A new project, which will be sent in a separate e-mail,
has just been completed under the title:
Review Essay:
Holding the Center
In defense of Political Trimming
Some introductory comments would be a good idea because the occasion
for the project was both my reading of the book and my reading of Gonzo's
earlier review published at Centrist Forum. However, as good as that
review is, there are a number of other things that ought to be said
about Eugene Goodheart's 2013 opus, Holding the Center.
Some readers will be familiar with my comments about "centrism" and
Radical Centrism since they more-or-less restate what I have said at
various times before. Yet not everyone who reads the new review
will be familiar with my point-of-view and even some who have read
my previous comments may have forgotten some essentials. Especially
since both concepts, centrism and Radical Centrism, can be defined
differently by different people.
It may be helpful to know how I came to discover RC. As far back as
it has been possible to trace things, I knew a few basics about the concept
of Radical Centrism from an issue of Utne Reader that dates to 1995
or possibly as early as 1994. At the time I was searching for some
new way to characterize my political views.
It was obvious that self-identification as a "liberal" was inadequate.
For one thing, commonplace definition of the term liberal had changed since
the time I first became politically conscious by about 1960. The era of
Adlai Stevenson and JFK was a receding memory and the political
philosophy that inspired many Democrats of that era, basically a mixture
of John Stuart Mill and New Deal thought, had been superceded in
the party by a development that can only be described as semi-Marxist
in character, that, and a strong dose of popular culture values derived
from
the realm of entertainment. As well, anti-religious sentiments were
becoming more and more pronounced in Democratic Party circles.
None of this made me happy.
Then, too, it was becoming increasingly clear that my views of the early
1990s
simply did not "fit" any existing political paradigm. Yet moving to the
Right
was out of the question. The Republican Party, then as in the past, and
now,
is the party of the rich. While this does not mean that there are no truths
about economics that conservatives can teach us, for instance the principle
that entrepreneurship is essential in a functioning democracy, it does
mean
that when all is said, GOP policy is antithetical to the interests of
people
who do not put money at the top of their list of priorities in life.
Which is a view that I find contemptible.
By 1993 or some time in 1994 it was clear that I needed some kind of new
self identification. Roughly a third of my political opinions of that time
were liberal in character, another third were more-or-less conservative,
and the balance was unclassifiable, largely based on the years when
I was a professional futurist always on the lookout for innovations.
Moreover, while it was no problem to see the virtue in compromise
about some issues, particularly in the realm of business and economics,
in most other areas of interest, especially social values, compromise
was completely out of the question. Yet, no way did my social values
line up with the Republican Party and its set of rights vs. wrongs.
The exact same thing could be said about the Democratic Party.
That was when I first learned about Radical Centrism. For me, although
there are times when compromise is the best alternative, compromise
has never been my motivation for identifying with RC. The exact opposite
has been true from the outset. The question I needed to find a solution for
was how to reconcile uncompromising views on number of issues that,
taken together, were not remotely Left-wing in character, nor were
they Right-wing. After all, to use this example, I am as strongly
pro-evolution as anyone on the Left ever gets while at the same time
I am as opposed to toleration of homosexuality as the most committed
Right-winger. Simultaneously, the reasons for my views are effectively
unrelated to the logic of either the Left or the Right.
Radical Centrism provided the perfect solution to my dilemma. And as I see
it,
RC has almost nothing to do with compromise even though it sometimes
is necessary and sometimes produces very good results.
Remarks in my review-essay bring attention to considerations like these.
Gonzo's review is provided here since it is discussed in the text of my
essay.
And because it is very good and I certainly cannot improve on it.
Billy R.
September 11, 2016
=================================================
_Gonz_ (http://centristforum.com/index.php?members/gonz.1/) o, _August 24,
201_
(http://centristforum.com/index.php?threads/holding-the-center-eugene-goodheart.524/)
6
Holding the Center
Eugene Goodheart
Centrist takeaway:
A core truth that Holding the Center quickly establishes is that the Left
and Right are polarized as if they're etched in stone. I realized about a
decade and a half ago that the Left and Right have done a good amount of
shifting, which strains the credibility of the Left/Right's claims to Centrism
being, in any way, less pure. Illustrating the relative malleability of
the Left and Right, Goodheart brings in the fact that it was the
arch-conservative, Otto von Bismarck, who invented the modern welfare state.
