Centrism can work

What has been overlooked in the discussion about Mr. Obama's centrism is that the Left can be as racist as the Right. And because of this, a smart politician uses what s/he can from both sides, knowing that neither really has a monopoly on the higher ground.

Admittedly there are significant nuances within the landscape of our two-party state.

But I want to press the issue that the Left has not sorted out its borders.

And I'm not advocating the Left always move Right. (This past week's yes vote by 40 Republicans in the House for SCHIP is a promising example of forces joining in common interest.)

But it's hard to be effective when you're intentions are unclear. How do we solve the commonest of problems? - Take the plague of drug related homicides in this country. The Boston Globe reported this week that Jordan Manuel's half brother and two accomplices robbed, shot and stabbed Jordan and burned his body in the woods. Jordan was 16 and grew up in a family of drug dealers on the Massachusetts Cape. The Right thinker might conceivably say, "personal accountability - when will families take responsibility for the sons and daughters they raise to be killers?" A Lefty might argue, "the system failed that family - we can't trust the police and social services aren't doing their job." But if the aim is resolution, something useful could be taken from both points of view.

What about arguably more complex problems, like those we face overseas, say in Afghanistan. How do we resolve that dilemma when we can't even order our own homes? (It's not hard incidentally to understand the Right's indefatigable focus on "family values" as an effort to exert some control over this problem of 'home.') Ann Jones writes that we're all but doomed to fail in Afghanistan. She lists a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that we disempowered Afghans by giving vast amounts of reconstruction money instead to US contractors unable to account for it now. There is a racial component to this, would America treat 'white' people this way? The Left can do better at defining how to find a reasonable way to collaborate with Afghans to rebuild their own country. But looking, for example, at the US's largely Democrat run inner-cities, pock-marked by corruption, drug crime and where many children go uneducated or jailed, some understanding about what people need and what works has not gained traction, or perhaps more shockingly, is even unknown to the Left.

And this is the heart of it: in avoidance of this work, the Left has a way of getting caught up in mountains of details with no clear narrative, no moral indignation to make the storyline/s stick. This week, for example, John Tanner (formerly head of voting rights at the Republican dominated DOJ) was caught on record saying that he likes his coffee, "Mary Frances Berry Style - black and bitter" and that, "voter ID laws discriminate against the elderly, and therefore not against African-Americans, because African-Americans die younger." For the record, if this is the worst he's said, I feel sorry for him. I've surely heard a range of inappropriate things from Lefties. From the reporting on Tanner, there is some ambiguity about the goal of his words: blacks do die younger and this is tragic. Blacks can be bitter and the question is why. If we don't accept these facts, how can we see the truth? How can we solve that which we deny exists? American blacks who wish to be in the world can't really get by (or ahead) by being blind in this way. They'd scarcely have anyone to work with if this were so.

An undefined Left and a heap of problems. I've listed just two in the points above - drug crimes at home and Afghanistan overseas. And in the midst of this an undefined Left by turns assails and supports their guy Mr. Obama. I suspect it'd be in better shape if it worked out in detail where it stands on its family values: What does it hold most dear? What is im/moral to a Lefty? In the meantime, I certainly understand why a politician would take a moderate view and be open to ideas wherever they come from.

Comments

[MC-Shalom]

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, You Bail Out, We Opt Out.

All of Our Economic Problems Find They Root in the Existence of Credit.

Out of the $5,000,000,000,000 bail out money for the banks, that is $1,000 for every inhabitant of this planet, what is it exactly that WE, The People, got?

They Bail Out, We Opt Out

The Credit Free, Free Market Economy

Is Both Dynamic on the Short Run & Stable on the Long Run, The Only Available Short Run Solution.

I Propose, Hence, to Lead for You an Exit Out of Credit:

Let me outline for you my proposed strategy:

http://edsk.org/

The other option would be to wait till most of the productive assets of the economy get physically destroyed either by war or by rust.

It will be either awfully deadly or dramatically long.

A price none of us can afford to pay.

“The current crisis can be overcome only by developing a sense of common purpose. The alternative to a new international order is chaos.”

