US President Joe Biden's plan to rebuild infrastructure has been stalled and scaled back by the efforts of two Democratic senators, Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona and Joe Manchin from West Virginia, politicians who usually present themselves as "centrists". On this occasion, many commentators asked the question of what that label even means in 2021. And it was not only political cynics who suspected that the two aforementioned senators were not so much centrists as ambitious politicians who were guided by only one imperative - to be re-elected.
What criteria should we use when judging centrists? That issue is becoming increasingly important, not only in the United States, but also in France, where President Emmanuel Macron, after promising to form a new center in French politics, is preparing for elections next spring. As in the case of the two US senators, Macron's centrism is interpreted by critics as a smokescreen for a politician who continues to represent the interests of the right and thus justifies the well-deserved label of "president for the rich".
The question is not "will the center give in", but what is the meaning of the position of the center in today's politics. The term was more useful in the 20th century, which many described as an age of ideological extremes. The position of the center implied a fight against anti-democratic parties and movements. But even at that time self-proclaimed centrists were accused of not acting in good faith. With customary irony, Isaiah Berlin, a liberal of the first order, described himself as one of those "poor centrists, scorn worthy moderates and skeptical crypto-reactionary intellectuals."
In the past, self-proclaimed centrists could live off the merits gained in the fight against fascism and Stalinism. But that credit has since thinned out quite a bit. In many countries today, a kind of zombified centrism is in circulation - a relic from the Cold War era that cannot offer its supporters any meaningful political orientation.
This was recently discovered by the German Christian Democrats. In the federal elections in September, they were spectacularly defeated in an attempt to defend the position of the center against a potential coalition of social democrats and the post-communist left. Their anti-communist campaign, almost rewritten from the 50s, clearly missed the challenges brought by the 20st century. The image of Olaf Scholz, the thorough and responsible finance minister of the outgoing government (and future chancellor), waving red flags in the Reichstag must have seemed extremely bizarre to many.
But there are also two forms of centrism in circulation that cannot be reduced to a zombified version of Cold War liberalism. The first is procedural: in systems with the separation of powers, like the United States, politicians are forced to practice the art of compromise; it is even more pronounced in a situation where convincing majorities in legislative bodies have become rare.
The same imperative applies to the increasingly fragmented system of political parties in Europe. As many as 17 parties sit in the Dutch parliament (perhaps more, depending on how we count them). After several weeks of negotiations, Germany will soon get a government in which the left-leaning Social Democrats and the Greens will rule in a "traffic light coalition" with the Free Democrats, which is in favor of big business.
Fragmentation - institutional or political - forces politicians to resort to what the Dutch philosopher Frank Ankersmit called "principled unprincipledness" to make democracy work at all. Most people, of course, are not enthusiastic about the idea of compromise for its own sake, because compromise is rarely the best possible solution.
The exception is those who adhere to another plausible form of centrism. That is positional centrism. The effort to maintain an equal distance in relation to both sides of the political spectrum is presented by positional centrists as proof of their own pragmatism and unencumbered by ideology, and they try to capitalize on this in moments of deep political division (as in the USA today). At times when inflammatory rhetoric dominates on the left and right, they can sound quite reasonable. In the first election campaign, Macron routinely emphasized the radicalization of his political opponents, the extreme rightist Marine Le Pen and the extreme leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to show that he is the only candidate acting from a position of responsibility.
Invoking the "horseshoe theory" - very popular among anti-communists during the Cold War - centrists insinuate that left-wing and right-wing populism always eventually meet at the extreme point of political illiberalism. Also, similar to the "third way" theorists of the 90s, Macron's followers emphasize that "left" and "right" are outdated labels today. This helps them to win both former socialists and former degolists to their movement.
But centrism is not automatically and by definition democratic. A good example is Macron, who has already been described as a "liberal autocrat". His posing under the slogan "neither left nor right" implies an openly technocratic form of government. It is a rule that implies that for every challenge we face there is a unique rational solution. Critics of such a solution can be automatically written off as irrational. But as Macron discovered in the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) episode of 2018, such an implied denial of democratic pluralism can produce a fierce backlash.
Both procedural and positional centrism imply the existence of a functional democracy, while in situations of asymmetric political polarization they become dangerous. The Republican Party in the United States refuses to accept the fundamental principles of democracy. Republicans are redistricting, disenfranchising, disrupting elections and obstructing legislatures, showing no willingness to compromise. Biden is in the White House, however, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a reluctant but reliable ally of Donald Trump, continues to apply the same tactics he developed during the terms of Barack Obama.
Procedural centrism loses its meaning if political opponents no longer respect procedure, as is the case with Republicans today. Positional centrism is in an even more difficult situation. If one of the parties rejects the democratic principles themselves, insisting on maintaining an equal distance makes us complicit in the attack on democracy. If Sinema and Manchin fail to offer something more than zombified, procedural, or positional centrism, voters will punish them for obstructing initiatives that actually have broad support in the electorate.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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