What Do Centrists Actually Believe?
There's more to being a moderate than just picking the middle path.
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. This week we’re diving into the Earth equivalent of the neutral aliens from Futurama (above).
Earlier this month, when eight Senate Democrats voted against raising the national minimum wage to $15, it underscored that it is the centrists, not progressives, who currently run things in Washington. As I wrote in my last newsletter, while social media and old-fashioned media remain fixated on polarizing politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrats won back Congress thanks to candidates who embraced popular, uncontroversial opinions and the party leaders are almost entirely middle-of-the-road, socialism-is-bad normies. It’s these sorts of Democrats who control the agenda, and that’s why the agenda did not, in the end, include a minimum wage hike.
So it’s vitally important to understand what centrists believe. But centrists themselves don’t want us to know.
While progressives and conservatives love talking about their respective ideologies online, in prestigious magazines, and at conferences, centrism has none of that visible infrastructure. Intellectuals and pundits sometimes debate whether a given politician is a “real” progressive or “real” conservative, but there’s hardly any equivalent squabbles over who gets the centrist label. Very few think tanks identify with the center, with the most prominent one being Third Way. There’s an old Twitter joke about how a centrist rally would have people shouting “better things aren’t possible” which is funny partly because there’s no such thing as a centrist rally; as political philosophies go it’s unusually slippery and hard to pin down.
But centrism has principles and dearly held ideals. Here’s my attempt to define them based not on what they say but what they have done in the past decade.
Efficient, limited government
During the Obama years, “nudge theory” became fashionable. This was the idea, based in social science, that small changes to policy could have big effects on society. The classic example involves altering drivers license forms so applicants have to check a box not to become an organ donor (“opt-out” rather than “opt-in”). This tweak, studies have found, causes many more people to agree to be organ donors.
Nudge theory is as pure an expression of centrist dogma as you’re likely to find. Instead of the government intervening in big, expensive, socialistic ways, the government in the centrist model is hands-off, only getting involved when absolutely necessary. Unlike conservatives, centrists don’t want to tear down government power, but they are biased toward inaction. The great thing about nudge theory was that it provided a rationale for why doing almost nothing was actually optimal.
This philosophy has left fingerprints all over public policy every time Democrats run DC. Instead of having the federal government provide health insurance directly to people, you allow people to buy insurance and try to push them into doing so with a (complicated) system of subsidies and tax penalties. When you need to stimulate a struggling economy, err on the side of the stimulus being too small. Will the White House forgive student debt? Not on Joe Biden’s watch. Instead of giving unemployed Americans an extra $400 a week, centrists gave them $300. Instead of building more public housing, centrists want to eliminate zoning restrictions and encourage developers to build rental units so prices go down through market dynamics. Inaction is always preferable to action, small preferable to big.
Sometimes centrists defend these positions by saying that progressive or socialist policies are too expensive; in other cases they find other reasons for the government to do less, like the senators who cited the need to protect small businesses as a rationale to vote against a $15 minimum wage. In some instances centrism can seem like neoliberalism—a faith that free markets can reduce poverty and inequality—but I think today’s centrists are more willing than the past generation of neoliberals to embrace big government. But they have to be convinced that it’s absolutely necessary, and they worry about changes being too drastic.
The church of bipartisanship
Another tenet of centrism is that making deals with the opposing party isn’t just something you do when you don’t have the power to make your own agenda into law. A good centrist is always looking for a compromise.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is the champion of this view. As the chamber’s swing vote, he has an enormous amount of leverage, and he said in a recent Axios interview that he would use that leverage to make sure the Biden White House listens to Republicans when it comes time to discuss an infrastructure and climate bill. He said he personally wants that bill to be huge, potentially in the $4 trillion range, and fully paid for through the use of tax cuts.
