Beware The Radical Center!!!

I wrote the first part of this post as a reply to Booman’s so-called “critique” of a comment that I made on his recent article We Need to Stop Arguing About Neoliberalism.

That comment began with the words:

Booman’s right, of course.

We do need to stop arguing about neoliberalism.

It is dead.

Killed by its own compromises with neoconservatism and metamorphosized into neocentrism, which itself is dying a slow death as it flails around trying to get rid of Trump by blaming everything and everybody on earth for its own failures.

He replied:

Quite possibly the most unintentionally stupid thing you’ve ever written.

And I answered:

We shall see, Booman.

Just because I disagree with your conclusions does not mean that I am “stupid.” I see things differently from my position in life than do you.

I think that the entire Democratic Party…if it does not soon reorganize its whole approach…is doomed to massive failure. Not necessarily a total electoral failure…not yet…but a moral failure beyond words.

The whole, system-supported middle is compressing towards the center, leaving more and more people isolated on the outside of its self-imposed boundaries. There will come a time…sooner or later…when there are more people excluded outside of that artificially constructed and maintained “center” than there are inside. When that balance changes, another, even more radically non-linear event like Trump’s rise to power will happen….they call them “revolutions” in the history books, and they are always nasty. Only a change in viewpoint from the middle will prevent that, and in my view only the Democratic Party has even an outside shot at that sort of change. If it continues on its constantly compressing, morally compromising trek towards the middle…the Schumer/Pelosi middle, the Clinton/Obama middle…then there will be no longer be an effective, legally constituted part of the system that truly tries to represent the excluded.

The excluded…something like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” but including those abandoned by the left, the center and the right.

I do not know when that will happen, but the process is already under way.

When the “deplorables” outnumber the center and cannot be bought off because of economic problems, then we will see the shit hit the fan.

Watch.

Only the Democrats can turn that fan off, and they are not even trying to do it.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

We shall see.

Won’t we.

AG

Read on for more:
So here I am today with a day off…or more accurately, a day to practice my many instruments with no particular schedule to meet. I mostly practice active physical approaches that are very much like calisthenics…what some people have called “musical isometrics’ or “musical dynamic self-resistance”. These exercises require frequent rest periods, which allow me the luxury of wandering through the internet in search of interesting material.

And today I found a post on Counterpunch that thoroughly agrees with what I have been saying here about the failures of neocentrism – Beware the Radical Center, by Ryan Shah.

Go read it.

Some pertinent quotes are in order.

Beware the Radical Center

“You watch the neighborhood, we’ll watch the skies” reads one particularly curious web image which include pictures of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and Martin Luther King Jr. superimposed over the Manhattan skyline. Though the image’s exact origins are unclear, it is a perfect representation of the latest repackaging of neoliberalism: the “radical center.” The radical center doubles down on the neoliberal project which, after complicity in myriad crises, is sputtering to a grinding halt. At the forefront of this “radical” movement to maintain the political and social status quo are the wunderkind Macron, Trudeau and, occasionally, Angela Merkel, always represented by the mainstream media as confident, friendly and competent. From the perspective of the radical center, these custodians of our brave new world are more than just leaders of our global order – they transcend it. In contrast to the likes of Trump and Corbyn, who attack the status quo for its shortcomings, Macron and Trudeau are the figureheads of a harmonious, peaceful, intelligently designed world system that has, luckily for us, transcended the petty partisan divides that have hitherto stifled human development. The latent message which underpins this new movement is that neoliberal capitalism is not just the only way, it is the right way.

“The Future of American Politics”

To begin, what is the precise difference between the traditional political center and the radical center? In terms of substance: not a lot. We can, however, chart one core difference between the new paragons of the radical center and previous centrist politicians; it lies in the way that contemporary radical centrists stake out their political project in opposition to a politics of extremism and division. The radical center is specific to the way that neoliberals have articulated their project following the inauguration of renewed rightist, and leftist, energy following the election of Trump, Brexit and Corbyn’s impressive electoral challenge. The term, sometimes synonymous with Blair and Clinton’s “Third Way,” became a more complete political project following the publication of Ted Halstead and Michael Lind’s 2001 book The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics. In it, Halstead and Lind lament the partisan gridlock which plagued American politics and offer up the “radical center” as their ingenious political solution. This “radical” political proposal is, despite its name, a mere repackaging of centrist, neoliberal political goals which were, at the time, pervasive in the American system. These goals included the privatization of social security and the granting of $6,000 to every child at birth (in lieu of a more extensive suite of social programs). The radical center, then as now, is the standard privatization and de-regulation of neoliberalism, yet presented as a sort of transcendent salvation to atavistic partisanship. The thread between the radical center of the early 2000’s and the emergent radical center today is precisely its claim to transcendence of an ineffectually polarized and partisan political system. Macron, Trudeau and Merkel all support a kind of “progress,” though this progress is never defined in positive, explicit terms. Rather this progress is defined negatively, against the headwinds of emergent far-right, and far-left, movements. What the politicians of the radical center neglect to tell you, however, is that the cure is worse than the disease.

