The Anti-Ideology

The great trick is that ideologues have de-legitimized non-ideologues in the American political system.

In re-creating a political centrism with staying power, we should seek to develop the anti-ideology. That is, political centrism should be an open system with normative values, but with a decisiveness that is subservient to fact. We need to create something which advances a path forward, but is always tethered steadfastly to reality. One of the most underappreciated historical American political figures put it well: “ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides.” Isaiah Berlin’s take was similar when he called utopias a wonderful expander of imaginative horizons of human potentialities. Berlin was also right, though, when he called them fatal as guides to conduct. Noting the largely disastrous effects in attempts to establish utopian and artificial communities throughout history, beginning with Plato in Syracus all the way through the Soviet experiment, it is safer to human life and welfare to leave utopianism to the pages of speculative fiction and rationalist philosophy.

 

The new political centrism will be something dynamic and open. But this centrism will also give recognition to facts that are independent of our opinion, no matter how much we dislike them. That is, the battlefield rests within the issue that arises, rather than our predisposed judgment, though with honest recognition that we exist within a legal framework which sets limitations to action. This will prove to be a difficult task. It is much simpler to retain our unrealistic ideas when we operate as the opposition, rather than a positive force or, as Benjamin Disraeli wistfully noted, “how much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”

 

One notable benefit of holding opinion as subservient to fact: unlike the far right and far left, the center does not need to poach historical figures and manipulate their beliefs to match a twisted ideology. Instead, we are intellectually free to draw wisdom from historical figures which run the gamut. Rabbi Stephen M. Wise, in memorializing Lincoln, quickly pegged this trend, admonishing the political class to stop trivializing our heroes by manipulating them to fit our prejudices:

 

Instead of following Lincoln, we too often strive to make it appear that he is following us. Instead of emulating him, we too often venture to appropriate him. Instead of sitting at his feet as disciples, and humbly heeding the echoes of his lips, we attribute to him our own petty slogans. The truth is that Lincoln belongs to no party today, though in his time he stood well and firmly within party ranks.

 

In a later section, Re-forging the Ladder, I will follow Wise’s admonition to follow our heroes rather than forcing them to follow us. 

 

Asking the Right Questions

 

In attempting to unite centrists into a political force, I considered creating a legislative scorecard, but I quickly realized the flaw in this: the far left and far right in congress quite often ask the wrong questions, making both yea and nay irrelevant. As political centrism is not represented in government and does not carry the tools of office, we will have to develop our ideology through coalition leadership rather than stances on proposed legislation. As R. Douglas Arnold notes in The Logic of Congressional Action, while coalition leaders are free to advance whatever policy alternative they choose, legislators simply choose between paired alternatives. This selection of coalition over legislation, in the early offing, allows political centrism to avoid falling into the trap of false dichotomy. 

 

The critic’s response: but where’s the line between keeping your coalition together and telling the truth? 

 

Yes, it is unavoidable that, at many points, those two ideas are going to collide. What will differentiate political centrism from the ideologies is that, when the two ideas collide, fact will predominate over the coalition and scrupulous honesty will reign. 

 

Political extremists cast themselves as gladiators in the arena, using terms such as “liberal lion” and “conservative warrior,” evoking the idea that they are fighting a noble battle on behalf of an oppressed public. The problem is that this quixotic battle is often fought over the wrong thing, and the public, rather than serving as the damsel in distress, is often the victim and/or unwitting dupe of these political machinations. Problems that are fairly easy to solve become a proxy on an imaginary battlefield over entirely unrelated ideological questions. Simple questions such as, “should we temporarily keep the government open until we can resolve our budget issues?” become knock-down-drag-out philosophical battles over the scope of government. Meanwhile, the issue is never resolved satisfactorily and our citizens are saddled with the macroeconomic effects of American financial uncertainty. R. Douglas Arnold identifies the rationale that brings about the debt ceiling trap: voters consistently support balanced budgets, but federal spending contains a large number of components and there are many negative short term impacts to restraining spending. In response, elected officials treat the debt ceiling as a surrogate to appease ideologues, while simultaneously poisoning the political atmosphere and making it difficult to honor their obligations more difficult.

 

Cue the Democrats who are reading this and pointing the finger at only the GOP, as if their demand for more, more, more doesn’t contribute to the problem. Now cue the Republicans who point to the unsustainable level of government spending who still won’t make a sacrifice on a cent of extra revenue in exchange for substantially more program cuts. A successful political centrism, which operates as a positive force, will address issues head-on without serving as tools of inapplicable doctrine. As Giuseppe Garibaldi, a founder of modern Italy rallied, “let timid doctrinaires depart from among us to carry their servility and their miserable fears elsewhere.” It is long past time to get political centrism back on track and lead again, to operate only as servants of the public interest and the interest of posterity, rather than utopianism and tired doctrine. Assume that you will be paying the cost of programs as you use them, and make decisions that way. If you would end up spending money on a program like a liberal, don’t complain about it like a conservative.

 

Pedants, the same ones who claim that atheism is a religion, will continue to lobby criticisms that even an anti-ideology is still an ideology because it advances ideas. I will address this point directly and with finality: If you are still making this critique, you have poor reading comprehension skills. A core aspect of ideology is that it holds ideas over fact. Non-ideological thought holds fact over ideas. That is, when the facts change, centrism itself changes. 

 

Ultimate Goal

 

We will know that political centrism is successful when we fulfill the Founders’ vision of the future state: rectifying parties and achieving a lasting consensus. Alexander Hamilton noted that, in ratifying the Constitution, the Founders were determined “to abolish factions and unite all parties for the general welfare.” We all know that Washington and Jefferson also warned the nation of the dangers of faction. Critics will note that political parties are the vehicle with which groups achieve their political goals. But isn’t this definition more applicable toward government? Certainly there will be groups that arise to promote certain issues and solutions, and there will always be elections, but why must there exist a permanent duopoly, in eternal opposition over every single issue, real or imagined? As Cicero noted, “what house is so stable, who city so firm, that it can’t be destroyed by hatred and division?” We can begin to address this hatred and division by adopting Henry Clay and Daniel Webster’s position that the national interest trumps narrow sectional interest. Likewise, as we are all equal in respect to being American citizens, broad growth is preferable to narrow growth. At its core, a vast majority of Americans are after this same thing. We can get Americans to buy into national interest by selling a common vision: maximizing material prosperity in a system that respects the practical limits that we’ve set for government. In marketable parlance, this vision is “responsible innovation.” 

 

This singular vision stands in contrast to contemporary left and right thought, both of which bundle positions to unite single and limited-issue groups in order to achieve electoral success. In bundling issues to appeal to disparate groups, liberal and conservative definitions to terms like “freedom” and “equality” become increasingly nebulous, as ideologues struggle to squeeze extreme single issue voters into their tiny tents. These positions become contemporary “liberalism” and “conservatism” which, somehow, become passed off as pure, even though they are simply an electorally potent issue bundle.

 

A message of “responsible innovation” is different because it accepts that American priorities change. Political centrism recognizes that, in a liberal democracy, a party must reflect the interests of the voter and centrism readily and unreservedly accepts fact. Historically, responsible innovation is a fairly well-accepted technological concept: an innovation process which considers effects and impacts on society. All things equal, the conservative prefers tradition to novelty, and vice versa for liberals. These preferences are consistent in regard to what the left and right find distasteful about governance and society, tradition being tied to historical majoritarianism and novelty linked with breaking existing power structures. The political centrist rejects the false choice of novelty and tradition by achieving innovation while preserving, to its maximum extent, our existing framework and institutions. 

 

In criticizing mid-century far right thought and its failure to understand the true nature of tradition, top Eisenhower aide Arthur Larson noted the existence of a false conservatism. This false conservatism guards the mechanisms of the past, abhorring new mechanisms, “while ignoring in the meantime what happens to our traditional ideas and values. It worships the shell of the past, and lets the living substance die.” In few places in recent history has this been more visible than the battle over gay marriage. Traditionalist conservatives acted against their own interests by refusing enfranchisement into the most conservative institution in human history. The Supreme Court ended up affirming the right to gay marriage. A logical move for the far right would have been to reflect the reality of the situation and move on. Instead of recognizing facts, though, conservatives responded to the gay marriage by re-framing, proving once again that, for extremists, ideology prioritizes ideas over objective reality. In Richard Grenell’s Fox News opinion piece, the media commentator frames a conservative embrace of gay marriage as a victory for individual liberty over totalitarian government. It doesn’t take much thought to see this as a backhanded apology that blames human error rather than leaving open a deeply flawed ideology to mass critique.

