I’ve been thinking lately about the middle. The political middle, that is. A place where moderation lives, where change goes to decelerate and perhaps die. The moderate – the dweller here – is perhaps someone who wants to preserve the status quo, or maybe, sees complex problems for what they are and avoids sweeping, revolutionary, solutions. The moderate seems an endangered species these days and their home – the political center – has been reappraised and the taxes raised. It’s costly to be a moderate now; the very label carries the connotation of a political “insider,” someone more willing to pull the secret levers of negotiation than to oppose something on bombast. A swamp dweller. Amy Klobuchar might as well be an anarchist.
Nothing new here though. Moderates have been the target – sometimes rightfully so – of sages and doers throughout American history. From Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr., moderates have been accused of being faint-hearted or weak-minded guardians of the way things are. Sometimes the status-quo sucks and needs a good upheaval (think Civil Rights). They also make good targets for argument. The “true believer” is unlikely to give you a hearing (we have widely circulated social scientific terms like “Confirmation Bias” to pathologize what we knew to be true) but the moderate stands closer to you. Perhaps the right appeal might bring them around. They’re willing to listen at least.
Moderates, however, were sometimes lauded. After World War II, centrist politics was highly praised. Books like Arthur Schlesinger’s, The Vital Center, extolled those who sought merely to tweak a system that was already great. Moderates were both the exemplars and the guardians of a national character allergic to sweeping ideologies (think Communism) and content to leave things well enough alone. There were articles commending apathy and denouncing impassioned politics – the thinking here was that those who are sated by the system will not get political. Apathy, therefore, is not a sign of disenfranchisement but a sign that things are well, and people have other things on their minds. Politics doesn’t simply invite mischief, it is mischief. How did we get there?
Fascism. The fascist regimes that emerged in the period between the world wars indicated a vulnerability – that democracy can’t guarantee outcomes. Tyrants were democratically elected in Europe; when Hitler’s extra-legal power grab (Beer Hall Putsch) failed, he realized democracy offered an opening worth exploiting. American observers latched onto this lesson (itself a slight distortion of what happened in the interwar period) and so we got excited about dispassionate politics coalescing about a stable, liberal-democratic center. The last thing we wanted were unrestrained zealots in service to charismatic tyrants.
Are there any connections to the present? We have a vocal group, pursing voting constraints through the soft underbelly of our state legislatures yet, rather than preserving the status quo, they are in service of radical change, namely the disenfranchisement of the opposition. Democracy has always been curated to serve power-hungry, well-connected groups (see, The Right to Vote by Alexander Keyssar for a great account of this), but the recurrence of this problem is no reason to historicize it into nothing (“things will never change”). Is a moderate politics worth pursuing again? Has it always been a force, even today (see Moderates by David S. Brown for an interesting look at their steady influence)? Maybe a politics of radicalism and strong argument will get us to the root of our stubborn inequities. Can we revive anything fruitful about the consensus politics of the postwar era? Or, perhaps, we might ask a different question – can you pursue a moderate politics and still seek radical change in areas that need it (racial justice, economic injustice, environmentalism)? Is political centrism a political style or temperament that could lend itself to transformational causes, or is it a content-specific recognition that the present system, in all its faults, needs nothing new? Let me know.