Will Centrist Politics Ever Return?

It seems the GOP has been taken over by a Tea Party xenophobic streak, and the Democratic Party has been taken over by the MoveOn.org extreme pacifist/PC wing. Not coincidently, these two events happened during both Bush II and Barack Obama. Both TP and MO people seem to know no nuance, no reason, no compromise, and the presidential nominee hopefuls are pandering to them hard. I do think Hillary is trying her best to bring back the centrism to the party, but Obama, who rode the MoveOn crowd to the nomination, seems to have nearly made centrist wing gangrene. Maybe its curable, maybe not. I do have hope from her foreign policy speech: however, I do want her back down on the refugees and “radical Islamic terror.”

Moderate incumbent Dems and Repubs always face primaries these days, or mass calls to face them, if they don’t vote the “correct way” on an issue. Many GOPers have faced it on illegal immigration, and Democrats are likely to do so on Iran deal and likely the refugee thing. What ever happened to representative democracy?

In the GOP race, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie are at the bottom of the pack of the varsity team, while Trump and Carson both lead. In the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, is enough of a challenge to Clinton to make her have to work, which shouldn’t be given how unpopular socialism broadly is in America.

Why are moderates dead? Is this a product of the internet echo chambers that activists sit in, which makes them less tolerant of non-right/left wing views? Is it a product of the Fox News era media? Both? Or are Bush and Obama merely D/R versions of each other?

The incentives both parties have right now, or at least think they have, leads them to go to more base appealing strategies than swing voter strategies. As long as elections are nearly 50-50 affairs, political parties will make it a race to get their voters out. This will stop as soon as an election is decided by 10 points or more.

We also need more pure swing voters. Right now there’s so much vitriol between the parties that voters tend to take sides and their decision doesn’t consist of much more than “vote for my party or stay home”. When the parties’ competition was a little healthier, a lot more voters were willing to consider both. Eventually things will settle down. The Presidential primary process still favors more moderate candidates. The next President could be a much less divisive figure than we expect, which would raise the approval rating of both parties and create more voters willing to consider candidates from both. Then you get more swing voters and candidates have to appeal to them.

Another problem is two consecutive shitty administrations and so everyone’s pissed off.

It’s tempting to think of what’s going on now as the new normal, but sooner than you think things will get upended again. Either demographic change will give the Democrats dominance as they’ve long hoped, or Republicans will get a clue and learn how to govern.

Centrist politics returned in 2009 and have never left. The ACA is centrist. Avoiding stupid wars is centrist. The Iran deal was centrist. Most things Obama has done have been centrist.

This focus on verbiage – that saying “radical Islamic terror” has magical power that would actually affect anything anywhere – is ridiculous. They all hate the terrorists, and oppose them, and they all call them something bad (extremists, Islamists, terrorists, etc.).

Moderates aren’t dead, except in the Republican party. Bernie is way to the left of Obama – Obama and Clinton barely differ in policy (you know that Clinton supported the Iran deal, right?). Even W was moderate compared to the present version of the Republican party – W tried to make effort to speak in diplomatic language, even as he was launching dumb wars.

We don’t live in moderate times. War and economic collapse will engender some strong feelings. Plus, informed voters tend to be more passionate, one way or another. Being a mushy beltway moderate ain’t that respectable.

What? Where? That would be hilarious! I want Warren or Hillary to tell some senator to check their privilege then get in a limo.

The “edge” types are always better able to motivate people, given that their base comes “pre-passionate”. I mean, think about it. Imagine marchers saying “What do we want? Moderation. When do we want it? Fairly soon.”

People wishing a more centrist politic will have to work for moderates of any stripe over the extremists. And will have to deal with some really unsexy topics like redistricting reform.

Kids, can you say “false equivalence”?

Oh yeah. :smack:

Since Reagan the right has been getting more and more extreme, and as they elect Tea Party type candidates who can’t actually chop the head off of government they are getting more and more angry. The popularity of Trump and Carson is from them not being happy with any politician who had to actually get something done, even Cruz.

