes to challenge the elite's power and privileges. As this preference for "liberty" over "fraternity" and "equality" implies, the conservative liberal is apt to be more attached to liberal capitalism than to liberal democracy, and to see the market as the domain of freedom as against a state in which, should it go beyond their view of its legitimate functions (above all, the protection of property), they are quick to see tyranny--by comparison with the "less conservative" liberal, who will often see it as necessary for the state to regulate property in order to preserve liberty.
In understanding the conservatism of this form of liberalism some will argue that liberalism has been conservative from the start--that liberalism has always been just an ideology of property owners pursuing their interests, speaking of "the rights of man" when this was an effective weapon against absolutism, feudalism and the princes of the Church who stood above them in the Old Regime, while even then ready to preempt any challenge from the peasants and proletarians and others below them. (Indeed, it seem relevant that while just about every scholar of the matter seems to identify Edmund Burke as the founder of the modern conservative tradition, there are those who also claim Burke--who had been a Whig and not a Tory--for the liberal camp.) However, whatever one thinks of that claim conservative liberalism is what people have long had in mind when they spoke of conservatism in the modern world, differentiating it from that side of the liberal tradition that placed more stress on equality and less on absolutist notions of the right of property ownership. It would also seem that in American history such conservative liberalism has generally constituted the range of mainstream politics, from the framing of the Constitution forward, with challenge to it, if more present than the "consensus historians" and their contemporaries cared to acknowledge, still tending to be an effectual force only for short periods, and if extracting important concessions in the process, still consistently neutralized and marginalized over the longer run. So does it remain today, especially in the wake of the "neoliberal" turn of American politics, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the Democratic Party that represented the "left" option put before the voter.
Considering those politics it seems to me that one term that merits wider understanding and usage is "conservative liberalism." One may speak of this as an ideology which is conservative in the fundamentals of its political philosophy, but (in its particular way) accommodated to and defensive of a liberal societal structure. Those conservative fundamentals are to be found in their pessimism about "human nature," and the potential of reason to be of use in understanding or managing human beings and their affairs, and going with it an inclination to a view of society as an "organic," naturally hierarchical entity, and respect for traditional institutions and values--against the liberal's confidence in human rationality, egalitarianism and skepticism toward tradition and readiness to change existing arrangements in line with their values. However, they accept the societal arrangements classical liberalism is credited with producing, with their stress on individual right assured by the "rule of law" and representative institutions.
In this combination of conservative theorizing with liberal institutions the former has a shaping effect on the design and operation of the latter. The adherent of conservative liberalism is likely to be in earnest that liberal rights and institutions should not upset a social order that is anything but equal. They are thus likely to stress some rights over others--rating the right of the property holder more highly than other human rights (a tendency at its extreme in the defense of slavery on the grounds of respect for the property rights of a slave's owner in pre-Civil War America). The conservative liberal is also likely to desire a limitation of representative government as a necessity for preserving (acceptable) representative government, as by limiting the franchise to exclude those who might be thought likely to vote "irresponsibly," and also limiting the consequences to votes that would appear to them "irresponsible" when and where they do happen, most obviously procedurally, but also by attempting to put the most important areas of life "outside politics" so as to make them untouchable by such "irresponsible" action. Thus do they support qualifications for the franchise that will exclude the most threatening elements in the population (e.g. with a property qualification that excludes the propertyless), support checks on the actions of elected politicians (for instance, checking a popularly elected legislative body with a more senior legislative body not directly elected by the public, and the legislature as a whole with judicial review by an unelected judiciary), and favor limits on government's sphere of competence altogether (for instance, via legislation or interpretation of the law so as to constrain rather than enable government, particularly with respect to its authority over property holders), thus sharply reducing the chances of the kinds of change that would be threatening to the social order--most obviously keeping the poor from using their votes to challenge the elite's power and privileges. As this preference for "liberty" over "fraternity" and "equality" implies, the conservative liberal is apt to be more attached to liberal capitalism than to liberal democracy, and to see the market as the domain of freedom as against a state in which, should it go beyond their view of its legitimate functions (above all, the protection of property), they are quick to see tyranny--by comparison with the "less conservative" liberal, who will often see it as necessary for the state to regulate property in order to preserve liberty.
In understanding the conservatism of this form of liberalism some will argue that liberalism has been conservative from the start--that liberalism has always been just an ideology of property owners pursuing their interests, speaking of "the rights of man" when this was an effective weapon against absolutism, feudalism and the princes of the Church who stood above them in the Old Regime, while even then ready to preempt any challenge from the peasants and proletarians and others below them. (Indeed, it seem relevant that while just about every scholar of the matter seems to identify Edmund Burke as the founder of the modern conservative tradition, there are those who also claim Burke--who had been a Whig and not a Tory--for the liberal camp.) However, whatever one thinks of that claim conservative liberalism is what people have long had in mind when they spoke of conservatism in the modern world, differentiating it from that side of the liberal tradition that placed more stress on equality and less on absolutist notions of the right of property ownership. It would also seem that in American history such conservative liberalism has generally constituted the range of mainstream politics, from the framing of the Constitution forward, with challenge to it, if more present than the "consensus historians" and their contemporaries cared to acknowledge, still tending to be an effectual force only for short periods, and if extracting important concessions in the process, still consistently neutralized and marginalized over the longer run. So does it remain today, especially in the wake of the "neoliberal" turn of American politics, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the Democratic Party that represented the "left" option put before the voter.
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