It was nice of Business Week to publish an article that at least opens with kudos to the concept of Radical Centrism, but I have to agree with DB that it is all downhill after that. No focus, for one thing. The essay seems to have been written by a "soft Democrat" now feeling cast adrift after the election, groping for a way to understand what has just hit him.The writer is someone who also seems to have gotten wind of the phrase and idea of Radical Centrism, but doesn't really "get it." Not that the central axioms of RC are necessarily obvious. But here is a review that may be helpful . This reflects my subjective feelings at the moment but does, at least I think so, present an objective overview : ( 1 ) RC is anti-partisan This principle should not be taken too far. About specific issues partisanship may well be in order. And there is respect for partisanship when it is appropriate, such as among leaders of a political party, or at various "inspire the troops" events. But party-line thinking is abhorrent to RC. It is axiomatic that each major party will be wrong about 40 % of the time, with the 20 % difference ( between the two parties ) in the category of uncertainty , or right-and-wrong .Obviously this general idea also applies to "other" parties or political philosophies. ( 2 ) RC seeks to learn whatever is useful or good from all political movements or causes. The exceptions, in principle, are totalitarian ideologies Yes, even here, it is worthwhile to study the hard Left or the far Right, but the point is that extreme caution is necessary and ANY ideas which might be borrowed from either persuasion need to pass serious tests to screen out even a hint of authoritarian values. ( 3 ) RC seeks creative "out of the box" solutions to problems . This says that partisanship --any party-- blocks some solutions because there are pre-established priorities set by a political ideology. Therefore, forget partisanship and seek a new solution from scratch if, that is, objectively the new solution is really worthwhile. ( 4 ) RC seeks to solve problems by seeking to find a synthesis between extremes that incorporates the best from Left and Right. The qualification is that this is just one option, it is not the only option to seeking to solve problems. This makes RC partly Hegelian, which, as I see it, is all for the Good. ( 5 ) RC is based on " cafeteria politics." RC offers a platform for Independent voters to put together, as seems smart and good to each Indy, a combination of positions on issues taken from both Left and Right --and sometimes Other-- in new ways. This obviously is also only one alternative within RC. But the point is that a significant number of issues are pretty much set in concrete, and not much can be added by way of discussion to what they are. The problem of diminishing returns applies to political ideas too. How much additional research or deep thinking can possibly "refine" the abortion debate further ? Same for teaching evolution in the schools. To use these examples as metaphor for all other such issues, one is a typical Right view, the other a typical Left view. A Radical Centrist may say that both are Good, combining clearly solid Left and solid Right positions.And this may be the case for 100 other issues. But if it really is RC there will be an approximate balance, over all, although the exact mix may vary, year to year. ( 6 ) RC insists that all positions one takes should be researched. The ideal is the informed voter. RC places a premium on education as a general rule which applies specifically to politics. "Research" assumes serious thinking, testing ideas, and all the rest. ( 7 ) RC requires that all issues anyone champions should be moral. Exactly what this morality should consist of is open to discussion and debate but it is safe to say that one version of this morality compares to the morality of Evangelical Christians. However, this also says that compatible moralities for example of many or most Buddhists, is also Radical Centrist in character. ( 8 ) RC finds its highest political ideals in the US Constitution before all other sources This hardly says that there aren't other sources, everything from the Code of Hammurabi to British common law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but the US Constitution has a special place in RC thought and no ideas advocated by Radical Centrists which can be deemed "unconstitutional" are acceptable. When Radical Centrists arrive at new ideas which the Constitution does not address, or when functional problems with the Constitution or its amendments are identified, it is always acceptable to suggest new amendments. I think this fairly summarizes the essence of RC. If anyone thinks that something has been omitted, or if anyone thinks something is mistaken, please speak up, we would all benefit from your comments. Billy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The intro article to this week's businessweek seemed to be quite insightful and aligned with the principals of RC.
_http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_46/b4203008297339.htm_ (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_46/b4203008297339.htm) David Little -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reply from DB It both does and doesn't align itself with such principles. It presumes to lecture the voters again, and the author would be well advised to see how that worked out for Obama this time. You don't call the voters "stupid" and then expect them to vote for you. Calling them stupid implies that they were stupid to vote for the politician making the statement in the first place, and to overcome that stupidity they make up for it by not making that same mistake again. About "considering the source:" There are blessed few unbiased sources, if indeed there are ANY in that category. It's hard to calm the voters down when they get the distinct impression that the political class is not listening. In the face of large protests, raucous town hall meetings, and floods of e-mails and phone calls, they passed what was not popular and then they wonder why they are not popular. Jobs and the economy for this administration and this congress has shown them to be "all hat and no cattle." They spent damn near a year on "Health Care Reform," and then slammed through the "Financial System Reform" in just a couple of months. Even THAT does not create one job