As for the Democrats, when have true moderates been forced out of the party? Pacifism is not the same as not being willing to send American troops to pointless wars. Pacifist presidents don’t dump tons of drones on terrorists. And PC to the right means being unwilling to use ethnic slurs.

It is weird- there isn’t a single moderate GOP candidate, all are racing to be shown as the most reactionary possible. Now, I know a lot of Repubs are moderates- why didnt one candidate try to capture the center?

QFT

And in a subject that I have been involved recently shows, things like Cap-n-trade were centrist solutions to get industry involved in controlling issues like acid rain, it has worked well for that and it was going to be very useful to deal with the emissions of CO2 that need to be controlled.

The current Republican party was compelled by powerful interests to avoid can-n-trade like if it was the plague and extremists with money then removed many Republican moderates from office. Now we see that the few options left are regulations and taxes, that are also by “coincidence” anathema to the current crop of Republicans.

For this and many other reasons all Republicans that want to see common sense in their party once more need to see the *Climate of Doubt *documentary from Frontline to see one of the big factors that has given us the extremism seen in the right nowadays:

Because angry voters are motivated voters, the ones who are most likely to turn out in the primaries. So every candidate has to pass inspection by angry voters if they want to get enough delegates to even have a shot at the nomination. And angry voters don’t particularly respond to “let’s reach across the fence and find workable solutions,” as a rallying cry.

Sure. But with such a large field, which splits the ‘angry voters’ vote, there’s room for a moderate. And who is to say that moderates can’t be angry that the extremists are dominating the nomination procedure? Or that the Teapartiers are controlling the GOP?

To me it makes more sense to look at it like pre-modern, modern and post-modern politics. The Tea Party and the GOP base is mostly pre-modern (evangelicals, puritans, absolutists etc), but also has (or at least had) a modern part too. The (D) seems to consist of modern (like Hillary I guess) and post-modern types (Obama and Sanders).

The left/right/center scale is outdated and I think it is more valid to look at the elections through an evolutionary filter. Most Western nations today are pretty firmly in the modern era collectively, but a few (like the Netherlands and Scandinavia) have become mainly post-modern. The US is trailing behind because of low education levels and a polarizing political arena.

The pre-moderns have been phased out or marginalized in most western societies but for some reason are still going strong in the US. They are obviously freaking out now that their society is being transformed into something so alien as a pluralistic and relativistic community that encourages multiple perspectives. For a good reason. The post-modern worldview IS anathema to many core values of the pre-modern era. Gay marriage, feminism, multiculturalism… all these are very real threats to anything pre-modern.

From the outside it looks like the US is at a decision point on whether to take the leap from a modern to a post-modern nation, or whether the reactionary will be able to pull it back into the never ending battle of “Good vs Evil” and “Us vs Them” that characterizes the pre-modernists.

Will centrism return? No. Not the way it was. What will (hopefully) happen is that the US “goes green” and the new centrists will be the ones filling the gap between modern and post-modern views. Hopefully the US will relatively quickly be able to get rid of its pre-modern contingent as they die off or get access to better education (they are mainly old or uneducated).

In 2012 Jon Huntsman, who was the closest thing to a “moderate Republican” candidate, got less than1% of votes in the Iowa caucus and 16.8% in the New Hampshire primary before he dropped out of the race.

Guess we skipped right over the existentialist politics.

#Analysis. Now let us examine your little pet theory…

Puritans, sadly, are all but extinct these days in the capital “P” sense and while soft puritanism does exist in Evangelical Christianity, it also exists in the moral righteousness of progressive movements. Also by what criteria are you labeling evangelicals “pre-modern”?

