The Centrist Delusion: ‘Middle Ground’
Politics Aren’t Moderate, They’re
Dangerous
By
Raoul Martinez
December 12, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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In
a world of competing narratives serving
competing interests, there’s always a
temptation to gravitate to the political
centre ground, the would-be midpoint
between two apparent extremes, with its
aura of moderation, reasonableness and
realism. After all, isn’t the truth
supposed to be ‘somewhere in the
middle’, a composite of competing
claims? The simple answer is no. Not in
science and not in politics. When there
are two opposing sides to a debate,
sometimes the midway position is
empirically false or morally abhorrent.
In every civilisation, the centre ground
of political opinion has been home to
dangerous, inaccurate and oppressive
ideas.
A consensus of the
powerful.
In
eighteenth century Britain, centrists
endorsed slavery, reformists called for
improved working conditions for slaves
and radicals demanded the abolition of
the entire institution. As historian
Adam Hochschild recounts, if in 1787
“you had stood on a London street corner
and insisted slavery was morally wrong
and should be stopped, nine out of ten
listeners would have laughed you off as
a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed
with you in principle, but assured you
ending slavery was wildly impractical.”
The centre ground is a social
construction, commanding most loyalty
from those whose privilege protects them
from the ravages of the system they
support.
The centre ground doesn’t necessarily
represent majority opinion — it’s a
consensus of the powerful. In the US,
for instance, public opinion has for
decades been in favour of universal
healthcare, while most US politicians —
Republicans and Democrats — have
staunchly opposed it. The shifting
centre ground has reframed political
perceptions to such an extent that
someone like Bernie Sanders, who would
once have been regarded as a
middle-of-the-road politician in the
mould of president Franklin D.
Roosevelt, has long been characterised
as a radical insurgent.
Struggles to abolish slavery, end child
labour, resist colonialism, extend
voting rights, achieve racial and gender
equality, and grant basic human rights
to all required courageous members of
society to challenge the dominant
identities and narratives of their day.
Those who did were labelled as
extremists, and sometimes punished with
imprisonment or death.
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It’s easy to look back at the injustices
of history with moral clarity and ignore
the fact that this clarity owes its
existence to the hard work of those who
came before us. Our moral compass is the
outcome of yesterday’s sacrifices and
struggles.
Extremists for love
or hate?
Today, Martin Luther King is viewed by
many as one of the greatest Americans in
history. In a 2011 survey, 94 percent of
those polled viewed him positively, yet
in his own lifetime, a 1966 Gallup poll
found that 63 percent of respondents
viewed him negatively. In 1961, a Gallup
survey showed that even when Americans
supported the stated goals of the civil
rights movement, a majority did not
support their tactics — sit-ins, freedom
buses and mass demonstrations. When King
spoke out against the Vietnam war, Life
magazine described his speech as
“demagogic slander”. King, Rosa Parks
and other civil rights activists were
regularly called ‘Anti-American’,
‘communists’ and ‘traitors’. The FBI
referred to him as “the most dangerous
negro leader in this Nation”. Robert
Kennedy signed off on a surveillance
program to monitor King’s home, offices,
phones and hotel rooms, as well as those
of his colleagues. At one point, the FBI
even sent him an unsigned letter
encouraging him to kill himself. Why?
King was deeply critical of the centrist
politics of the day. His demands for
change challenged the legal, cultural
and political mainstream. In his famous
Letter From Birmingham Jail, he
described his views of the sympathetic
so-called moderate:
“I have almost reached the
regrettable conclusion that the
Negro’s great stumbling block in his
stride toward freedom is not the
White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku
Klux Klanner, but the white
moderate, who is more devoted to
“order” than to justice; who prefers
a negative peace which is the
absence of tension to a positive
peace which is the presence of
justice; who constantly says: “I
agree with you in the goal you seek,
but I cannot agree with your methods
of direct action”; who
paternalistically believes he can
set the timetable for another man’s
freedom; who lives by a mythical
concept of time and who constantly
advises the Negro to wait for a
“more convenient season.” Shallow
understanding from people of good
will is more frustrating than
absolute misunderstanding from
people of ill will. Lukewarm
acceptance is much more bewildering
than outright rejection.”
King was often called an extremist.
Initially he was distressed by the term
but later “gained a measure of
satisfaction from the label”. As he put
it, “the question is not whether we will
be extremists, but what kind of
extremists we will be. Will we be
extremists for hate or for love? Will we
be extremists for the preservation of
injustice or for the extension of
justice?”. King felt that the world
desperately needed creative extremists
for “love, truth and goodness” and
argued that freedom was never given away
by systems of power. It always had to be
won by “strong, persistent and
determined action”.