A Politics of Transcendence

At the official launch of his Presidential campaign, Macron passionately announced that what his new party, En Marche, wants “is not to unite the left, it is not to unite the right; it is to unite France!” This pronouncement embodies perfectly the essential kernel of the radical centrist narrative – the narrative which predicates the radical center’s claim to be the solution, rather than the problem. Unlike the petty partisan ideologies of left and right, the radical center considers itself to be a sort of science rather than a political movement that favours a particular set of social relations over others. This scientific and pragmatic dimension emerges from the radical center’s claim to apolitical transcendence, a transcendence that elevates radical centrist thought and leaders above existing social cleavages and political coalitions. Macron, and his proponents, provide the perfect example of this phenomenon. Macron claims to be “neither right nor left,” but, instead, for France. This vague proclamation obscures Macron’s actual political program by appealing to the ethic of fraternité – a fraternité carved out in ostensible opposition to the divisive rhetoric of his then opponents, Le Pen and Mélenchon. What Macron’s narrative of post-partisan unity neglects is, of course, the deeply divisive and inequitable political program that his election has inaugurated. The first major policy announcement by his government is a set of tax reforms which amount to an enormous transfer of wealth to France’s richest citizens. Such a policy should be no surprise, given Macron’s complicity in the implementation of the anti-labor, anti-union El Khomri law in 2016.

A piece written for The Hill by David Anderson entitled Why the `radical center’ must be the future of American politics celebrates Macron-style centrism and provides us some additional insight into the self-perception of this new re-packaging of tried-and-true neoliberalism. Anderson writes that “the radical center does not regard itself as a “centrist” position at all. It doesn’t really sit in between left and right.” He goes on to suggest that the “radical center transcends left and right but takes important elements of both sides.” What exactly these important elements are is left to the readers imagination – instead, Anderson goes on, at length, about the importance of naming this movement something other than the radical center because “the language of the “radical center” does not play well in the United States.” Here, the vacuous nature of the radical center is apparent: the radical center fails to offer positive policy alternatives to the status quo. Rather, it merely provides a new aesthetic treatment to crisis-prone neoliberalism. The radical center points fingers at partisan political movements and positions itself above them – reasserting the Blairite claim to centrist transcendence over political and economic matters. This transcendence is, of course, an unabashed lie. Macron and, as we will discover below, Trudeau, are inarguably partisan politicians whose political programs are reiterations of the disastrous status quo which has produced simultaneous social, economic and environmental crises.

Staying the Course

The narrative of the radical center, as we have seen, relies on a rather noxious sleight-of-hand. The same type of policies and social relationships which have produced the vast array of crises our world faces are given a new aesthetic treatment – and presented as the solution to the impending cataclysms they, themselves, generated. Justin Trudeau’s recent Earth Day escapade provides a further example to illustrate this process. On Earth Day, Trudeau kayaked on the Niagara River – the perfect opportunity to demonstrate Trudeau’s commitment to protecting, and enjoying, the environment. While the outing was a pleasant surprise for several passers-by, this particular act of political performance erases the political reality of Trudeau tenure as Prime Minister of Canada and of neoliberalism more broadly. Trudeau’s government is responsible for accelerating the climate crisis thanks to his government’s decision to approve the Kinder Morgan Pipeline, an oil pipeline connecting Canada’s environmentally disastrous oil sands to its west coast. The Trudeau present on Earth Day told a different story by imbuing himself and, by extension, his government’s record with an environmentalist aesthetic. In spite of his clearly unsustainable politics, or perhaps because of them, this media venture was used by Trudeau as a platform to speak about the urgency of the climate crisis. In a video taken shortly after his kayaking expedition, Trudeau urged global action against the impending array of ecological disasters that his government has been complicit in expediting. In his speech Trudeau lamented the damage already done to the environment, but reasserted his hope for a greener future. Still wearing the life jacket from his kayaking expedition, he announced that “the future is still bright for those who have the courage to confront hard truths and the confidence to stay the course.” The truth of this articulation of Trudeau’s radically centrist political vision, and others of like it, lies in Trudeau’s suggestion that confidence is required to “stay the course.” What is absent from this speech, of course, is the fact that the course being charted by Trudeau and his colleagues has directly produced the impending climate crisis. The view that supporting extractive capitalism somehow requires “confidence” on the part of both the government and individuals nullifies a broader, systemic critique which sees the climate crisis as actively perpetuated by the same agents of capital which Trudeau, and his radical centrist brethren, are happily in bed with. Instead, the solution offered by the radical center is merely “staying the course,” a phrase that ironically smacks of Hillary Clinton’s pathetic “America is already great” retort to Trump’s fascistic nostalgia.

–snip–

Perhaps that image with which Mr. Shah started his article might better be captioned this way: