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."
