A good friend of mine who’s in the middle-of-the-road politically recently asked me if a centrist politician could win the presidency. My friend lives in Texas, whence comes the saying: “The only thing in the middle of the road is white lines and dead armadillos.” But I take his question seriously; and though I’m not a centrist myself, I wonder about it.
In theory, centrist leadership might be unifying for the country post-Trump – but we have no idea as yet what post-Trump will look like, if we make it that far. And I have serious doubts about such unification given the present polarization. I don’t even like the term “polarization,” because it’s misleadingly simplistic. We had polarization ten years ago, and fifty years ago. What we have now is something qualitatively different. Instead of left vs. right, our politics is left vs. anti-democratic.
There is no traditional Republican Party left, much less a significant center accessible to both parties. The composition of Congress makes that obvious. The last remaining conscientious Republicans – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – have been banished by the voters. Traditional conservatism is no more, and the center is also no more. You could even say that the ideological spectrum is no more.
A second (lesser) problem is that the center is (or was) a vague place, and while it used to be easier for a centrist to get elected, it’s hard for a centrist to lead once elected. In some respects, Eisenhower and Kennedy were both centrists, but their legacies were mixed and nebulous. Eisenhower’s biggest legacy was the interstate highway system; Kennedy’s was his spirit, which inspired a lot of people; but it was Lyndon B. Johnson – one of the most liberal presidents ever, along with Lincoln and Roosevelt – who used the political and moral capital of Kennedy’s legacy to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed.
It’s interesting to speculate about what Kennedy might have accomplished had he not been assassinated. But Nixon and Reagan pulled the country to the right, and Bush Sr. kept it there; Clinton nudged it toward the center-left (especially with his Supreme Court nominees) and added 22 million jobs; Bush 2 went back to the right, Obamacare was a step to the left, and so on.
The center isn’t dangerous – but neither is it, in my view, inherently any better or worse than any other democratic political view. (I talk a lot in The Sound Bite Society about “ideological agnosticism,” which means not just tolerance but recognizing the essential legitimacy of all views – on the spectrum, that is. MAGA is not among them.) All democratic politics is “essentially contestable,” i.e. there is no higher principle to appeal to in defense of any ideological position. MAGA is blatantly anti-democratic.
Right now, democracy itself is on the ramparts from many directions, led by a felon and anti-democrat who’s also a compulsive liar, hyper-narcissist, predator, traitor, and other bad things. As H.L. Mencken wrote in the 1950s, "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Finally, although friends assure me that there’s an important role for centrism in Congress, and ordinarily I believe them, it’s not the case at this extraordinary moment. And the biggest problem is our democratic system itself. If we had a parliamentary system, like most countries, centrists of various types would be represented by third parties and would hold real power.
Being in the center, and able to bargain their way into coalitions with leftist and rightist parties, moderates would arguably hold disproportionate power to their numbers. But that is not necessarily undemocratic. Besides, more people would feel represented, and thus more would participate, as is the case in most parliamentary democracies.
Tragically, we don’t have such a system and can’t get there from where we are. We’re stuck with the arcane version of democracy (not entirely bad, but very bad in this respect) given us by the Founders. They failed to foresee that two parties would dominate in such a system. In fact, they failed to see parties at all. Their bad.