Tag Archive for: centrism

What Would A Centrist Do?

The notion of centrism invites scorn from true believers. In many cases it is justified. A politician or person who just bends to the wind and prioritizes staying out of the crossfire, can often be accused of believing in nothing. Those in the so-called center deserve no respect if it is merely a hiding place for cowards and opportunists. But there’s another way to consider centrism.

Introduced as far back as 1976 by Donald Warren in his bookThe Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation, the concept of a centrist being a “radical” is based on the idea that a concrete, uncompromising political agenda can form that rejects extremism on the Right and on the Left. This concept is further explored in Ted Halstead’s more recent book The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, published in 2002.

What Warren came up with in 1976, or Halstead in 2002, may or may not be applicable to America in 2021. But they expressed a powerful idea: The center does not have to be the refuge of cowards and opportunists. It can represent a vision and an agenda that is as revolutionary and as precise, if not even more precise, than the ideologies on the Left and Right that it rejects.

One of the liberating factors in proposing a radical centrist agenda is that it doesn’t have to adhere to ideological dogma from either extreme. It can focus on pragmatic policy solutions that rely on popular support and are designed to improve the freedom and prosperity of all Americans. There are other labels that might apply, although using them may muddle as much as clarify the notion of radical centrism. One of them is conservative populism. The choice of that label may be fraught, but it also provides familiar territory to anyone attempting to define a radical centrist agenda.

A centrist agenda could rest on common sense, facts and logic, and a pragmatic vision that aspires to come up with policies that benefit everyone rather than select special interests or identity groups. Such an agenda could acknowledge the good intent of policies motivated by concern over climate change or racial injustice, while exposing the hidden agendas that propel these movements. There’s nothing wrong with building resilience into America’s infrastructure to cope with catastrophic weather events—we’ve been doing that since the dawn of civilization. There’s nothing wrong with condemning racism—that, too, is consistent with the historical progress of the United States since its inception.

One of the problems facing conservative populists is the failure of center-right politicians, moderate Republicans and even many Democrats, to recognize that what conservative populists are asking for is not extreme. The obligation of conservative populists is to state unequivocally that their positions are moderate, despite how they are tagged by the establishment Left. It is a moderate, rational position to call for an all-of-the above energy strategy to address the energy challenges facing America and the rest of the world. It is a commonsense position to demand a colorblind meritocracy in American institutions, and a positive, patriotic emphasis in public education.

Across every facet of policy, ideas that are commonsense, moderate points of view have been stigmatized as right-wing extremism. The solution is not only to expose the hidden agenda of the Leftist establishment, but to occupy the center. It is a moderate, centrist position to acknowledge that America must control its borders, and to acknowledge that American citizenship bestows rights and privileges that cannot in any practical, equitable, or economically sustainable way be extended to every person that manages to cross into U.S. territory. Asserting these realities belongs in the center of political discourse. They don’t emanate from the extreme Right. They are centrist.

In compiling a list of centrist positions that need to be asserted as such, there’s a lot of ground to cover. It is not extreme, it is commonsense centrism to assert that young children in America’s public schools should not be trained to believe they can be any gender they wish to be. This is confusing to small children and has no place in elementary school curricula, if, for that matter, it belongs in any K-12 curricula. Similarly, it is commonsense centrism to recognize that while every individual deserves respect and compassion, regardless of how they express their sexuality, that doesn’t mean that people must be compelled to endorse every trending gender innovation. This is plain, simple, common sense—and there’s nothing extremist about saying so.

Similarly, it is commonsense centrism to recognize that if you decriminalize crime, and if you designate drug addiction as a lifestyle choice, you’re going to get more criminals and more drug addicts. Commonsense centrism would also recognize that if you legalize vagrancy, designating any tent parked on public property as constitutionally protected private space, and offer the homeless food and healthcare services for free and without conditions, you will remove any deterrent to vagrancy, attracting if not creating as many opportunists and predators among the homeless as genuine victims of circumstances beyond their control.

Awareness of incentives and their consequences should be one of the foundations of commonsense centrism, but somehow the policies and agenda that fall out of this awareness have become stigmatized as extremist. They’re not. If you pay people to remain unemployed, they will not work. If you approve students for graduation who can’t achieve minimum scores on standardized academic achievement tests, students will not study. If colleges and universities admit applicants without competitive academic skills, and if businesses hire and promote individuals based on their group identity instead of their qualifications, then students and workers will no longer apply themselves; they will no longer care if they’re qualified.

For the past few decades, and increasingly in recent years, these positions have been marginalized as right-of-center, if not extreme right-wing. They’re not. They are commonsense centrist positions. The people holding these positions need to calmly and relentlessly self-identify as moderate centrists. They need to demand that moderate politicians recognize them as such, and find the courage to support them.

