With the midterm elections coming up, and the complete and utter storm that was the 2016 election, I think it’s an important time for me to sit down and talk about “centrism.”
The problem with reactionary centrism is that subscribers to this ideology tend to put emphasis on political positions rather than political actions. Did you know Exxon supports a carbon tax? In an article published by the New York Times in June 2017 stated that Exxon Mobil, as well as several other corporate giants, announced their support for the plan to tax carbon emissions put forth earlier that year by a group of Republican statesmen. But the reality is that you would have a difficult time finding anyone on Capitol Hill that had ever felt pressured by these companies’ lobbyists to actually pass a carbon tax.
Only taking a political position is just a cheap form of political action. It seems to me that today, however, a lot of our modern thinking about politics is grounded in the idea that positions are more important than what people in positions of political power actually do. By basing their opinions purely off of positional thinking, reactionary centrists believe that if people on the left and people on the right just met in the middle, whatever that middle is, with a compromise, we could solve a number of contentious issues.
This is not the case.
For many people who may not be well-versed in politics, political stances in their eyes tend to follow what is called the “Horseshoe theory.” This theory asserts that far left political ideologies and far right political ideologies, rather than being at opposite ends of a linear political spectrum, actually closely resemble one another, like the ends of a horseshoe. The problem with this theory, however, is that it grossly over-simplifies political ideologies and, as such, ignores the fundamental differences between the far left and the far right.
According to Simon Choat, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Kingston University, far-left and far-right ideologies only share similarities in the ways that they both oppose the liberal democratic status quo, as well as neoliberal globalization and its elites, but there is no agreement between the far left and the far right on who counts as “the elite,” why they are a problem, or how to respond to them.
I understand that it feels good to try and appease everyone, and that there is some sort of noble compromise to be held in the center, but the Republicans who are in power right now have repeatedly shown through their words and actions that they are not at all interested in a compromise. Failing to listen to them, and then blaming the left for not “doing enough” to compromise with them, is sloppy and irresponsible. You cannot call yourself a “centrist” if you’re finding a middle ground between a moderate group and an extreme group. Because of the way the Overton Window (i.e., the window of discourse in politics that dictates what ideas are seen as tolerable within the public discourse) has shifted regarding American politics, Democrats now represent what people, especially those who identify with the far-left, see as more centrist ideas, while the ideals of the GOP and the Republican party have been growing more and more extreme with each passing day.
Centrists often go into political debates with the idea that everyone should be level-headed and respectful, and while that’s a nice notion, the field of politics is one that has always been loud and contentious. That’s how democracy is meant to work, at least in my eyes. Humans settle debates by arguing, not to mention that centrists seem to fall within the school of thought that believes the goal of politics to be respectful discussion, rather than the use of power, the distribution of resources, et cetera. You know, actually getting stuff done?
This isn’t to say there isn’t a role for centrism in politics, but the fact that moderation as a goal is easily exploitable by the right is a very dangerous habit for us to fall into. There’s room for compromise in politics, but it should be a means to an end, never the end goal itself.