The Great American Center

Back in early February, The New York Times published a front-page Week in Review article entitled “The Vanishing Political Establishment.” Its bold claim was that in a media-saturated internet age, party insiders wield increasingly less sway in the political process (1). What unfortunate timing. Within a few weeks it had became clear that insider superdelegates would choose the next Democratic presidential nominee, which made the “end of the establishment” argument appear about as foolishly premature as Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of The End of History. The recent record of American party politics – from Dubya's sponsored rise, to Howard Dean's 2004 drumming, to the Democratic superdelegates – should give pause to anyone who believes that visions of a crumbling political establishment are anything other than pie-in-the sky “netroots” fantasies. What we've been witnessing is not the disappearance of an insider party elite, but rather a homogenization of the candidates, their positions, and the worldview of their elite sponsors such that the field arrives pre-winnowed. Perhaps the political reality the NYT sought to distill with “end of the establishment” more accurately recalls Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology—a similarly provocative and easily dismissed argument from a half-century ago, but one which now seems strangely prophetic as we march through yet another electoral circus in the era of “moderate centrism.” Published in 1960, Bell's book spawned a great deal of controversy—most of it arcane and laced with theoretical jargon. The details of the argument and the merits of its detractors are not really relevant now, but the question it poses seems more pressing than ever. When every exhortation we hear from candidates and commentators is oriented toward the same common themes of unity, bipartisanship, moderation, and centrism, one has to wonder: what has become of political ideology? How did divide and conquer get replaced with unite and stupefy?

Mainstream high-brow commentators frequently bemoan how the logic of the electoral horse-race systematically purges all substance from the democratic process. They single out the pernicious influence of the 24 hour news cycle and its tendency to shift the emphasis from differences of policy to differences of personality. But this critique errantly assumes there is any substance left to purge. Substantive policy differences between candidates have been shrinking even faster than the rainforest or the American middle-class. Hillary and Barack's extended duel merely drove the point home. Both sought to exploit the foibles of the other, only to then realize they were staring themselves in the mirror. Obama responded to flak over his impolitic remarks by criticizing the politics of superficiality, but how else could we possibly distinguish him from Hillary?From the way it's shaping up so far, voters in the November election will likewise be faced with the difficult choice between “change [they] can believe in,” or “leadership [they] can believe in.” And these were supposed to be the two “authentic” candidates!

No politician in the U.S. can receive any greater blessing than a reputation for non-partisanship. Just look at the political biographies of the two presidential nominees. No red states or blue states, no special interests, no dogmas. This is the litmus test of the centrist era. Recall that even a statesman as wretchedly extreme as our outgoing Decider campaigned as a Uniter – Not a Divider. And if you look closely at some of even the most ardently critical diagnoses of his reign, you'll note that they direct the brunt of their moral outrage not at the scorched earth of Iraq, the destruction of New Orleans, or any number of abominable outcomes, but rather at the divisive, anti-democratic methods by which Rove and Co. diverted the ship of state from its centrist course. A recent, rather ordinary editorial in the L.A. Times basically sums it up: After detailing the surprising degree of (apparent) policy overlap between Obama and McCain, the editors conclude with what is truly the tenor of the age: “Some might complain that this means voters will have little to choose between in November. We say: Welcome to the middle, candidates. We hope you stick around here once you're in office..." (2)

A few hours combing the e-archives and I could add hundreds of examples in precisely the same vein. Conventional wisdom has settled on the middle as the place to be.

Who's to say whether this is what the founders had in mind? Talking points like centrist, moderate, bipartisanship, etc. are quintessentially American. They resonate well with our longstanding delusion that we are a pragmatic people, as well as our frustration with the fact that our politicians are anything but. Nevermind that the vacuity it exploits is largely a product of its own creation; the centrist mantra indicts conviction as the great impediment to progress. Thus popular political culture has recast the 1960s from a period of forward progress to an era of poisonous discord. And thus talking heads and opinion polls remind us of our contemporary desire for Congress to quit its partisan bickering and get something done. If only the two sides could just get over their ideology and “special agendas,” then maybe we could finally accomplish some pragmatic, non-ideological tasks like ending welfare as we know it, subsidizing petroleum production, and gracing the world with our trademark sound and light show called Shock and Awe.

A common refrain these days is that the center has moved to the right. Probably so, but before the center could “move” anywhere it had to become a meaningful waypoint in the first place. Wasn't this bound to happen in a two-party, winner-take-all system? And in a political culture nourished with so many stories of America's “pragmatic” tradition? Maybe. Like so many trojan horses of the modern era, spatial metaphors of political ideology were originally a gift of the French revolution. During the meetings of the National Assembly in Paris the radical Jacobins congregated on the left side of the room while the more cautious Girondists munched freedom fries on the right. From this rather mundane and arbitrary seating arrangement our political vernacular of left and right was born. It was not by mere coincidence that the French revolution was also the birthplace of modern political punditry, but at this point the collective response from the pundits was not yet vive le centre!

