The Centre Must Hold E-Book

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 490

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Division in society. The spread of misinformation. The rise of extremism. Centrism holds the answers. In an age of complex global challenges, extremism and populism offer a simple but fatally flawed narrative to a public craving a sense of normalcy. There is another way. Centrism has proven itself not only the most effective antidote to their dangerous brand of politics but also as a successful way to lead countries. Far from being an arbitrary middle point between left and right, centrism offers a coherent set of political ideas, principles and approaches - the importance of moderation and pragmatism; the embrace of complexity; the deep commitment to liberal democracy; the belief in equality of opportunity; and the belief that through balancing the tensions that exist in every nation we can make people's lives better. It is about finding the most productive and effective balance between globalisation and local communities, civil rights and security, religion and democracy, free markets and protecting the weakest in society. Drawing together politicians, thought leaders and social commentators – from Tony Blair to Michael Bloomberg, from Malcolm Turnbull to Kathryn Murdoch - The Centre Must Hold contains a series of essays from those who have led from the centre or made significant contributions to centrist thought and policy-making, including former prime ministers, policy makers, ministers and leading journalists from across the world. Praise for The Centre Must Hold: 'With a resurgence of the nationalist right in the world and a fading away of the populist left … this book is a timely call to action' Lord Peter Mandelson 'This book should be studied in every school across the globe' Anthony Seldon, author of Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 'A work of real breadth and hidden depths' Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works 'This book's clear-eyed case for our cherished liberal values is urgently needed.' The Right Honourable Sir Ed Davey MP, Leader, Liberal Democrats

Leseprobe

‘With a resurgence of the nationalist right in the world and a fading away of the populist left, the centre ground has the opportunity and responsibility to reinvent itself for a new era. Will it do so? This book is a timely call to action.’

Lord Peter Mandelson

‘This book should be studied in every school across the globe. Its quiet voice of reason needs to be heard loudly now above all!’

Anthony Seldon, author of Johnson at 10

‘With authoritarianism and extremism on the rise around the world, this book’s clear-eyed case for our cherished liberal values is urgently needed. Democracy, liberty, human rights and the rule of law are all under threat, but this book shows how critical they are. Its positive alternative to the destructive politics of fear and division offers something we all badly need today: hope.’

The Right Honourable Sir Ed Davey MP, Leader, Liberal Democrats

‘In this age of unreason and extremism, this collection of essays provides a rallying cry against the siren calls of populism and offers hope of real solutions to the biggest challenges of our time.’

Wes Streeting, Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

‘For hope of the future surely lies in the revival of the Center – in the triumph of those who believe deeply in civil liberties, in constitutional processes and in the democratic determination of political and economic policies. And, in direct consequence, the main target of both totalitarian extremes must be the Center – the group which hold society together.’

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr1

CONTENTS

Introduction

Yair Zivan

SECTION 1: WHAT IS CENTRISM?

1    Reflections on Centrism

William Galston

2    Centrism and the Fight for Liberal Democracy

Jennifer Rubin

3    Faith, Philosophy and the Foundations of Centrism

Micah Goodman

4    The ‘Vital Centre’ as a Face of Moderation

Aurelian Craiutu

5    The Evolution of Democratic Centrism

Lanae Erickson and Matt Bennett

6    Centrism and its Critics

Philip Collins

7    The Case for Centrism

Yair Lapid

SECTION 2: CENTRISM AND THE BIG QUESTIONS

8    Centrism and the Strategic State

Tony Blair

9    Centrism and Free Speech

Ruth Anderson

10  Centrism and Global Cooperation

Børge Brende

11  Centrism and Public Policy

Chrystia Freeland

12  Centrism and the Rule of Law

Marco Buschmann

13  Centrist Journalism and Defending Democracy: Non-partisan but not Neutral

John Avlon

SECTION 3: LEADING AS CENTRISTS

14  A Centrist Approach to National Security

Michèle Flournoy and Richard Fontaine

15  A Centrist Approach to Education: Reform Must Move Forward from the Centre

Arne Duncan

16  A Centrist Approach to Progress: Innovation and Incrementalism

Haley Stevens

17  A Centrist Approach to Counterterrorism

Jonathan Evans

18  A Centrist Approach to Global Energy Policy

Rachel Pritzker

19  A Centrist Approach to the Challenge of Technology

Jamie Susskind

20  A Centrist Approach to Foreign Policy

Yair Zivan

21  Centrist Economic Policies and Identity Politics

Andrés Velasco and Daniel Brieba

SECTION 4: CENTRISM AROUND THE WORLD

22  Centrism and the Australian Model: The Value of Compromise

Malcolm Turnbull

23  Europe at the Centre

Matteo Renzi and Sandro Gozi

24  How the EU Empowered Centrists All Over Europe

Stéphane Séjourné

25  Japan’s Political Centrism in National Security Policy

Tomohito Shinoda

26  Centrism in India in a Time of Polarisation

Shashi Tharoor

27  The Future of Liberal Democracy in Latin America: In Search of a Centre

Mauricio Cárdenas and Eduardo Levy Yeyati

28  The Case for a Democratic Centre in Brazil: Overcoming Polarisation

Simone Tebet

29  A Centrist Approach to Developing Countries: Expand Opportunities

Ann Bernstein

SECTION 5: CENTRISM AS THE WAY FORWARD

30  Governing as Centrists

Michael Bloomberg

31  Winning as Centrists: A Centrist Guide to Political Campaigns and Communication

Josh Hantman and Simon Davies

32  The Centrist Organisation of the Future

Josef Lentsch

33  The Centrist Method

Polly Bronstein

34  Centrism and Building a Better Political System

Charles Wheelan

35  Centrism and Building a Better Society

Daniel Lubetzky

36  Centrism in a World of Extremes

Kathryn Murdoch

Conclusion: A Centrist Roadmap

Yair Zivan

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Yair Zivan

On the evening of 13 June 2021, a new Israeli government held its first meeting in one of the nondescript committee rooms in parliament. A few hours earlier a coalition made up of eight political parties had been confirmed by Israel’s parliament with the slimmest of majorities. Sitting in that room waiting for the photographers to take a few final shots, as the two leaders of the new government shared a joke, it was impossible not to be struck by the diversity of the ministers around the table – from the progressive left to the nationalist right and including Israel’s first Arab party in a governing coalition. But the heart of that coalition ran through the political centre. Not only was the largest party in the coalition a true centrist one – Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid – but the ethos of the coalition was quintessentially centrist. I served as senior advisor to Yair Lapid in his role as foreign minister and prime minister, and the next eighteen months gave me a front-row seat to how a centrist-inspired government can work.

Our government did much to be proud of during that time and had an extensive list of successes across a whole variety of fields – but ultimately its political diversity, which was almost unprecedented in global politics, proved to be its downfall. The fringes of the coalition, from the left and the right, tore the fragile partnership apart and the centre was not strong enough to prevent it. While the key players were consistently willing to compromise and cooperate, the political fringes, under pressure from the extremes on their side, ultimately resorted to ‘all-ornothing’ politics. That left us all with nothing. At the end of December 2022, I watched from afar as a new government was sworn in to replace us. It was by far the most right-wing and conservative coalition ever elected in Israel – and its divisive actions and policies led to one of the most disastrous years in the country’s history.

The experiences of those eighteen months, one of the great political experiments of modern times, and the centrist leadership I saw up close as we met with counterparts from all over the world led to the conception of this book. It is an attempt not only to explain what centrism really is but to lay out the positive vision it has for the world, to see if it can answer the questions being asked of political leaders in the twenty-first century and, critically, to assess if it is strong enough to stand up to the threat coming from the political extremes. I met some of the contributors to this book during my years working in politics, while others simply share a deep commitment to the centrist idea. Each has written about their own area of expertise or passion; each brings a unique perspective.

Centrism is based upon a clear set of ideals and principles: the importance of moderation and pragmatism; the embrace of complexity; the deep commitment to liberal democracy; the belief in equality of opportunity, and that through balancing the tensions that exist in every nation we can make people’s lives better. The first section of the book explores these ideas and the roots of centrism, and gets to work dealing head on with the challenges it faces; the second looks at some of the biggest issues confronting society today; the third shows how centrism can provide answers to specific policy areas; the fourth demonstrates how centrism works, with examples from across the world; and the fifth offers a path forward for the future.

I entered government a committed centrist and left with a conviction deeper than ever that centrism can provide the answers to the challenges of our time; it is the antidote to the extremism and sustained attacks on liberal democracy that are sweeping much of the democratic world. But for that to happen we first have work to do.

Gallons of ink have been spilled on the crisis of democracy, the divisions within society, the spread of misinformation and the rise of extremism. Some of that is undoubtedly true, some is exaggerated. The populist right, for example, is clearly rising across much of Europe, visible in many election results, while a populist left discourse dominates on campuses and in academia.

Resentment, anger and despondence all drive populist sentiment. People who feel a sense of loss for a world that once was and fear the world that is coming are drawn to politicians who offer simplistic solutions, especially if no one else is willing to take those valid fears seriously. Populists can neatly reduce any issue to two basic messages: the solution is always straightforward and failure is always someone’s fault. There is no problem that can’t be solved by a tweet or a five-word slogan. Populists always have an easy, if ultimately unworkable, answer. If the problem is rapid technological change, they’ll take us back to the glory days. If it’s overpowerful elites, they’ll smash the system. If it’s inequality, they’ll bring down capitalism. If it’s globalisation, they’ll close the borders. And whatever you’re angry or fearful about, they will always find you someone to blame. Populism, at its core, is the attempt to divide society into two easily distinguishable groups. Often it’s the ‘real’ people vs those working against them in some way, whether that’s the elites, the deep state, newcomers or outsiders. Or sometimes it’s the oppressed and oppressor, in which the latter is always attempting to subjugate the former, based on race, ethnicity, gender or economic status. The individual doesn’t count, only their identity classification. Whatever form populism appears in, this divisive approach leaves no room for nuance, context or complexity. There is no room for introspection, for debate, or for self-criticism.

That is why populism goes hand in hand with political extremism, dividing us and preventing us from finding any common ground. Extremists want us to believe that compromise is never necessary, that it is a symbol of weakness and failure. They too always have a simple solution to all the problems of society – total commitment to their ideology. When they fail to deliver on their promises, it isn’t due to faults within their ideology but because people failed to embrace it fully enough, usually blamed on some imagined moment of weakness in which compromises were made that supposedly undermined the purity of the ideology.

But what if those people who guarantee easy solutions to complex issues – who seek to exploit genuine economic difficulty and sincere cultural fears – are the problem? What if we’re not as divided as they want us to believe? What if, in fact, many of us are eager to inhabit a political centre ground?

Not only do the populists and extremists fail to offer real solutions, they’ve become one of the foremost problems: an obstacle we must overcome to move our countries in a healthier direction. It’s not enough to brand them as irresponsible or racist or anti-democratic, although they may be all those things. Someone has to offer a better alternative. That alternative can’t come from another brand of extremism or a different strain of populism, it must come from the centre. It is the centre which offers the antidote to the politics of intransigence and inflexibility; it is the centre which can counter the messages of despair and divisiveness.

In his first victory speech, French President Emmanuel Macron said, ‘I will do everything to make sure you never have reason again to vote for extremes.’ That should be a rallying cry for centrists because it’s aimed at us. It’s not a criticism of the extremists and it’s certainly not a criticism of the public – it’s a challenge to centrists to do more to give the people a clear alternative and connect with their genuine, well-founded fears about the future.

