"What is Centrism?": A Few Thoughts on the Matter

Looking up what centrism is--perhaps asking your friendly neighborhood AI--one is likely to get the answer that it is a tendency that is neither right nor left, but in the middle, which is very concerned for liberal institutions, and compromise, and very averse to "ideology." Whoever is giving the answer may also say that centrism sets great store by things called "pragmatism," "pluralism" and "civility."

It is a less satisfying answer than it may appear at first glance. After all, if one favors the "middle," why do they do that? Why should one assume the answers lie in the middle, rather than the "extremes?" How does one know where the middle and the extremes are anyway? In claiming to stand for liberalism, how do centrists understand the concept--and navigate the dilemmas political actors constantly face? Why do they make such a virtue of compromise, and dislike "ideology" so much--and for that matter, seem so oblivious to the fact that even before going any further centrism itself already sounds like an ideology, making being anti-ideological a hypocritical pose? These terms "pragmatism" and "pluralism" and "civility"--what exactly do they mean, in themselves, in connection with centrist priorities, in practice?

The answers to these questions are by no means esoteric. As anyone who has read Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Bell and their contemporary "fellow travelers" finds, there really is a very elaborately structured understanding of the world spelled out in their writings--a very thoroughly developed ideology--which is the basis of what one calls "centrism."

Short version: centrism is basically conservatism, and understandable in terms of two particular aspects of that tradition, which are not mutually exclusive. One is America's tradition of "liberal conservatism"--the conservatism of a liberal society where elites are committed to property rights, marketplace exchange and representative institutions as against outright dictatorship (monarchical or otherwise), but less enthusiastic about the "common man" having a say in public affairs (that important centrist Louis Hartz summing it up well as a "tradition which hates the ancien régime up to a certain point, loves capitalism, and fears democracy"). The other is the tradition of "classical conservatism" that emerged in reaction against the Enlightenment, galvanized by the French Revolution. If that tradition has paralleled (and maybe informed) America's tradition from the start, centrism produced what is readable as a version updated for mid-twentieth century America, with the essential framework retained even as centrism has gone through important evolutions.

In line with the conservatism common to both of these, the centrist is deeply pessimistic about human reason, "human nature," and the possibility of rationally and deliberately altering the structure of society to positive ends; more anxious for order than equality, justice or freedom; highly respectful of existing arrangements as the best that can reasonably be hoped for, not least in keeping a bad human nature in check for the sake of upholding said order; and fearful of the "lower orders," with their worst nightmare their becoming mobilized behind some agenda for change, in a way that earlier generations of conservatives identified with 1789, but which they identify with 1917. In line with the application of this conservatism to a liberal society it keeps representative institutions, but insists on the need to "manage democracy" very carefully. Hence its insistence on the pragmatic, pluralistic, civil discourse, which takes the world as it finds it without bothering for deeper understandings (pragmatic), sees society as a collection of different, competing interests none necessarily more important or valid than the others (pluralist), and prefers to leave the ethics out of politics in favor of those who disagree doing so "respectfully" (civility). Thus, the centrist holds that those engaged in the political dialogue must forget all about getting to the roots of things and what is right or wrong, fair and unfair; treat the structure of society as settled and off-limits to discussion; negotiate the issues one at a time without (un-pragmatically) seeing connections between one thing and another, while respecting their opponents as being as legitimate as themselves, assuming their good faith, and not worrying over who does or does not have the power in the situation as they negotiate; and if the resulting compromises are not to their liking, take their frustration with good grace, and hope to do better "next time" while never thinking of breaking with the rules. Thus does the centrist focus on mediating the process, with the good centrist politician not the principled fighter for a cause, but the one who "upholds consensus" behind things as they are by seeing that every interest able and willing to play by the rules is represented, and in the process discontent, if not necessarily allayed, prevented from reaching that point at which it radicalizes and divides and opens the door to the revolutions which haunt the centrist's imagination by way of the appropriate "course adjustments." Thus there may be change, but as little as possible, the minimum required for the sake of preserving the social structure, rather than setting about solving societal problems simply because they are problems, let alone turning the social order into something else, as with those leftists who seek a "reformist" path toward a different order.

