Centrism in History, Philosophy, and American Politics

Kevin Cassell

What is political centrism?
Centrism is a political--and, hence, cultural--position that locates itself between opposing ideological forces. In the Western world, to occupy the center means to be between the left wing ('liberalism") and right wing ("conservatism") and their respective ideologies. Centrism is not a clear-cut ideology (or belief system); many encyclopedias don't even include it as a category unto itself.

How does it work?
In the United States, centrist politicians are called "moderates." To moderate means to intervene in disputes by opposing parties and help achieve some sort of consensus. Moderate Republicans sometimes break with their party's platform on some issues (like abortion, for instance) and side with Democrats as do some Democrats with Republicans (on military funding, for example). Democrats who frequently side with Republicans are rarely called moderates; rather, they're often known as "conservative Democrats," since the Republican Party has come to be known as "conservative" and the Democratic Party as "liberal."

What is conservatism and liberalism?
At the most basic level, conservatives believe social and political progress should be incremental, that cultural institutions (family, religion) should be preserved, and that government should be small and centralized. Liberals tend to be "progressive" (that is, they want progress to occur rapidly), largely secular, and support a government that addresses the needs of all people, including the disenfranchised. Both forces have grappled with each other throughout the history of the Western world, with liberalism having made the most dramatic impact during the modern era.

What sort of impact is that?
To study modern Western culture is to study the rise and spread of liberalism, but not the kind necessarily associated with the platform of the U.S. Democratic Party. According to Bertrand Russell, early liberalism (as opposed to late liberalism) was a product of England and Holland and dominated 18th century thought. It stood for religious tolerance (following centuries of bloody wars), democracy over monarchy, the rights of individuals, and a strong middle class. It opposed fanaticism in any form. Isaac Newton's model of a vast but synchronous universe, largely replacing the Medieval heaven/earth/hell model, was central to its world view. The French encyclopediasts and American founding fathers were products of this age, also called "The Age of Reason" and "The Enlightenment." Early liberalism embodied principles that many contemporary liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, strive to subscribe to.

What is late liberalism?
Late liberalism absorbed the notions--many of which still reign supreme today--of 19th-century Romanticism. Philosophically, the romantic movement began in France with the philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau, a social and political radical who argued that institutions like Church and State were "unnatural" and oppressed people. He promoted the idea of a "noble savage," a men (or women) who turned their back on society and tuned into the rhythms of "Nature"--a notion seized upon and triumphed by artists and writers. American romantic writers, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, adopted the ideal of natural freedom but believed that institutions, with gentle prodding, could come to accommodate the rugged new individualism of the age. By comparison to some European Romantics who longed for industrialism's decline, this was a conservative position. By comparison to today's politics, it was very centrist.

What about conservatism?
Conservatism really wasn't a movement until very recently. It is possible to equate conservatism with the status quo; when forces arise that seek to undermine its institutions and traditions, those who rise in defense are conservatives. Technically, the term "conservative" gained widespread use around 1830 when it was applied to descendants of the British Tory Party. Many Europeans, shocked by the excesses of the French Revolution and its widespread disregard for time-honored institutions, quickly coalesced around the belief that change, if it should come at all, must come from within--not without--the established social framework. The saying "I want to change the system from within" expresses a fundamentally conservative position even though it is precisely the position of liberal Democrats in the US today.

It sounds like liberals and conservatives have some things in common. So why the extreme polarization that has come to characterize American politics in recent decades?
There are many reasons for this. Most fundamental, I believe, is that American political activists who subscribe to the left-wing/right-wing paradigm became especially pugnacious after the collapse of the USSR, when the US became the undisputed superpower of the world.

A left-wing/right-wing "paradigm." Isn't it just another way of saying liberalism and conservatism?
Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that people on the mainstream left call themselves liberals and people on the mainstream right call themselves conservatives. But the left-wing/right-wing paradigm can be viewed as having its own unique history and development.

Where does it come from?
Technically, it goes back to the first French legislature after the Revolution, when conservative representatives were seated to the right of the speaker and the radical deputies were seated to the left. Like a bird, the speaker made up its central body and the opposing sides its "wings." The aim was to get the body to somehow fly. It could only do so, of course, with a strong, moderating center.

So how did the seating arrangement of the French legislature become a "paradigm"?
It all goes back to the German philosopher Georg Wilheim Friedrich Hegel and his notion that history was progressive, that an "Absolute," or "Spirit", some sort of cosmic force (his word: zeitgeist), weaved the periods of history together, creating conflicts that resulted in resolutions that in turn led to further conflicts and so on, until, ultimately, "everything worked out in the end." When history ended, paradise on earth was achieved.

Whoa. What's that have to do with left and right wings?
In addition to being a tremendously influential philosopher of the 19th century, he was a popular professor at the University of Berlin. After his death, students at the university divided on how best to interpret and implement his philosophy. They adopted the right-wing / left-wing paradigm, with the radicals calling themselves "left Hegelians" and the more conservative students calling themselves "right Hegelians." It was at this time that a bright young man (and aspiring Romantic poet) enrolled and started hanging out with the Left Hegelians. His name was Karl Marx and he went on to become one of the most well-known and controversial thinkers of the modern era.