Traditional conservatism was once inseparable from paternalism. Enter American
fusionism in the 1950s, and now conservatism is now suddenly inseparable from
anti-collectivism. Though the Right and center-right conservatism would
eventually shed the skin of paternalism in favor of the free market, the Right
seems to return to skepticism of markets again and again (see: the alt-Right).
Summary:
But what does trimming mean, in practice? Regarding practical politics,
the author notes the oddity of requiring a supermajority in the Senate to
pass a law, yet only needing a single vote majority in the Court to invalidate
a law. Goodheart offers, as an example of political trimming, that the
Supreme Court require a two-thirds vote to declare a law unconstitutional,
just as it exists in-practice in the Senate. The result is a much less
activist court.
Regarding economics, he draws a Judtian distinction: "the opposite of
austerity is not prosperity but luxe et volupte. We have substituted endless
commerce for public purpose." Sage point. Even ardent capitalists, like
Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen, have noted much the same. It is now
time to begin distinguishing between the different varieties of innovation:
the consumer innovations of Louis Vuitton designers and the largely public
innovations of Elon Musk.
Goodheart lists a number of extremist tendencies in both the Left and
Right:
The Right:
1. A theocratic ambition to undermine the establishment clause of the
Constitution and define the United States as a Christian nation
2. A dismantling of the government agencies that regulate the
environment and the economy
3. Draconian anti-immigration laws
4. Laws that monitor sexual behavior in the privacy of a bedroom
The Left:
1. A command economy that would nationalize all economic activity
2. A militant atheism that would undermine religious freedom
3. Radical egalitarianism, in other words, economic equality of
result rather than equality of opportunity
4. David Graeber's proposal to wipe out "the morality of debt" and
his embrace of non-industriousness
But this doesn't mean that we should wash away our political differences
into a uniform gelatinous muck. Goodheart distinguishes between a manichean
rhetoric that is all too ready to call the opposite side evil and the
airing of legitimate policy differences. When a party becomes corrupt or
dangerous to the democratic process, the correct view for the opponent is to
wish
for a replacement, rather than the glory of political monopoly. And it's
also important to distinguish between individual bad actors and remaining
party members.
The author does not withhold his annoyance with those who sit by and
accept injustice, though. Goodheart disapprovingly notes Karl Jaspers'
admonition, nullifying collective guilt: "Only individuals have a will and can
therefore be held responsible." I specifically remember reading Hannah
Arendt's
books where she had come to the exact same conclusion, determining that the
"cog theory" is inseparable from moral evasion. Goodheart paints a picture
of guilty nations that must act to achieve national redemption. I disagree
with Goodheart here. The result of collective guilt can only be witch
hunts, the universalization of values that creates blind shame for the past,
and the politics of destruction. It was the painful series of reparations,
tied to the instilled war guilt, toward Weimar Germany after World War I that
_only helped exacerbate_
(https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/politics/treaty-versailles-text-article-231-war-guilt-clause
-politics) German fanaticism in advance of World War II.
The author identifies three ways of looking at events:
1. Using the past to look at the present, or the Tory outlook
2. Using the present to look at the past, or the Whig outlook
3. Judging the past and present by the same universal standards
The first two options are simply tired; to paraphrase a Bowie song, we
keep crashing in that same car. The third is severely logically flawed in that
it doesn't account for future standards, which will look nothing like the
"universal standards" of today. How would these universal standards, then,
be "universal." I see a better alternative: judging the past and present
each by their own capacity and confines.
