The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaces even the four-letter words they scrawled.
- Joan Didion, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”
The center was not holding. It was a center-less country—of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements—and when unarmed kids were gunned down in self-defense, some conservatives called them thugs.
The center was not holding. The House of Representatives was killing food stamps in the recovery—such as it was—from the Great Recession, Detroit—a whole goddamned city—was going bankrupt, and we wondered over a politician’s cock.
The was no center anymore—at least none that anyone ought to want to be a part of. What is the center position between killing and saving food stamps? What is the center position between calling Trayvon a thug and not? What is the center between fantasy and reality?
And, so, I don’t understand articles like this: Jonathan Martin at the New York Times writes a piece entitled “Some Democrats Look to Push Party Away From Center.” He writes:
Ms. Warren is also challenging the centrist consensus on high finance and has sought to revive a dormant conversation about whether investment and commercial banking should be intermingled by introducing a bill to restoreGlass-Steagall, an issue few senior Democrats on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue want to revisit.
Center-versus-left tensions have come into view in just the last few days amid speculation that Lawrence H. Summers, the center-left former Harvard president and senior economic official in the Clinton and Obama White House, is a serious candidate to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Summers, to remind us all, is a man who didn’t just not see the biggest financial upheaval in my life coming, he’s a man who was
actively hostile to those who did and who advocated the very deregulation policies that led to that upheaval—the upheaval that left the economy in ruin. What, then, does center-left even mean?
Ezra Klein, in an post called “There’s no such thing as ‘the center’” writes,
What unites the policies Martin names is that they’re really, really popular. I don’t think Warren’s proposal to tie the interest rate on student loans to the interest rate the Federal Reserve offers banks makes a ton of sense, but then, “makes a ton of sense” isn’t the point of that policy. The point of that policy is that it’s really popular to say that the federal government shouldn’t charge higher interest rates to students than they charge to banks. It’s in “the center” of public opinion, you might say.
The sad truth is that "the center" as defined by the punditocracy has less to do with fiction or reality, with the center of popular opinion, as it does with what pundits hear at cocktail parties. Klein writes:
Martin’s article doesn’t define “the center.” But it’s not the center of public opinion. It’s more a reference to an amorphous Washington consensus. Insofar as that concept ever made sense, the idea was that it’s the legislative center, the zone of compromise where things can actually get done. But even that concept has begun to break down in recent years, as that Washington center — what you might call the “Simpson-Bowles center” — no longer holds any weight in Congress.
When you’re judging policy, “good” and “bad” are descriptions that make sense. So are “popular” and “unpopular,” and “likely to pass” and “no chance.” But “the center”? It’s time to retire that one, or at least come up with a more rigorous definition of what we mean when we use it.
I think we ought to go farther than Klein: The center was not holding, not because it just doesn't exist, but because it was destroyed—ripped apart as one party moved so far to the right that "the center" snapped like too-taut string.
[Crossposted at Ich Bin Ein Oberliner]