Much Needed: Rise of the Feisty Centrists

The vexing problem of our common life is captured in W. B. Yeat’s well-known poem “The Second Coming,” where the first stanza reads,

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,/ “The falcon cannot hear the falconer./ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

Another, less poetic, but still haunting framing was offered in 2019 by the writer for The Atlantic, David Frum, who observed, “If liberals don’t deal with the border, fascists will.” In other words, if liberals or Democrats pretend there are no legitimate issues with immigration and borders (as the Biden administration did for most of the time it was in office), that doesn’t mean the issues and problems will go away. It means the vacuum will be filled by far-right fear-mongers and demagogues.

Frum has proven prophetic. We now watch the draconian, arguably fascist, tactics of ICE under the Trump administration, including the calling out of National Guard in American cities on the pretext of protecting federal agents, namely ICE personnel.

Something similar has happened with another target of MAGA and the Trump administration: American universities. Since few stood up to the extreme left in academe — the centre did not hold — the door was opened to a backlash from the extreme right.

Recently, a team of writers and researchers at the liberal site “Persuasion,” published the results of their study of left-leaning/progressive bias in universities based on a review of course syllabi. Here’s the intro to the “Persuasion” article:

“We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics — racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out.”

I’ll encourage you to read whole piece, only citing one example as illustrative. On the first issue, racial bias and criminal justice, the authors note that Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, appears on virtually every relevant syllabi. It should appear, as it’s an important book. The problem is that it isn’t the only book to read on this topic. Moreover, a number of other important works contest Alexander’s argument and findings. These virtually never get read in these university courses.

Back to the Persuasion study. As soon as it was published, The New Jim Crow stirred contention within academia. The most prominent critic was James Forman, Jr., a professor at Yale Law School. Forman challenged Alexander’s thesis. Among other shortcomings, Forman wrote that The New Jim Crow “fails to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment, ignores violent crimes while focusing almost exclusively on drug crimes, obscures class distinctions within the African American community, and overlooks the effects of mass incarceration on other racial groups.” Forman’s work culminated in a book titled Locking Up Our Own, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

“How often is Forman’s book assigned along with Alexander’s? Less than 4 percent of the time. Other prominent critics like Michael Fortner, John Pfaff, and Patrick Sharkey are assigned even less often. Fortner’s important book The Black Silent Majority, for example, is assigned with The New Jim Crow less than 2 percent of the time.

“So what is assigned with The New Jim Crow? Mostly books that are broadly aligned with it. The three most commonly co-assigned texts include Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. We estimate that less than 10 percent of professors assigning Alexander’s book actually teach the controversy surrounding it.”

The pattern is much the same with the other big issues under review. And now you have Trump’s assault on universities, for which the Frum quote might be amended, “If liberals don’t deal with bias and lack of diversity in the academic world, fascists will.”

Are we then condemned to the see-saw of “passionate intensity” of “the worst,” and to a centre that does not hold, or even show up? Maybe not.

The editorial board of The New York Times recently argued “America Still Has A Political Center and It Is the Key to Winning.” Yes, there have been many calls for that and a host of organizations committed to that cause. What sets The Times contribution apart is careful documenting of the “vast evidence” of the success of moderate or centrist candidates for office in recent years.

But with a twist — these centrists are not always polite people wringing their hands for “civility” nor are they bland technocrats touting expertise. They are, what The Times termed “angry centrists.” People who are angry with the mendacity of the extremes and the polarized gridlock. Here are the opening paragraphs from The Times editors:

“American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated. It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp.”

Here’s a key passage:

“The moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober, 20th-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo. It is more combative and populist. It tends to be left of center on economics and right of center on social issues (with abortion being an exception). ‘Angry centrism is a very potent way to run,’ said Lakshya Jain, a founder of Split Ticket, a political data firm. Rather than locating itself midway between the two parties, this new centrism promises sweeping change while criticizing the two parties as out of touch.”

As The Times editors note, both the far-right Republicans and far-left Democrats have worked hard to obscure this story, but the data don’t lie. Check it out.

The Times editors close in a way that takes us back to Yeats and to Frum. They note that crucial to the success of the feisty centrists is respect for the people they would lead and serve. Failing to receive respect, voters will opt for “an alternative, even a destructive one.”

“Ultimately, moderation is about respect. Politicians do not need to heed every bit of public opinion. They can sometimes attempt to forge a new consensus. But they cannot dismiss views held by most Americans as uninformed and insist that one day the ignorant masses will come around. When politicians try that, voters usually choose an alternative, even a destructive one. Today that destructive alternative has arrived. The antidote is a creative, re-energized political center (emphasis added).”

It is time for a new breed of cat, time for the feisty centrist, and time for a re-discovery on the part of voters of our power to change the course we are on.