One of the reasons King is celebrated
now is that his legacy has been
sanitised in ways that distort what he
believed and fought for. He is
remembered for his inspiring message of
racial equality, an area where the
dominant story has been revised, but his
message of economic justice and his
anti-war campaigning are deemphasised or
ignored. Few people associate him with
the view that the global system of
capitalism takes “necessities from the
masses to give luxuries to the classes”
and has “outlived its usefulness”. These
views are as challenging today as they
were in King’s time.
The saintly aura of bygone human rights
icons is rarely matched by those who
wage the same struggles today. They are
constructed after a battle has been won,
and in ways that prevent us learning
from history. How many of us would have
supported King and the movement he
represented when to do so came at a
cost, when the struggle was dangerous,
the methods unpopular, and when those
who did support him were dismissed as
cultists or threats to national
security?
It
takes courage, effort, and imagination
to rewrite dominant narratives, to
perceive the familiar as extreme and the
normal as outrageous. It takes robust
understanding to develop and defend
convictions that are incompatible with
the assumptions of peers and the
powerful. This is the moral challenge of
every generation: to see beyond the
prejudices, lies and smears of their own
time; to identify the injustices,
threats and problems of their era, and
work together to overcome them. The
location of the centre ground is never a
given — it is precisely what we want to
change when we engage in political
struggle.
The unconvincing mask
of moderation.
In
my own lifetime, centre ground
politicians have launched illegal wars
based on false claims, in which hundreds
of thousands of innocent people were
killed; made billions in profits from
selling arms to the most repressive
regimes on the planet; systematically
dismantled the regulations of the
financial sector leading to one of the
most devastating economic crashes in
history; pursued, unnecessarily,
economic austerity which has resulted in
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
people and inflicted great suffering on
millions more; allowed tens of thousands
of desperate souls to drown in the
Mediterranean; and all while overseeing
soaring inequality within and between
nations. These are serious and tragic
failings, but the problems with
business-as-usual politics go deeper
still. If we take the warnings of the
scientific community seriously — and we
must — the very survival of our
civilisation depends on us radically and
urgently redefining the centre ground of
political opinion.
Confronted
with the extremism of the far right,
many in the establishment are clamouring
for a return to the centre-ground, to
turn back the clock to the 1990s. These
dynamics played out clearly in the US
election of 2016. During the Democratic
primaries,
poll after poll
showed that Bernie Sanders, with his
populist progressivism, stood a far
better chance of beating Donald Trump
than Hillary Clinton. The data signalled
that a contest between Trump and Clinton
would be extremely close, with some
polls putting Trump ahead of Hillary,
but that a contest between Trump and
Sanders would very much favour Sanders.
In May 2016,
analytics expert Dustin Woodard wrote
that Sanders “beats Trump in every
single poll and by an average margin of
14.1 percent.” Yet institutional support
— within the Democratic party itself,
but also in the wider media — rallied
behind Clinton. According to Democratic
National Committee Chair, Donna Brazile,
this support extended to rigging the
primaries to keep Sanders out. At a time
of deep anti-establishment sentiment,
this was a gift to Trump. Ultimately,
Clinton won the popular vote but lost
the election. A poll on the eve of the
election suggested that Sanders would
have emerged with a large majority.
After the election, pollster guru Nate
Silver concluded “Bernie probably would
have won”.
Clinton’s
loss is symptomatic of something deeper:
an establishment committed to holding
the unconvincing mask of moderation
firmly in place over a corrupt,
exploitative and unsustainable system.
Trump and the emboldened far right
across Europe represent a new category
of threat, but the reality behind this
mask reveals greater continuity between
Trump and previous administrations than
we have been led to believe. Trump’s
rhetoric about immigrants is hateful,
but
Obama deported more immigrants
than all of the presidents in the
twentieth century combined. Trump’s idea
to build a wall along the Mexico border
has rightly angered many, but in effect
the wall already exists, consisting of
an extensive system of detection
technologies, guards, and hundreds of
miles of barriers and fences.
Moreover,
under Obama, the annual budget for
border and immigration enforcement rose
to $5bn more than all other federal law
enforcement agencies combined. Trump’s
brash climate denial is terrifying, but
Obama’s environmental record was dismal.
According to climate scientist James
Hansen,
he “failed miserably”
on climate change, presiding over
policies that were “late, ineffectual
and partisan”. Indeed, under Obama’s
watch, the US became the world’s number
one producer of fossil fuels; oil, gas,
and coal subsidies rose by 45 percent
(to almost $20 billion a year); and the
US repeatedly weakened climate
negotiations, resisting any legally
binding emission targets. The assessment
of
Harvard professor Cornell West
is that: “Despite some progressive words
and symbolic gestures, Obama chose to
ignore Wall Street crimes, reject
bailouts for homeowners, oversee growing
inequality and facilitate war crimes
like US drones killing innocent
civilians abroad.”
