#352: Is Centrism Political?

Is centrism a politically sensible position? I recently ran across a video where someone stated that if you claim to be a centrist, that would be hypocritical — that there is no such thing as real centrism, real moderation, because you can only really be political by being for or against something, and being somewhere in the middle is not real.

Well, I’m not sure I would agree with that, though I understand it. Let’s look at the argument first.

What we have here is a definition of “political” that is very much tied to the idea of political parties. This is typically what people mean in the American context when they talk about politics: “What is your politics?” means what party do you vote for, what candidate do you support, and so on.

It is a very narrow framing, though, of politics, of the political. I would suggest it is too narrow and too limiting.

That which is political is that which we all do together in a democratic republic. The word obviously comes from the Greek word polis, which is the concept of the city as a community of people, in contrast to the physical city, the asty. So political means that which belongs to the polis, that which belongs to the community, that which belongs to society.

This is what Aristotle means when he says that we are all zoon politikon — we are all political animals — which means we are all social creatures who form societies and have to negotiate our togetherness, our community, each day, together. That is what “political animal” means. We build states, we build communities. We are not just individuals; we are also not just families.

So when you take that sense of “political,” we can combine it with the idea behind what “republic” means. That term is derived from res publica, the things of the public — the things we have together. And, if you want an oblique Sopranos reference, “this thing of ours”: that which we share, that which is public, that which we all have in common, that which we all are living in, that we all subscribe to.

That means that which is political is already something that requires us to get together. It requires us to develop ideas of compromise, and it requires us to negotiate. It requires us to have a sense of humility, because without humility you cannot even entertain the possibility that the other side could have some valid things to say.

So in order to be political, you need a sense of an independent and critical position — an ability to think critically in a wide, not a narrow, sense. You have to understand yourself and understand the other. And once you understand, you also see what you have in common.

So you could argue that whatever we call the political is a position in which we have to aim for the concrete work of being together in this community, in this society, in this country, on this planet.

When we think about the more narrow understanding of politics, this is where parties come in. We have political parties because our societies are large. We don’t know everybody — it’s impossible to know everybody. And thus we need to figure out how to form coalitions with others who are somehow like-minded, either on issues or in their approaches to politics.

Because the real area where we seem to disagree is not necessarily the issues, but how to solve them, how to solve problems. We don’t disagree most of the time on the “if” or the “what,” but on the “how.” And even when it seems that we disagree on the “what,” below that there might be a disagreement on the “how.”

For instance, some people will say, “I don’t like the idea of climate change,” because of the way climate change has been handled politically. People will say, “I don’t like socialism,” because socialism is what already happened in forty-plus — almost fifty — countries on the planet, and always with disastrous results. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want people to have a certain amount of support in society. You may say, “I don’t like capitalism,” because of changes in how businesses used to be able to think long-term and now think mostly short-term, with shareholder interest and so on.

So our critique of society benefits if we actually talk about details and not about the big picture all the time. That is the mistake populism makes. Populism pretends there are problems that can be very easily identified and attached to very easy solutions — and that if you have the right person in charge, all the problems can be magically solved. That is what populism means, on the left and on the right.

It is not, as populists claim, an answer to the people. It is a condescending attitude toward the people, because you think the people are stupid enough to believe that complex problems can be easily identified, easily diagnosed, and that only with a stable genius can you then arrive at the simple and effective solution, after which everything is fine. That is a form of utopian thinking that you find, again, both on the left and on the right.

And that is where politics goes wrong, because this is where politics moves into an extremist or radical idea of some form of utopian engineering that pretends to have solutions but doesn’t — and that demands loyalty of you.

One thing I will not subscribe to, ever, is absolute loyalty to political movements. I don’t understand why we should have that, especially toward political parties, because these parties change over time. If you were a Democrat in the 1990s and you look at the Democratic Party now, it’s different. If you were a Republican, same thing. Parties change. Sometimes parties become the opposite of what they were. Sometimes parties drift so far toward the extremes that they become unrecognizable.

It used to be that the political party spectrum in the US would intersect, and for many years now political scientists have observed that the parties are drifting apart. Where there used to be a shared center, there is none.

And this is why an insistence on moderation and on centrism is the most political position. It’s the most necessary position. Because if everybody is separate from each other, if everybody just sees the extremes, where can we find the common ground that we have to find in order to find solutions? Solutions need to last beyond election cycles. They need to last beyond presidents. And this is where the center comes in.

So when you ask yourself: is moderation a betrayal of politics? The answer is no. Moderation is where politics becomes possible. Moderation is where the extremes have to be translated into practicality.

It is good to have dreams. It is good to dream big. It is sometimes good to have radical ideas. But radicalism, as I said before, is not the best representative of an idea, because if it’s too radical it will never be translatable into a practice that does not hurt people. You may have radicalism as the extreme, but then it has to be modified. Then we have to think about how to operationalize it, how to put it into action, how to make sense out of the flurry of ideas that people should have.

This is why free speech is so necessary. We need to be allowed to speak freely and to think out loud — to think out loud without punishment. And then these ideas can compete, and we have to translate them into practicality. And this is, again, where moderation comes in, where centrism comes in.

So centrism is a real thing. It does not mean there needs to be a centrist party. It means that within each party you have to have people who are willing to talk to the other side — to the perceived other side — because we are all in this together. This is something we all share. These are problems we all have to solve: within our local communities, within the state, within the federal arena, and internationally.