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.