Thus is anyone unwilling to play by these rules, who does get to the roots of things, question the social structure, raise the matters of power and rights and wrongs and what is fair and unfair, dispute their opponents' good faith as they have in mind priorities besides consensus preservation--valuing equality, freedom, justice over the "status quo"--excluded from the dialogue as ideologue and extremist. Thus to speak of capitalism and class, to question inequality, to cite the theories of critics of the system, to demand more than consensus-preserving course adjustments, to advocate mass movements, is to rule oneself out of the discussion, and indeed one does not hear of these things in the mainstream, with all this has meant for the left wherever these rules prevail--all as the right less obviously fell afoul of the rules, and the center was less apt to hold it to account for its failings.

Thus, one might add, does the centrist think the limitation of the field to two political parties not so far apart in policy and a collegial attitude among the national elite a good thing, thus do they in the digital age panic over "fake news" and yearn for the days when people watched one of just three nightly news broadcasts, thus do they have no problem telling the public to "hold its nose and vote" for one of the two parties rather than looking to any others, no matter how dissatisfied they are--because the limitation of choices of party and candidate and sources of information, and the lowering of expectations, are all essential to "managing democracy."

The result is an informally but tightly regulated, elite-administered discourse that uses liberal institutions to conservative political ends, with even change intended to uphold the existing social structure above all. As centrism's theoreticians themselves acknowledge, all this is very frustrating for those earnest about addressing society's problems, or ardent about the disenfranchised having a say in social affairs, or simply think democracy ought to offer something better than "Hold your nose and vote," and less than pleasing even to many who are on the whole contented with things as they are. Even as the left correctly sees in the center a fundamentally anti-leftist force many conservatives prefer a firmer commitment to their own principles than the "pragmatic," change-averse, compromise-minded center, see it in the avowed right, and prefer it. And indeed the unattractiveness of the centrist framework has plausibly been a factor in its being so little explained. Certainly, I think, it is few who understand it well--but many of those who do, even if sympathetic to the centrist outlook, knowing how uninspiring it is, think "discretion the better part of valor." They may well be right, given how centrism has endured as the conventional wisdom of American politics these past many decades, the center's essential political philosophy prevailing in American life even as the center's positions have shifted considerably in many a matter--an evolution, one must note, reflecting centrism's adherence to that philosophy. Consistently opposing the left, but reaching out to the right--indeed, consistently allying with the right against the left--the center succeeded in marginalizing the left, leaving the right the source of initiative within a political discourse that the center, again, mediated, shifting the discussion rightward and with it those stances the center took as it performed what it regarded as its role within American politics.

Two Posts From the Summer Regarding the Election

Back amid the crisis following President Joe Biden's disastrous performance in the (unusually early) first presidential debate back in June I wrote two posts. One addressed the media furor over Biden's mental fitness, which generally showed the media at its worst. The other focused on the way in which Joe Biden's "record-player moment" during a similar event back in 2019, which raised questions about his being "out of touch" and even his mental fitness then, was not being mentioned at all amid that furor--and what that slighting indicated about the press. The rush of events meant that both pieces came to seem too dated to be worth bothering with before I had the chance to put them up, but now with the election over, and the matter of the Democratic Party's bungling of the election being much chewed over, they seem to me topical again--and so for whatever they are worth, here they are.

Does No One Remember Joseph Biden's "Record-Player Moment?"

Back in September 2019 during the Democratic Party's presidential primary, in a debate among the candidates, Joseph Biden responded to a question about the effects of segregation with an incoherent string of remarks apparently to do with improving the education of young children in which he repeatedly yelled "School!" in the tone of a Frankenstein's monster. What got more attention than that, however, was the reference Biden made to the necessity of parents having the "record player" on so that their children could hear more words and thus enlarge their vocabularies.

At the time many already thought that Mr. Biden was "too old" for the presidency--not merely at a point in his life at which the odds of his still being of sufficiently sound mind and body five or ten years on to bear up under the responsibilities of the job were (few candidates aim to be one-termers) were increasingly open to doubt, but whether he was already becoming unsound that way, to say nothing of "being out of touch." And some thought that he would never recover from the "gaffe." That people would always remember Biden's response in that moment.

As it happens, amid the media's coverage of a Biden performance at the latest Biden-Trump spectacle that by all accounts was a disaster so great that the most Establishment organs are in despair over Biden's chances and calling upon him to give up the race and permit his place in the race to be taken by a more viable contender, I failed to find a single reference to his "record-player moment" in the press.

