No idea where your screed about "progressives" came from. I sent this around because it is worthwhile to know something of Michael Lind's background and to understand better the history of Radical Centrism --the movement and the phrase. Lind, of course, is a major voice at New America, the "competition," so to speak. Also found it interesting --although I have come across similar information before-- to read Lind's take about RC in the past, both Left and Right, both establishment and insurgent. OK, part of this story is "progressive" but part goes all the way back to George Wallace, hardly anyone's idea of a Lefty. How you interpreted this as a statement about Leftism eludes me. Just don't understand what this has to do with the fate of the Left after 1995. It is an essay about the history of Radical Centrism from the perspective of 17 years ago. Could be useful if there ever are debates about where RC came from and its founding principles, that sort of thing. Plus it is very good at differentiating RC from "centrists" or "moderates." And one way to differentiate RC.org from other versions of Radical Centrism. Billy ------------------------------------------------------------------ 5/6/2012 8:38:19 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
Have Progressives moved far enough from even this 1995 article to the point where the majority of them do not deserve the benefit of the doubt? Say what one will, but I don't believe that the majority of Progressives are for "good government" any more. That, or "good" is defined not in quality, but in them running the show, no matter how the intrusive or over- bearing the government behaves. And I reject that definition. I would say that the way they are currently running things is almost libertarian picture perfect "bad government." Or getting mighty damn close. David _ "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection."—Neal Boortz On 5/6/2012 11:49 AM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: 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." -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community _<[email protected]>_ (mailto:[email protected]) Google Group: _http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism_ (http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism) Radical Centrism website and blog: _http://RadicalCentrism.org_ (http://radicalcentrism.org/) -- 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