What is known today as the American Right, or as populist conservatism, needs to occupy the center, giving it substance. They need to push the establishment Left firmly aside, into the extremist margins where they belong.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

When is Extremism Justified?

It was him they’d come for, not only Jabez Stone. He read it in the glitter of their eyes and in the way the stranger hid his mouth with one hand. And if he fought them with their own weapons, he’d fall into their power; he knew that, thought he couldn’t have told you how. It was his own anger and horror that burned in their eyes; and he’d have to wipe that out or the case was lost.”
The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Stephen Vincent Benet

This excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s masterpiece offers a critical perspective on the nature of extremism. It is altogether justifiable to have an extreme reaction to an extreme problem, but if one descends to the same level of hatred and evil that inspires their oppressors, their fight loses its virtue. But can fate be reasonably expected to deliver a positive outcome merely because the good guys were more eloquent? Daniel Webster knew he could not overcome hatred with hatred, but his ability to persuade a jury of the damned to spare a man’s soul, while a powerful moral fable, is nonetheless fiction.

In the year when The Devil and Daniel Webster was written, 1937, ideological hatred was exploding into violence and war across the world. But unlike in Germany, where an entire population succumbed to the exhortations of a fascist demagogue, in America, the growing extremist militancy was attenuated by the calm leadership of FDR. The point here isn’t to defend FDR’s solutions nor to condemn them. Rather it is noteworthy that while worker grievances were addressed through what many still consider to have been a dangerous drift towards socialism, these policies were enacted in America without demagoguery, scapegoating or an epidemic of murderous violence. In Germany, the Nazis were also attentive to worker grievances. But their solutions came at horrific cost. Roosevelt, unlike Hitler, projected a kind persona. Instead of inflaming a nation, he healed it.

In our time there has been a relentless campaign by opponents of president Trump to paint him as another Hitler. Obviously Trump has done his part to feed this assault, since he’s all too willing to openly mock his detractors and rivals. Shifty Schiff, Nervous Nancy, Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie, Pocahontas, Mini-Mike, Cryin’ Chuck, Low-IQ Maxine, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low Energy Bush, Leakin’ James, and so on. But the media, along with everyone else horrified by the Trump presidency, go way too far.

While President Trump isn’t afraid to utter divisive, politically incorrect statements, those represent only a small fraction of what he has to say. Some of his tweets are inflammatory. These tweets, along with out of context low-lights from spontaneous moments at his rallies, are replayed endlessly by the anti-Trump media. Never shown, unless you make the effort, are the rest of his tweets, the rest of his speeches, and the rest of his proclamations, which invariably are positive, uplifting, optimistic, and even – gasp – inclusive.

Trump’s recent state-of-the-union address gave Americans a glimpse of that side of him which the media never shows. But it’s Trump’s policies that ought to provide additional evidence that far from being the reincarnation of Hitler, he is a moderate centrist, violating as many libertarian pieties as leftist ones. Examples of this are plentiful. Investing in the inner cities, pushing for paid parental leave, passing “right-to-try” legislation, and championing infrastructure projects are all taken straight out of the Democrat’s playbook. Other policies advanced by Trump, such as common sense roll backs of environmental regulations and encouraging conventional energy development, are only controversial because the “consensus” pushed by the liberal elite had itself become extreme. In other areas, such as deescalating tensions with Russia and North Korea, and avoiding war with Iran, Trump’s actions are condemned as appeasement. Whatever they are, he’s no second coming of the Fuhrer.

But no matter what Trump does, the America Left condemns him as an authoritarian, a wannabe dictator. Their hatred of Trump, however, is what should be of concern. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, it would have meant an acceleration of every leftist project that had already acquired dangerous momentum during eight years of Obama’s presidency. With Trump, the Left encountered the first substantial resistance to their agenda in over a generation, and this is what guides their fury.

They’d better watch out. Trump is a pussycat compared to what comes next if the leftist agenda in America isn’t stopped in its tracks.

Americans of all stripes – let’s forego the obligatory itemization of identities and just go with “stripes” – are deciding they don’t want to live in a nation where foreigners outnumber natives in most cities and several states, and enable Democratic socialists to acquire a permanent electoral majority. They’re also tired of watching their jobs get exported at the same time as millions of welfare migrants get imported.

Americans of all stripes don’t want their children groomed in the public schools to consider sex to be a subjective individual choice, and they want to decide for themselves how to discuss sexuality with their young children.