One can argue that this has been a matter of effective damage control carried out in the aftermath of the episode, as a Democratic Party leadership once again determined to get a reliable old centrist-neoliberal on the ticket even though this had cost them again and again over the years ultimately succeeded in warding off the challenges to Biden on the grounds of age, just as it had on the grounds of his centrism, and in the circumstances succeeded (as often it did not) in getting much of the public to "hold their nose and vote" for him. One can also argue that the "record-player moment" was buried under a pile of other gaffes (Biden was never thought brilliant even at the peak of his powers, or for that matter, honest or humble about his limitations) amid a general degradation of public discourse, which along with the "interesting times" in which we have apparently been cursed to live made any one of them simply seem less important.

However, it also seems to me to be the case that the vast majority of those who produce our "journalism," displaying signs of what they accuse Biden of much earlier in life, have no ability to recall anything that happened more than two weeks ago, let alone reference that knowledge in such a way as to help them illuminate the present. It also seems to me that even if they had the capacity to make and use such recollections this particular one would be inconvenient--suggesting that those who argued that Biden was unsuited to the nomination because of his condition were correct. After all, the way things work in our media is that the Establishment and its experts are never held accountable for being wrong.

By the same token those who challenge the Establishment are never given credit for being right, even though they are that about as often as the Establishment is wrong--which seems pretty much all the time these days.

On Joe Biden's "Brain"

For as long as I can remember I have despised the horse race-style coverage of electoral campaigns so beloved by the news media, which reflects the absolute worst in them, not least the preference for talking about politics rather than policy that is not just a matter of idiots being dazzled by "showbusiness for ugly people," but outright evasion of . . . everything else. Naturally they have delighted in President Joseph Biden's by-all-accounts disastrous performance in his unusually-early-for-the-season debate with the Republican nominee Donald Trump--because it gives them the chance to fill up the headlines with a virtually unprecedented turn in this horse race, namely an incumbent appearing mentally unfit for reelection and being publicly pressed to drop out of the race by his colleagues in his party and their backers, affording lots and lots of opportunity for the kind of palace intrigue crapola and sterile speculation about "what it all means" for how the horse will go with which they love to deluge their readers, listeners and viewers.

Indeed, the coverage has been so obsessive that Rebecca Solnit understandably characterizes "the pundit class" as "desperate to push Biden out of the race," with their eagerness here plausibly having consequences different from what they claim to desire. Moreover, even after this story's monopolizing American headlines for two weeks there is no sign that it is about to end any time soon. The New York Times and its far-from-the-worst-of-rather-a-bad-lot writer Ezra Klein do not impress me as sources of fact, truth or insight--but when the latter writes in the former that "The Nomination Crisis is Far From Over" I see no reason to doubt them, not least because the Times is all by itself in a position to do a very great deal to keep that crisis at the top of the news, all as the rest of the major media outlets of the country, across the painfully narrow portion of the political spectrum the mainstream heeds, show every sign of being happy to help in the performance of that particular task.

The Biases of Western Analysts Regarding the Chinese and Indian Economies: A Few Thoughts

For orthodox economists it has been bad enough that neoliberalism has had as its product not only social misery but developmental failure. Making things worse is that a nation should enjoy so much success for so long a time by way of rejecting neoliberal prescriptions, instead following a statist and mercantilist course of development that has stressed exactly the "hard" industries that finance-singing neoliberals are so prone to treat with disdain (along with those who stand up for them). That the government presiding over the progress has been run by a party still calling itself Communist (however little its actual policies may have to do with Communism), that international relations have become more hostile (indeed, even that China has become such a large producer of "green" technology of the kind the fossil fuel-worshipping right despises, such that one does not hear the right screaming against the recent tariffs on such goods in the name of their free-market pieties), has only lent a further edge to their hostility to China's gains. The result has been their endlessly predicting doom for China's growth, and even the outright collapse of the Chinese state--only to see China defying those predictions for decade after decade. Even the Great Recession, escalating trade war with the United States and its allies, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this remains the case, China's growth admittedly slowing, but still greatly superior to what the rest of the world has seen for the most part, with China's 4.7 percent a year average annual GDP growth rate in the crisis years of 2020-2023 enviable (certainly next to the U.S.' mere 2 percent, Europe's 1.1 percent, Japan's 0.3 percent over the same time frame)--and even the slowing seeming to bespeak not the failure but the maturity of an economy that by this point would seem to have surmounted any "middle income trap" to go by its high-technology exports (greater than those of the whole G-7 in the aggregate, and greater than those of the U.S. today in per capita terms).