Now this is even more ridiculous. How are you distinguishing between “modern” and “post-modern” Democrats? About the only thing that Obama and Sanders have in common that Hillary Clinton doesn’t (excluding being male) is that the former two opposed the Iraq War while the latter voted for it which seems like an odd criteria. In other respects, Obama and Clinton as social liberals have far more in common then either does with the left-social democrat Bernie Sanders and indeed on some socioeconomic issues Clinton may very well be to the left of the current President.

Where have you been for the last 8 years? In an era of rising income inequality, mass un- and underemployment, declining conditions for the working and lower-middle classes, disastrous austerity policies, erosion of community, renewed assaults on the welfare state, and signs of Russian-style demographic catastrophe for large portions of working-class America the politics of the left and right have never been more relevant and certainly much more so then these pseudoscientific musings.

Again, how are you defining this?

The United States has a fairly high rate of those who’ve completed a tertiary education degree-it is roughly in the same range as the Scandinavian states, Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand and outpaces the Germans by a healthy margin.

As opposed to your “post-modern” utopia of the Netherlands where a party that makes your average Republican look like Bill Maher is in charge of the Dutch Bible Belt?

Pluralism has been a defining element of American society for decades and quite frankly something that the US has done a better job at compared to Europe-for the most obvious examples note that anti-Semitism is far less prevalent here compared to Europe and there is no serious proposal to ban hijabs from school. And naturally in an era of atomistic individualism and erosion of community, people are going to be upset-the only question who the ire will be directed at and what the solution is.

Postmodernism is the death of the left. Funny you should cite those particular examples-even as the US has national gay marriage, there are quite a few European states (including Germany and Italy) that has yet implement gay marriage which is quite remarkable considering America’s greater size and religosity. Meanwhile, of course the US has one of the permissive abortion laws in the world compared to much of Europe which has far more strict restrictions on (for example) at what stage of pregnancy an abortion may be performed. Finally, as we are seeing in the electoral successes of right-wing populist parties (UKIP, FN, PVV, Swedish Democrats, DPP etc.), the Europeans aren’t particularly taking well to multiculturalism-partially because some see is as undermining other liberal values such as rights for women and homosexuals.

Neither. Whenever progressive movements have achieved success-be it the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights for racial minorities, fighting fascist and communist totalitarianism, or the great expansion of social welfare and labour rights under the New Deal liberals of America and the social democrats of Europe, they have won by clearly defining the battle as one of “us vs. them” and of right and wrong not through the useless sophristries of the relativist morality of postmodernism.

The last thing America needs is it to resemble Israeli politics where it is more likely that some tech company executive who sneers at Christianity because he happened to come across Dawkins and Nietschze in high school is more likely to be a Democrat than a Southern Baptist nurse in a Mississippi hospital or a conservative Roman Catholic fireman in Cleveland, Ohio. Of course that lovely little touch at the end where you hope the great unwashed reactionary masses kindly die off or at least read some Sam Harris to enlighten themselves nicely shows everything wrong with the modern left in the developed world.

Now for something at least approaching the actual answer:

The reality is that what is called “centrism” in the United States really refers to only one brand of centrism, namely the centrism of the upper and upper-middle classes of the Republic and promoted by such periodicals as Wall Street Journal and the Economist and such politicians as Bloomberg and Chafee. This variety of centrism which, at least in my view, had its peak popularity in the Bush years before going into a well-deserved comatose state never had mass popularity because it represented such narrow class interests and anyhow was an utterly bland ideology incapable of rousing one’s spirits (which of course is the same reason mainline Protestantism is hemmorraging members). The ideology of this brand of centrism was essentially “moderate heroism” that generally urged the “golden mean” on everything regardless of the merits of both sides although given its backers, it tended to arrive at neoliberal positions on socioeconomic issues and permissive positions on cultural ones. Yet somehow, most of the American electorate was unenthusiastic about the prospect of a centrist commonwealth where gay marriage would be legal and assault weapons would be banned in exchange for brutal austerity policies in the middle of a recession and privatized Social Security and Medicare (see Simpson-Bowles).