- Henry A. Kissinger

They Bail Out, Let's Opt Out!

I am, Mr Chairman, Yours Sincerely,

Shalom P. Hamou AKA 'MC Shalom'
Chief Economist - Master Conductor
1 7 7 6 - Annuit Cœptis
Tel: [phone]
http://edsk.org/

[jhNY]

The Democratic Party is not the Left, and can be thought of as Left only in the sense that the party is an imperfect and and unsatisfactory affiliation of last resort for progressive politics and their supporters. And your example of the Left's racism is just an example of Democrat candidates' focus group-driven posturing in the hopes of election success during a primary debate.

The Democrats are by definition a centrist outfit, courting concensus and accomodation among the usual players and suspects, and as other commenters have noted, it was and is centrism that gave us the Iraq War, and the bailout of the plutocracy. Praise centrism if you must, but don't confuse it with the Left, a mostly marginalized and disafftected non-group of scattered progressives, with the Democratic Party.

Here's a real idea from the Left: Decriminalize drugs. Stop the Drug Wars against the people.

[Pdubya]

Simply a ruse. This is our Congress. Not "theirs" or "not me", but ours. "Centrism can make a difference"?? It has made a difference, and will continue to do so.

We diddled with the passage of the Iraq War, still not a declared war, but it "passed" by centrists. Same goes with the Bailouts, whereby an unilateral "NO" by the constituency was blatantly ignored by a centrist body of politics. Same goes for FISA, Military Commissions Act, and the Patriot Act.

And now the neocons are pinching themselves over Obama's cabinet - hawks on foreign policy and good company if you like to spend funny money.

It is the true progressives and true conservatives that are being squashed by the calls for the new global economic order, global citizenry, and the new world order. Biden, Sarkozy, Obama, Herbert Walker, Clinton, W., Krugman, Kissinger, Cheney, Powell....­....and many more, perceived party liners, talk like, smell like, walk like global centrists.

So, can it work? You betcha. Except, I don't like the results.

Silly partisan, tricks are for kids!

[jsarets]

Centrism doesn't work. A government needs a coherent strategy, not a layered patchwork of policy deposited like sedimentary rock formations smashed together by the shifting tectonic plates of political ideology, trauma, and not a little drama.

The result is not a happy medium, it's a public policy regime for which nobody lobbied and nobody vouches, a disharmonious salad of clashing intentions wilted in the insipid broth of majoritarianism and weighted down under gobs of pork fat.

The great innovation of centrism in a single-member district plurality system is that it neutralizes the policy debate in electoral politics. Before centrism, candidates could run on signature policy proposals so long as they could generate controversy about those of their opponents. But centrists induce centrism in their opponents by denying "second strike" deterrence.

The result of the great race to the middle is the perpetuation of ideological purgatory. We don't know what works, we don't really know what doesn't work, and we won't allow any experimentation lest the opposing view be shown to have merit.

Centrism is at best a glorified form of leading by following and at worst a delusional commitment to shield the electorate from uncomfortable realities. It doesn't break through the political gridlock, it IS the political gridlock. and it's why we've been spinning our wheels on the same issues for decades.

[FearlessFreep]

Are you using "the Left" as a synonym for the Democratic Party? LOL!

BTW, this Lefty's response to the murder of Jordan Manuel is that we should end prohibition of drugs, for the same reasons we ended prohibition of liquor.

[TheBaffler]

Wait, you can't start of your blog asserting the left can be as racist as the right and then fail to cite any examples of how this is so. How do you reckon this to be so?

Centrism is the soft road for the spineless. It's just a euphemism for capitulation to the right. "Bipartisanship" is what happens when the principled betray their principles and roll over for the right, ceding everything, while the right gives nothing in return.

[LoRiseAntlers]

Amen.Centr­ism is like being agnostic,wallowing around on the muck under the fence.too weak and wishy-washy too make a stand.

And you keep making racist allegations against teh left,yet you're either unable or unwilling to give any proof of those allegations.

You kinda suck at this.

[TheInsomniac]

She links to an example of said racism. Did you not see the hyperlink tied to that exact statement?