Centrism and the Right: A Few Thoughts

Looking at political centrism as more than "middle of the roadness" but as a distinct ideological tendency these past few years my conclusion has been that this centrism is an adaptation of classical conservatism to the situation of the early Cold War. The resulting center has been fundamentally conservative and, if declaring itself equally opposed to extremisms of the right and left both, founded on anti-leftism rather than anti-extremism , and in fact usually partnering with a right in which it was always reluctant to see any extremism against a left it saw as inherently illegitimate.

That right-center combination pushed back against the left, minimized the concessions that the left's existence required (some readiness to provide which was usually what distinguished the center from the more plainly reactionary right), and ultimately marginalized the left. By the 1980s and even more so the 1990s this produced a situation where the left had simply ceased to exert any force at all. Meanwhile a center conservative to begin with, disinclined to put up much resistance to the still effectual right, accustomed to treating the right with respect in spite of the fact that the right showed the center no such respect, accommodated itself to the right's continued rightward pull over and over again.

All of this moved the center, the discourse, and even the right further rightwards--quite predictably given the dynamic discussed here, which would seem to, in the absence of a strong left, make the center's rightward shift, and even what some have called the "normalization" of the more extreme right, a default mode for a centrist-dominated politics. Moreover, this has been reinforced by the extent to which the center hastened upon the hugely unpopular course of abandoning its old function of securing social concessions in its rush to embrace neoliberalism, and an ascent of "status politics" inseparable from the weakening of the left, producing discontents which the right (even if itself even more staunchly neoliberal than the center) exploited through appeals against which a center with little emotional appeal to a broad public had few defenses, and little ability to compete. This disadvantaged a center that responded by accommodating itself to the right that much more--with this pattern exacerbated by the combination of crisis, anemic growth, repeated government combination of rescue of the financial sector with austerity for the public so much seen since 2007, and the absolute determination of centrists to stick by their more fundamental policies in spite of all the opprobrium that had come to be attached to them.

Considering all this as it has played out in American history over the twentieth and twenty-first century (as the Democratic Party of the New Deal gave way to the Democratic Party of the Neo-Liberals in the Clinton era, etc.) my first thought was that it was mainly relevant to a United States unique because of the extent to which American politics was defined by Cold War Anti-Communism, and the marginalization of the left, to a greater degree than in any other major Western country (such that what is called here "centrism" is what has passed for "liberalism" in America). However, I soon enough saw how some of these dynamics were operative in British politics. More recently reading political scientist Aurelien Mondon's discussion of the rightward trajectory of French politics it seems to me fairly clear that this same tendency of an ostensibly in the middle but actually deeply conservative center to come down hardest on the left and accommodate the right, pushing a country's politics in a rightward direction, has been operative there as well, with the consequences already seen, and now anticipated from the election for the country's National Assembly.