Wasn't Marx a commie?
Yes, he was, but he would have been appalled by communism as it developed under Stalin in Russia and has manifested in other counties like China and North Korea. Marx had developed a collaborative relationship with Frederick Engels, a radical intellectual who called himself a "communist," and both sought to address the misery endured by workers in industrial factories whose owners lived lives of lavish comfort and leisure. Both subscribed to Hegel's view of history as being progressive, but tossed out the notion that its driving force was a cosmic "Absolute." In its place Marx substituted class struggle: the capitalist class produced by the industrial revolution exploited, via brainwashing and tight purse strings, the workers whose labor allowed for their comfort. Marx's philosophy was one of action: "Philosophers up until the present time have merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it." His notion of change was revolution: "Workers of the world unite!" Through him, left-wing politics became one of revolt against the powers that be.

So, again, what's all this got to do with American politics?
Plenty. Marx offered the first compelling, if not at times naïve, critique of capitalism, and it wasn't pleasant. He forcefully argued that because of its internal contradictions, and due in no small way to the unequal distribution of power and wealth in such a society, capitalism is a doomed ideology. It would result in chaos and revolution, which in turn would bring on a classless, "socialist" society, or communism. The United States, meanwhile, came to epitomize the "success" of capitalism. The power elite, the "bad guys" as far as Marx was concerned, came to wield tremendous influence on the American political system, as is the case today. Corporations--the "defense industry," the "oil industry"--have so much power that it's often difficult determining who calls the shots when it come to issues of foreign and domestic policy.

Doesn't capitalism's success and the collapse of Soviet communism prove Marx wrong?
It's too early to tell. But we mustn't underestimate the extraordinary influence Marx and his followers have had on our culture. Unionized labor, workmen's compensation, overtime pay, forty hour work weeks, even two-day weekends: these "perks" are basically capitalism's attempt to stave off discontentment by workers and ensure productivity--a huge step away from the slave-labor conditions of the industrial revolution that, prior to Marx's consciousness-raising movement, most workers simply accepted as their plight. The collapse of the USSR actually seems to prove Marx's argument: the powerful victimized the weak, the rich dominated the poor, a small elite lived off the fruits of the masses--albeit it within a "communist" framework--and the system finally went bankrupt and collapsed. We would like to think that such a thing couldn't happen in America or in Europe, but history has a way of socking us all with unexpected surprises.

So what does all this mean? That the Democrats, because they are left wing, are on the side of workers and the Republicans, because they are on the right wing, are on the side of corporations?
The Democrats would love for you to think that way (unless you are a major CEO, of course!), but if it were true Ralph Nader's Green Party wouldn't have stolen so many progressive voters away from the Democrats in the 2000 Presidential elections. President Bill Clinton, who was savagely attacked by a well-funded and organized right wing throughout his two terms in office, was no lovechild of the left. Political critic Noam Chomsky, filmmaker Michael Moore, and publications like The Nation offered cogent and damning criticism of many of his policies (Moore termed Clinton "a Republican-in-disguise"). Clinton's support of gay rights, the legality of abortion, and increased regulation of environmental polluters got him branded as a "liberal," but in fact he was more of a centrist on many issues. However, it is a fact that corporate financial backing is increasingly going the way of the Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, depend largely on the largess of trial lawyers. Here's where we see the right-wing (pro-corporation) vs. left-wing (pro-Average-Joe) paradigm play out. As Republicans like former Senator Jesse Helms watched helplessly, Democrat-supported trial lawyers, working on behalf of "regular people" and in conjunction with many states' attorneys-general (not all of whom were Democrats), backed the tobacco industry into a corner then shamelessly shook them down. No small part of the economic prosperity of that decade was due to the exploitation of these fat-cat corporations. True Marxist leftism, however, would have disabled the tobacco industry and put it completely into the hands of its workers--its suppliers, secretaries, machine operators. Even trial lawyers would never go that far. They reaped huge settlements, increased their own personal fortunes, then retreated. The industry has suffered greatly but its infrastructure remains intact. So the mainstream, typically Democrat left wing is a far cry from the radical leftism espoused by Marx and still active outside the edifices of government by, for example, the anti-globalism movement.

So the Democrats aren't really left-wing?
Because the Republican Party has moved so far to the right, the Democrats seem left-wing, but in fact many Democrats are traditional centrists. The kind of Marxist leftists we have today proclaim themselves anarchists. They desire revolution. The mainstream television news media, however, largely ignore this movement and focus instead of the drama of Democrats versus Republicans--especially when it comes to issues central to the so-called "culture war" (gay rights, abortion, gun control, etc.) being waged in the United States. These "wars" have polarized the two parties like never before. In such a vitriolic environment, political centrism is more than just a position: it is the tie that binds.