Redefining the centre
ground.
The centrism of our time
is the gateway drug to the far right.
This lesson needs to be learned — and
quickly. Just as the US establishment
treated Sanders as a greater threat than
Trump, the UK establishment — even its
more progressive wing — has treated
Jeremy Corbyn as a greater threat than
Boris Johnson. As a result, during the
present UK general election campaign, I
have heard friends warn of the dangers
of
all
extremes: both Corbyn on the left and
Johnson on the right. I have seen the
Liberal Democrats attempting to position
themselves as the sensible choice
between these wild alternatives. A
string of prominent voices, from Tony
Blair to John Major, have called for a
return to the centre ground. They, and
many others, suffer from
the
centrist delusion:
the notion that the existing
centre-ground, almost by definition, is
the home of reasonableness and
moderation. It’s intellectually lazy,
oblivious to the fact that it has been
the establishment consensus — embodied
by the likes of Tony Blair and Barack
Obama — that has created the
intersecting inequality, democratic and
climate crises we now face. Failure to
recognise the disease of toxic centrism
prevents us treating its ugly symptoms:
Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu,
Modi and now Johnson. Ideologies of hate
are thriving on the failure of
establishment politics to respond to the
crises it has unleashed.
In
the UK’s imminent election, the choices
are clear. The Conservative manifesto
was described by Paul Johnson of the
Institute
for Fiscal Studies
as being so lacking in substance that it
would be inadequate for a budget, let
alone a full term in government. And the
promises that have been made (such as
50,000 new nurses and 40 new hospitals)
have not survived scrutiny. But we don’t
need a manifesto to know what we are
going to get. A party funded by
billionaires and shielded by the
billionaire-owned press does not exist
to serve the majority. The Tories have
been in power for almost a decade, with
Johnson offering them firm support
throughout most of that time. Judging by
their record, we can expect more NHS
privatisation, more tax cuts for the
rich, more inequality, more
homelessness, more public and private
debt, more hungry children, more
underfunded schools, more weapons sold
to human-rights-abusing regimes, more
scapegoating, and more broken promises.
And in the context of the climate crisis
— the most serious issue we face — their
manifesto, should it be emulated,
amounts to a death sentence for
countless people in the Global South and
a grim future for us all.
Internationally, a Johnson government
constitutes a boost to the far right
which has been chalking up victories
from the US to Brazil to Hungary.
The Liberal Democrats embody the toxic
centre ground. Their 2045
decarbonisation target is a polite form
of climate denial — inadequate to the
extreme. Their leader, Jo Swinson, has
voted with the Tories over 800 times,
more than a number of Tory politicians.
These votes include supporting fracking
and backing a punishing austerity regime
which not only was economically
illiterate,
costing
Britain over £100 billion,
but is implicated in the deaths of over
120,000
Britons.
One of the researchers behind this
finding called it a form of ‘economic
murder’. Shortly before the election,
the Liberal Democrats abstained on a
motion demonstrating opposition to NHS
privatisation. Since the start of the
campaign, they have repeatedly misled
the electorate about how to vote
tactically to keep out the Tories. By
splitting the vote, they may well hand
the keys of No. 10 to Johnson,
guaranteeing a disastrous Brexit, and
contravening their stated aim for the
election. Perhaps most tellingly, from
Gordon Brown to Ed Miliband to Corbyn
they have shown a far greater
willingness to work with the
Conservatives than Labour.
A new common sense.
The Labour manifesto, in stark contrast,
is a big step towards a genuinely
reasonable and rational centre ground —
a new common sense. Placed in
international context, their spending
and taxation plans, endorsed by hundreds
of senior economists, are unremarkable.
Were every spending pledge implemented,
the UK would still be spending less than
Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Finland and
France. Were corporation tax raised to
26%, as Labour intend, it would still be
lower than in Germany, France,
Australia, Canada and Japan. It may not
be radical according to international
standards but, in the context of British
politics, it represents a warm embrace —
a decisive break with neoliberalism that
reverses austerity, renationalises the
NHS, rescues our schools, removes the
debt burden from our students and makes
affordable housing a reality. When it
comes to addressing the climate crisis,
Labour would turn the UK into a world
leader while creating a million green
jobs in the process. More needs to be
done, but it’s a bold start — one judged
by Friends of the Earth to make them
greener than even the Greens. Labour’s
Brexit position — a referendum within
six months with a credible Leave option
beside a Remain option — is the height
of moderation in a nation split down the
middle by the issue.