Centrism, as envisaged in the pages of this book, is not the middle point between two ever more extreme tribes on the left and right. Centrism, when properly articulated and implemented, sets the agenda that others must respond to and so becomes a driving focal point of politics. But something has been missing from the centrist message. If the great challenge to democracies today is the emotional pull of populism and the way in which it is amplified by sections of the media and the algorithms of social media, then centrists must find a way to break through with an emotional appeal of their own. There are good reasons for people to be concerned about the impact of AI on the future of their jobs or for their despair at stagnating wages while the cost of living rises. Centrists must show genuine compassion and understanding of the anxiety that large swathes of the public feel and then offer a better path forward.

We will never beat the extremists at their own game, nor should we ever seek to. If illiberal extremists drive the agenda with fear, then liberal centrists must do the opposite. One of the major effects of fear-driven politics is that it destroys trust in public institutions and poisons the public sphere. It creates what political scientist Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation calls the ‘cynicism and mistrust doom loop’. He summarised it in his newsletter, Undercurrent Events, in September 2023 as follows: ‘muddling authority thus undermines authority. This distrust fuels cynicism. Cynicism drives both demand for and consumption of misinformation.’ This cycle only serves to strengthen the extremes and weaken moderate liberal centrists. It is why centrists must lead the fight to preserve liberal democracy and the institutions which sustain it. As Germany’s minister of justice, Marco Buschmann, writes in his essay, ‘Centrism and the rule of law are two sides of the same coin . . . it is the role, belief and duty of centrists to defend those checks and balances which lie at the heart of our system.’ And there are successful models for doing so.

In 2020 the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor of Utah recorded a campaign advert together. In that advert they both asked the public to vote for them but did so while standing next to one another as they insisted, ‘We can debate issues without degrading each other’s character . . . We can disagree without hating each other.’ Of course, only one candidate could win that election, but subsequent research shows that those who saw the advert were less likely to support political violence or undemocratic practices (such as refusing to accept the result of an election). If repeated in elections across the world, those sorts of campaign tactics could help to reduce the polarisation and extremism that undermine liberal democracy.

The best defence, though, is for centrists to help people feel that even when things are genuinely difficult, as many believe they are now, they can be better. To show people a path that seems plausible. To offer them hope.

Hope is a powerful emotional driver. It works across borders and across generations. Political consultants and marketing experts have debated for years whether it can compete with fear. It can, and there are plenty of examples where it has. Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign was infused with messages of hope including a particularly famous and impactful sixty-second advert, ‘A Place Called Hope’, named after his birthplace. Barack Obama focused his election campaign, as well as an iconic image and the title of a best-selling book, around the word ‘hope’ with great success. Going further back, in 1960 Frank Sinatra re-recorded his hit song ‘High Hopes’ as the anthem of JFK’s election campaign. Communicating a hopeful, authentic message that has broad international relevance is key to strengthening the appeal of centrism.

The former chief rabbi of Great Britain, Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, wrote that ‘optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one.’ The ‘politics of hope’, as Rabbi Sacks termed it, not only inspires an emotional reaction but drives action, forming healthier societies that are more cohesive, tolerant and open, as opposed to politicians with authoritarian and illiberal tendencies who imbue societies with fear and create violence and prejudice. Centrists, therefore, need to play an active role in building those societies, which they will then also benefit from politically – creating a positive re-enforcing loop.

The politics of hope is strongest when it is infused with patriotism, acknowledging the public’s sense of pride in the tradition, community and character of their society. People want to feel pride in the place they live and want to know that the unique characteristics that make up their identity are genuinely respected. They want to be part of an uplifting story. When the far left reject classic symbols that form part of the identity of the country, they are rejecting the identity of large sections of the public. When the far right refuse to acknowledge the complexity of a nation’s history, with all its faults and failures, they are rejecting the experiences of many of those who make up a modern society, in particular minorities.

It is here that centrists borrow from Edmund Burke, despite his traditional (and often misplaced) association with conservative politics. Burke spoke of society as a contract between the generations of the past, the present and the future. He wrote, ‘A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.’ In other words, respect the past but don’t try to recreate it, respect identity and culture but don’t be afraid to modernise them gradually and carefully, respect the values of your grandparent’s society but don’t hold your children’s future hostage to it.

To many in the UK, the royal family, Shakespeare and Churchill are essential symbols of what it means to be British. None of them is perfect, all have flaws which could easily be used to argue they have no place as part of the modern national consciousness, but they are part of the rich tapestry that makes the UK unique. The same is true of the Founding Fathers of the USA, the revolutionary political past of France, the iconic cultural influence of Italy or the ancient philosophies of Greece.

We can strengthen society by respecting traditions and still be committed to improving it going forward. That is something centrists are uniquely placed to do. George Orwell, in his ‘Notes on Nationalism’, wrote that patriotism is ‘devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people’. Centrists can offer a hopeful national story which is patriotic without being jingoistic, which respects the past without dreaming of reliving an idealised version of it and which embraces cultural icons with the same nuance with which we approach our daily lives. Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, in their excellent book The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, aptly called this ‘the tradition of renewal’. When a strong national story is combined with a willingness to look forward and engage with a changing world not through fear but with hope, centrists can strike the emotional connection needed with the public.

And then comes the substance: the work of getting things done. Centrists believe in a clear set of principles and a defined approach to policymaking.

It is not enough to talk about ‘common-sense solutions’ or ‘sensible politics’. Those are abstract terms which mean different things to different people – and often mean very little to most. The ‘we believe in common sense’ style of politics risks playing into the accusation of arrogance that is so often levelled at centrists. It can come across as patronising because it suggests that all other ideas and beliefs are irrational or foolish.

Instead, centrists must find a way of communicating what common sense really means: that we believe in embracing complexity and difficulty in any sector, whether education, national security, economics, international development or technology. There are centrist answers to the specific dilemmas facing individual countries and the world as a whole. These approaches to the major challenges we face are laid out in this book, perhaps for the first time in a global and comprehensive manner.