 

The history of left wing thought is similarly a disjointed shamble of manipulated reality. Yesterday’s liberals supported charter schools to improve the quality of education in inner cities… until they risked losing teachers in their voting constituency. Suddenly, rather than trumpeting the positive effects that charter schools offer in minority-majority cities, charter schools became leeches that sucked public money away from public schools and, thus, were cast as a causer of untold maladies (as with Sanders and terror-causing climate change). The left wing supports “science,” but only in terms of climate change and religion. Once scientific opinion is rendered upon the public danger of vaccine conspiracy theory, the overwhelming majority opinion that genetically modified foods are safe, or the fact that nuclear power is an effective clean energy alternative, the far left wing is ready with a boatload of excuses that begin to sound downright right wing. By that token, actually, shouldn’t a Democratic administration that constantly pays lip service to science and research also have a strong space program? Then how is it that NASA is at its weakest level under the Obama Administration since the agency’s inception?

Governing Centrism

 

We have, of late, seen the Republican Party represented as the “Party of No,” as if conservatism and intransigence are inseparable. This is not true. Elihu Root, an arch-conservative’s arch-conservative and Secretary of War for Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, recognized that negative forces and destructive criticism is not conducive to the preservation of civilization. As Root aptly noted, “to criticize is not to do the work.” Root advised affirmative, constructive forces to preserve and develop civilization. 

 

Root is correct. The American political tradition is a form of governing centrism which recognized majoritarian government with deference and consideration to the rights and opinions of the minority. Of late, the left and the right have opened multiple fronts of attack on governing centrism. Broadly speaking, the right seeks increased emphasis on majoritarianism (a popular front), while the left seeks the same for political minorities (identity politics). At further ends of the scale, extremists seek to accomplish this by marginalizing and de-legitimizing their opponents.

 

In attempting to topple the establishment, extremists have opened three lines of attack. The first attack is in disputing the very existence of centrism. The second attack is in tying political centrism together with the “establishment” bogeyman. The final extremist attack is in reinforcing the artificially binary U.S. political system by claiming moderate political supporters are actually untrustworthy enemies.

 

Centrism as Non-Existent

 

The first attack, the claim that centrism itself does not exist, is the weakest of the three and the quickest to swat down. Adherents to this belief claim that “centrism” is a catch-all category of populists, moderate libertarians, communitarians, etc. and, thus, the orthodox opinion that centrism represents the mainstream portion of the populace is false. Certainly, a pro-lifer and pro-choicer cannot reside in the same political group, even if they agree on the other 99.9 percent of issues, right? The extremists make this argument in an attempt to divide the center against itself, which serves to reinforce the U.S.’s artificial duopoly. Those adherents further state that, as centrism is not united and consistent, it must not exist at all. The answer to this claim is that all modern political ideologies are a bundle of disparate groups and ideas in an uneasy alliance.

 

Political theory and philosophy at-large contain bundles of thoughts roughly grouped into categories, and precious few of these are a monolith. The American right (calling its movement “conservatism”) is itself comprised of libertarians, the Moral Majority, neoconservatives, war hawks, capitalists, traditionalists, disaffected former communists, small businessmen, all intermingled with the occasional jingo and right-racist. When conservatism was at its nadir in the early 1950s, William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and others purposely fashioned modern conservatism as a fusion of libertarianism, anti-Communism, and traditionalist conservatism. Even the two patron saints of modern conservatism, Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, are as dissimilar as they are similar. 

 

The left (the movement that calls itself “modern liberalism”) actually operates in the form of an interest group coalition, rather than a structured ideology. Liberal ideas and proposals (such as charter schools) are quickly jettisoned as the make-up of the coalition shifts. The Democratic Party was itself nearly torn asunder before the 1968 presidential election, as the ascendant New Left ran Robert F. Kennedy against the incumbent Old Left president, Lyndon B. Johnson, forcing his exit. In short, if political centrism doesn’t exist, liberalism and conservatism don’t exist.

 

Increasing Partisanship

 

Contemporary politics is largely a battle waged by the political class in the spring, rather than the fall. Through partisan primaries in most states, political activists set up general elections as unrepresentative choices for the voter. 

 

In the 2014 election cycle in Florida’s 9th congressional district, left wing incumbent Alan Greyson (D) defeated the Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush-endorsed right wing candidate, Carol Platt (R), 54-43. There are 688,665 residents of the 9th district; of that number, 46,218 voted in the Democratic and Republican primary election, or 6.7% of the district’s population. It gets worse. Only 30,183 voters filled in the bubble for either Platt or Grayson, or 4.3%. Most primary elections throughout the nation follow a similar pattern. Things get worse in races where the general election is uncontested. During the same election cycle, Hank Johnson from Georgia’s 4th district faced no general election opposition after receiving votes from 26,514 voters in the Democratic Primarily, effectively being selected by 3.8% of district residents. With this in mind, inferring increased levels of partisanship from election results becomes yet another exercise in sophistry propagated by a duopolistic system beneficial to both dominant parties.

 

If you are a centrist who is annoyed by a lack of choice in the general election, it is because you and your compatriots likely have not voted in the primary election and you have already lost.

 

The “Establishment”

 

A more confounding attack on centrism argues that if you are not an extremist, you are the “establishment”. As stated earlier, when you extract governing majorities from the “establishment,” you’re left with only conspiracy theories. George Gilder and Bruce Chapman tackled the idea of a mysterious establishment that fueled the reactionary right’s drive toward control over the Republican Party. Gilder and Chapman found that the theory is “imprecise to the point of irrelevancy.” The authors find that this “establishment” is comprised of leadership in politics and finance who are mostly either moderately liberal or moderately conservative, which should be expected within a nation whose voters who identify the same way.

 

Centrists as Quislings

 

Finally, the dimmest, though longest-lived, attack is that centrism is simply a weak form of whichever ideology the subject dislikes. This line of criticism is as follows: extremists believe that there is an apocalyptic fantasy battle between the left and right. Left extremists believe that left centrists (and vice versa) are Quislings – collaborators with the enemy that leave their flank weakened. Their strategy is in addition through subtraction; that is, the idea that elimination of weaker members of their party strengthens their party as a whole. Members of the right have even accepted the proposition that a permanent, but pure, negative party in the minority is preferable to an impure governing party in the majority.

 

We see the result in the increasing numbers of independents and disaffected voters, paired with intra-party ideological witch hunts (i.e. utterly childish “DINO hunting” and “RINO hunting” that should be beneath the dignity of elected representatives). Some elected officials have gone so far as to claim their political opponents are in league, not only with domestic enemies, but with international terrorists (see Alan Grayson’s “Taliban Dan” campaign strategy).

 

It is fallacious to associate “the establishment” with the status quo, when the establishment represents a path, rather than a position.

A way for elected officials to properly represent the will of the voters is to consider matters on an issue by issue basis, rather than chase narrow, hyper-ideological sections of the populace.

 

Democratic politics means bargaining between legitimate groups and the search for consensus. This is so because the historic contribution of liberalism was to separate law from morality.

Daniel Bell – The End of Ideology

 

Acton’s dilemma was most clearly reformulated by Max Weber in his discussion of politics as a way of life. One can see the political game, he said, as an “ethic of responsibility” (or the acceptance of limits), or as an “ethic of conscience” (or the dedication to absolute ends). The former is the pragmatic view which seeks reconciliation as its goal. The latter creates “true believers” who burn with pure, unquenchable flame and can accept no compromise with faith.

Daniel Bell – The End of Ideology

 

It is traditionally American to fight hard before an election. It is equally traditional to close ranks as soon as the people have spoken.

-Adlai Stevenson

 

“The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse – to challenge others to form free opinions.”

-Karl Popper

 

“It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.”

-Edmund Burke

 

A nation, divided irreconcilably on “principle,” each party believing itself pure white and the other pure black, cannot govern itself.

-Walter Lippmann

 

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

-Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

 

No wise legislator will under-value the power for peace and order and progress which lies in the traditions of respect, the conformity to custom, and the habit of obedience among a people towards their own established, though perhaps illogical, institutions. When changes are needed they should be made fearlessly and thoroughly but in such a manner, with such relation to custom and opinion as to be natural developments from the life of the people of the state; and in a state with such a history as ours the burden of proof rests always upon the advocates of change.