Spatial metaphors languished and periodically reappeared over the succeeding century, but the current prominence of the political “center” is actually a rather recent homegrown innovation. Its modern origins can be traced to an economist named Harold Hotelling, who was trying to figure out where businesses locate (or ought to locate) in geographic space. He posed the puzzle in terms of two competing ice cream stands on a busy beach-front boardwalk: Intuitively one might expect that the best strategy for either vendor would be to seek distance from the other in order to carve out a niche and monopolize a portion of the boardwalk. Hotelling argued they would do the opposite. Instead of repelling, the logic of competition dictated that both would move to the center of the beach-front (3). For consumers this is utterly irrational, for the pleasures of cold dairy suddenly necessitate a longer walk across the burning sand. However, from the firm's perspective the center is the safest ground since it prevents undercutting by the competitor. This same logic leads to the familiar situation in which four gas stations cluster around a single intersection, leaving hundreds of miles on either side devoid of automotive life blood.

^{Illustrations by Alec Jacobson}

Transposing the spatial model from the market for ice cream to the market for false promises was not a difficult task. From the 1970s to the 1990s, political scientists – and later politicians – adopted the framework with gusto. For one, the “the middle” had long held a cherished role in certain schools of political philosophy stretching back as far as Aristotle, who thought that truth, virtue, and happiness could be found through the “golden mean.” Simply triangulate amongst various nodes of bullshit and there thee shall discover all that is good! What modern social science did was to revive and update this old idea by cloaking it with scientific certainty. Spatial models made the behavior of politicians and voters explicable in terms of strategic movement along a spectrum in “policy space,” and like impersonal market forces, they made “centrist” positions (whatever those are) appear to be both the individually rational strategy, as well as the collectively inevitable equilibrium.

Even as this framework aspired toward scientific detachment on one hand, its underlying normative impulse was to elevate the the moral authority of the imaginary “median voter” – that elusive character named Soccer Mom or Nascar Dad. No longer would the best interests of the polity be determined by the dangerous judgment of the philospher-king, the godless schemes of wooly-headed intellectuals, the machinations of out-of-touch technocrats, or the divisiveness of class consciousness, but rather by the infallible preference set of Joe Six-pack.

The increasing salience of spatial thinking had tremendous effects on political culture and practice in the U.S. The old spatial monikers which once denoted different clusters of ideological conviction (e.g. "The New Left"), became rearticulated as a spectrum in cartesian space. In this world political strategy is less about mobilizing adherents than skillfully moving one's ice cream cart in response to shifting market demand, and then hoping the public is too oblivious to notice the disingenuous relocation. Shiftiness, of course, was hardly a new trait for politicians, but making a science of it was. Politicians may have values, agendas, and corporate buddies in need of another tax break, but ultimately their top goal is to get elected. Social-scientific models offered a seemingly sure formula. At this point the underlying logic has become so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche that Freud could give it a name. Even the resentful take it for granted: “how else can he possibly win a plurality of the votes in a country of 300 million people?” And yet for some reason the model of American democracy taught to schoolchildren is still that of lofty principles conceived by patricians in funny wigs. In fact the reality is so much more intuitively accessible to the I-pod generation: our political system is basically about peddling ice cream. The name of the game is capturing the largest market-share.

None of this is to suggest that ideology has disappeared, or that politics has actually been subsumed into some sort of parallel cartesian reality. Quite the contrary. For all the talk about the political genius of Karl Rove, his only real insight was to perceive this simple truth against the farce of conventional political wisdom. Thus while the Democrats attempted to sell John Kerry like a sprinkle-topped ice cream cone, Rove operated with the knowledge that ideology and dirty tricks had never ceased to be the bread and butter of political domination. He rightly calculated that Americans are willing to walk a little further toward the right side of the boardwalk if the product in the center appears to contain too many artificial ingredients. And if the vote-counting cash registers fail to charge you the correct amount, sorry but there are no returns or exchanges on electoral purchases. Sure, Rove tipped his hat to the centrist logic (e.g. “compassionate conservatism”), but this was merely a decoy to cover the underlying extremism of the Bush administration.

Of course in the end Rove found out that Bob Marley was right: you can't fool all the people all the time. Plenty of gleeful eulogies in the liberal media took this to heart and celebrated Rove's fall as a genuine victory for both democracy and truth. Real reality had finally come back to bite that smug, totalitarian turdslinger who thought he could construct his own self-serving reality—a world in which falsity was spun into a web of fact. But the naïve conceit of the supposedly rationalist celebrants was to think that the de-centered aberration of Rove's misbegotten reality was grounded in fantasy more so than the “normal” political reality to which we've all been sensitized. In the centered world of the reality-based community, it is ludicrous to claim that Sadaam was swimming in an arsenal of WMD, but it just business as usual when we hear that Hillary feels the pain of those people in Pennsylvania who are struggling to put food on the table. And of course she's sending a strong message to Iran that all options are still on the table. In our centrist era a return to reality is hardly a return to grace.