Centrism seeks out the most productive and effective approach to tackle the competition between globalisation and local communities, civil rights and security, religion and democracy, free markets and social-safety nets. Its approach is dynamic, not static, as it is modified by circumstance and context, adapted when new information becomes available.

It is by no means an easy act to balance these ideas. When globalisation doesn’t protect local communities too many get left behind, but isolationist policies that reject the international community leave too many opportunities untapped. Free markets that leave the poor to fend for themselves destroy healthy societies, but welfare states can strangle the free market, destroying enterprise and innovation. Policies that try to impose total equality in society disincentivise hard work and individual success, but ignoring structural inequality ensures whole communities are almost guaranteed to fail. Centrism is the never-ending work of managing competing tensions, of setting national priorities that accept those tensions exist rather than wishing them away.

Centrists believe in such incomplete answers as part of an imperfect world; those seemingly partial solutions help us to continue living together by creating a broad-based shared narrative, a tolerance and understanding of differing points of view, a continuation of government rather than wild swings of the policy pendulum. When centrists govern, it is with the aim of making sure no one is entirely overlooked, even if no one will get everything they want.

While extremists seek total victory and dominance over the entire political system and to remove dissenting voices, centrists understand the dangers of that approach – it is the driving force behind some of the darkest periods in human history. If centrists try to compete with extremists for one-dimensional solutions they are bound to fail along with them, and it’s a failure none of us can afford. And so centrists must do the opposite and do it willingly, not as a measure of last resort but as the key to building successful policy that allows us to live harmoniously in one society. That is the higher value.

To those on the fringes of politics, compromise is treachery, a betrayal of the purity of their positions. They would rather fail. To the old social democrats and classic conservatives, compromise is too often a necessary evil to make the system work. They aim to achieve the narrowest workable majority. To centrists, though, it is a core tenet of liberal democracy itself. It is the way to get things done and make them last.

Take, for example, the debate about the best approach to com-batting terrorism. The left focus overwhelmingly on addressing root causes of terror (real or imagined) and the right almost exclusively on the use of force. The centre must acknowledge the truth: fighting terrorism is complicated. The solutions aren’t immediate and never will be. We will get it wrong sometimes. We may have to change strategy along the way. The fight may never actually be over. We constantly have to balance the tools at our disposal with the values that define us. We need to fight terrorism with force, while at the same time offering a path that rejects violence, that defeats the ideological foundations which lie at the heart of terrorism. As Jonathan Evans, the former head of the British Security Services, writes in his essay: ‘A counterterrorist strategy is most likely to succeed if it recognises the complexity of the problems it must address.’

The complexity of policymaking, even across seemingly less controversial fields like education or health care, requires hard decisions when setting priorities. There is often no obvious right answer. The temptation to always say ‘both’ when presented with a choice is overwhelming but unrealistic in a world of limited resources. Whichever path you choose demands something of the government. It demands that the government trusts the public. People understand that resources are limited, and that the government can’t give them everything, but they want to know three things: that those in power care, that they have really thought about what is most important, and that they are acting responsibly. People don’t expect perfection, but they do expect better. That’s why centrists must insist on good governance and on a form of communication that does not shy away from acknowledging the complexity of making and implementing policy. Let the public know that you’re making hard choices and show them that, even when they disagree with you, you’re making the decisions with good intentions.

In 1996, after winning his second term, President Clinton declared: ‘The lesson of our history is clear: When we put aside partisanship, embrace the best ideas regardless of where they come from and work for principled compromise, we can move America not left or right, but forward.’ The idea was to create policies that transcended the traditional party positions, rather than being held back by them. The key was to offer something new, something different, something that yielded results. It was a message that was reflected by Third Way politicians in Europe and adapted successfully by Tony Blair in the UK. They understood, as we need to understand today, that the public is far more interested in outcomes than outdated definitions of ideology. If a policy works, if it makes their lives better, if the trade-off is reasonable, then who really cares how much of it can be claimed by modern advocates of Marx or Hayek?

Ultimately, centrism subscribes to a belief that we can make people’s lives better through an acceptance of complexity and moderation rather than a search for simplicity. And as former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull writes in his essay, ‘In a frenzied world, the respect, compromise and moderation at the heart of political centrism are the best guarantees that our democracies will endure.’

That’s what political centrism has to offer, and it is a dramatic break from the trajectory of our modern political world.

SECTION 1

WHAT IS CENTRISM?

The principles of centrism have been shaped by the reality of the modern world but they also have deep philosophical roots. Centrist ideas can be found throughout history, from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment to the Founding Fathers of the USA, and they provide the foundations on which modern centrism, as articulated in this book, is built. William Galston, Micah Goodman and Aurelian Craiutu draw the foundations of centrism from the civil rights movement, James Madison, ancient Chinese tradition, Western philosophical thought, Jewish texts and the writing of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. They make the case for pragmatism, moderation, humility and holistic thinking, all core elements of the centrist approach. Between their essays, Jennifer Rubin makes the case for the inseparable and mutually dependent connection between centrism and liberal democracy. Defending the foundations of liberal democracy and the values at the heart of it is a task that unites centrists across the world.

One particular strength of centrism is the ability to adapt and to learn from criticism, to improve and to act accordingly, and the changes it has undergone over the years are dealt with in this first section as well. These changes show a consistency of principle combined with an acknowledgement of the changing world. The major criticisms often heard in the media and from political opponents are taken on in good faith and deconstructed without being dismissed.

Having established its beginnings, evolution, challenges and critics, the section concludes with a coherent, articulate, inspiring and positive case for centrism.

1

REFLECTIONS ON CENTRISM

William Galston

When writing on centrism, many authors begin by ritually disclaiming all efforts to equate the concept with some mathematical midpoint between extremes. Although this rejection is warranted in the end, it is worth pausing for a moment to review the reasons why some political scientists have taken this conception seriously.

