Centrism, Democracy and the Gilens-Page Study

Back in 2014 Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page published the article "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" which discussed the results of a systematic study of nearly eighteen hundred "policy cases" from the 1981-2002 period in which government policy could be compared with polling data indicating public preferences regarding policy changes. As the abstract to the article puts it, they concluded "that economic elites and organized groups have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

The Gilens-Page study got a bit of attention beyond the narrowly academic world, a number of mainstream media items registering it--I suspect, less because the public was truly shocked than because the study provided rigorous, comprehensive empirical confirmation of what many long suspected, if not took for granted--and then did not seem to get too much more attention, likely for the same reasons. That limited attention, characteristically, did not include serious discussion of how this squares with the prevailing conceptions of how democracy is supposed to work. Certainly if, as I imagine most people think, representative government is supposed to make for representative policy--representative of the preferences of the public--then this study confirms the widespread cynicism about whether American democracy has lived up to the ideal of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" held by most of the public. Indeed, it seems that many have since come to refer to the Gilens-Page study as, in line with its assessment of the implications of domination of policy outcomes by the preferences of elites and interest groups in the face of contrary majority opinions for the system's actual workings (corresponding to what they refer to as theories of America's political system as a scene of "Economic-Elite Domination" and "Biased Pluralism" rather than the majoritarianism with which Americans conventionally identify their system), "the oligarchy study."

However, in acknowledging the gap between the idealistic and intuitive conception of democracy I describe here and the reality one has to acknowledge that it has not always been the one held by what one may call the "political classes," and certainly those abiding by the centrism that has long predominated within the mainstream. Less than anxious to see the public "represented" or in any other way much involved in making policy--indeed, preferring that public be passive, and quiet, casting its vote in November without great hopes or expectations and not getting it into its heads to do much more than that--it espouses a "pragmatic," "pluralist" and "civil" practice of politics that sees it as a play of interests, the principal but indispensable virtue of which play in centrists' eyes is their making sure that discontents don't get so great as to threaten the status quo with radicalization, division, extremism, revolution, and the swift slide into totalitarianism that the centrist is (hysterically) sure must follow from politics being anything more, even if this is mainly a matter of leaving open the hope of peaceful change rather than actually delivering redress of discontents. In practice this is hugely unsatisfying for many, for, if centrists tend not to admit it, said pragmatic, pluralistic, civil politics tend to reflect rather than ameliorate the considerable imbalances of power in society. Indeed, if he left the opinion out of the founding classic of centrist theory that is The Vital Center Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argued in books before and after that work, for decades, that the default mode of such politics in America is Big Business government, with the best that can be hoped for the rest of society getting so sick of its excesses that it unites behind reform for a while long enough to redress its worst excesses. (Indeed, Schlesinger posited a cycle of alternation between such Big Business government and reformism as operative through America's political history, and in fact the key to understanding it.) Being honest about this matter he was also honest enough to acknowledge how frustrating all of this is for those desirous of the address of society's problems, or simply clean and honest government--and that the position he championed stood for this less than inspiring practice because it was the only one he, and his fellow centrists, saw as consistent with liberal freedoms (all as, of course, he relentlessly sneered at the liberals, progressives and leftists who thought otherwise in the most patronizing and troll-like fashion).

In short, the centrist expects the voters to accommodate themselves to oligarchy as the order of things, and at most strive for small, "practical" changes--and is made much less anxious by oligarchy than those who call out oligarchy and deem it unacceptable (centrists call such people "ideologues" and "extremists")--and call the situation unity, moderation, stability and consensus. Naturally, even as they picture the world in this way centrists they are, as compared with past decades, disinclined to spell out their understanding of politics to a broad audience. Perhaps this is because they are all too aware of how little patience even the supposedly more educated portion of today's reading public has for such theorizing, but perhaps even more aware that in this period in which the hopes of that measure of reform that seemed plausible within the system back when Schlesinger wrote his book have been dashed, it would simply be unpersuasive to those who could understand the argument--and its proponent an emperor wearing no clothes.