What centrism is and isn’t

When I tell people that I’m a centrist, I often get responses like, “Oh, yes, I’m a moderate, too.” But such a response betrays a certain ignorance concerning what centrism is, for in reality, centrism has nothing necessarily to do with how moderate one’s political philosophy is. In short, centrism does not involve so-called ‘first things’, or political principles; rather, it is an approach to law and policymaking that views compromise and collaboration as the necessary foundation of representative democracy, that in effect, one rarely ‘wins’ a policy argument and must work with others to find a solution that respects and guards one’s principles.

Indeed, I would think it is exceedingly difficult to construct a ‘moderate’ political philosophy. More often, what one gets from such an approach is merely a clutch of tepid and shallow doctrines that inspire loyalty from no one, because the only self-interest they protect are those of imaginary people, people who exist only in the abstraction of a policy discussion. It is possible that the sum of the parts of a man’s political philosophy might place him more or less in the middle of the political spectrum, but on any one issue, who feels himself to be only moderately right? On any one issue, who feels his self-interest in the matter to be only ‘moderate’?

For example, is it so difficult to imagine a man who clings tenaciously to a traditional worldview concerning the role of the family, the sexes, and sexuality itself, and yet who also advocates for the responsibilities the rich have toward the poor? Or a man who supports the vigorous state regulation of private business, yet who also opposes protectionism for its own sake? We tend to view such policy positions as contradictions of some order, but actually, there’s nothing particularly at odds in such views. It merely indicates that starting points—or fundamental assumptions—regarding self-interest and public policy are far more heterodox than ideologues would have folks believe. On the sliding scale of political ideology, such views may cancel one another out, leaving one in the center, but this does not imply moderation concerning the individual, particular political opinions involved.

This confusion regarding centrism is quite prevalent, so much so that there are some folks who believe it to be a moral imperative to have so-called moderate political views, but this so little accords with political realities. On any one issue, no one willingly starts in the middle, or from some imaginary center, and those who train their intellects to do so are likely engaged in a vast and thorough self-deception and should not be trusted. Russell Kirk, in his gloss of Edmund Burke, more accurately captures the heart of political debate and process: “In good government, the object of voting is not to enable every man to express his ego, but to represent his interest [italics mine], whether or not he casts his vote personally and directly.” What Kirk is getting at here is not the simple up-or-down voting process found on the floor of a legislative body, but rather, the very animating spirit of political discourse. One’s duty is bound to one’s interest. In this, I’m afraid the oft-repeated dictum that one ‘vote his conscience’ is hopelessly wrong-headed, for it implies that a political actor can or should surmount his interest in order to develop an objectively ‘right’ policy. Rarely do such policies exist, and rarer still that any man possess the objectivity and equanimity required to apprehend their existence. Those who claim such special knowledge are very often the ideologues of left and right who have abandoned the center in pursuit of the chimeras of their public religion. It is a far more honest and functional position to merely proclaim one’s interest in the public square, more honest in that one doesn’t pretend to a knowledge one doesn’t possess, and more functional in that, absent the ideologue’s sense of self-infallibility, it creates the necessary conditions for compromise and collaboration, without which any democracy is fated to succumb to the interests of its most inflexible members.

As you might imagine, the centrism I’ve attempted to sketch here is highly dependent upon process. Indeed, one could say it is process, over and against substance. I say this because the moderation that occurs in democratic decision-making is not—and should not be—a defining feature of the individual political positions themselves, but rather the result of a collaboration, a collective effort at bargaining, of each group deciding what it can and cannot live with, of each group selecting those principles to protect and those that should be amended or bargained away in the name of amity and mutual respect. Of course, in order for such a process to work, there is the assumption that amity and respect actually exist within the body politic, qualities that I feel arise quite naturally in the American character once one abandons the faulty notion of political objectivity.

But such pretensions to objectivity are, in their present form, difficult to put away, for the very structure and organization of current American political discourse put objectivity at the heart of the matter. The chief offenders in this regard are the men and women of the mainstream media establishment, who with every editorial, every talk show, propound the essential rightness of their political positions. But right for whom? Well naturally, right for that imaginary American out there listening or reading, that statistical anomaly we call John Q. Public or Joe Sixpack for whom each organ of the mainstream press purports to speak. Unlike some, I do not believe the media is in thrall to a shadowy network of corporate interests; there are many genuinely well-intentioned people working in the media industry, and this applies broadly across the board, from the editorial pages of The New York Times to the studios of Fox News. Most of these folks are not agents of some grand conspiring malignity; they are simply poor blinkered souls who believe they actually speak for real people, who believe that they are objective arbiters of public opinion. The unpardonable sin committed by the mainstream media is its claim to understand competing points of view. In the political arena, it is not ours to understand another’s self-interest, to hold it up to some self-regarding idea of ultimate reality and then pass judgment; it is enough to know it exists, to make allowances for it, and to consider it when coming to the table to collaborate on a law or policy. The really debilitating thing is not the media’s extended fantasy; rather, it’s the public’s uncritical acceptance that political objectivity is achievable, or even very desirable. In politics, I prefer to deal with the man who is honest in proclaiming his self-interest, no matter how contrary it is to my own, over the man who speaks in grand abstractions, who purports to know what is good for all, and who has just the perfect program to deliver us unto the Promised Land. Such a preference is the true measure of centrism, not the contrived middle that so beguiles the well-intentioned.