Centrism = Status Quo

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Conservative Daniel Larison has another great post up, Apparently, Centrism Cannot Die.  His main point is that while there was nothing classically conservative about the Bush/Cheney administration the conservatives were blamed for the disaster they left and at the same time while there is little progressive about the Obama agenda progressives are being blamed for it's failures. 

Frank�s column from earlier in the week covers much the same ground as I have in the last ten days since the Masssachusetts Senate election. Whether or not one agrees with his advice, his analysis seems right. Progressives are now discovering again the frustration of being blamed for policies over which they have had little or no influence. Just as conservatives, or at least dissenting conservatives, were arguing for years under Bush, policies of corporatism, imperialism and insolvency did not represent our views, and it was unfair and wrong to associate these things with conservatism properly understood.

Frank is appalled by the return of the Rubinites, and well he might be, and populist conservatives are appalled by the unending grip of the cult of Greenspan-Bernanke on our monetary policy. Centrists are thrilled by both. Almost everything that progressives and populist conservatives reject, albeit for different reasons, is the product of a centrist establishment consensus, which might best be typified by the idea of a �McCain-Lieberman party� and all that this stands for. It may disappoint Scott Brown�s new admirers that it is precisely these two embodiments of self-important, unprincipled, priggish, warmongering centrism that he cites as his contemporary political role models and friends. These are the ones who effectively prevailed on January 19, even though the voters definitely intended something very different.

The ideology of centrists basically boils down to don't rock the boat.  The reality is the boat is on the rocks and it's going to take some rocking to get it off.  The belt way millionaire pundits and talking heads love the status quo because they are doing just fine thank you.  When you come right down to it we have seen very little difference between the Bush and Obama administration but still what we heard from the talking heads was that Bush was not far enough to the right and Obama is too far to the left. 

Employment cannot be increased without reevaluating US trade policy.  "Free Trade" is only free for multinational corporations.  The budget crisis cannot only be solved by reevaluating the US "defense" policy. The United States spends more on military spending than the rest of the world combined and the only thing it's defending is the bottom line of defense contractors.  A majority of Americans supported health care reform until the centrists watered it down to little more than a blank check for the medical industrial complex.

It's centrism that's leading to the US decline.  I am a progressive so I think the progressive path is is the one to take but at the same time I think a classic conservative path would be better than the status quo of the centrists.

Larison concludes with this:

Despite Frank�s best efforts to make the argument, though, centrism
did not die in Massachusetts, because it has not been perceived to be
the thing voters were repudiating. That doesn�t mean that it wasn�t the
thing voters were repudiating, but it means that very few in the media
and the political class are willing to believe it. Frank cites all of
the right data to make his argument, but something I have realized
during the last couple of weeks is that no one of consequence is
interested in correctly assessing what the public wants. Republicans
have their ready-made narrative that they are going to tell to anyone
who will listen, and most Democratic politicians seem to be reacting as
if they still lived in the mid-�90s or even earlier. They remain
terrified of being associated with real liberal convictions. The
instinctive impulse to retreat, cower, fall back and give ground to
more assertive Republicans has not been beaten out of them yet, and
perhaps it never will be.

One thing that is very frustrating about this dynamic is that it
greatly aids in the perpetuation of corporatist, militarist centrism as
represented by the likes of McCain and Lieberman, and it ensures the
perpetual marginalization of any remotely coherent or consistent
conservatism. Conservatives effectively pay tribute to a centrist
establishment that has nothing but contempt for them and their
interests, and so then end up tying themselves to this establishment
and defending its interests against left-populists with whom they
probably have much more in common.

The classic conservatives and progressives have more in common than they realize and those common concerns are what is feeding the populist/teabagger movement.  That's not the way the centrist establishment sees it because it does not fit their narrative.