-Elihu Root

 

“Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.”

-William E. Gladstone

 

A commitment to states’ rights, responsibilities, and potentialities does not imply obstruction of federal programs. A balanced federalism will require the resourceful use of the federal government whenever it is clearly justified by failure on the state and local levels, or by a problem which is homogeneously national in scope and for which a national program affords economies of scale.

Gilder and Chapman, The Party that Lost its Head

(a note the authors add: financial incapacity is not an excuse for nationalizing a solution)

 

The Centrist Abdication

 

The Struggle for Recognition

 

I am more of a pragmatist and empiricist, but there is one aspect of Hegelianism that I believe in: life in a community is a struggle for recognition. This struggle extends itself into the political field. In campaigning, you may be tempted to avoid legitimizing your opponent by not deigning to recognize them. In fact, modern campaigning says that, if your political opponent is struggling to gain name recognition, you are damaging your own campaign by mentioning your opponent and giving that candidate free publicity.

 

However, denying others their legitimacy can result in setting a chip on another’s shoulder. Those who struggle to be heard understand that going negative can garner attention. The Tea Party itself knows all of this too well, as does the GOP, recognizing the Tea Party as a self-inflicted wound. Not giving another person proper recognition and respect turns an opponent into an enemy. Whether you consider that your responsibility or not, you may eventually find yourself in a very nasty battle when you originally anticipated only a political race. That nasty battle will be the product of your behavior, and it will color voter’s impression of the movement.

 

Even should this not occur, there are a myriad of cases where the mum strategy backfires. The unknown candidate may suddenly gain traction as a legitimate alternative to you, leaving your campaign without an established narrative.

 

Take care that you never treat the misanthropic as they treat mankind.

-Marcus Aurelius

 

The double charge against the American press may thus be stated: its failure to inform the public better than it does is the evasion of its responsibility; its failure to educate and elevate the public taste rather than following that taste like a blind, wallowing dinosaur is an abuse of that freedom.

-Clare Boothe Luce

 

The mass society is the product of change – and is itself change. It is the bringing of the “masses” into a society, from which they were once excluded.

Daniel Bell – The End of Ideology

 

The Future

 

In the section titled The Centrist Abdication, I mentioned social institutions, education, and the space program in terms of ideological failures because they’re core human infrastructure. Social institutions represent our society’s connection to the past, while education and the space program represent our commitment to the present and future, respectively. Much of Western Europe’s fiscal policy revolves around a concept of the fiscal golden rule. This rule can best be described in terms of intergenerational responsibility. That is, a generation’s revenues should match its expenses, and government should only encumber itself with additional spending when future revenues will match or exceed that number. The practical effect is that deficit spending is only justifiable in increasing debt for future generations when it will help to increase revenues to those generations. The fiscal golden rule reveals a truth that all centrists know, yet most ideologues find hard to grasp: all government spending is not equal. There are defensible and indefensible government programs, and the distinction normally revolves around cost, effectiveness, and reach.

 

Unfortunately, a critical flaw of the conventional far left and far right is that they are structurally two dimensional. Both ideologies only think in terms of generations which live today. Hence, budget busting is amenable to both the right and left, so long as infrastructurally destructive low taxes and cripplingly expensive domestic programs, respectively, in addition to insane military spending, are all funded by extravagant borrowing to be paid by people who are not alive today (read: people who are not us). At the PEN World Voices literary festival, author Jostein Gaardner urged his audience to apply the golden rule, also known as the Principle of Reciprocity, in terms of a third dimension – we shall do to the next generation what we wish the previous generation had done to us. When one considers the damage that we’re causing to future generations, our government’s financial behavior becomes less and less defensible regarding both revenue and expense.

 

It was, perhaps, Gaardner’s closing that served as the most impactful portion of his speech: “based on the Principle of Reciprocity, we should only permit ourselves to use non-renewable resources to the extent that we at the same time pave the way for our descendants to be able to manage without the same resources.” Applying this principle elsewhere, it becomes devastatingly clear where our nation’s deficiencies lie.

 

The Responsible Citizen

 

Modern ideologies act as a loose coalition of interests that, in the absence of unity of action, are naturally negative. A negative ideology becomes positive when a person or organization establishes a compelling rallying statement, doctrine or principle for followers to adhere to. For instance, the George W. Bush administration campaigned on the concept of compassionate conservatism, which formed the policy thrust of the GOP during the first Bush year. But positive political philosophy has a shelf life; voter interest changes, new crises arise, and generational shifts occur. September 11th occurred and compassionate conservatism was ejected in favor of the Bush Doctrine. 

 

Unlike the positive ideology of the Bush years undergoing a shift in reaction to political events, when the great silent majority was shaken by the succession of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, political centrism did not reformulate after decades in the woods. It was this lack of reformulation that opened the door into high office for the far right and far left, who gained support by exploiting tragedy for political gain. Exploitation of national tragedy and fear is a hallmark of political extremism. On a contemporary level, you will frequently hear something along these lines after a disastrous national event: “this tragedy is our fault because God/guns/gays.” The thing to remember is that the mouthpiece of this egregious example of scapegoating doesn’t care about the tragedy, he/she only cares about the pet issue. 

 

When a school is attacked by a maniac, it’s always the guns that are the problem. What follows are promises that all the violence in the world will go away once guns disappear, as if imported guns, makeshift guns via 3D printing, other weaponry, poisoning, etc. will no longer exist either. Likewise, some quack is always available after every major disaster to quickly pin the blame on gays and a lack of God in schools. In a previous era, we could have waved them away as unhinged. Unfortunately, these crackpots now make up the base of the Democratic and Republican parties, and political candidates are listening to them.

 

How do we minimize the impact of political extremists? One frequent proposal is to simply form a third party. Even a cursory look at the political landscape shows that there are hundreds of third parties, and not a single one (save a brief moment in the life of the Reform Party) has made even a quantum of success. In a world where half of the population refuses to identify with either the Democrats or the G.O.P., and where Congress routinely suffers approval ratings lower than most blackjack hands, it is a continued fact that no third party has competed. Such is a political system ruled by a duopoly of cooperating competitors. In absence of a competitive third party that can consistently win, independents should rejoin both parties and act as a moderating influence in party primaries. Consider voting in primary elections a citizen’s essential chore.

 

Our Abdication of Responsibility

 

To a large extent, it was the American political centrist’s abdication of the responsibilities of public life that allowed the far right and left wings to seize control of American politics. The poisonous American political landscape is a centrist’s self-inflicted wound caused by inaction. George Jean Nathan, a dramatist and co-founder of The Spectator who knew how to get directly to the point of an issue, knew this point intrinsically: “bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”

 

If you don’t vote in primaries, don’t be surprised by the general election candidates that you’re getting. When centrists draw themselves away from public life via a combination of disinterest and disgust, it creates an amplification of political extremism that only serves to derive further disgust with the political field. When centrists cease taking part in party activities and remove themselves from civic discussion, the result is that the far right and far left create unimpeded, unquestioned echo chambers for themselves in the form of blindly parroted talking points. Younger readers should note that this was not always the case.

 

Many decades ago, New York Times journalist James Reston observed that the decisive battleground in American politics resided in the center, and neither extreme could capture the area. When a party defies this principle, it does nothing to improve its electoral chances or even electoral opposition. This observation appears to no longer be applicable, as both parties are now almost perfectly “sorted” into vanguard far right and vanguard far left. Worse, a duopoly naturally seeks to fortify itself by colluding with its opposition, thus limiting the possibility of a legitimate third competitor. In just about every state legislature, the redistricting process protects both parties. Attempts in states to recognize third parties are stymied by a joint effort by the Democrats and Republicans.

 

Small Tents

 

In a big tent party system, primary candidates must cast their tents wide in order to capture enough votes to win the primary election, with those primary winners simply keeping those tents open through the general election. In a small tent party system, misfits become independents, or unaffiliated voters, which strengthens the impact of the party base (ie: uncontrollable political jacobins). In order to capture the party nomination to advance to the general election, primary candidates make promises to the extremist wing of their party base. 

