Nate Silver recently titled a piece “12 questions for the center-left.” If you delved into the 3,000-word article in a linear fashion, odds are you never made it to even Question One. It appears only after roughly 2,000 extraneous words — a point far ahead of where you took flight, having by then (somewhere around the 600th word) forsaken all hope of ever arriving at the titled promised land.
I’m here to help. And my name is Brevity.
Silver’s 12 questions (each of which contains multiple questions, themselves consuming 900 words) can, without inflicting unforgivable injury on the topic, be enfolded into one. Which, as luck would have it, just happens to be Silver’s first question — that is, questions:
1. Should the center-left explicitly avow liberalism as opposed to centrism, moderation or compromise? Is it a separate third thing with distinctive characteristics, or a sort of a 70/30 blend of progressivism and conservatism? If the latter, how does the center-left address the critique that it doesn’t really stand for anything?
A 100,000-word volume would be required to address these inquiries comprehensively. And that, of course, would only create more questions, since there is no universally satisfactory guide if one is exploring the character and political sentiments of 50 differing states, 435 incomparable congressional districts, and millions of unique Americans.
So we must settle for what Metaphor calls broad strokes. This really is the best we can do when confronted by questions of impossibly confining specificity, such as whether the center-left should “explicitly avow liberalism,” but not the separate creatures of moderation and compromise.
All four, pretty much, mean the same thing. (We may safely remove “centrism” as either a redundancy or an element of internal contradiction.)
Yet Silver, I think, rather nicely provides the keystone of the center-left’s broadest philosophical architecture when he asks if it’s “sort of a 70/30 blend of progressivism and conservatism.”
Bingo. After striking “sort of.”
For with remarkable, if not ironic, precision, that was FDR’s expansive political formula — an approach that took the nation from deepest economic despair to a vast and still-growing middle class right up until the 1980s, when Republicans’ “populist” pseudoconservativism reset America’s trajectory.
Roosevelt’s progressive-conservative politics were resolutely non-ideological, oriented around pragmatism (America’s sole philosophical invention), experimental and — a now-dead but resurrectable art of public policy — open to admissions of failure, though damn it all, we would begin anew.
FDRism helps answer, as adequately as possible, Silver’s three other “Core questions” within the 12: “What is the center-left’s relationship with the Democratic Party ‘establishment’?”; “What is the center-left’s strategy for dealing with an increasingly angry electorate?”; “What is the center-left’s view on how capitalism is going?”
Under Roosevelt, the center-left was the Democratic Party, whose “establishment” moniker would have been something of a puzzling curiosity; it dealt with an angry electorate by being candid and honest and therefore — let’s get touchy-feely — vulnerable; and its view of capitalism was that to save it, regulatory straitjackets were indispensable.
As for Silver’s non-core questions, most can be answered with brutal succinctness. Say, #7: “Should the center-left … [regard] Trump as a 5-alarm, existential threat to American liberal democracy?” Well, yeah. Since Trumpism is indeed an existential threat, and to more than democracy.
Or #8: “Should the center-left regard the ‘DSA left’ as a threat to liberal values?” When it goes crazy illiberal, just grinning and bearing it would be an extraordinarily crazy alternative. The easiest, #12: “How does the center-left navigate Israel/Gaza?” In the same way it navigated South African apartheid and German fascism.
And there you have it, my nearly singular answer to Nate Silver’s 12 questions (in 598 words).
***
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.