Of course, none of this has given the doomsayers any pause, the predictions still forthcoming.

Such analysts' ceaseless doomsaying about China has had its complement in their comparative optimism about the prospects of India--which they view so much more positively because in contrast with the statist-mercantilist, manufacturing-minded Chinese model India presents a more thoroughly privatized-neoliberal, services-oriented, financialized economy of the sort they approve and champion, with India's undeniable explosion in inequality part of what they find a very welcome package. (If the term "billionaire Raj" is in many utterances a criticism of the combination of extreme wealth in a few hands with vast poverty, for such economic thinkers the country's generation of billion-dollar fortunes are India's glory.) That India is governed by a far right political party, and is seen as at least potentially a counterbalance to China (a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but also a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), only makes them more favorably disposed toward the country and the prospects of its economy.

Of course, none of this in itself means that China will not find its development stalling out, or that India will not eventually overtake China's progress (even if in the most bullish scenario this is apt to be later rather than sooner given China's very, very long lead with a GDP more than five times as big as India's, and a manufacturing value added more than ten times India's, to go by the United Nations numbers). What it does mean is that anyone taking an interest in that conversation ignores those very powerful, enduring, prejudices at their peril and should look the more closely at the specifics that analysts offer in support of their claims, rather than relying on their supposed "authoritative judgment" as "experts" in the way that the mainstream media ceaselessly encourages us to do--and pay particular attention to those who refuse to conform to the prevailing "consensus." A good example of this is Michael Roberts, a longtime City of London economist who has not towed the line, least of all on China and India--and, right or wrong, given us a good deal more to think about than do the purveyors of "elitism mixed with banality" so beloved of those besotted with pompous phrases like "the adults in the room."

Emmanuel Todd's Writing About Natality

When Emmanuel Todd published his La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West) rightist commentators in America were visibly delighted at the fact of a prominent French academic who had tended to be associated with the left presenting America as being in economic decline, and general decline as a leading power, due to the decline of the homogeneity of its elite, waning religiosity and a neglect of engineering-oriented education, and its championing of "non-traditional" ideas about family and gender internationally in a world for the most part little inclined to have anything to do with them. (Thus was it the case that, while it is far from the norm for major American newspapers to devote pieces to books not even available in English, figures like the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell wrote about the book for the New York Times.) However, those writers seizing on Todd's authority in support of these positions were of course being very selective, overlooking much else that Todd had to say, not least about the subject of natality. In Todd's view fertility correlates inversely with neoliberalism--the prevailing version of capitalism depriving people with middle class standards with regard to "personal responsibility" in regard to marriage and family of the security that they would regard themselves as requiring before they have children, with neoliberal champion Korea's plunging fertility rate and neoliberalism-resistant France's relatively high rate both making the point in his view.

If any of those rightist commentators' approval of Todd's discussion of such matters as the decline of Protestantism translated over to an openness to his criticisms of neoliberalism, it has so far escaped me.

Just What is the Total Fertility Rate in the U.S. and What Does it Tell Us About American Life?

It seems that natality has become a fashionable topic in America--mostly because of the culture war-minded right, but then, the logic of centrism and the biases of the media being what they are, it is that right which sets the agenda in American discourse, its grievances the ones that get discussed.

Of course, as is usually the case with the dialogue about such matters we hear little of substance. Consider the reality of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). As a quick check of the World Bank's data set regarding the matter shows, the U.S. TFR had its ups and downs in the past. After the post-World War II "baby boom" the TFR trended downward, and fell especially steeply after the early 1970s, striking 1.7 in 1976. There was a recovery, but it was only at the end of the 1980s that the rate returned to replacement level, where it stayed for the '90s and '00s before dropping again after 2008-2009.