 

After winning the party nomination, that candidate must manipulate a huge pivot to the center in order to appeal to independents and disaffected members of the other party. But the issue is that the candidate has now quite likely made incongruous, conflicting promises to the extremist party base and the fairly moderate general election crowd. This requires the newly minted elected official to make a choice regarding whom to break promises to. Most often, the elected official feels pulled from both sides and each group feels shafted. Hence, the familiar contemporary political scenario: the extremists feel betrayed by the candidate who told them they were electing a warrior, while the moderates feel unrepresented by someone who made claims about being just like them.

 

Sociologist Morris Fiorina was one of the original supporters of the perfectly sorted political system – that is, a system of a right wing party and left wing party, rather than two big tent groups. It was only years later after the fruition of this system that he expressed regret at the results, reflecting that “through a mixture of accident and intention, we’ve created a political system that gives a disproportionate influence to the political class, rather than the vast majority of America.” The result is that the bi-partisan consensus (traditionally known as the vital center of American politics) is under-represented in our elected government. 

 

Fiorina pegged the issue correctly: creating two sorted parties strengthens the political class (those individuals and groups who are professionally political) at the expense of the vast majority of the population. Parties exist to create cleavage on every issue, even if none previously existed. As a historian of the GOP, Geoffrey Kabaservice notes that radical ideologues develop a strategy of rule and ruin in order  

 

The greatest menace to our civilization is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness – each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked – each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred – Herbert Butterfield

 

The Dangers of Sanity in an Extreme World

 

In a political field where two extremes, in parallel, compete for power while colluding to exclude alternatives, it becomes socially dangerous to represent the obscured bipartisan consensus. Political extremists will paint the centrist as both racist and freedom hater, concurrently a bigot and an enemy to religious freedom. Being a centrist in an increasingly extreme political system creates two enemies for yourself, rather than a single opponent – a self-described enemy at each flank who cooperate to eliminate threats to a powerful duopoly.

 

For the most part, the United States has been insulated from violence toward consensus, though our record of presidential assassinations speaks to something worrying. President McKinley was shot by a deranged anarchist. President Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer. President Kennedy met his end at the hands of a Soviet defector. Many other first world assassinations claim relative centrists and moderates as their victims. The guillotine was a tool of the French far left against not only the French monarchy, but the insufficiently extreme Girondins. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote that communists and Nazis recruited from the same pool of disaffected citizens, and these groups both claimed the same relatively apolitical victims, scapegoated as the cause of their counties’ problems.

 

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel after a short war, and shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize shortly thereafter. Consistently rejecting the hard line drawn by Middle Eastern neighbors, Sadat’s Egypt was suspended from the Arab League and found self-declared enemies among the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and al-Islamiyya, to name just a few. In October 1981, Sadat became a victim of his moderation. In eulogizing President Sadat, Felix G. Rohatyn stated that, “in times of upheaval, the passions must be for moderation and not for extremes.” Rohatyn goes on: “the passion for moderation may be one of the most dangerous passions today, and yet it is especially vital to our future. Sadat took the risks and paid the price.”

 

Political Violence

 

To call political violence a failure of only the system is to use the system as a scapegoat for bad behavior. Responsibility for political violence can rest with either individuals, the system, or both. The philosopher of the open society, Karl Popper, distinguished between violence in a tyranny and democracy, indicated that violence could only be justifiable in a system where reforms without violence were impossible. Reform in any violent system should have but one aim: to bring about a state of affairs which would make reform without violence possible. 

 

Certainly, in a democracy, there is no absolution of responsibility, where legitimate methods of accomplishing reform can occur. Frustration and desperation is a transitory result of temporary failure, and violence as a result of this feeling is representative of the perpetrator’s own failures. In a constitutional democracy, one does not have the right to “force change” over the will of the majority by any other method than working through government (the courts, the executive, and the legislature). The threat of political violence to accomplish narrow advantage is consistent with the definition of terrorism, and represents an extreme of egotism and misanthropy. The idea that a democracy is good only so long as voters vote and act a certain way, and should be overthrown if voters assert any independence, isn’t a democracy at all. A democracy is a governance of the masses, and a belief in democracy is predicated on the belief that the people shall rule, no matter their conclusion.

 

The sophist will respond: we live in a republic, not a democracy. 

 

We live in a democracy, which takes the form of a liberal republic. Throughout this country, citizens have a wealth of tools to accomplish everything they’d like, so long as they convince enough fellow citizens that their view is correct. 

 

The amateur historian will respond: the founding fathers were scared of democracy. 

 

The founding fathers believed in a democracy that tempered the extremes of mob rule and the excesses of populism, but they purposely developed a system which rested upon the will of the people, which was an innovation in government. 

 

Left-wing college students will interject: the founders only intended for rich, white landowners to vote… how is that a democracy? 

 

The present state, where nearly all adults over 18 can vote and no one is in chains, is the result of the seeds planted by the founding fathers, tended through the ages. Some reforms are immediate, whereas others can only be accomplished over a long period of time. You can look at things in different ways: You can slander political figures from the past because their world was less sophisticated and developed, or you can look at the nation’s history in terms of organic development. A progressive system where things get better, by definition must have a past which is worse. Thank our communal ancestry for its contributions to the conditions enjoyed in the present day… because they certainly didn’t get our quality of life or comfort as they toiled.

 

And, as Tocqueville said, the great advantage of America over other countries, is that we Americans are born equal, rather than becoming so. Recognition of our rights is the process of discovery, rather than through violent democratic revolution.

 

The extremist responds: you’re making distinctions where they’re not needed. And, besides, Tocqueville didn’t know about the Civil War.

 

Creating the new American Renaissance

 

The first vestige of those without a plan, who have an interest in the status quo, is to go negative. The dominant view of “the establishment” is that “they” have an interest in stagnancy. Yet, “the establishment” ruled Washington during an era when the United States saw record low unemployment, made unparalleled human advances (the Moon landing is a pretty nifty accomplishment), fought injustice, and increased dramatically the wellbeing of American citizens. Where we seek the wellbeing of Americans and where this mythical establishment makes giant leaps for and at the behest of its citizens, there is no logical reason to cripple this establishment. Yet the established order in Washington was overturned and extremists were sent as representatives for the sole of purpose of introducing intransigence and disorder.

 

Root noted that the true center in American politics is a core of optimistic, professional, diverse citizens who seek to overcome challenges. Excuse my double negative: if you have a plan to make things better, there is no reason not to be an optimist. Wake up every day thinking Marcus Aurelius’ admonition: In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; “I am rising to a man’s work.” We live in a flexible liberal democracy with frequent elections. Even the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land, can be amended if people work hard enough. For political centrists, gaining the mechanism to achieve change is as simple as winning a handful of Senate seats. Be proud of your moderation and good sense.

 

In addition, being upbeat about the country’s future is the first bulwark against extremism. Philosopher Eric Hoffer frequently spoke about the true believer’s distaste for the present and the hope for some utopia in the indeterminate future. Hoffer, in painting a true leader, advised that, “the leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.” In other words, real leadership means giving people hope that the practical path will lead to better conditions. To do otherwise is to fall into demagoguery, utopianism or despair.

 

Re-Forging the Ladder

 

The Fallacy of Ideological History

 

Washington was a slaveholder, as were many Revolutionary-era politicians from Virginia. Some influential political figures were against political enfranchisement of certain groups. I am not of mind to re-litigate the past and hold political figures to standards that existed outside of their time. Even a cursory look through history would reveal that a majority of humanity held a number of repugnant ideas (however, it is fair to credit historical figures for their foresight). The standard of progress through responsible innovation when it is operating correctly, by definition, requires a past which is worse than the present, on balance, and a present which is worse than the future. Partisans who attempt to whitewash history should be mindful of a number of fallacies:

 

1. The historian’s fallacy: an informal fallacy arising from the assumption that a historical figure held the same perspective and had the same information as the present historian.
2. Whiggishness (no relation to the Whig Party): assumption that figures from the past held today’s beliefs.
3. Chronological snobbery: Argument that prior thinking and human product are inferior to that of today simply by virtue of temporal placement.

 

Falling into this trap runs the distinct potential of falling into Hoffer’s true believer mindset, where a preoccupation for the future prevents seeing the present and prompts true believers to re-arrange the past.

 

What We’ve Learned

 

Radical historians: “consensus history smooths out history, which ignores seismic shifts in society.”

 

We’ve since learned through the 24 hour news cycle, the internet, and vastly increased levels of connectedness that society doesn’t change through short bursts. Rather, there is a steady evolution that old media, through its own limitations, struggled to catch up to.