Centrism finds its natural home in broadly democratic understandings of politics in which the opinions of citizens shape policies and determine which parties will be entrusted with temporary power. In these circumstances the ability to mobilise majorities is decisive, and understanding how best to do this is essential.

Assume for a moment that the attitudes of citizens are arrayed along a single left–right continuum and distributed in a ‘normal’ bell curve, with the largest number clustered at or near the midpoint. If so, the centre represents the point at which it is easiest to construct a majority while minimising its reach along the continuum – in other words, while maximising agreement within the majority coalition. It is easy to see why practical politicians would prize advisors who can help them achieve this kind of majority.

In the real world, of course, matters are more complicated. Even if there is a single dimension that dominates politics, opinion may not be distributed in a bell curve along it. As many commentators on US politics have noted, there has been a decades-long movement of citizens from the centre towards the periphery on both left and right, pushing the two major parties away from the overlap that defined the operational centre of politics in the middle decades of the twentieth century and towards partisan polarisation.

There is a second and even more significant problem with the simple view I sketched: voters are no longer (if they ever were) arrayed along a single ideological or policy dimension, such as the role of government in the economy. Rather, their views are multidimensional. In the simplest formulation of this more complex reality, voters have varying views on both economic and cultural issues. Some lean left on economic issues and right on cultural issues, as many populists do. Some ‘libertarians’ do just the reverse, and so forth. Still, unless one of the quadrants in this two-dimensional space contains a majority of the electorate, the problem remains of constructing a majority with sufficient internal coherence to persist over time.

In conceptualising the democratic centre, then, the actual distribution of public sentiment cannot be expunged entirely. Centrism considers the existing correlation of political forces, even though it does not simply situate itself within them. As Tony Blair rightly observes in his essay later in this book, however, centrist politics is about more than ‘triangulation’. It represents a reflective response to emerging public problems and relies on the ability of its leaders to persuade the public that new approaches are needed. It begins with politics as it is, but tries to find new possibilities within current realities.

What guides this quest for innovation? The authors in this volume all embrace some version of liberal democracy, which already commits them to some version of political pluralism. Liberal democrats modify pure majoritarianism by insisting on protecting individual rights, however majorities may feel about them.

This commitment to pluralism extends beyond regime-level politics to include policy as well. As James Madison famously observed, in circumstances of liberty, individuals and groups are bound to diverge in both their interests and their beliefs. The alternative to accepting social pluralism is using power, public or private, to suppress it. This means, in turn, that politics must seek to balance competing interests and conceptions of good lives, a process that often requires compromise.

It is possible to regard this form of politics as merely a concession to reality. But centrists often go further, embracing epistemological humility. Not only does human reason not suffice to choose among competing religious doctrines, but also there are many opinions with legitimate but competing conceptions of what gives meaning and purpose to life.

Humility in understanding suggests moderation in practice. After all, one may argue, finding a way to accommodate competing conceptions is not only the best way of honouring their equal claims; it is wise politics as well. Proceeding too far, too fast in any one direction can be seen as unfair to those who may feel marginalised by non-incremental social change.

To state this argument is to see its limits: some circumstances may require immoderate action. In his famous ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ (1963), Martin Luther King Jr speculated that the greatest obstacle to civil rights might not be Bull Connor’s dogs and water cannons or the Klan’s robes and burning crosses but rather white ‘moderates’ who embraced the aims of the civil rights movement while rejecting its means as ‘extreme’, criticising the movement for demanding too much too soon, for wilfully if non-violently breaking the law, and for disrupting social order. King replied that ‘law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and [that] when they fail in this purpose they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress’. A year later, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, a leader cut from very different cloth, declared that ‘moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue’, a principle that King would have endorsed while deploring the way Barry Goldwater used it.

All of which is to say that centrism cannot inflexibly embrace a single mode of political practice. While it inclines towards gradualism, it must recognise that some circumstances require bolder and more disruptive strategies. This reflects the limits not only of moderation but also of the epistemological humility that undergirds it. A defensible pluralism requires a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate ways of living. Centrists must be willing to say that certain forms of social life are beyond the moral pale and that it is morally wrong to balance them against the claims of their critics. Rather, centrists must be committed to reforming these ways of life as fast as circumstances permit.

Indeed, centrists typically embrace reform as the antidote to both the classic conservative defence of the status quo and the radical call for revolution. As practical politicians within liberal democracy, they reject the charge that this form of government is fundamentally flawed while acknowledging that its practices often fall short of its principles. In this respect, among others, Martin Luther King was a centrist. Like Abraham Lincoln, he accepted the principles of the American Founding Fathers and deployed them to criticise racial injustice. He situated himself between Black Americans too drained of self-respect to challenge segregation and those who insisted that only a violent revolution could overcome centuries of oppression.

In practice, however, calls for reform often fall flat with groups whose grievances against the status quo are deep and visceral. A reasonable, evidence-based politics finds itself on the defensive against the politics of passion, as it did in the UK during the struggle over Brexit, when arguments about the long-term economic consequences of separating from the EU proved less compelling than did fervent denunciations of Polish plumbers and lost sovereignty.

From time to time, centrists have a chance to present themselves as insurgents, as did Bill Clinton in 1992, Tony Blair in 1997, Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and Yair Lapid in 2022. Tellingly, three of these leaders gave way to conservative parties in which populists enjoyed increasing power. The fourth, France’s Macron, lost his parliamentary majority during his successful re-election campaign and has found it difficult ever since to govern his country. The most likely beneficiary of his weakening hold on the French electorate is not the Socialist left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon but rather the populist right of Marine Le Pen. In a similar vein, the principal beneficiaries of the weakening of Germany’s long-dominant centre-right and centre-left parties has been not the far-left parties, but rather the increasingly radical right-wing AfD.

Centrists must figure out how to counter this challenge, which has been fuelled by the decline of the industrial working class and the rise of an educated professional elite whose cultural preferences antagonise less-educated voters. Abstract talk of a better balance between globalisation and domestic production won’t get the job done, and neither will a new generation of policies centred on the promise of technological progress.

