That's what I'm hoping for. Centrism is very blobby at the moment. Remember, though, that conservatism was like that prior to Buckley and Bozell in the 40s and 50s. You had dogmatists like Senator Taft, but the movement was really fragmented and full of isolationists, anti-New Dealers and anti-Semitic groups. It took a rally of disparate movements (libertarianism, classical liberalism, social conservatism) around anti-communism to get our American conception of conservatism. I think that's what we need to do as a first stage. Rally around a single concept with a certain enemy, and develop an alternative to the two parties. Right now, it just seems like populist anger out there, which doesn't create a governing philosophy.
With "radical centrism", I think a lot of inroads have been made, but it's going to need some tightening up over time, as a wide-reaching political philosophy takes time to develop. Conservatives got lucky, because politicians like Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke so closely matched the values of mainstream American conservatives (religion, traditionalism, liberal democracy for Burke, in particular). I think liberalism is a blob also, though. US Democrats are considered part of the liberal democratic tradition, while they lie internationally on the social democratic line. Somehow, they continue to straddle both categories in keeping all their interest groups happy. Yes, I agree that centrism simply refers to those who reside in the political center. Centrism will always be relatively loosely defined, but it we can find those three or four things that are essential to the average person in the middle (against extremism, emphasis on the middle class, grounded and empirical, technological solutions, possibly?), and we can let people stray on other things. The benefit of finding the important commonalities among many of our people is that we could finally bring centrism, as we define it, to an international standard. The Popular Party of Spain doesn't believe the exact same things as our Republicans, but they both follow that general religious liberal democratic umbrella. Internationally, the Liberal Democrats of the United Kingdom adopted radical centrism, and the Democratic Movement party in France have adopted a platform that is very close to the "radical centrist" mode , but there's a dearth of consistency regarding "centrism" in international terms. I've gotten relatively annoyed lately with Ennahda in Tunisia being referred to as a "moderate Islamic party", "centrist party", and "centrist Islamic". I get that they mean that the party preaches moderate emphasis on the Islamic aspect of their party, but it gives the impression that it is a "moderate" and "Islamic" party. At what point, from our American view, do we say that a party that presses a certain religious doctrine can't be a party of a movement or consistent ideology that we put together? I don't know if we have the hubris to base centrism on American values, like separation of church and state. Welcome to the group. On Dec 1, 5:30 am, Rise of the Center <[email protected]> wrote: > I am what you could call a professional centrist (I blog and freelance > about politics for a living), but I'm not so blind to my own biases that I > believe this sort of nonsense that our system is somehow less colored by > personal opinion than any other. All centrist means is we're between the > left and the right, and in other nations the center is nowhere near where > the center is here, and if you don't think there are centrist zealots out > there... run a popular centrist blog for a while. They're out there too, > and they'll assuredly come out of the woodwork once there is a more > organized political center in our country. > > There is no centrist religion, or centrISM, yet... but it's pretty much a > 100% likelihood that, if a centrist political establishment developed one > would eventually come about. Its just human nature to try and develop > systems of thought like that. -- 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