 

These people create narratives in order to live out an imagined epic fantasy battle against some faceless evil force, whether that’s a shadowy white patriarchy or a plutocratic capitalist army.

 

Post-Revolution

 

George Washington

 

President Washington belongs to no party or ideology. We’re all Washington partisans.

 

Alexander Hamilton

 

Alexander Hamilton is quite possibly the patron saint of American political centrism.

 

Idea of Progress – meliorism through industry and commerce

 

Infant industry argument

 

Distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy

 

James Monroe

President Monroe must unquestionably be given credit for the Era of Good Feelings.

 

Antebellum

 

John Quincy Adams

 

Henry Clay

 

The reader may notice that no Whigs (Presidents W.H. Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, and Fillmore) were listed as centrist presidents. This is because the Whig party tended to field uniformly awful candidates for president. The Whigs were an unmistakably legislative party that served as a vehicle for Senator Clay, rather than an executive party that advanced the concept of the strong presidency.

 

In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy in historical writing.

 

infrastructure

Daniel Webster

 

Our proper business is improvement. Let our age be the age of improvement. In a day of peace let us advance the arts of peace and the works of peace. Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered. Let us cultivate a true spirit of union and harmony.

-Daniel Webster

 

Abraham Lincoln

 

“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”

President Abraham Lincoln

 

Post-Civil War

 

Frederick Douglass

 

Rutherford B. Hayes

 

President Hayes 

 

Grover Cleveland

 

The Progressive Era

 

The Pragmatists

 

William McKinley

 

Theodore Roosevelt

 

The far left and far right have never gotten a good handle on Theodore Roosevelt. The New York party bosses feared Roosevelt’s reputation as a progressive reformer, even though Roosevelt clearly noted in 1913 that “every movement has a lunatic fringe.” Roosevelt never shied away from using his beloved bully pulpit to talk directly to the people, while he warned that “when there is a great unrest, it becomes extremely difficult to beat a loud-mouthed demagogue, especially if he is a demagogue of great wealth.” 

 

What Roosevelt knew that today’s progressives don’t is that there’s little good that “comes from the individual who is fighting ‘the system’ in the abstract; just a mighty little good comes from the church member who is fighting Beelzebub in the abstract.” Theodore Roosevelt’s great charm was in how he always kept two feet planted directly on the ground, exploring, but never exceeding the limitations of his office. President Roosevelt believed in those who took the next step, rather than theorized about the 200th step.

 

Roosevelt unquestionably believed that the role of anyone with executive power is to serve the people whenever and in whatever manner necessary. Unlike today’s far left, Roosevelt treated the Constitution as a brick wall, not a speed bump. Unlike today’s far right, Roosevelt argued that reform was the antidote to revolution. For President Roosevelt, power itself was a pragmatic tool to deliver results. In 1913, after completing his tenure in the presidency, Roosevelt recognized this:

 

I acted for the public welfare, I acted for the common well-being of all our people, whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition. I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power.

 

Roosevelt identified James Buchanan’s failure as a president to Buchanan’s legalistic view that the president is subservient to congress, rather than the people, and that the president may not do a thing that the Constitution explicitly commands.

 

“We must regard the past, but we must not regard only the past. We must also think of the future, and while we must learn by experience we cannot afford to pay heed merely to the teachings of experience. The great preacher Channing spoke with fine insight on this very point: It is possible to make experience too much our guide. There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when in truth to dare is the highest wisdom.’ These sentences should be carefully pondered by those men, often very good men, who forget that constructive change offers the best method of avoiding destructive change; that reform is the antidote to revolution.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

 

Elihu Root

 

Within political centrism, Root should carry the moniker of hero of the citizen’s responsibility and practical campaign finance. With the experience of serving as Theodore Roosevelt and Taft cabinet member under his belt, Root noted that popular government can only succeed if citizens generally take part in the government. In Root’s summation, governance formed a general responsibility of the populace, proportionate to an individual’s education, life experience, disinterestedness, and capacity to lead. For Root, zeal and the desire for fame are set against honesty and love of country. The venerable statesman goes on:

 

The selfish men who have special interests to subserve are going to take part; the bitter and malevolent and prejudiced men whose hearts are filled with hatred are going to take part; the corrupt men who want to make something out of government are going to take part; the demagogues who wish to attain place and power through pandering to the prejudices of their fellows are going to take part. The forces of unselfishness, of self-control, of justice, of public spirit, public honesty, love of country, and set over against them; and those forces need every possible contribution of personality and power among men, or they will go down in the irrepressible conflict.

 

Two millennia earlier, Cicero said much the same, stating that citizens with a natural capacity for public administration should run for office and not hesitate to engage in civic life. Without this, Cicero adds, “there’s no other way for a state to be governed or for greatness of soul to be made evident.” 

 

Elihu Root, having also served in the legislature, also intrinsically knew the connection between money and politics. Root noted that when a “great corporation” gives a large amount of money to a candidate or political party, it creates a debt to be recognized and repaid with the votes of representatives in the legislature or by the actions of executive officers. One would expect this sort of language from a progressive like McKinley or Roosevelt, but not from Root, a noted political conservative. Ever the good citizen, though, Root wrote that it “is never possible to cure neglect of duty by changing the form.” Simply pulling money out of politics does not address the issue of centrists not taking part in their government. Or, as Root said: “No matter what constitutions you have or what statutes you enact, sooner or later you come to the polls; and if you do not have virtue and public spirit there, your government goes down.” 

 

But conservatives and progressives who lived prior to World War II both recognized the political consensus and weren’t fact averse. There were certainly large divisions between parties and ideology, such as Root’s opposition to the direct election of senators and Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s populist, theocratic bent, but there were no such things as “progressive facts” and “conservative facts.” In pre-War American politics, there was only objective reality. The cure to the division between parties could only occur through “long discussion, free, open, unrestrained discussion in representative assemblies,” which serve as a substitute for war.

 

The New Deal and the War

 

Modern conservatives attack The New Deal as the entry of socialism into the United States. With record high unemployment and citizen satisfaction, the threat of a socialist revolution grew ever more, with figures such as Huey Long looming large as a demagogic specter. The New Deal, in actuality, was an attempt to establish a bulwark against this existential threat of a socialist uprising. 

 

Post-World War II

 

Hannah Arendt

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

Though we think of the birth of American far right politics as occurring during the rise of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election cycle, the far right was actually in force throughout the 1950s. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, by any practical measure a strong conservative for the time, was opposed by far right elements composed of the John Birch Society, The National Review, and other anti-Communist zealots. A weaker President without a strong national profile would have collapsed before the dissension that threatened the GOP’s ranks. Luckily, Eisenhower was able to use his goodwill among the public to sell his vision for the country, but his terms were not without tension within the Republican ranks.

 

In order to combat the threat that the far right posed within his own party, Eisenhower and his aides fashioned an alternative to far right ideology, called “New Republicanism.” This New Republicanism distilled the American political consensus into a policy roadmap. Unfortunately, the ideology did not survive beyond the Eisenhower Administration, though the nation was lucky enough to be given the choice of two practical presidential candidates in 1960 – John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Americans would be given a starker (and by any account worse) choice in 1964.

 

Eric Hoffer

 

Nicknamed the “Longshoreman Philosopher,” Eric Hoffer 

 

The Modern Era

 

John F. Kennedy

 

The original candidate of hope and change, President Kennedy entered office with high expectations and, within three short years, exceeded every single one of them. In terms of prestige, the Kennedy Administration served as the high watermark for the office of the presidency.

 

“I don’t believe in big government, but I believe in effective government action, and I think that’s the only way that the United States is going to maintain its freedom; it’s the only way we’re going to move ahead.”

-John F. Kennedy

 

If in the search of our conscience we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brook no political, sectional, religious or racial divisions, then maybe it may yet be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain.

-Walter Cronkite

 

The Dormancy of Sanity

 

The death of Kennedy brought about the rise of both the far right and the far left. The comparatively heady philosophy of Richard Nixon gave way to the extremist ideology of one Sen. Barry Goldwater, while the Democratic Party graduated into the Black Panthers, the New Left, campus protests, and vehement anti-“establishment” politics.