If Rove unmasked the feebleness of centrism's claim to marginalize extreme ideologies, he and others have also long found it a potent instrument for masking their interests and agendas. Often this is a conscious strategy. One need only think of how frequently the mantra of pragmatic moderation is mobilized behind neo-liberal economic policies. As an example take virtually any statement ever made by former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, who as current chairman of Citigroup can still claim with a straight face that in order for the federal government to successfully fix the financial crisis, it will be necessary to “keep all the other special agendas out,” presumably so that Congress can concentrate on embroidering the ornate details of the golden parachute.

Likewise, in electoral politics the logic of centrism is as much about generating an aura than actually adhering to a set of “moderate” positions. Behold John McCain, the rabid conservative whose maverick willingness to cosponsor legislation with Democrats earned him the ire of many Republican operatives, but also the adulation of the talking heads and the respect of the majority of Americans. The power of the post-ideological halo surrounding him was most clearly evident in the extent to which it captured his erstwhile opponents. Between 2003 and 2006, poll after poll found that the Arizona "maverick" was the most trusted politician in the United States, and the Republican toward whom Democrats felt most favorable. Nevermind his terrifying beliefs. At least he was independent-minded. It used to be that McCain brandished his bravery by enduring a torturous stay in the Hanoi Hilton. Now he need only “reach out across the aisle” in order to earn the CBS/MSNBC medal of centrist valor.

McCain's non-partisan credentials have no doubt diminished now that he has has been promoted from pork-slaying Senator to Republican presidential nominee. But the point is that our national celebration of centrism doesn't actually divorce politics from the extremities so much as inebriate our perceptions. Through spectral thinking we see the (apparent) relations between positions – not their contents. And thus it is divisive politics – not divisive policies – which the centrist mind perceives to be so repugnant. As a corollary to the first electoral commandment (mimic thy opponent), centrism also adds a second: greet thy (scumbag) opponent with a smile. One need only pick up an old copy of Machiavelli to realize that nothing is more inimical to the underlying essence of politics than our contemporary expectations of how it ought to operate.

The great paradox of the centrist fantasy is that the American public tends to loathe its effects while remaining trapped in its logic. We are tired of the status quo. We're sick of the scripted lines, triangulation and insincerity. We want someone who will affirm all the vacuous assumptions we've come to take for granted, but with candidness and authenticity. We want organic ice cream. Hence the awkward vehemence with which otherwise thoughtful people have embraced Obama. He dangles the prospect of transcending all that frustrates Americans about politics while not challenging its underlying logic in a way that might cause us to view him suspiciously. At times the two imperatives threaten to unravel each other when Obama (or his infamous pastor) calls it a bit too much like it is. But somehow he always manages to recover the balance with inspirational visions in which the alternately bellicose and patronizing status quo is transformed into a post-ideological polity of corporate-sponsored understanding.

Progressives in particular are left baffled by this curious mixture of substance and fluff, of an agenda which appears genuinely progressive on one hand, and smacking of the powers-that-be on the other. Of speeches which at one turn reflect his firsthand knowledge of the grim reality of the urban poor, and at the next turn sound divorced from reality altogether. Certain clues give pause, like the AIPAC speech, the dubious associations of several of his advisors or the cringe-inducing video (available on YouTube) in which he virtually bows in reverence at the Gipper's grave. What are we to make of Obama's Reagan worshipping? A cynical ploy to capture those erstwhile conservatives who could perhaps be made to forget that our newest great communicator is actually a welfare liberal? Probably not. Obama appears to genuinely believe that collective catharsis is an end in itself. After twenty-four years, he's here to inform us that “It's morning again in America.” This time, however, the sun promises to shine on everyone. Such a message, which Obama terms the “politics of hope,” is both powerful and naïve. Where exactly it would take us on the policy front remains troublingly unclear.

One thing is clear, however. The profound changes he speaks of, which put so many goosebumps on the arms of the liberal intelligentsia, have nothing to do with the realm of policy (there the changes will likely be minor), but rather with the realm of culture: Obama's big change is about altering the national tone, to shun ideological division for the collective affirmation of our common self-conception – basically Oprah writ large.

The novelty of this style of centrism is that it is grounded less in ideological triangulation than in transcendence of ideology altogether. Although Obama may ultimately represent the same “Third Way” worldview associated with figures like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the political tone charts a rather different course. His centrist logic does not seek to capture the middle by straddling ideological divisions so much as float above it by convincing us to move beyond them. And what could be more consummately centrist than that? Maybe I'm just stuck in the politics of cynicism, but I seriously doubt those liberals are shivering with goosebumps out of genuine excitement at the prospect of uniting with their gun-toting, bible-thumping countrymen from the red states. No, that's just their centrist guilt bubbling to the surface. As much as everyone would like to think that Obama's rhetoric strikes such a powerful cord because of the transformed future which it conjures, perhaps his message really finds its strength from its profound resonance with the centrist present.

There is little question that Barack Obama is one of the most thoughtful, erudite, and potentially progressive candidates to emerge from the rotten Democratic party in a generation. I will vote for him. But make no mistake. Far from being transcendent, his politics are actually the epitome of the era.

Adam Goldstein is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

(1) Nicholas Confessore, "The Vanishing Establishment", The New York Times, February 10 2008