in the private sector. It creates a ton more of arrogant, incompetent, pompous, overblown bureaucrats. Yeah, we need lots more of that BS. That sounds like someone other than the voters is "stupid." David Block =========================================================== (http://www.businessweek.com/) (http://www.businessweek.com/) Commentary November 3, 2010 Election Aftermath: Beyond the Extremes Toward a politics in which the central truths of conservatism and liberalism can interact rather than collide In the gloom of the 1981-82 recession, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a letter to a supporter about the upcoming midterm elections. "The issue, plainly put, is whether the center will hold—in both parties," said Moynihan, then a Democratic Senator from New York. "In three decades of government and politics I have felt myself living in a comprehensible and creative political environment. Of a sudden, I am not certain. Of a sudden, both parties are under attack from extremes." Of a sudden, America has swung back to the right after a leftward shift in the 24 months since Barack Obama stood in Chicago's Grant Park—remember that?—as the symbol of a new age in which the extremes of both sides were quieted by crisis. In retrospect, it was the briefest of political ages (which, given the unimpressive longevity of political ages, is saying something). At first, in both tone and substance, the Obama Administration was more reminiscent of New Frontier technocracy than of Great Society liberalism. At the moment, it is evoking nothing so much as the well-meaning but inept Carter era. Appropriately for the Democrats, the election fell this year on All Souls' Day, also known as the Day of the Dead. Republicans won a net of at least 60 seats in the House—more even than the GOP took in Newt Gingrich's 1994 victory—and six in the Senate. Governorships flipped from blue to red. The best news for the Democrats was the reelection of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada, followed by Joe Manchin's Senate win in West Virginia. Manchin, the state's Democratic governor, won the seat by deserting Obama—in one campaign ad, he fired a rifle bullet through a facsimile of the cap-and-trade bill. A thumpin' indeed. But has Obama really been refudiated on substantive grounds? He is no radical; the relative lack of enthusiasm for him among liberal Democrats is proof enough of that. And yet much of the country thinks he is just to the right of Mao. Push a bit, though, and you begin to see that the opposition is more atmospheric than philosophical. A Bloomberg National Poll conducted in late October found that by a 2-to-1 margin, likely midterm voters think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program will not be recovered. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things. The purportedly anti-business Obama has presided over rising corporate profits and a successful rescue of the American auto industry. Yes, there have been regulatory and rhetorical excesses. The proliferation of 1099s and the occasional Presidential snarl at the private sector have helped create a disproportionate but a deeply felt sense that Obama is waging "war on business." This is less a war, though, than a police action. The Congressional Budget Office believes health-care reform will ultimately bring down the deficit and estimates that the stimulus package saved 3 million jobs. I recently spoke with a Mississippi relative who is addicted to Fox News and distrusts the President. Asked to describe how, precisely, Obama's policies have hurt him—he is comfortably well-off—there was a bit of sputtering and then silence. Since politics is not rational—it is, after all, about people—it's pointless for the White House to complain that voters just don't understand what Obama has done. They know what they think they know. Culture of Conflict Tuesday marked a victory, to paraphrase President Kennedy, not of party but of a dispiriting habit of politics in which conflict reigns. Inherently dramatic and exciting, conflict is more interesting than cooperation, struggle more exhilarating than the substantive working out of differences. Pity the President—any President, really. We are living in a frenetic political period. While it is in no way as frenzied as that of the 1960s or as apocalyptic as that of the 1930s, it is as momentous as the 1950s or the 1980s, eras that set the contours of ensuing decades. The Eisenhower years ratified the New Deal/Fair Deal understanding of government's essential role in society, and the Reagan-Bush 41 era established an anti-statist ethos that would climax in Bill Clinton's 1996 declaration that "the era of big government is over." In the future, the Bush 43-Obama age will come to be seen either as a time when Americans chose to fund a larger role for the public sector—for military spending, entitlements, and bailouts—or as an hour in which we chose to finance that larger role for the public sector through irresponsible borrowing, hoping to defer the reckoning forever. This is perhaps the central question of the age: Will we pay our way in real time, or dine royally now and leave the check for future generations? Voters' Complicity At this point in an essay such as this, composed and published in the tumult of a contentious election, the author traditionally clears his throat and undertakes to advise the President on how, in two of the most epic clichés in contemporary journalism, he should "hit reset" and "get his groove back." Not here, not now. I believe that we, the people, are complicit in creating and sustaining a political culture in which we bounce from one party to another and from one issue to another like so many bumper cars at a state fair. And so my counsel, for what it's worth, is directed not at the White House or Congress but to the voters, of whom I am one. Here are three points that, if borne in mind, could lead us back to the "creative and comprehensive political environment" of which Moynihan spoke three decades ago. Consider the source. Partisanship is as old as politics. Yes, the Founders hoped, in their dreamier moments, to avoid the "spirit of party" and faction. But Jefferson and Hamilton understood that parties were necessary to advance one's vision of life. And as they discovered almost immediately after George Washington took the first Presidential oath in April 1789, they were