Many centrists suffer from an inability to take culture seriously and won’t reoccupy the commanding heights of politics until they learn how to do so. Centrists must set aside crude materialist presuppositions that treat cultural debates as diversions from the ‘real’ economic challenges Western democracies now face. Issues such as immigration, ethnic loyalties and resentments, nationalism, traditional values and the role of religion in society cannot be dismissed as diversionary. Doing so will only drive a deeper wedge between centrists and voters without professional degrees or jobs.

This is to say that there is not only a centrist morality and politics but also a centrist sociology. Since Aristotle, political analysts have understood the relationship between moderate politics and a strong middle class. For the three decades after the end of the Second World War, the middle class increased in size, prosperity and self-confidence throughout the West. Since then, many members of the middle class – especially those who attained this status through industrial rather than professional occupations – have experienced downward pressure on their economic wellbeing as well as diminished security in the face of economic and social change.

Making matters worse, these changes have been highly correlated with geographical differences. Since the 1970s, large cities (especially capital cities) have thrived while small towns and ‘peripheries’ have fallen behind. Populist leaders have scored gains by mobilising non-urban voters against educated urban elites, to the detriment of centrist politics. Rebuilding public support for centrist parties and policies will require their members to get out of their comfort zones, literally and figuratively, and re-engage with the groups of voters they have surrendered to conservative populists.

In the USA, political analysts will continue to debate the extent to which President Joe Biden has governed from the centre. But there is no debate about the fact that in the USA, as elsewhere, the principal challenge to mainstream politics is coming from the populist right, not the socialist left. Former president Donald Trump may well regain his office in the November 2024 presidential election, with incalculable consequences for the alliance of Western democracies.

All of which is to say that this is no time for centrist triumphalism. The challenges to moderate governance, democratic reform and liberal democracies are graver today than in many decades. Centrists should work with a renewed sense of urgency to shore up the parties that defend their creed and to offer policies that renew hope among social groups that have turned away from the centre towards a new right whose commitment to liberal democracy is very much in doubt.

2

CENTRISM AND THE FIGHTFOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Jennifer Rubin

We live in a political era in which far too many words have lost fixed, agreed-upon meaning. Radical authoritarians who would take a meat cleaver to democratic institutions call themselves ‘conservatives’. Others unsubtly rename overt racism, sexism and homophobia as ‘anti-woke’. If reactionary radicalism can masquerade as conservatism and fascism as common sense, then useful interchange is impossible. In such an atmosphere, then, linguistic precision is critical. Accordingly, before we engage in an analysis of the relationship between centrism, a widely misunderstood term, and liberal democracy, also misunderstood, it behoves us to define both terms.

Popular misconceptions of centrism should not distract us. Indeed, we can easily define centrism as what it is not – a waystation between political extremes, a mushy tendency to compromise or a fondness for style over substance. Those mischaracterisations are ably deconstructed by other authors in this collection. Rather, centrism has a positive and specific meaning. We can reduce it to a formula: moderation + heterogeneity.

Moderation, as authors such as Aurelian Craiutu, a fellow contributor to this book, have defined it, is a commitment ‘to promote necessary social and political reforms, defend liberty, and keep the ship of the state on an even keel’. It requires humility, restraint and ‘a tolerant and civil virtue related to temperance and opposed to violence [that] respects the spontaneity of life and the pluralism of the world and can protect against pride, one-sidedness, intolerance, and fanaticism in our moral and political commitment’. But moderation alone can amount to dilution of virtuous positions, leading to perverse results. If one recognises climate change as a scientific fact, then exercising ‘tolerance’ for climate deniers is not an option. When confronted with one political party that assaults truth and democracy and another that defends it, some onesidedness is in order.

To avoid such moral and intellectual predicaments, centrism requires another element: the ability to combine solutions, analyses and policies from a range of political sources, to appreciate that wisdom does not exist solely on one side or another. Conservatives have something to offer in commending the benefits of free-market capitalism while progressives’ devotion to equal opportunity and remediation of historic inequalities has value as well (all, of course, in moderation). Centrism recognises that, for example, capitalism and regulation, individual merit and social justice, and diversity and cohesion not only can coexist but must. Centrism appreciates the inherent intellectual conflicts in free societies (freedom and equality, national self-interest and human rights). We cannot, and must not, resolve such conflicts entirely in one side’s favour. Centrism, in short, stands for the proposition that ideological tensions are best resolved when we borrow the best from conflicting perspectives.

Liberal democracy refers to a system which protects individual rights and recognises the people as the ultimate source of power. The essential attributes of liberal democracy include the rule of law, limited government, the peaceful transfer of power through popular elections, a free press, an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military and renunciation of violence as a political tool. At the heart of liberal democracy, then, is an unavoidable tension between individual rights and popular sovereignty. Minority rights and majority rule are the x and y axes that set the contours of most debates: how much individual accumulation of wealth derived from free-market capitalism do we curb through taxation? When does freedom of religion give way to popular will or competing values? How do demands for national security coexist with the right of privacy? And how much individual liberty should we sacrifice to tackle a national emergency or contain a pandemic?

Faced with two principles of liberal democracy in constant tension, if not conflict, it should not be surprising that centrism, the ideological perspective designed to combine the best of contrasting perspectives, should be critical to its survival. Conversely, severe polarisation (the opposite of centrism), widely regarded as the enemy of liberal democracy, exerts resistance to compromise, fosters an all-or-nothing mentality, diminishes respect for political opponents, weakens critical institutions and provokes refusal to cede power (because political opponents are cast as an existential threat to society). But if we can see that polarisation stresses the foundation of liberal democracy, it is not self-evident how centrism reinforces it.