The reader who knows anything of economic history has likely noticed a commonality between the slippage in the 1970s, and the slippage after 2008-2009, namely that in each case it correlates with a nasty and prolonged economic shock, the kind that makes responsible people put off having families and children precisely because they are not confident of being in a position to take care of them. Indeed, it is significant that America's TFR hit its low in 2020, dropping to 1.6 amid the addition of the post-pandemic disruption of American life to the stresses of the Great Recession that, contrary to the press' stupid propaganda, never really went away, and with it the added disinclination to make the commitments involved in having children (as, of course, an enormous amount of data demonstrates).

Still, if there have been ups and downs it does seem to me that there is more at issue than the merely cyclical character of economic life. The highly insecure neoliberal way of life that the economically orthodox think is so delightful is anything but for the vast majority of those actually living it, and it seems to me that Emmanuel Todd is entirely right when he argues for the inverse relationship between neoliberalism and natality. Alas, our media, which in its usual manner hastened to give platforms to the culture warriors as they selectively seized on Todd's work as affirmation of their ideas, has no interest in platforming anyone likely to take up those ideas of Todd's, or for that matter, any alertness to hard economic realities and what they actually mean for those we more mendaciously than ever call "middle class." Instead when it comes to topics like that, outfits like the Times give us Justin Wolfers telling us "Don't worry, be happy" in pieces that absolutely embody Thomas Frank's characterization of the American news media's "paramount problem" as its "annoying professional-class assumptions."

Book Review: The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, by Upton Sinclair

While it is the last of the books I have reviewed for this blog, The Profits of Religion (1917) was actually the first of the books of what became the "Dead Hand" series that Upton Sinclair published.

As the play on words that is the title of Sinclair's book makes clear, he regarded organized religion as a racket--and has been pretty much the same racket all over the world, since the dawn of recorded history. This has, of course, all been said over the years many, many times, but in an era in which it is generally the right that gets to have it say before a wide audience on this subject as on virtually all others so that the "New Atheists" dominate what passes for "rationalist" criticism of religion within the mainstream, Sinclair's coming at the matter of religion from a very different standpoint can by itself distinguish him from those other writers on the subject one is likely to encounter today. Beginning with a surreal and symbolic vision of a field of people trying to, literally, lift themselves up by their bootstraps toward the sky under the tutelage of priests, as the Wholesale Pickpockets Association takes advantage of their distraction to do what its name indicates to be the main activity of its members, Sinclair tells us explicitly in Profits that his "thesis is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation"--an effect he traces from the prehistoric past to the present day. That is to say, if prehistoric peoples' incapacity to tell the difference between reality, dream and fancy as they strove to explain the often perplexing and frightening world in which they lived gave an emergent priestly caste the chance to build "a mighty fortress of Graft" upon the foundation of their fear ("Confess your own ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite"), those particular grifters were through history partners, and at that junior partners, to other and increasingly bigger criminals--helping keep the slaves, serfs and commoners subdued and exploited by more "worldly" rulers, be they lords of war or lords of capital, by upholding the cruelest features of the social order by way of promises of prosperity and salvation, threats of damnation and hellfire, the hand-waving of ritual, the stultification of the mind with obscurantism, and of course, in the case of those who failed to respond to the standard operating procedures, persecution of the heretic unto death, as they made of human life a swamp of oppression and hypocrisy.

The New Atheists, for the most part, would not dare such criticism of course, more inclined to laugh at the poor when they get taken in by the grifters, and rather less prone to acknowledge a relationship like Billy and John's. Moreover, rather than promoting xenophobic and often blatantly racist intolerance, Sinclair concerns himself above all with religion in the mainstream of Western life, and above all American society--with, of the seven "books" comprising Profits, after he has got through laying out the essentials of the racket and their origins in the first book ("The Church of the Conquerors"), Sinclair devoting three to the more established Protestant churches (numbers two, four and five, "The Church of Good Society," "The Church of the Slavers," "The Church of the Merchants"), and still another to more novel American institutions (number six, "The Church of the Quacks"). It is in keeping with this spirit that if Sinclair has something to say of the Lutheran Church of America's then-wartime enemy, Germany, he has rather more to say of the established church of its ally and mother country (and root and cousin of Sinclair's own absolutely mainline Episcopalian Church), England's Anglican Church; that if he devotes a whole book (number three, "The Church of the Servant-Girls") to Catholicism abroad and at home in a time when anti-Catholicism was a significant prejudice in American life, he at least endeavors to be clear that, unlike the nativists of his own time to whom he is anxious to give no aid and comfort, he is criticizing the institution of the Church and the policies explicitly laid down by its undisputed authorities, rather than persecuting people of Catholic background; and that when referencing other religions from ancient Mesopotamia to the present-day South Seas, his concern all the way through is with showing the universality of the pattern he describes, rather than mocking, let alone demonizing, the "Other" or "exotic."