This is not how Republicans themselves think about policy or the power of the Senate. In 2017, when the GOP controlled Congress by a narrow margin, they used a trick called reconciliation to pass a massive tax cut package without Democratic input. But even though Democrats could figure out a way to pass an infrastructure package if all 50 of their party’s senators agreed on one, Manchin instead wants to come to a compromise with Republicans.
The downside to this fetishization of bipartisanship is obvious: The other side has to agree to a deal. Manchin says Republicans would join Democrats in supporting some kind of infrastructure bill, and maybe they would, but they could also do what they did in 2009 and 2010, when the GOP asked for changes in the original Obamacare bill, added amendments, then voted as a bloc against the package anyway. If you are a centrist who wants the government to do as little as possible, maybe you don’t mind it so much when you can’t pass legislation, but for progressives, this type of unilateral disarmament is baffling. This is because they don’t have the final ingredient of centrism:
Relentless optimism
Manchin’s belief that he can get Republicans to vote for a bill that hikes taxes and increases spending might seem borderline delusional. But it speaks to an optimism embedded in centrism’s DNA that is unique in American politics right now.
Leftists will tell you that a better world is possible, but by this they generally mean that society and the economy need to transform fundamentally to address various inequalities and injustices. Conservatives may have been at one time optimistic about America but in my lifetime they’ve spent most of their time complaining about how evil, censorious liberals have taken over the country. Donald Trump, cranking this tendency up to 11, devoted his entire inaugural address to the concept of “American carnage.”
By contrast, Biden, taking the oath of office at a time when life in America was objectively much worse than it was during Trump’s inaugural, spent his speech extolling the virtues of the United States and the importance of unity and patriotism. For centrists like Biden, America’s greatness isn’t conditional—it’s always been a good country with mostly good people in it, and when there were brief moments of badness, like the Civil War, the “better angels of our nature” (a phrase Biden quotes) saw the country through.
If you have this worldview, a lot of what centrists do makes a lot of sense. If America is already great, there’s no need to transform it by, say, adding states or eliminating private health insurance (two things progressives tend to favor). This form of optimism is basically just a bias toward the status quo. When you think things are basically good as they are, you’re going to emphasize the downside of any possible change—you might worry about the effect of a minimum wage increase on small businesses—and you’re going to want to move as slowly and deliberately as possible.
Is this stuff popular?
Centrism is frustrating to a large and vocal portion of the Democratic base, who see people like Manchin as standing in the way. When centrist Democrats in the Senate kill a minimum wage increase or when Biden says he won’t move to erase student loan debt, it seems like the party is tying one hand behind its back.
But I think there’s a lot that’s appealing about centrism for voters. It’s important to remember that older people vote more frequently than younger people, white people vote more frequently than other races, wealthier people vote more frequently than the poor, homeowners vote more frequently than renters. These trends are partly a result of rules that erect barriers to voting for poor people and people of color, but whatever their causes, the result is that voters have a built-in bias toward the status quo that is mirrored in the preferences of centrists.
Another factor is that while bipartisanship may be unrealistic, Americans at least tell pollsters they like it. Most voters don’t have deeply informed views about every issue, but they like the idea of compromise and the notion that politicians are working together on stuff.
This brings us back to why centrism is able to dominate politics so quietly. Right- and left-wing ideologues attract media attention and drive debates online, but they also can turn off voters who don’t share their ideology. Biden showed in 2020 that a steadfastly boring politician can win not by whipping up their base but by providing a bland contrast to their opponent’s extremism. There are other, lower-profile examples of this happening: One 2017 political science paper looked at congressional races where a primary was closely contested and found that if the winner of that primary was a more “extreme” candidate, they tended to do worse in the general election, as voters from the opposing party turn out in droves to stop them.
Not every centrist position is actually popular. Raising the minimum wage, for instance, is very popular and yet was blocked by Manchinesque moderates. But centrists’ superpower is that they portray themselves as reasonable compromisers even when they are being manifestly unreasonable. So far, it’s been working.
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