And upon close examination one finds plentiful evidence that without devotion to centrism (moderation + heterogeneity) liberal democracy will falter. There are at least three ways in which centrism acts to reinforce and protect liberal democracy: 1) centrism is essential to manage and maximise the benefits of diversity; 2) centrism is critical to maintain respect for an independent judiciary, which is the lifeblood of liberal democracies; and 3) centrism is a fundamental aspect of democratic norms that supplement the rule of law and democratic institutions.

Diversity

In liberal democracies, pluralism – of race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation and political opinion – is both a fact of life and an outward manifestation of individual rights. George Washington, in his ode to religious liberty delivered to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, declared:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Washington, in singing praise for religious diversity (not simply tolerance by the majority for minority faiths), rebuts the argument that differences must be assimilated entirely for democracy to function. Given the diversity in human experience and viewpoint, uniformity is neither desirable nor possible in liberal democracies.

And yet pluralistic liberal democracies must reach consensus on certain issues, provide the conditions for widespread prosperity and defend their institutions and security. And here is where centrism plays such a vital role. Centrism is the wellspring not only of humility and restraint; it provides the impetus to borrow from conflicting sides. Centrism encourages elected leaders to forge alliances that may shift over time, that cross partisan lines and that provide the stability and sense of unity necessary to function.

It is a truism that in US politics, if you want to achieve progressive aims, elect a centrist. And in President Biden – a man able to achieve momentous domestic progress and forge an unprecedented international alliance in support of Ukraine – one sees a full flowering of centrism. He can neither overwhelm nor ignore opponents. Instead, he combines spending with deficit reduction, an historic investment in green energy with market-based incentives.

Despite disagreement on many issues, President Biden found allies across the aisle on everything from infrastructure to microchip production. His goals were progressive, but in exuding moderation and borrowing the right amount of policy from right and left, he brought ballast to the presidency at its most turbulent time. Biden provided a sterling example of centrism’s capabilities: better outcomes come not from overpowering or ignoring one side but by borrowing, luring and co-opting them. It is not coincidental that at a time when liberal democracy was stressed as never before in US politics, a self-styled centrist was best able to navigate to success.

A credible judiciary

Be it in Poland, Turkey or the USA, the perceived politicisation of judiciary at the hands of right-wing ideologues has endangered liberal democracy itself. A judiciary co-opted by reactionary politicians soon loses the qualities that the law of rule, an essential aspect of liberal democracies, provides. Politicised judges who reflexively side with the politicians who appointed them inevitably discard precedent and lack intellectual coherence to reach predetermined outcomes. In doing so, they soon jettison their legitimacy and lose public support. A court that earns the scorn of voters soon faces threats to impede its independence and/or limit its jurisdiction.

If one considers the US Supreme Court, compare the two former Republican-appointed justices widely regarded as centrists (Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy) with the trio appointed by President Trump. In selecting O’Connor and Kennedy, President Ronald Reagan departed from ideological litmus tests – in the former to appoint the first woman to the high court and in the second to gain consensus after two failed nominees. The result: justices respected for their independence, common sense, flexibility and judicial restraint. They helped the high court stay tethered to a modern USA, moving incrementally and adhering to precedent on hot-button issues like affirmative action and abortion. Public support for the high court remained high for decades. By contrast, a court transformed into a right-wing partisan pugilist saw its approval crater. Critics now deride its partisanship, and a ferocious political tumult roils the country, throwing jurisprudence and society (including medical practice, voting maps and the administrative state) into a period of chaos.

As voters come to see the judges as something other than neutral arbitrators, the court loses legitimacy. And when a court fails to restrain its own ‘side’ from excesses, it endangers the foundational principles of liberal democracy.

Democratic norms

Democratic norms go beyond the letter of constitutional law, cajoling politicians to act in good faith and lending support to institutions. When democratic norms evaporate, authoritarianism – complete with an assault on objective reality, political deployment of violence and suppression of a free press – fills the vacuum. These attacks on democratic norms have spread across western and eastern Europe, budding democracies in the Middle East, and areas of Latin America. And sadly, the USA hasn’t been immune.

Without democratic norms, laws can never perfectly insulate us from populists and extremists. Such norms stem not simply from personal virtue, but from a spirit of centrism, an understanding that your side’s defeat does not mean the apocalyptic fall of the nation. A peaceful and effective transition of power is a part of the democratic process. If centrism holds firmly to the belief that neither side has all the answers or all the virtues (even if they are not evenly distributed), then democratic norms will be secure. Centrism rejects Manichaeism, allows the natural ebb and flow of political power and respects co-equal branches of government. Simply put, centrists don’t start or tolerate coups.

The future

We have no shortage of warnings about the decline of democracy, nor of explanations for threats to its survival. Failure to spread economic prosperity, demographic change, decline of civics education, religious fundamentalism, information bubbles and globalism have all contributed to democracies’ slide into mixed government – partially democratic and partially not. Some combination of these factors inevitably leads to support for a strongman who vows to fix intractable problems that ‘messy’ democracy cannot solve. But perhaps we are looking in the wrong places.

We can address all those challenges to liberal democracy, provided the spirit of centrism pervades. If one sincerely believes there are no permanent victors and no permanent losers, that solutions to problems stem from no single ideological pedigree and that humility, tolerance and pragmatism are essential to governing complex, diverse modern countries, then sizeable, even staggering problems – from climate change to poverty, from injustice to election disputes – can be effectively addressed within the context of liberal democracy. Centrism that can accommodate diversity, preserve a credible and independent judiciary and secure democratic norms is essential and foundational to liberal democracy.

Having seen the fate of liberal democracies when centrism falters, we should appreciate the urgency to cultivate centrism. Liberal democracies’ future depends upon it.

3

FAITH, PHILOSOPHY ANDTHE FOUNDATIONS OF CENTRISM

Micah Goodman

The political centre has its roots in the ancient past. The primeval intuition that defines the centre was born in ancient traditions that cultivated the idea that balance is at the heart of the ideal way of life. There is no one clear way to attain balance; the history of human culture offers two different approaches: the ‘golden mean’ model most notably favoured by Aristotle and the model of holistic equilibrium advanced by Heraclitus.

