NY Times
THE RADICAL CENTER OR THE MODERATE MIDDLE?
By MICHAEL LIND
Published: December 03, 1995
COLIN POWELL'S DECISION NOT TO SEEK THE PRESIDENCY HAS left an opening for
the emergence of a new leader or a new party in the center of the
political system. Whether or not there is an independent or a third-party
challenge, the Democratic and Republican Presidential nominees in 1996 will
have to
court centrist voters who are repelled both by traditional liberalism and
radical conservatism.
This is the conventional wisdom. It is half right. A substantial number of
Americans (as much as a third of the electorate, in some polls) are indeed
alienated by a two-party system that tends to present only two options --
conservative Republican or liberal Democrat. But the growing number of
disaffected voters do not form a cohesive bloc with a shared viewpoint that
might serve as the basis for a third party. On the contrary, alienated voters
tend to divide into two distinct and incompatible camps: the moderate middle
and the radical center.
Paul Tsongas declared after Powell's decision not to enter the race that
"there is a clear consensus and it's right in the middle -- socially liberal,
fiscally conservative, pro-environment, pro-campaign reform." The "clear
consensus" Tsongas describes is that of the moderate middle (which Powell
called "the sensible center"). Members of the moderate middle tend to be
old-fashioned Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans alienated by the
supply-siders and religious right activists who, since the 1970's, have taken
over
the G.O.P. The moderate middle also includes neo-liberal New Democrats based
in the suburbs and successful in the private sector. The ranks of the
moderate middle are heavy with managers and professionals with advanced
degrees. They tend to combine liberal views on social issues like abortion and
gay
rights with concern about excess government spending on welfare and
middle-class entitlements. The standard-bearers of the moderate middle include
Democrats like Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas as well as former
Republicans like John Anderson and Lowell Weicker.
The moderate middle, however, is only one of the two "centers" in American
politics. The "radical center" (the name was coined in the 1970's by Donald
Warren, a sociologist) consists largely of alienated Democrats, who broke
away from the New Deal coalition to vote for George Wallace in 1968, Nixon
in 1972 and then, in 1980, for Ronald Reagan. These former Wallace-Reagan
Democrats tend to be white, blue-collar, high-school-educated and
concentrated in the industrial Middle West, the South and the West. They are
liberal,
even radical in matters of economics, but conservative in morals and
mores. Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown, while not spokesmen for the
radical center, have espoused ideas and sentiments that are attractive to this
constituency.
The moderate middle, by and large, is satisfied with the American private
sector, to the extent of viewing its accounting procedures and
organizational structures as a model for good governance in the public sector.
The
radical center hates big business (and big labor) as much as big government.
Not
infrequently, this hostility extends to the two big parties, between
which, as George Wallace famously suggested, there isn't a dime's worth of
difference.
The moderate middle could not be more different, in style and goals, than
the radical center. It is hard to imagine Paul Tsongas slow-dancing, as
Perot has, to the strains of Patsy Cline's "Crazy," or to picture Warren
Rudman
joining Pat Buchanan in summoning the country to "religious war" and
"cultural war." The belligerent and often colorful oratory of today's
self-described populists of the radical center echoes the oratory of the
Jacksonian
Democratic and Populist spellbinders of the past, like William Jennings
Bryan, and Huey P. (Kingfish) Long.
The political spectrum, like American society in general, is divided by
class, so that the rationalistic meliorists of the moderate middle, in
socioeconomic terms, are "above" the angry populists of the radical center. The
difference is reminiscent of the class and cultural divide between
upper-middle-class metropolitan Progressives and rural and small-town Populists
at
the turn of the century, who viewed each other with suspicion even though
they shared many criticisms of the existing order. THE ANGRY CENTER, ON CLOSER
INSPECTION, turns out to consist of two groups so unlike as to doom any
project of uniting them in a single third-party movement. The platform of
Perot's new Independence Party stresses reforms of campaign finance and the
budget process that both radical centrists and moderate middlers, for
different reasons, can approve, but takes virtually no stand on contentious
social
and political issues that divide the two centers. Perot himself, in spite
of his Texan populism, resembles a classic good-government progressive in
his concerns about special-interest influence and bureaucratic inefficiency.
However, to judge from the rapturous reception given at Perot's recent
Dallas convention to the Nafta opponents Patrick Buchanan and Representative
Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, the center of gravity of the Perot movement
is the radical center, not the moderate middle.