If
the majority of people simply voted in
their own interests, Labour would come
close to winning almost every seat in
parliament on December 12. Yet the
billionaire-owned British media — parked
as it is on a socially and ecologically
toxic centre ground — has made the
choice between a warm embrace and punch
in the face seem confusing and
difficult. How have they achieved this?
Mainly by moving the conversation away
from policies, voting records and party
funders, and onto the reputations of
party leaders. It’s easy to destroy
someone’s reputation, much harder to
destroy support for the NHS, affordable
housing, well-funded schools and a
million green jobs.
Since his election as leader, Corbyn has
been attacked for being incompetent, a
threat to national security,
disrespectful to the queen, a terrorist
sympathiser, a foreign spy, a Russian
stooge and, most recently, an
antisemite. From within his own party, a
small but determined group of MPs and
officials have been working to force him
out, orchestrating mass resignations
from the shadow cabinet, public warnings
of electoral disaster, repeated pleas
for him to resign, a failed leadership
challenge, and numerous attempts to
smear his reputation and undermine his
credibility. Those behind these attacks
have demonstrated a willingness to
sabotage the electoral chances of their
own party in order to achieve this aim.
This is nothing new. It is worth
remembering that socialist Tony Benn,
who passed away at the age of 88 having
achieved near national treasure status,
was — when running for deputy leader of
the Labour party — viciously attacked by
the media and labelled “the most
dangerous man in Britain”. He was
demonised in news articles and cartoons,
repeatedly called “mad”, a “loony
leftist”, and once was depicted as
Hitler in a Daily Express cartoon. Like
Corbyn, he was attacked by other Labour
MPs such as Tony Crosland who described
him as “just a bit cracked”. The media
attacks reached their highest intensity
when Benn ran for the deputy leadership.
David Powell, the author of Benn’s
biography, described the ensuing
campaign as “venomous”. According to
Labour MP and Benn supporter, Michael
Meacher, ‘There was never less than a
half-page of vitriol in the press every
day, and the source was the right wing
of the Labour party.” When Benn stood in
a by-election in 1983, the day of
polling saw the Sun run a feature with
the headline: “Benn on the couch: a top
psychiatrist’s view of Britain’s leading
leftie”. The article diagnosed Benn as
“a Messiah figure hiding behind the mask
of the common man … greedy for power and
willing to do anything to get it.” Benn
himself concluded that press owners used
their papers “to campaign
single-mindedly in defence of their
commercial interests and the political
policies which will protect them.”
Protecting privilege.
Those holding most of the wealth and
power in society need centrist politics
to rationalise and protect their extreme
privilege. They work to normalise
whatever policies and ideas will favour
them. Over the last few decades, this
has meant low taxation, deregulation and
privatisation — neoliberalism — coupled
with an amoral, exploitative and
extractivist foreign policy justified
under the rubric of ‘national interest’.
To succeed, a compliant media is
essential. It is absurd to call the
media ‘free’ when it is controlled by a
handful of billionaires whose outlets
each day feed millions of people words
and images designed to reproduce the
toxic centre ground from which they
profit. Historian Mark Curtis recently
conducted a search of the UK national
press spanning the three months leading
up to the election. He found 1450
articles on “Corbyn and antisemitism”
and only 164 covering “Johnson and
Islamophobia”. He also found 272 pieces
on “Corbyn and the IRA” compared with
only 2 mentioning “Johnson, Yemen and
war crimes”.
In
some parts of the world, individuals and
groups that threaten entrenched
interests are assassinated. In Britain,
they are character assassinated. When
you are swindling most of the people,
most of the time, the only way to
engineer consent is through deception.
This is a constant, yet the current Tory
campaign has reached Trumpian
proportions of deceit. To give just one
example, the Coalition for Reform in
Political Advertising, a non-partisan
group, have found that 88 percent of the
Conservative party’s promoted ads, on
Facebook and elsewhere, contain false
claims. Hundreds of the ads put out by
the Liberal Democrats were found to be
potentially misleading. As for Labour,
not a single ad was found to contain
falsehoods or distortions.
We
have long been told that there’s no
smoke without fire. Unfortunately, in
the world of politics, not only is there
smoke without fire, there is often fire
without smoke. Real crises go unnoticed
while fictional crises saturate the news
cycle. This pattern has brought our
civilisation to a crossroads. The scale
of the crises faced in Britain and the
world requires a rapid, bold, ambitious
change of direction. Winning this change
requires sustained struggle each and
every day. But some days are of special
significance, presenting opportunities
to dramatically broaden or narrow our
collective horizons. December 12, 2019
is one of those days. Let’s use it to
start this change. Let’s elect a Labour
government.
Raoul Martinez is a philosopher and the
author of Creating Freedom: Power,
Control and the Fight for our Future.