It is also the case that if Sinclair pulls no punches in attacking "actually existing" organized religion, Sinclair also tells us that he wrote his book "in the direct line of the Christian tradition" and "for the cause of Jesus" as "a man who was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places," "thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever lived on earth," and "has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men," with the contrast with the outlook of his friend H.G. Wells helpful in grasping his attitude. Where Wells, in that underappreciated book that drew the threads of his life's work together, The Shape of Things to Come, pictured the world's churches falling into neglect for irrelevance and eventually being "cleared away like dead leaves" save for a "few-score beautiful chapels, churches and cathedrals" preserved for their artistic and historical interest (and the same happening with the houses of worship of every other religion)--what good the religions had ever stood for advanced by other institutions, in other ways in the era of the "World State"--Sinclair anticipated in his seventh and last book ("The Church of the Social Revolution") the modernization of religion saving the churches, which he saw as still fulfilling real and enduring human needs. Social progress, Sinclair declared in the chapter "The Church Redeemed," "will abolish poverty and parasitism . . . make temptations fewer, and the soul's path through life much easier," but would "not remove the necessity of struggle for individual virtue"--only raising the struggle to a higher level on which human beings would find "newer and higher types of virtue"--while humans would "more than ever" desire to gather "in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one another," and do so the better in "places swept clean of superstition and tyranny." Indeed, Sinclair held that just "[a]s the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses," so the Catholic Church, and every other such institution, would also be "compel[led] . . . to repudiate its defense of parasitism and exploitation," and himself made so bold as to "record the prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the Church ever opposed . . . true Socialism" the same way that those Authorities had already come to "deny that the Church ever . . . burned men for teaching that the earth moves around the sun," or "sold the right to commit crime."

Of course, Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) lived to see that as of 1950 no such thing had come about, or even come close to happening--and had he also lived for the fifty-six years between his passing and our day he would have found himself still waiting for such denials (indeed, seen Popes celebrated for their role as Anti-Communist Cold Warriors). Just as was the case with the institutions he criticized for their corruption what he saw wrong with organized religion proved far more enduring than he expected in those hopeful times, which has translated to another unpleasant irony--just as was the case with his other works of nonfiction, the reader may find Sinclair's concerns and arguments all too contemporary precisely because the world simply did not move forward, the issues and conflicts of his time still the issues and conflicts of ours, so much so that some speak of the twentieth century as unfinished.

These days that lack of resolution, which ever more gives the lie to the smug claims that history as a whole was finished at the twentieth century's chronological end, seems ever more the story of our times--not least as we feel ourselves living through another edition of the interwar era, amid long depression, the resurgence of fascism, and renewed threats of world war.

Of the Term "Populism"

In recent years usage of the word "populist" has exploded--almost always in reference to figures, tendencies, ideas, movements, parties of the right whose politics a short time earlier would have put them outside the mainstream; to what can be called, descriptively rather than pejoratively, the far right. Almost unquestioned by the mainstream media, some analysts of contemporary politics have nevertheless taken issue with that choice of terminology as obscuring the facts in highly consequential ways, among them Aurelien Mondon.

In making his case Mondon begins with an indisputable definitional mistake on the part of analysts--their conflating "populist" with "far right." After all, the two terms are not synonyms. There are populists who are not of the far right; and there are far rightists who are not populists; but one would never know that from how the "punditry" uses the word "populist." However, at a deeper level there is also the reality that even those far right tendencies which advertise themselves as populist have not only been elite-tolerated or elite-backed (without which tolerance and backing a far right tendency would be no more successful than the left tendencies which have such a hard time for lack of such tolerance and backing), but elite-founded and elite-led as they promote elite agendas. At the very least such facts impose on any serious analyst the obligation to admit that such a tendency is more complex in nature than the opposition of "the people" to "the elite" denoted by the use of the term "populist." It also draws attention to the fact that in many an ostensibly populist movement the popular component is not only slight, or only marginally supportive of the tendency in a field offering few choices amid much discontent, but mere "astroturf."