A more logical alternative, then, to today's two-party system would be not
a three-party system but a four-party system, with parties representing
liberalism, conservatism, the moderate middle and the radical center. More
likely, however, the two centers will transform American politics by
influencing one of the existing parties, or perhaps both, to adopt the most
important parts of their agenda.
Given the deep contradictions between the radical center and the moderate
middle, Democratic and Republican strategists may have no choice but to
pursue one faction while writing off the other. Interestingly, the Republican
and Democratic parties for some time have been pursuing the centrists who
have defected from the other party, rather than trying to lure their own
defectors back into the fold. For example, Republican strategists since
Richard
Nixon in 1968 have been willing to abandon liberal and moderate
Republicans in order to court ex-Democratic members of the radical center by
stressing social conservatism, while ignoring the economic populism that is
dear to
the hearts of the same constituency. In a memo for the 1984 Reagan
campaign, Lee Atwater made this strategy explicit: "Populists have always been
liberal on economics. So long as the crucial issues were generally confined to
economics -- as during the New Deal -- the liberal candidate would expect
to get most of the populist vote. But populists are conservatives on most
social issues. . . . When social and cultural issues died down, the
populists were left with no compelling reason to vote Republican."
Meanwhile, "New Democrats" like Bill Clinton have written off the radical
center (most notably, during the Nafta debate) while reaching out to the
business-class members of the moderate middle, many of them with liberal
Republican roots, by supporting deficit reduction and good-government reforms
like "reinventing government."
Of the two strategies, the Republican so far appears to be more successful;
Buchanan's Presidential campaigns may even help weld the radical center to
the G.O.P., as a wing of the party comparable in importance to the
religious right (a sectarian coalition quite different from the radical
center).
Clinton, however, has managed to alienate working-class radical centrists
with his moderate-middle synthesis of free trade and cultural liberalism,
without inducing a mass conversion of John Anderson Republicans to the
Democratic party.
WHICH OF THE TWO RIVAL CENTRIST movements is more likely to succeed --
either as an independent party, or (more likely) as a wing of one of the two
established parties? The answer might be sought in the historical precedent
of the Populists and the Progressives. Progressive politicians enacted many
of the reforms on the Populist agenda, from government relief for farmers
to child labor laws. The Progressives, though, rejected radical Populist
economic ideas, like the nationalization of the railroads and the
re-monetization of silver. More concerned with good government than with
popular
government, Progressives also rejected the radical democratic ideal of the
Populists; though they sometimes supported measures like referenda as tools to
combat political machines, their favored alternative to government corruption
tended to be the extension of government centralization by educated
elites, not the extension of grass-roots Jacksonian democracy. The Populists
fizzled out at the turn of the century; the Progressives, and their heirs, the
New Deal liberals, proved to be the dominant force in 20th-century American
politics, reshaping state and society alike.
If this parallel holds up, then the moderate middle (today's Progressives)
may adopt some of the reforms of the radical center (today's Populists),
while rejecting the most extreme radical-centrist approaches to economic
nationalism and direct democracy. Because the moderate middle tends to be
composed of disaffected members of the political, economic and intellectual
establishments, it has an enormous advantage over the less-educated and
less-sophisticated radical center. The moderate middle has prestige,
connections
and access to institutional power and wealth; the radical center tends to
have none of these.
The long-term odds, then, are stacked in favor of the moderate middle --
particularly if its spokesmen adopt, and domesticate, a few ideas from the
radical center (like campaign and lobbying reform, or trade sanctions on
countries that exploit labor). Even if some of its favorite reforms are
co-opted, though, the radical center may not be appeased. If wages continue to
stagnate or decline for most Americans, the accumulating resentments of the
radical center could energize a destructive anti-system populism, an American
form of Argentine-style Peronism that would make Buchanan's right-wing
populism look tame by comparison. The stability of the American political
order may depend on its ability to reassure angry populists -- and yet the
elitist bias of that very political order may insure that the interests of the
working-class members of the radical center continue to be sacrificed to
the ideals of the affluent and suburban moderate middle. If so, a new "South
American" politics of outsiders versus insiders or of bottom versus top may
replace the traditional American left-right spectrum -- and, with it, the
very notion of a "center" at all.
Michael Lind is a senior editor of The NewRepublic and the author of "The
Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American
Revolution."
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