The Aristotelian model of balance is well defined by Maimonides, a twelfth-century Rabbi and scholar considered one of the foremost thinkers in Jewish history. He writes: ‘The two extremes of each quality are not the proper and worthy path for one to follow or train himself in.’ One must locate these two extremes and place oneself at the midpoint between them: ‘The upright path is the middle path of all the qualities known to man. This is the path which is equally distant from the two extremes, not being too close to either side.’ The middle, the point between the extremes, is the path one should follow. Maimonides praises the golden mean, calling it ‘the path of God’, and states that ‘one who follows this path brings benefit and blessing to himself’.

Heraclitus proposes a different version of balance. In his view, balance is attained not from the middle but from the whole. Heraclitus does not seek the midpoint between opposites, but the whole that contains both opposites alike: ‘Harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.’ There is a secret to reality, one for which the bow and the lyre are metaphors. The bow is a tool of war and the lyre is a tool of music, but both are dependent on taut strings. The taut string of the bow shoots arrows and the taut string of the lyre produces notes. What causes the string to become taut and carry out its action? The fact that its two ends are pulled in opposite directions. What would happen if the two ends of the bowstring were not stretched in opposite directions? The string would not be taut and the bow would not shoot arrows. According to Heraclitus, the bow is the organising metaphor for the whole of reality. The opposites within reality are what holds it together. ‘God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, abundance and hunger, but he takes various shapes, just as fire.’

God, meaning the force that acts upon the world and holds it together, is the meeting of opposites. If winter prevailed year-round and rain fell ceaselessly, there would be no life. If summer dominated all year without a drop of rain, there would be no life. The world exists not because of winter or summer, but because of the contrast between the two. Reality is the string of the lyre, and its ends must be pulled in opposite directions for it to create musical harmony. The ancient Chinese symbol of yin and yang is a familiar expression of this idea. One side is black, the other is white, and where is the truth? The truth is not found in one of the sides, nor is it in the middle point between the two; it is in the whole that contains both sides together.

The Zohar is an immense mystic corpus containing many different writings of the Jewish tradition. Among the most mysterious of these is the Sifra di-Tsni’uta (the Book of Concealment), the secret within the secret. A concept appears in the Sifra di-Tsni’uta by which the godly world, the world of the sefirot (divine attributes), is organised as mitkala, Aramaic for ‘scales’. As we know, the balance of a scale depends on there being an equal weight on each side; and if the human world is a reflection of the world of the sefirot, then when the divine world is thrown out of balance, so too is all of human history. Dualists think the world will become harmonious when one side defeats the other; but according to the Sifra di-Tsni’uta, harmony appears when the two sides balance one another.

This is an ancient concept common to various mystic traditions, each offering a different metaphor by which to understand the divine balance of reality – the string of a musical instrument, the weights of a scale, and of course yin and yang. What these ancient traditions have in common is that they seek balance not in the middle, but in the whole. The truth is not found in the midpoint between extremes, but in the whole that contains both extremes within it.

The political centre can draw inspiration from these two different models. One is the ethics of the golden mean formulated by Aristotle and Maimonides. This is politics that distances itself from both the right and from the left. The second model is that of yin and yang. This ancient Chinese tradition offers a different path of balance. Inspired by this model, holistic politics is not a middle ground between the right and the left but a politics that contains right and left.

Buridan’s donkey

Can holistic philosophy be converted into political action? This is seemingly an impossible transition, because holistic philosophy tends to be very open at the conceptual level but paralysed at the practical level. One thought experiment, referred to as ‘Buridan’s donkey’, which has been formulated in different ways throughout the history of philosophy, does a good job of illustrating the major weakness in holistic thinking. In the Middle Ages, the analogy became common in the branch of philosophy that studies decision-making and the freedom of choice, and echoes of it can be found throughout the intellectual arena ever since, from Western philosophy textbooks to the writings of the Persian philosopher Al-Ghazali. Over the years, the analogy became attributed to the French philosopher Jean Buridan, although it does not appear in his writings. It is a guided imagination exercise.

Imagine a closed room in which the air does not move. On one side of the room is a pile of grain, and on the other side is another pile. The two piles are perfectly equal in size. In the exact centre of the room stands a donkey. What will happen to the donkey? If one instinct pulls it towards one pile of grain, and a second instinct of identical force pulls it towards the second pile – it will starve to death. It will remain immobile between the two piles. It will become a pile of bones, not due to shortage but to paralysis.

Someone who manages to break free of the binary pattern of thinking and view the world through a holistic lens sees the good in every phenomenon and the spark of truth in every notion. Such an individual can believe in a certain stance and in its opposite with equal conviction and may become completely paralysed as a result. One who sees the light in the political right and the truth in the political left is liable to freeze in place. The holistic approach forges passiveness.

People who believe that the opposing stance is a disaster are more devoted to their own stance and are willing to fight for it. This is the major advantage of binary thinking. It may narrow our mind, but it increases our effectiveness.

Is this tragic trade-off necessary? Are we doomed to choose between two problematic options? An open intellectual and spiritual life that neutralises the desire to act, or a life of active energy that stems from a narrow and binary spiritual world? Is there, to borrow a modern political term that appears elsewhere in this book, a third way?

The answer of Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes proposes this third path.

Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time? (Ecclesiastes 7:16–17).

This verse speaks out against excess – and, surprisingly, comes out against all forms of it. Not only should one avoid excessive foolishness, one should also avoid excessive wisdom. Not only should one avoid excessive wickedness, one should also avoid excessive righteousness. How do we neutralise the tendency towards excess? Well, Ecclesiastes does not suggest taking the golden mean between two extremes but proposes a completely different approach.

It is good that thou shouldest take hold of this; yea, also from this withdraw not thine hand: for he that feareth God shall come forth of them all. (Ibid.:18)