 

In Gilder and Chapman’s The Party that Lost its Head, the authors discussed the popular conservative formulation that intellectualism was tantamount to elitism. In their research, the authors found that it was a myth that intellectuals rejected the conservative Republican Party because intellectuals are a monolithic group of socialists or liberals. Rather, “most intellectuals have rejected the Republicans is that the party has not been paying attention to them; and it has failed, for the most part, to present any coherent programs at all.” Even in the 1950s, the GOP was known for its negative ideology.

 

The political world sees Richard Nixon as an enigma. I think what makes Nixon so interesting is that he’s seen as the closest that Americans have seen to a political Machiavellian – the complete severing of morality from utility. We know from his White House tapes that Nixon was able to distinguish between his personal beliefs and what was required to hold together his coalition. But Nixon was able to see beyond the simple moral calculus of Machiavelli’s The Prince, yet he wasn’t able to get over his sense of indignation over perceived slights. 

 

Margaret Chase Smith

 

The 1960s were undoubtedly the decade where the political wheels fell off. The rise of the New Left (and the zeal which stood in for a numerical majority) threatened the link between the Democratic Party and its constituency. Similarly, the years of organizational infiltration by the far right paid off, as right-wing party machinery bec 

 

The Communitarians

 

George H.W. Bush

 

Bush was, like later GOP presidential nominees Dole, McCain, and Romney, temperamentally unsuited to modern extremist activist politics.  It was President Bush’s failed attempts at appeasing the far right (“Read my lips”), combined with a modest economic recession, which ultimately spelled his electoral doom. History should record that George H.W. Bush was an excellent Commander-in-Chief and pragmatic world leader, done in by extremist elements within his party’s own ever-shrinking tent.

 

The Third Way

 

Third Way contributed to centrism by its emphasis on finding the excluded middle. Tony Blair

 

William Jefferson Clinton

 

With the skill of David Bowie, President Clinton entered office in 1993 as a big government leftist (with healthcare reform on his mind), but quickly shape shifted into a pragmatic centrist after the disastrous 1994 midterms. 

 

Clinton’s political achievements rested with his ability to cast liberal ideas as conservative and conservative ideas as liberal. 

 

The New Class

 

The average American voter would not believe it, but political centrism has been bubbling under the surface for decades. Liberal Democrats, David Frum, John Avlon. All it takes is a rallying voice to bring these groups together.

 

A Responsible Innovation

 

Responsibility

 

Integrity vs. Sophism and Indignation

 

False Dilemmas

 

Another hibernating idea that re-emerges from slumber every four years: the running joke that undecided voters are morons because they haven’t decided on their favored candidate yet. Pundits and the media make the faulty assumption that a stark difference between two candidates makes a choice easier, rather than making them both more unpalatable. The inability of ideologues to see the existence of anything outside of two rigid orthodoxies is their crippling weakness, not ours.

 

Centrists are basically Burkean conservatives

 

As for the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” as one who has been afflicted by both labels, depending on the stance of the afflictor and the foreign or domestic nature of the issue, I doubt their utility in this day and age for anyone except slapdash journalists.

-Lane Kirkland

 

The great rank and file of the American people are liberal about some things and conservative about others, and the shifting distribution of such impulses depends largely upon circumstances and interest. That is the way it should be, because there really are things one ought to be conservative about and things one ought to be liberal about, and they do change.

-Lane Kirkland

 

“Some ideologically intoxicated Republicans think Democrats are not merely mistaken but sinful. Such Republicans believe he earth must be scorched and sown with salt before the Heavenly City can be built. Some Democrats, having lost their ideological confidence, substitute character assassination for political purpose.”

-George Will, Vicebusters is remake from 40 years ago, Washington Post, June 1, 1989

 

Self-Vilification

 

Social media has led to the further democratization of culture and has given the world a new First Amendment medium. This advancement is an overwhelming positive for human society. Like most creations, though, there are externalities. The negative prime development arising due to instant, thoughtless media is two-fold: 1) the tendency of people to view their social media interactions as the equivalent of side talk and gossip rather than substantive forums, and 2) the creation of a “hater culture” of wandering indignation in response. The perpetually offended wander the internet looking for the next thing to be outraged about, and thoughtless internet commenters provide bountiful offerings. Max Scheler found that moral indignation is a “disguised form of repressed envy and a peculiar fact of middle-class psychology”. In other words, indignation is a mental illness.

 

If this were a self-contained ecosystem, those two groups could feed off each other. Unfortunately, the offended ——-

 

We should look at Lincoln’s statement in his letter to X as a social creed: “I am not a Know Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, in in favor of degrading classes of white people?” The age of separatism must and shall die. There are different methods that groups use to combat bigotry. Social justice warriors use group politics in an attempt to rebalance culture. The weakness of this argument is that SJWs fail to recognize the worth and contributions of individuals. On the opposite token, libertarians resolve separatism by claiming to be individualists. These libertarians are blind to the existence of groups, families, nations, and country. A prime exercise in centrism is to resolve false dilemmas. We recognize the intrinsic worth of all individuals and the existence of artificial race distinctions, but centrists resolve separatism through ardent nationalism. We are all equally American and endowed with the same freedoms and responsibilities. To promote racism, regionalism, sexism, etc. represents the most reprehensible affront to national unity and we abhor the behavior.

 

Conversely, there is no better way to express unity than to use the term “fellow citizen” without regard for race, gender, creed, age, or religion. 

 

Some members of the social justice community recommend wealth redistribution as a remedy for racial and ethnic wrongs committed in the history of the United States. This is a temporary solution. A permanent solution is to invest in the types of public innovation that directly affect everyone’s lives. 

 

You can’t redistribute wealth until you create it.

 

We have learned to call this propaganda. A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to suit their purpose. That the purpose was in this case patriotic does not affect the argument at all.

-Walter Lippmann

 

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

 

“Morally speaking, it is as wrong to feel guilty without having done anything specific as it is to feel free of all guilt if one is actually guilty of something.”

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment

 

“There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence only make sense if applied to individuals.”

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment

 

But ah! did the pilgrims, when they first landed on these shores, quietly compose themselves, and say, “These Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever?” Did they sluggishly sigh and say, “Our lot is hard; the Indians own the soil, and we cannot cultivate it?” No, they first made powerful efforts to raise themselves.

-Maria Stewart

 

Clearly a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

-Jean-Francois Revel

 

Separatism and Shame

 

“I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever—it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?”

-Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

 

Slavery was only temporary, accidental, partial and incongruous, but freedom was perpetual, organic, universal, in harmony with the Constitution.

-William Seward

 

“I have heard something said about allegiance to the South. I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance.”

-Henry Clay

 

“Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.”

-Michael Sandel

 

“Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”

-Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

 

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

-Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

 

“We honor cultural identity. We always have; we always will. But separatism is not allowed. Separatism is not the American way. We must not allow ideas like political correctness to divide us and cause us to reverse hard-won achievements in human rights and civil rights.”

-Barbara Jordan

 

“If anything is characteristic of Lenin or Trotsky or the representatives of the professional revolutionary, it is the naive belief that once the social circumstances are changed through revolution, mankind will follow automatically the few moral precepts that have been known and repeated since the dawn of history”

 

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment

 

The Constitution vs. Legal Utilitarians

 

When we hear about the constitution being attacked, it is normally a talking point directed by the party outside the White House toward the party of the President.

 

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

-US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8

 

Fiscal Conservatism vs. Fiscal Utopianism

 

It is now time to refute the dangerous idea that labor and technological innovation aren’t required to secure material prosperity. Proponents of fiscal utopia argue that some manipulation of monetary or fiscal policy is enough to solve problems. 

 

I think we can do better. I don’t want the talents of any American to go to waste.

-John F. Kennedy

 

As an elected official, Bill White saw firsthand how 

 

It would be a travesty to call the right the stewards of fiscal conservatism in light of their disastrous experiments with “starve the beast” fiscal adventurism. A return to fiscal conservatism would require a new set of traditions, namely:

 

1. The end of off-the-books spending.
2. Embracing pay-as-you-go
3. Adoption of “golden rule” budgeting

 

“To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.”

-Benjamin Disraeli

 

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate.

-George Washington – Farewell Address 1796

 

Budget practices instituted by the Founding Fathers helped generations of fiscal leaders resist the temptation to borrow excessively. Those practices included clear accounting, “pay as you go” budget planning, and the use of trust funds with spending confined to the level of tax revenues dedicated for a specific purpose. Congress clearly defined the amount and use of each debt incurred.

