Why Centrism Fails

Policies designed to benefit the few will end up pissing off the many

Someone once told me that, in politics, “if you piss off everyone at least a little you’re probably doing something right.”  There is something to this, as politics is often called the art of compromise. Though the original quote from Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable - the art of the next best” is a more optimistic ideal.

If you ask most Americans, they will agree with this sentiment.  But when they vote, they often seem to elect leaders who will do anything but compromise.  Why is that?  And why, in today’s hyperpolarized era, do centrists seem to be as hard to find as a jaguar roaming the mountains of southern Arizona?

I’ve heard a lot of opinions on why centrism as an ideal has fallen out of favor: One is that it has no backbone, that it doesn’t take a side for “justice” or “truth”, or that it’s social media’s fault for curating content using algorithms designed to keep us liking and swiping, and thus serving up the same type of content it thinks we’ll like vs content that challenges our assumptions. Or maybe it’s the media’s fault, especially 24-hour cable news networks that cosplay as “news” while really offering up a form of entertainment that is also designed first and foremost to keep us watching, because ratings mean profits and people love to hear what they already know or assume.

I think all these things inform this discussion and our skewed reality today. I also think that gerrymandering is one of the biggest cancers poisoning American democracy in our time.  But the main reason that centrism has fallen out of favor is simply because it cannot be trusted to fight for regular people.

Centrism’s original sin goes back to the Triangulation days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.  Briefly, triangulation refers to Clinton’s “move to the middle” after losing badly to Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections.  The problem is that this ‘move to the middle’ didn’t so much try to compromise with both sides as it adopted a lot of destructive policy ideas left over from Reagan. Many of these ideas have greatly harmed working people across the political spectrum, especially workers in manufacturing.  The policy ideas that came out of the 1990s overwhelmingly benefited the educated and professional classes, Wall St. and the top 2% of the wealthiest Americans, all while ignoring those without a college degree, especially in rural areas. An excellent read on this is Michael J. Sanel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? that I will be posting more about in the future.

For this post, it’s important to know that the working class began losing faith in Democrats once they started pushing policies that benefited rich, urban, educated professionals at the expense of everyone else.

Today that cynicism and distrust pushes more and more people deeper into the political margins. It’s also true that, when so much in America feels so broken, the people offering measured tweaks to the status quo come off as wanting to keep as much of the status quo the same for their own benefit.

People don’t trust Centrists because most Centrists are well-off, urban professionals who are doing fine under the status quo. They benefit from centrist tax policies that reward wealth and punish the poor. They know how to navigate byzantine healthcare systems and know right people who can open doors when they occasionally get lost in the maze.  They work in an environment that rewards an expensive education while sending their own kids to private schools, helped by expensive tutors who can help them get many steps ahead of working class kids, who are on their own, competing for the same few seats in higher education.

Centrism can work, but today it is populated by the people who benefit from the broken status quo.  Groups like The Third Way should rightfully fail because all they are rebranded versions of political and professional elites who have spent the last 40 years rigging the system in their favor at the expense of everyone else.  

So how do we rid ourselves of today’s toxic centrism and start electing leaders again who know the art of compromise?

First and foremost, we must get rid of gerrymandering. I know this isn’t a novel take, but I would argue that fixing a ton of what’s broken in America isn’t as hard or intractable as many “elites” make it out to be.  Gerrymandering distorts the political process by drawing district lines that all but ensure the majority party will win in the general election. Primary elections bring out highly engaged, motivated and more partisan voters, meaning that the extremes of either party decide who will move on to the general election.

Due to gerrymandering, the voter-advantaged candidate that wins the primary is almost assured a victory in the general election. But primaries, on average, rarely turn out more than 20% of a local electorate across both major parties. Think about that. If less than 20% of the electorate is voting for the eventual winner, and each party shares that 20% equally, it stands to reason that only about 9 or 10% of voters are deciding the legislative rulers of an entire district.  This is not what a healthy democracy looks like. 

In reality, gerrymandering rewards the most extreme members of a party and rewards elected officials to ONLY work for this narrow slice of voters if they want to be re-elected. In fact, if elected leaders in highly gerrymandered districts do compromise and reach for Bismarck’s “art of the next best”, they are all but assured to be out of a job when it comes time for reelection. Gerrymandering creates a direct incentive to not compromise. Perhaps worst of all, gerrymandering also creates the very noxious, media-hungry politicians we’re all so tired of seeing on the news alongside their latest stupid stunt or crazy take. These politicians are performing only for their 9% of voters. Is it any wonder why the rest of us can’t believe they keep getting reelected despite being such obvious idiots?

Second, we need more non-partisan elections, coupled with more equally mixed legislative districts.  Take my neighborhood in central Phoenix. We are a competitive district where both Democrats and Republicans win. It’s not unusual to see political signs of both parties equally scattered on lawns on my small street, sometimes with both Rs and Ds represented on the same lawn. On my small street (33 houses) live almost every race and match up you can imagine in America: there is an orthodox Jewish family, a Muslim family, a few secular Jewish families, evangelical Christian families, mixed race families, Hispanic families, a married lesbian couple, white families, married couples with kids, some without kids, single women in a few homes, a single mother raising her kids, and a divorced dad. We have Republican precinct leader living here as well as activist Progressives.  And you know what? We all get along. We have street parties and house parties, we help each other out when needed, and everyone knows everyone else and especially our dogs.

This is the America I love, and I bet the one most people want to live in.  This is an America that believes in each other, and our ideals, even if we don’t agree on our politics.  My wife and I are another example. She’s a lifelong Republican while I’m much more Progressive. But while we may not always agree on the path to get there, we always agree on the outcomes: more prosperity for more people, a justice system that is as fair to the poorest among us as it is to the most rich and famous, a healthcare system that is accessible to everyone, and an education system that creates smart citizens who can contribute to our economy, our community, and our civic society by being informed, critical thinkers with minds of their own.

Centrism can be all of this, but to get there we have to first stop ceding this space to a professional elite that prefers to protect a system built in their own interests, undo an electoral map that empowers the crazy few at the expense of the rational many, and start electing people who want to work for all of their constituents, not just their most vocal minority.