Renegade Centrism

At the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, the right and left need each other—the right, to get shaken out of its complacency and fatalism; and the left, to learn that human nature will always defy its fondest imaginings. The Holy Grail is somehow fusing the best of both, but corporate bipartisanship always seems to end up combining the worst.

One of the more memorable episodes of Bill Moyers Journal during my time at PBS brought together Reps. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, the far-out freethinkers of the seemingly wide-open 2008 presidential race, who’d fast become folk heroes.

It was still dark when the alarm went off in my grody Hell’s Kitchen apartment: almost time to catch car service across the river to Newark airport to hold up a sign for Dennis and accompany him back to our west side studios. Ron I didn’t have to worry about, as one of his libertarian acolytes was flying him in by helicopter.

Dennis was on the phone almost the whole ride; I could barely ask him to autograph the Lewis Lapham book I was reading, but Ron seemed happy to sign a placard I printed out. Both were great on the show—advocating eloquently for civil liberties and against the Iraq war, and coming off so much more human than their better-coiffed competitors.

After the broadcast came a flood of blog comments and viewer mail, a motley assortment of voters begging Dennis and Ron (or Ron and Dennis) to team up for a grand unity ticket against the warmongers and big banks. Yet it was significant that the two hadn’t been interviewed together: as many common themes as they shared, and broad countercultural appeal, there remained vast separation among the tribes.

The further one scrolled, as idealists on left and right asserted their moral authority, the more any theoretical alliance broke apart. However appalling the status quo, the camps tended to hate one another more than they loved the possibility of slow incremental progress through compromise, and ultimately preferred to cast their lot with the establishment or not vote at all rather than give quarter to their cultural enemies.

Between raw political talent and a worshipful media, Barack Obama was eventually able to coopt much of the outsider appeal that fueled the Kucinich and Paul candidacies—and largely hold on to it even as his administration embraced more war, more abuse of civil liberties, and more grinding down of the middle class. The truth was, class concerns were getting less and less salient on the institutional left as Democrats increasingly became the party of the rich. After the last spasms of Occupy Wall Street it was easier to sustain the coalition with polarizing social issues—as Bernie Sanders demonstrated in his 2016 campaign when he renounced his lifelong support of immigration controls in favor of the open borders he’d previously described as “a Koch Brothers proposal.”

Despite his flip-flopping Bernie did manage to become something of a cross-partisan folk hero, and might well have done better in the general than Hillary Clinton, but left a ton of room for another insurgent outsider to channel the discontent of the beleaguered middle class. Before Donald Trump got boxed in to the Republican brand, and started speaking exclusively to his base, he sounded more like the kind of fire-breathing third-party reformer that so many of those Moyers viewers had been hoping for. It wasn’t standard GOP boilerplate that eked out Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Having grown up on the left, and tried to devote my career to it, what’s happened to our institutions has been heartbreaking. The liberals I’d known had cared about listening to ordinary people and pursuing policies to improve their standards of living. Yet, except for rhetoric, that’s largely gone now—today’s thought leaders and policy makers tend to be dogmatic technocrats, disproportionately from very privileged backgrounds, eager to impose managed decline and the latest ideological fads on a public they see mainly in the abstract.

Most have the best of intentions, and honestly feel they hold a monopoly on truth. To punish and censor and take things away are for people’s own good in the crucible of global citizenship, and only a crank or bigot could possibly object.

As such, an authoritarian mode of government like China’s is now seen less as a cautionary example than a model to strive for—so long as it’s “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people” like us, as Thomas Friedman might say. And thus a movement once about winning sick leave and a living wage has become an establishment obsessed with dominance and control. Whatever their tribe, most of the electorate doesn’t like it.

With today’s hyperpolarization, and especially where there’s ballot harvesting, elections are decided more by base turnout and out-of-state fundraising than convincing the shrinking numbers of persuadable voters. The game is primarily getting people to vote against cultural totems they hate rather than for anything they might support.

Perhaps the discourse is so far gone, the tribes so at each other’s throats, that it’s no longer possible for an outsider to accrue cred across the political spectrum. But on the off chance that there’s still a critical mass of disaffected independents paying attention out there, it seems an awfully wide lane to leave open.

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Next: Positively Discrimination

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