Resurrection of the centre

Bursting back out of the middle ground

The Night of the Living Dead cemetery, Evans City, Pennsylvania

I think a new centre ground is slowly emerging from the polarized politics of the past decade.

One symptom is that there is a new consensus over parts of policy. This runs roughly: no to trade with China, no also to Russia; yes to “friendshoring”, i.e. trading with and investing in the West’s military allies; yes to lower migration and tougher border controls. Parts of these ideas came from the “New Right”¹, but they’ve now been ingested by the policy establishment in the US and much of Europe. (Conversely, many European far right parties have backed swiftly off from Putin: it turns out, sucking up to foreign dictators is not a popular nationalist position.)

Another symptom is that there are now a lot of smart people in the “middle”. (At least they seem smart to me.) Jon Haidt has been thoughtful and even-handed in his critiques. His story is that on the right, crazy people took over the Republican party, while on the left they took over the institutions: media, universities and corporations. Jonah Goldberg and the guys at the Dispatch also distribute their scorn evenly among across both sides. Over on the left, the most interesting voices are Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith and Ezra Klein. All seem like leftovers from a Clinton/Blair/Obama world of wonky, emotion-free policy analysis. They understand economics and read academic papers. They should be completely past their sell-by date, but by now that thoughtfulness is refreshing.

The intellectual strength of the middle ground gains from a comparison with the extremes. Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism) and Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) seem both to be pretty small beer. In terms of deep political philosophy they’ve got nothing on Alasdair Macintyre; in terms of practical policy, as Klein points out on his podcast with Deneen, they doesn’t seem to know what he really want. (Debating no-fault divorce, Klein says in frustration “this is a policy question, not just an argument!” You can make your own judgments: here’s one of Deneen’s essays.) As for the extreme left, it continues to be a thought-free zone, but sure, I’m not the person to ask.

Lastly, there’s a technological side to the return of the centre. Extremism was partly driven by the growth of new platforms which democratized, and automated, the flow of communication. Now, governments are responding to this. The Intercept reports how the Department of Homeland Security has set up systems to challenge disinformation on Twitter. There’s a neat quote by a Biden appointee:

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.”

Whatever one thinks of government meddling with free speech online, this is insightful. Tell me how a country talks to itself, and I’ll tell you how it thinks and decides. So, the old power structures are struggling to integrate and meld with the new world: staid embassies take a cue from Trump and troll each other on social media.

At the same time, the most effective old media sites — the New York Times, Washington Post or Guardian — have transformed themselves into online empires, with the reach, scale and scope of Twitter, but the professional newsgathering and punditry of their newspaper heritage. It turns out that those things are useful, nay essential, and so old media is retaining its power to shape the conversation. Of course, old media doesn’t imply centrist values: there are wackos at Fox News and the NYT. But these sites are tied to mainstream establishments and aim to appeal to mass audiences. That makes them places where radical ideas get folded back into the mainstream.

The swing of the pendulum is a common historical pattern. A new movement arises, and shakes things up, but it’s too extreme. Eventually, the useful parts are absorbed by pre-existing institutions. Keynes’ proposed reforms to capitalism were motivated by the competitive challenge of socialism, and post-WWII social democracy indeed stole the socialists’ clothes by taxing, redistributing and offering free public services. The Reformation looks like this too, with early radicals being supplanted by the state-led Protestantism of England and Prussia.

MAGA zombies

It would be daft to mourn the extremism of the past decade. We can’t even be sure it’s properly dead and buried. But equally the return of the centre is never an unmixed blessing. The new centrism is more state-centric than before, in a world where foreign policy looms large. There will be more guns, planes, nukes, generals and spies, much against the preferences of both the extreme right and left. Radical hopes for change will be disappointed. Various zealots — the Bannons and Farages and Cummingses — will be put back into their box. They were nuts, and some of them like Alex Jones were truly bad people, but they were entertaining. Their dreams will be filleted for what is usable as part of the new status quo. That also entails, as ever, that the people who were in power before will stay in power.

---

(Last year’s Halloween newsletter: is genetics dark?)

If you enjoyed consuming this article’s brains 🧟‍♂️🧟‍♂️🧟‍♂️, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback/hardback/ebook, and you can read more about it here.

You can also subscribe to this newsletter (it’s free):

And, if you liked it, share this post on social media:

1. I’m old enough to remember the original New Right of the 1980s. This is the new New Right of post-2016.