leading a nation in which opinion would always be divided and partisan clashes were inevitable. The key thing, as Jefferson put in it his 1801 inaugural address, was to remember that not every difference of opinion is a difference of principle. Few took his point—then or now. More than two centuries on, Americans are likely to see division as insuperable. Is the partisan feeling substantively different in 2010 from what it was in 1801? No, and therein lies an underappreciated problem. The 18th and 19th centuries were dominated by an explicitly partisan press. Newspapers were funded by politicians—Andrew Jackson grew so unhappy with his party's during his Presidency that he founded his own, and edited copy—and the tone could be violent and vitriolic. That changed for the better beginning in 1896, when Adolph Ochs, a Tennessee publisher, bought The New York Times and started attempting to cover the news "without fear or favor." Now the media world that Ochs created is breaking apart all around us. So the question is not whether our political culture is better or worse than it was in the early years of the Republic, but whether it is better or worse than it was in 1980 or 1990. And the answer is yes, it is worse. That is because so much political information is coming from a thriving class of provocateurs, on the Internet and some cable news outlets, who have an economic stake in the perpetuation of conflict rather than in the solution of problems. That's why it's crucial for voters to consider the source of what they read and hear. If there is a set ideological orientation, be aware of it, and judge what you absorb accordingly. As Moynihan liked to say, everyone is entitled to his own opinions—but not to his own facts. Calm down. It is a difficult time for many. Unemployment is too high, investment too low, pro-growth policies too scarce. According to Gallup, only 21 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the country Still, the world is not ending. In November 1964, as voters chose between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote a piece for Harper's Magazine on what he called the "paranoid style in American politics," a tendency on the part of some people—on both left and right—to overdramatize the temper of the time. The paranoid, he wrote, "is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. … As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." Conviction matters, deeply, and devoted partisans are often people of goodwill. We would not want (and could not have) a country or a politics without True Believers, for they delineate the terms of debate. The truth does not always lie between extremes, and compromise is not always the correct course. But sometimes it does, and sometimes it is. The best way to decide whether this or that hour is one of those times is to stop and think. Don't settle for the status quo. With only a few exceptions, two competing parties have dominated American politics for a century and a half. Today we have Republicans and Democrats who fight one another with Shermanesque tactics, hurling themselves into total political war over—well, over what, exactly? The partisan clamor with which we live is not commensurate with the actual distinctions between the two parties. We have a Democratic President who has increased the projection of U.S. force in Afghanistan, rescued the financial sector, and cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. (And who, by the way, has little time for issues such as marriage equality or gun control.) We have a Republican Party whose last President created vast deficits, grew government, and who, in crisis, all but nationalized the banks. Although both sides of course vigorously dispute all this, the fact remains that shifts in party control do not have to create seismic structural changes. Health-care reform, a seeming exception, does not even quite count. Remember that the bill Obama signed did not mandate universal coverage—a central progressive cause for more than a century. Could it be that the parties, either consciously or unconsciously, understand that they are largely part of the same established ethos, and that the fury of the contests between them reflect what Freud once called the "narcissism of small differences"? Voters should think more creatively and demand more options. Americans love free markets except in our politics, where we are strangely satisfied with having only two brands. There is clearly room for an independent force. A scrambling of the existing parties and a reordering of outdated ideologies are overdue. The Tea Party is not exactly the embodiment of a moderate third-way movement—it fits more in the Hofstadter paranoid tradition than it does with the emergence, say, of the Republican Party 150 years ago. But its success in propelling relative outsiders into positions of power underscores the system's fundamental instability. The Tea Party activists are onto something, and others of perhaps more moderate views and temperament could learn from their example. Chance for Interaction Hopes about third ways may be ephemeral and doomed. Here, however, is one great perennial truth: Politicians, dependent on their clients for their daily bread, will fill any demand that makes itself obvious, urgent, and consuming. The exact content of that demand is still to be determined, but one thing is clear: There is a market opening for an enlightened pragmatism. The shade of Daniel Patrick Moynihan is worth one more consultation. "In some forty years of government work I have learned one thing for certain. … The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society," Moynihan said in a note preserved in Steven R. Weisman's new book, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary. "The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Thanks to this interaction, we're a better society in nearly all respects than we were." Interaction—not collision. Tuesday was a win for brute force. But now come Wednesday, and Thursday, and the day after that, and the day after that. The jobless will still be jobless, the poor will still be impoverished, and our competitiveness will still be in peril. It is up to the winners—and the losers, come to that—to begin the work of restoring Moynihan's creative and comprehensive culture. ____________________________________ -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