Because of its centrist ideological bias the media is ill-equipped, and frankly disinclined, to cope with such complexity, or penetrate beneath the surfaces of political life to get at underlying realities. After all, the epistemologically pessimistic, consensus-minded, center is neither particularly interested in nor optimistic about the intellectual endeavor involved in uncovering the truth, while being much more interested in adhering to the rules of "civil" discourse. These rules hold it to be "uncivil" to do anything less than take at their word anyone it has not ruled out of the discourse as an "extremist" and thus deprived of the legitimacy obliging it to show respect--all as the center avoids calling out extremism at the right end of the political spectrum, keeping them from being so ruled out (in contrast with the left the center treats as as inherently illegitimate, and excludable as a matter of course). Adding to the difficulty for the media on this particular point it is especially squeamish about attending to realities of class and of power--making it even less likely to call out a "populist" movement as other than that, the more easily in as the centrist is so attached to the image of working people as hippie-punching "hardhats" (with the fact that the thought of a right-wing working class is much more comfortable for the centrist than a proletariat out of an Eisenstein film not irrelevant to their promulgation of that image).

Altogether this gives the centrist media ample reason to respect far rightists who claim to be "populists" as being what they say they are--with, ironically, even those in the center troubled by the far right's ascent the more inclined to believe them because the centrist is so ready to believe in the wisdom and responsibility of elites, and the backwardness and viciousness of "the lower orders." However, as with so much else produced by centrist news coverage the resulting view of the situation is not only intellectually muddling, but highly advantageous to the right as against its rivals. In discussion of such groups it switches the subject from their politics to their presumed popularity, with the same switch uncritically affirming their claim to being the true representative "voice of the people" which, presumably unrepresented before or by anyone else, must be given a respectful hearing, and accordingly afforded a platform for the presentation of its views such as that same media would not have accorded it earlier (and again, such as it would never give the left).

As Mondon has made clear all this has played its part in mainstreaming the far right, enabling its electoral victories again and again--even as that same media condemns "extremism" in its profoundly hypocritical fashion.

Rachel Reeves' Rancid Rhetoric: A Few More Thoughts

Recently taking up the issue of Rachel Reeves' first speech in Parliament about the new Labour government's fiscal "inheritance" my primary concern was establishing the hard specifics--just what it was that her government meant to do, and how it looked from the standpoint of the Labour party's promises and image. Quite predictably it affirmed the view of Starmer's government as promising to be the most right-wing in the century-long history of his party--and perhaps one of the more right-wing of any party.

Going over the rhetoric only reaffirms that, not only in such ways as the gratuitous reference to welfare cheats so dear to those who believe stupid lies about "welfare queens" living in luxury bankrupting the nation, or the none too subtle attacks on organized labor (with Ms. Reeves twice attacking public sector strikes as causes of the "inheritance"), but the way in which she broadly raised the matter of fiscal discipline, and situated what remain Britain's two principal political parties in relation to it. Making of "unfunded" the dirtiest word in the English language and throwing it about in the fashion of the pseudomature after they have just discovered swearing as she went down the list of "unfunded" Tory programs, she made it seem as if the Conservatives who presided over the country's brutal, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights-condemned austerity regimen of the 2010s were a pack of government program-mad lovers, upholders and extenders of Big Government and the welfare state who had to be reined in by stern Labour budget balancers in a profound reversal of the simple-minded stereotypes ceaselessly promulgated by Establishment media and expertise.

Much of this, of course, was the sort of cynical grandstanding that the politics-loving courtiers of the powerful, to their great and eternal discredit, absolutely admire and adore, and much prefer to cover as against the policy that is actually the end of all the nonsense, and really affects people's lives. Still, for a moment take it at face value and think--What if this really is, if only in some slight degree, how the world looks to Ms. Reeves, Keir Starmer and their colleagues? If by the standard of these persons Tory austerity really was spendthrift welfare statism, with all that implies for what the British people can expect under Starmer?

Really, really think about it.