Yet, there is another brand of centrism-a form of centrism which is popular, social, and national that also exists and unlike the above-mentioned Episcopalianism of political ideologies, may be gathering force. This form of centrism is identified here and is based on the very common-sensical observation that someone who say opposes raising the retirement age for Social Security need not be favourable to permissive abortion laws. Thus here you arrive at centrism not by pedantically looking for the middle ground on every issue but rather combining right-wing positions on cultural issues with left-wing ones on socioeconomic ones or vice versa (or even mixing and matching positions within those two broad groupings such as opposing both gun control and marijuana bans). For the working- and lower-middle classes of America (especially its white component), one begins to arrive at the semblance of a coherent ideology albeit one that is rarely given voice to due to the lack of representation in the cultural elite-an ideology that may be called populist and combines strong support for most of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state with opposition to means-tested benefits that they perceive as benefiting only the “wrong”/lumpenproles and cultural conservatism exacerbated by the perception that the liberal cultural elites of America are ignoring and even persecuting them. These are the sons and daughters of those who supported George Wallace in 1968 and they can be won over by either party depending on which issues are emphasized. Of the major party candidates, Jim Webb may have been their strongest champion although he suffered from a certain obscurity and the fact that he himself seems to have mistook his native popular centrism with elite centrism leading him to flirt with #NoLabels and assorted cretins. Instead, we now have Donald Trump leading the Republican primaries by rallying these voters to his banner with his combination of uncompromising rhetoric, unapologetic persona, nativist policies, and defense of Social Security and Medicare while Bernie Sanders who as Vermont’s Congressman and Senator voted against several gun control measures and immigration reform (because it included guest worker provisions) tries to win them over from the left going so far as to speak at Liberty University much to the sulking and crying of the weakling weepers of the SJW/Tumblrista left.

This brand of centrism will not go away as long as the erosion of community in small-town and rural America continues and the ambitions of a generation are frustrated. The only question is whether it’ll be channelled towards a right-wing nativist party as in Europe or if the Democrats have enough sense and guts to win them back to build a New New Deal coalition.

So sad.

I consider myself left-center, and would be perfectly willing to vote for a right-center candidate. Huntsman was my guy, and probably could have taken my vote from Obama. I wish he would have run in 2016.

No, except for avoiding stupid wars, although that’s a mischaracterization of the President’s foreign policy. Centrism by definition means that you won’t see huge disparities in support for something between Democrats and Republicans. The policies you cite feature a huge disparity between Democrats and independents, as in Democrats are pretty much the only ones that support the policies you listed.

If I was using your logic, I would site DADT and DOMA as examples of centrism.

No, you can only say that by ignoring history. The ACA was indeed a Republican idea that was deemed anathema only because the Democrats decided to implement it. And so it goes for the idea of cap-n-trade.

You are going for a definition of centrism that denies that there has been a radicalization of the Republican party. To look at why this has taken place, check the Frontine documentary to see why.

Before DADT the policy was to arrest and dismiss the soldiers that were found to be homosexual, nowadays we know that it was a compromise that was not a solution, and by the time 70% of the American public (In a poll in 2010 the Republicans showed a similar level of support) thought that it should be repealed and that gays should serve in the military many of the Republican candidates in 2012 called for the restoration of DADT.

What you are pointing out is actually a good example of the refusal of centrism and more radicalization of the elected Republicans that is at odds with many Republicans and the rest of the public actually want. It is interesting to research, but it is really bad for the nation that many Republicans are not getting what they think they are voting for. As Bob Dole can tell you, these are not the Republicans that he knew.

DADT was a Democratic idea. Therefore, how could Democrats possibly object to it?

Since Democrats have supported spending cuts, free trade, welfare reform, harsh immigration enforcement, and bombing seven countries at one time, therefore Republicans will be enacting centrist policies when they take office and do all those things.