-Bill White – America’s Fiscal Constitution

 

“Mr. Jefferson argued that foreign restrictions, foreign prohibitions, and foreign high duties, ought to be met, at home, by American restrictions, American prohibitions, and American high duties. Mr. Hamilton, surveying the entire ground, and looking at the inherent nature of the subject, treated it with an ability which, if ever equalled, has not been surpassed, and earnestly recommended protection.”

Henry Clay – The American System speech

 

The idea that unfunded tax cuts will significantly raise our real incomes and thus pay for themselves in one of the illusions of our age.

Tyler Cowen – The Great Stagnation

 

Taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income already pay for more than 43 percent of the US government, and taxpayers in the top 1 percent pay for more than 27 percent; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns.

Tyler Cowen – The Great Stagnation

 

A wealthier and more populous world, all other things equal, raises the return of beneficial invention of the sort that helps a large number of people.

Tyler Cowen – The Great Stagnation

 

Innovation

 

Innovation vs. The Luddites

 

While the far left and far right are indeed damaging our society, they pale in comparison to what Luddites can do to a society. Luddites question the entire premise of the Industrial Revolution in favor of the naturalistic fallacy.

 

Another dangerous Luddite fallacy revolves around the idea of overpopulation. The argument goes something like this: as the population increases, space becomes more constrained. As space becomes more constrained, farms are crowded out. As farms are crowded out, more people starve. As people starve, they die. Thus, population increases lead to death. Tyler Cowen demolishes this argument quickly by arguing that a wealthy and more populous world actually raises the return of beneficial invention which helps a large number of people. That is, more people lead to more inventors and scientists who can solve more problems more quickly.

 

Finally, Luddites advance the Lump of Labor fallacy, which assumes that there is only a certain amount of work to be done in a society. A cursory contrast between 19th century and 21st century society makes quick work of this fallacy. As hard labor is relieved by work, more people are able to purse the sciences and the arts. Machines often also create additional new jobs as they destroy others. Consider the demand for pilots, airline companies, flight attendants, technicians, airport officials, etc. as the advent of commercial flight dealt a death blow to domestic train travel. Additionally, the decreased cost of labor decreases the cost of necessities, increases consumption, and allows for a larger social safety net which improves the health and wellbeing of a society’s citizens.

 

Space leadership

Our future is in space

Asteroid mining

National defense

The Luddite argument that we should spend money from the space program on solving world hunger instead is a severely uninformed fallacy. The technologies that were developed in exploring the heavens have actually made it easier to feed people. Modern crop dusting could not exist without the advancement of aviation. Should early 20th century government have held off on investing in air technology in favor of yet more funding for traditional crop planting? Should we disdain enriched baby food, modern water purification, and freeze drying, since they trace their origins to NASA technology?

Economic benefits of space elevator

Public and private efforts

 

Another line of argument recently advanced is that, with the advent of companies such as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX picking up the slack on space exploration, government entities like NASA are no longer necessary in this sector. At some point, we’ve accepted the idea that every sector a private company has entered must result in our government vacating its responsibilities. In order for the United States to be the overwhelming leader in the space sector, both private and public interests must nurture each other to achieve dominance in this area. This belief is consistent with the infant industry argument and the American System, the traditional economic foundations that made the United States a superpower to begin with. It is reasonable to believe that the U.S. government should not select winners within the domestic marketplace. It is not reasonable, however, for the U.S. government to leave U.S. companies out in the cold as they attempt to compete against innovation mercantilists in China. Without economic strength derived from industry, the United States is a hollow shell.

 

Consistent with political centrism’s belief in responsible innovation, we understand that American Exceptionalism isn’t the result of fate. American Exceptionalism, as we understand it, is the result of centuries of hard work and ingenuity by our forefathers. The United States is not the leader in space exploration because we’ve been blessed; we are the leader because previous generations sacrificed to make us number one. Now our position is disputed by mercantilist Russia and China, among other countries. Futron publishes an annual Space Competitiveness Index, which ranks countries on how they invest in and benefit from the space industry. While the United States has remained the top country on the index, it is the only one which has been in decline for seven straight years (as of the 2014 index). The organization noted that the United States’ “currently unique convening power in setting the global space agenda is not guaranteed.”

 

In Developing National Power in Space, Brent Ziarnick notes that it takes more than just growth in numbers to ensure continued U.S. dominance in the space industry. Ziarnick states that in “order to add true value, in space power as in economics, growth by itself pales in relation to positive development, and positive development is achieved through innovation.”

 

Both futurists and administrators have long noted that our lack of increased presence in space is the result of government negligence, rather than insufficient technology. As Stephen Petranek notes, in his How We’ll Live on Mars TED speech, that we’ve been able to reach Mars for the last thirty years but have seen no political will to take that leap, and he points to a single pivotal moment that set American space exploration back. Given the choice of NASA administrator Werner von Braun’s Mars proposal and the competing space shuttle program, President Nixon went with the space shuttle due to the shuttle’s ability to better launch and repair spy satellites. On top of this, Nixon killed von Braun’s Saturn V rocket, leading the dispirited founder of American space rocketry to retire from public service entirely.

 

The years since, populated with unmanned travel coupled with a disappointing International Space Station, have taken the nation’s space program severely off-course. Only thirty-one years separated the first modern rocket launch from the first satellite to orbit Earth. Only twelve years separated the first satellite to orbit Earth from the moon landing. As we now approach the fiftieth year since a human has last exceeded low-Earth orbit, let alone setting a foot on another planet, it is time for a new long-term vision.

 

The promise of space exploration carries high potential for bipartisan consensus. 

 

Wisdom vs. Ignorance

 

The naturalistic fallacy

Anti-science

Vaccines

GMOs

Climate change

 

Institutions vs. Disorder

 

There is a small segment of the population whose primary position on government is as follows: blow it all up. 

 

“Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees. And both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.”

-Henry Clay

 

The need for order and the benefits that a government can offer.

 

In The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen differentiates between private and public goods, blowing open the argument that America is just as “innovative” as it has ever been:

 

A lot of our recent innovations are “private goods” rather than “public goods.” Contemporary innovation often takes the form of expanding positions of economic privilege, extracting resources from the government by lobbying, seeking the sometimes extreme protections of intellectual property laws, and producing goods that are exclusive or status related rather than universal, private rather than public; think twenty-five seasons of new, fall season Gucci handbags.

 

Cowen sagely notes that “’the rise in income inequality’ and the ‘slowdown in ideas production’ are two ways of describing the same phenomenon, namely that current innovation is more geared to private goods rather than private goods.” That is, while innovation in public goods are spread widely over the entirety of a populace, the replacement of public innovation with largely private innovation has resulted in financial benefit for few rather than all.

 

While most citizens of a certain age in the United States see space exploration and the “space race” as intrinsically connected and modern politicians see economic opportunity and national defense responsibilities in the heavens, centrists seek to balance both desires. As President Reagan said: “we can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful economic and scientific gain.”

 

Historically, we’re mostly whigs, but we’re mavericks and take the best of all options without hesitation. Noting this, we share one attribute with 19th century Democrats: we ardently believe in Manifest Destiny, with the caveat that power and influence must be exercised responsibly and ethically. The United States, with its record of internal democratic reform, is a force for good in the world and there is no shame in being American.

 

“All civic virtues, all the heroism and self-sacrifice of patriotism spring ultimately from the habit men acquire of regarding their nation as a great organic whole, identifying themselves with its fortune in the past as in the present, and looking forward anxiously to its future destinies. When the members of any nation have come to regard their country as nothing more than the plot of ground on which they reside, and their government as a mere organization for providing police or contracting treaties; when they have ceased to entertain any warmer feelings for one another than those which private interest, or personal friendship, or a mere general philanthropy, may produce, the moral dissolution of that nation is at hand. Even in the order of material interests the well-being of each generation is in a great degree dependent on the forbearance, self-sacrifice, and providence of those who have preceded it, and civic virtues can never flourish in a generation which thinks only of itself.”

-William Lecky

 

“Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.”

-President Rutherford B. Hayes

 

“On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.”

-Daniel Webster

 

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.”

-Benjamin Disraeli

 

Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration.

DeWitt Clinton

 

“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

 

Crime is a form of resentment, a desire for gain, an act of violence against a person who has more. These are lower class crimes, and the Negro makes up the bulk of the lower class. There is nothing racial about this fact. At the turn of the century, the majority of such crimes were committed predominantly by the Irish, later by the Italians, then by the Slavs.

