The space in the center
The email arrived early Monday from something calling itself the Centrist Project. It hailed the French presidential victory of the independent centrist, Emmanuel Macron. It declared that the same kind of “constructive disruption” could happen in American politics.
“Construction disruption” is a wonderful phrase and glorious notion. It suggests a rejection of Donald Trump’s ego-driven demagoguery, of Bernie Sanders’ shrill socialism and of Ted Cruz’s smarmy faux-religiosity.
It proposes instead to shake up the system by marginalizing all of that and all of those. It proposes to pursue instead a genuinely radical notion in contemporary American politics. That would be studied problem-solving to consider issues on their individual merits rather than through personalities and labels and extremist-group pressures that require adherence to tired biases and hatred of the other side.
The Centrist Project is trying to recruit candidates to practice Macron-styled politics in the United States.
That means competent, reasonable, traditionally qualified and establishment-tied but not establishment-beholden. It means fresh faces unattached to the obligations of the two political parties—and to the tired formulae and dysfunctional polarization and debilitation thereof. It suggests a philosophy and practice that blend establishment competence with outsider independence while spanning moderation and centrism.
That’s basically a space along the American political continuum from Obama and Clinton on the slight left to Romney and McCain and Kasich on the slight right. It is where a prevailing segment of the American electorate lies. It encompasses women, suburban voters and people who despair of the silliness they see in contemporary American politics.
These people want something that works independently of special-interest money while advancing center-left compassion, center-right responsibility and utter rejection of the insufferably noisy and angry and nonsensical extremes.
A good example: Obamacare is a national health-care reform patterned largely after Romneycare, a health-care reform undertaken when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts. A politics coalescing along the spectrum from Obamacare to Romneycare— from Obama to Romney—would find a way to make the current health-care reform effort work rather than merely pretend to repeal and replace it.
Obama-Romney would have been a reasonable presidential ticket. But that was out of the question under the current system that insists on putting one of them on one side of an impenetrable wall and the other on the other, and on making them lead fictional characters in a narrative requiring pretenses of personal disdain to keep the primitives on the extremes energized.
The tragic problem in the United States is that we are so invested, financially and practically, in the embedded two-party system that something resembling the French system of multiple movements offering credible alternatives can’t squeeze through.
The closest we came was with Ross Perot in 1992. He did well enough to get into the debates and mount a nationwide campaign. He might have done even better than his impressive 19 percent if he had been a little less mercurial and a little more steady and confidence-inspiring.
As it was, Trump took the Perot outsider model and imposed it on the Republican primary. That gave him the traditional viability of a major-party nomination even though he was plainly even more mercurial and less steady than Perot.
By running on the traditional party path, Trump rendered himself unable to govern with genuine independence. He must behave more often than not as a regular Republican, solicitous of Tea Party extremists and dismissive of Democrats who might help him fix Obamacare and reform trade policies and embark on a major infrastructure program.
That’s except for the fact that the Democrats’ base insists not on pursuit of problem-solving where possible, but on that thing to which Hillary Clinton declared herself the other day to now be devoted. “Resistance,” they call it.
If the president was an establishment-serious independent elected from outside the two parties, and if he or she proposed real solutions drawn from Obama thinking and Romney thinking and points between, then partisans in Congress might be forced to consider those solutions. That’s as opposed to today’s arbitrarily binary practices of blind loyalty or knee-jerk resistance to the party affiliation of the one offering them.
But, no, the role of Democrats now on health-care reform is to trivialize this most deeply human and potentially tragic of issues by singing—on the House floor—the taunting lyrics of “na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye” to Republicans after they voted to replace Obamacare with something absurd.
That was a cheer we used in high school more than 40 years ago when a player for the opposing basketball team fouled out.
I’m surprised the Republicans didn’t think to respond with “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon rind, look at the scoreboard and see who’s behind.”
That’s all our contemporary politics is anymore—which of the two dysfunctional parties is ahead, and the juvenile taunts of pubescence.
France did better than that.