We would establish our standards through practice of deliberative
democracy. As the author quotes of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, the
practice of
moral reasoning "relies on reciprocity, publicity, and accountability, it
stands a better chance of identifying and ameliorating social and economic
injustices than a politics that relies only on power, which is more likely
to reproduce or exacerbate existing inequalities." Goodheart offers a
number of theses, of which I am entirely in agreement, but are certain to
rankle
extremists:
1 When political reasoning regarding the slavery issue was unable to
continue due to a combination of Southern racist and abolitionist
intransigence, war broke out. This war achieved a partial goal of ending
slavery, but
also failed to truly emancipate slaves, created further Southern resentment,
and led to countless unnecessary deaths. Was the war necessary? Even a
cursory amount of research shows that a number of other first world nations,
with substantial investment in slavery, were able to eliminate the
institution without a major civil war.
2 Likewise, the French Revolution supplanted the French aristocracy...
only temporarily, and replaced it with a blood thirsty "revolutionary"
warmongering regime. As with the last point, a cursory understanding of
history
will establish that the French king was actually supportive of attempts to
liberalize his country. And prior to the king's execution, French
revolutionaries had also largely achieved their insane policy aims
.
For deliberation to be successful, though, it must first affirm the
existence and potential validity of arguments on both sides. This idea will
always prove distasteful to the extremist who, as Gutmann and Thompson note,
are
always ready to impute bad motives to the opposition. That's not to say
that there is never bad motive, but some good faith attempt should precede
doubt.
Discussion:
I suspect that the shifting poles of Left and Right, Democrat and
Republican are less a matter of the truth changing, and more a matter of the
voters' own tastes shifting from election to election. Fair enough, but let's
be
honest about it, shall we? As Hofstadter noted decades ago, "the difference
between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is to be
established by polemics and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is
to be
established by their usability in government, is not a difference of
nuance, but of fundamental substance."
Likewise, the Left and center-left liberalism claim to be progressives,
yet do not hesitate to fall upon protection of calcified institutions of
corruption. Not to mention that the Democratic Party has become the preferred
party of foreign policy doves, yet the Democrats are historically the party
of war, while the Republicans through Senator Taft's ascendancy were
largely isolationist. Goodheart is right: the Left and Right are simply poor
guides of telling us what is desirable from our political system. "Left" and
"Right" are bankrupt political stereotypes; but Goodheart doesn't mean to say
that they're meaningless... simply that the definitions are not permanent
and, thus, poor guideposts. But why do we still have these designations?
The few adherents of the Left find the designations convenient to their
desire for class warfare. Likewise, the few legitimate supporters of the
Right support the divide because it's convenient to their desire for cultural
warfare. And both the Left and Right want to draft you for their war. I find
both distinctions of class and culture to be largely artificial and
disingenuous, heavily based on an entirely misplaced feeling of being wronged
by
those in power. Between (and beyond also, actually) these two ever-shifting
poles lie a continuum of consensus.
And for the temptations in a party system to wish for a permanent
majority? Even in a democratic government, the human despotic drive does not
disappear in spite of our unspoken code of civility. But it must be resisted,
as
one party rule will inevitably corrupt itself.
As the antithesis of these intellectual and political malefactors,
Goodheart holds up Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold,
Walter
Bagehot, Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Abraham Lincoln. The uniting
factor between these figures was their unique ability to engage in
trimming: "finding common ground between extremes not for the sake of
compromise,
but because reason does not have a single location on the political
spectrum." Goodheart identifies other political trimmers as Franklin D.
Roosevelt
and Barack Obama. I am less sold on these as obvious picks, but I suppose
that's Goodheart's point: the people we hold up as ideological lions actually
got a spot in the pantheon because they knew when to work with the
opposition. Obama's support for TPA and our continuing foreign policy
skirmishes
makes him look like an ultra-conservative next to Donald Trump. I'd have,
instead, gone with obvious selections such as Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D.
Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy, but no matter.
It's quite easy to cut right between the Left and Right. Simply view
alternative viewpoints as options to accept or reject, rather than duplicitous
and evil.
Quotes:
"The welfare state is not an alternative to a capitalist market economy,
but a humanization of it, an attempt to provide a safety net for the
casualties of an unregulated market."
"Contempt for the adversary violates the spirit of democracy."
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