Daniel Bell – The End of Ideology

 

While there is a greater “show” of violence – in literature, in movies, plays, century life, a “bureaucratization of violence” – in concentration camps, war, etc.) in the personal lives of Americans, in the day-to-day routines of the city, there is less violence than a hundred or fifty or even twenty-five years ago. One has only to go, say, to the contemporary accounts of life in New York and San Francisco to verify this conclusion.

Daniel Bell – The End of Ideology

 

Making the government lean by cutting the most defensible – because most productive – federal spending is akin to making an overweight aircraft flightworthy by removing an engine.

-George Will on federal support for science

 

“You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.”

-Michael Bloomberg

 

First, we need to look at the permitting system. To the Gray Lady’s credit, the piece gets this. Everything takes forever in the U.S., due to years of NIMBY obstructionism, legal review, and on and on. We need a dramatic acceleration in the speed at which our legal and permit systems operate, and we don’t just need that for infrastructure—the clogged arteries of the legal and bureaucratic state hamper business formation and all kinds of public and private activities.

-The American Interest

 

    The crazy cost structure in the U.S. also bears scrutiny. America’s infrastructure is so hard to fix in part because it is so much more expensive to do stuff here than in many other countries. It’s a bit like our health care system, in that regulatory capture, cronyism, and sweetheart deals involving both business and labor combine to drive up public costs. It ought to be getting cheaper to fix infrastructure—we use materials more efficiently, the machines are more powerful and faster, designs have improved—but costs are instead exploding. Our infrastructure policy, like our health care policy and our education policy, is being held hostage by producer lobbies and cabals.

-The American Interest

 

History of Duopoly

 

Both parties hold themselves up as exemplars of some shining standard, while the party faithless attempt to scrub their party of negative aspects of their past. You can see evidence of this in the Democrats writing out Jefferson, Jackson, and Wilson from their party. Those three presidents, you’ll note, represented the Democratic Party for a total of twenty four years.

 

The fact is that both parties must take responsibility and own the good and the bad.

 

“In our own century, intellectuals have been successfully wooed by Republicans under Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes, and lost again under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But the Democrats, with time out for Woodrow Wilson, still held the booby prize – condoning the Ku Klux Klan in 1924 the way the GOP convention condoned the Birch Society forty years later.”

Gilder and Chapman, The Party that Lost its Head

 

Politics becomes a matter of adapting oneself to all sorts of people and situations, a game in which one may score but only by accepting the rules and recognizing one’s opponents, rather than a moral crusade in which one’s stainless standard must mow the enemy down.

-Edmund Wilson’s description of Theodore Roosevelt’s attitude

 

“In short, that I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”

-George Washington, Mount Vernon, July 6, 1796

 

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

-John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780

 

There is no “Republican,” no “Democrat,” on the Fourth of July — all are Americans. All feel that their country is greater than party.

-James G. Blaine

 

The Extremists Playbook

 

“What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.”

-Charles Taylor

 

“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.”

-Isaiah Berlin

 

“The Conspiracy Theory of Society… [is] a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.”

-Karl Popper

 

“Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.”

-William E. Gladstone

 

Divide, weaken, and conquer.

 

• Attack the source, rather than address the point

 

Demagoguery

Nationally, the United States is a liberal republic where a multitude of interests converge into one governmental structure. In attempting to get ahead, the temptation is always there to secure narrow interest at the expense of the general interest. In the long run, though, the existence of perpetual narrow interests damages the long term health of a nation. Permanent minorities damage social cohesion and create further minority groups. The result is a fragmented society that further seeks to achieve narrow interest as a self-perpetuating spiral.

 

In response, the true center should nurture a sense of propriety as a vital character. That is, centrism should rigorously adhere to the appropriate over-arching moral standards of the time, without making excuses for poor behavior or ethical lapses.  When a society values the rights and feelings of all, prioritizing the moral center of society carries the effect of acting as a societal glue.

 

Your personal opinion is not more important than anyone else’s – it can only be more well-informed.

 

It’s dangerous to take the words of a small minority of anonymous people on the internet and make conclusions about people at-large. First, it’s not a good sample size. Second, anonymous internet posters on social media aren’t representative of the population.

 

Freedom is nothing in the world but the opportunity for self discipline.

-Clemenceau

 

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality. Hence the modicum of truth in the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet.

Walter Lippmann

 

In a comparison of our governments with those of the ancient republics, we must, without hesitation, give the preference to our own; because, every power with us is exercised by representation, not in tumultuary assemblies of the collective body of the people, where the art or impudence of the ORATOR or TRIBUNE, rather than the utility or justice of the measure could seldom fail to govern.

-Alexander Hamilton, The Continentalist #1

 

A New American Renaissance

 

What is true – and has to be explained – is the remarkable fact that the United States is probably the first large-scale society to have built change and innovation into the culture. This constant “creative destruction” reworks continually the topography of the society, allowing new social groups to claim a place in the social order.

Daniel Bell – The End of Ideology

 

“Great countries are those that produce great people.”

-Benjamin Disraeli

 

Justice

 

“Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.”

-William E. Gladstone

 

Justice ought to extend her protection with rigid impartiality to the rich and to the poor, to the powerful and to the humble.

-William Pitt the Younger

 

Today the Court regards itself as the maker of policy – no maker of policy can command respect for impartial dispensation of justice.

-Robert Taft

 

Courts are established, not to determine the popularity of a cause, but to adjudicate and enforce rights. No litigant should be required to submit his case to the hazard and expense of a political campaign. No judge should be required to seek or receive political rewards.

-Calvin Coolidge

 

The First Amendment right of free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word, and not just comforting platitudes, too mundane to need protection.

-Colin Powell

 

After all, if freedom of speech means anything, it means a willingness to stand and let people say things with which we disagree, and which do weary us considerably

-Zechariah Chafee

 

Disagreement is the lifeblood of democracy; dissension is its cancer.

-Daniel J. Boorstin

 

War

 

War is, and should remain, a transitory, temporary phase in a country’s diplomatic relations with another country. Perpetual war is contrary to orderly development and should not be used as an economic engine.

 

“Chickenhawk” is a particularly nasty epithet utilized by anti-war activists. The intention of the slur is to instill hesitancy in elected officials to declare war, but the effect is that it adds an improper personal consideration to the checklist. Whether or not war, the final means of diplomacy, is necessary to address a national security situation has nothing to do with the executive or legislator’s professional background.

 

Critics will respond with something along the lines of, “only a soldier understands loss.” This is true, and one of our very best presidents was a former soldier who understood the manipulative threat of the military-industrial complex, but the critic neglects the point that it is improper for personal feelings to cloud the welfare of the nation at-large.

 

In The End of Ideology, Daniel Bell noted that:

 

It is not poverty per se that leads people to revolt; poverty most often induces fatalism and despair, and a reliance, embedded in ritual and superstitious practices, on supernatural help. Social tensions are an expression of unfulfilled expectations. It is only when expectations are aroused that radicalism can take hold. 

 

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

-Eric Hoffer

 

“It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons.”

-Karl Popper

 

“Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.”

-William E. Gladstone

 

I believe that international terrorism is a modern form of warfare against liberal democracies. I believe that the ultimate but seldom stated goal of these terrorists is to destroy the very fabric of democracy. I believe that it is both wrong and foolhardy for any democratic state to consider international terrorism to be “someone else’s” problem.

-Henry Jackson

 

The idea that one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter” cannot be sanctioned. Freedom fighters or revolutionaries don’t blow up buses containing noncombatants; terrorist murderers do. Freedom fighters don’t set out to capture and slaughter schoolchildren; terrorist murderers do. Freedom fighters don’t assassinate innocent businessmen or hijack and hold hostage innocent men, women, and children; terrorist murderers do. It is a disgrace that democracies would allow the treasured word “freedom” to be associated with the acts of the terrorists.

-Henry Jackson

 

We can do more. For instance, is it moral to trade openly and freely with states who use the profits from such trade to finance the murder of innocents? Why should those who conduct remote control warfare against us rest easy that we will contribute to financing our own destruction?

-Henry Jackson

 

Those whose interests are threatened by extreme danger should think only of the wisest course of action, not of conventions.

-Theodora

 

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

-Eric Hoffer