Against Centrism

The idea of centrism has been under attack for the better part of the Obama presidency. From the Right this has manifested through electoral politics. The attacks on women, unions, minorities, elderly, students, the poor, etc. have predominantly come from newly elected more hard-core conservatives. These are not your father's Republicans, they're your great-grandfather's. On the left we are not seeing the same type of electoral shift. Instead, the changes have come on a more sociological level with the ongoing Occupy protests as well as the growth of groups like Anonymous and Wikileaks. The country is becoming more polarized. People who believed they had no interest in politics are starting to pay attention and realize that not only do they have opinions, they usually tend to have strong opinions. The idea that a knowledgeable electorate living in such turbulent period would favor centrist policies is absurd.

After all what are centrist policies? There is a different centrism and bipartisanship. Issues like having a police force, a national highway system, schools: these are not centrist issues, they are bipartisan issues. There may be a multiplicity of opinions on how such edifices of society should be run, but, by and large, their existence is supported across the board. Even if the centrist becomes a champion of, say, public works, and does not prove that politician to be a centrist, simply a pragmatist.

What defines a centrist is having an opinion on hot button issues that is moderately palatable to everybody. Centrists, by and large, do not believe in gay marriage, but they're willing to give some rights to homosexuals. They tend to support the idea of having access to healthcare, but see far too many problems to truly implementing a universal system in our country. They tend to speak against the horrors of war, but usually vote to pass every new military funding bill. Mistakenly labeled as flip floppers, all they really are are pen pushers. They're in the business of maintaining the status quo. Period. 

Last week famed centrist Olympia Snowe threw up her hands and declared that there was too much partisanship in Washington for her to run for reelection. And certainly the partisanship particular from the Republican side certainly has attributed the deadlock in our nations capital. But I would argue that it is simply weak leadership, from both sides of the aisle, that is causing this debacle. After all, perhaps the 2 most successful and celebrated presence of the last century, FDR on the Left and Ronald Reagan on the Right had a vision not of managing our country but re-imagining it. In our electoral politics there is now a clear right-wing. There is quite a clear center (center right). We must elect Progressives who present not simply a buffer to the onslaught from the right but true alternatives.