Normal hard working Americans, whoever they are, don’t want – in the name of “inclusive zoning” – to have homeless people, including drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals, perverts and the insane corralled into backyard “mini-homes,” or into apartment buildings dropped randomly into neighborhoods of single family homes. They especially don’t want this to happen when their taxes will help pay for the construction and help pay the rents.

Common sense Americans don’t want to spend $6.00 per gallon for gasoline, or $1.0 million for a home on a lot so small you can’t fit a swing set in the back yard. They don’t want to have to take buses and “light rail” every time they need to go grocery shopping or drop their child off at soccer practice. They don’t want to spend their lives living paycheck to paycheck based on the preposterous theory that if they do these things, somehow the “climate” will no longer deliver cataclysmic storms, fires, and floods.

Fair minded Americans don’t want to have opportunities denied to themselves or their children because of the color of their skin. They don’t want to be pushed to the end of the line simply because they happen to be white or Asian, and get told this is necessary because of their privilege, or their “proximity” to privilege. No fair minded American, “privileged” or not, wants to get a job merely because of the color of their skin, or because of their “gender identity.”

Patriotic Americans don’t want to have to submit to “common sense” gun control legislation that solves nothing, but jeopardizes their ability to defend their homes and their freedom. God fearing Americans – and, presumably, atheists with even a bit of humanity – abhor late-term on-demand abortion. Watch a high resolution ultra-sound video of a 20 week old fetus trying unsuccessfully to dodge the abortionists blade. You’ll never be the same.

All of these policies, pushed relentlessly by the American Left, are offensive to the vast majority of Americans. The only reason the outrage isn’t universal is because the mainstream media lies about the extent of these problems and completely ignores the causes. Similarly, the online media monopolies censor – or “throttle down” – content that exposes the leftist agenda.

Donald Trump may not be another FDR, but if he got fair treatment from the media, his popularity would be rising even faster than it already is. Because he has brought the leftist agenda out of the shadows and into a public conversation.

Donald Trump is also no Daniel Webster. But if you watch his speeches and press conferences, you can see that he is almost always thoroughly enjoying himself. The fact that he has not succumbed to the hatred that consumes his critics is a big part of the reason they hate him more than ever.

America is very lucky that Donald Trump, a moderate centrist with common sense and a sense of humor came onto the scene when he did. Because the American people are not going to let their nation and their culture be destroyed. Absent Trump, or at the least, absent some progress stopping the leftist agenda, Americans will eventually fight the Left “with their own weapons.” Fighting extremism with extremism is a last resort, but “when in the course of human events” all else fails, virtue is put aside, and it becomes the tragic final option.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

Realignment and Race in the Anglosphere

Two national elections, one decisive and the other a cliffhanger, have shaken the politics of the West to its core. In the United Kingdom, just last month, Conservative candidate Boris Johnson won a decisive victory for himself and his party. In the United States, barely three years ago, Republican candidate Donald Trump won the presidential election in a stunning upset where he narrowly lost the popular vote but logged a decisive victory in the electoral college.

The voters that supported these candidates represent a movement that has been building for several years but was not expected to result in a political realignment so disruptive and polarizing. Both candidates prevailed in the face of almost universal condemnation from the establishment media, the entertainment glitterati, most major political donors, and even members of their own party.

The reasons for their success are no secret, the only surprise was the level of support they were able to attract. To repeat what everyone acknowledges – whether or not they agree or disagree – Boris Johnson and Donald Trump owe their political success to a populist reassertion of national sovereignty. They represent renegotiating bad trade deals, reconsidering mass immigration, restructuring tax laws to discourage exporting jobs, repealing crippling regulations, and rethinking foreign policy to replace nation building with principled realism.

There’s much more to this picture, however, something harder to recognize, obscured by Johnson’s bombast and Trump’s bellicosity. While both of these politicians are channeling resurgent nationalism, they are also common sense centrists. While common sense and centrism isn’t how the typical critic of these men would characterize them, their lives and their policies provide ample evidence. Both of them have changed their party loyalties. Both of them are unwilling to engage in draconian budget cutting. Trump increased funding to the Veterans Administration. Johnson plans to invest more in the National Health Service. Both of them champion massive infrastructure investments. Both of them are pragmatists.

The politicians who oppose Trump and Johnson, on the other hand, are confirmed globalists. Their agenda prioritize values antithetical to nationalism. They tout the virtues of free trade, as if it’s a revelation that wool is cheaper in Scotland and wine is cheaper in France, and use it as the theoretical bludgeon to justify exporting millions of jobs to overseas sweatshops. They tout the virtues of integration and multiculturalism, but use it to treat their own people and their own culture as interchangeable with any other. They claim there is an urgent need to discontinue use of fossil fuel, nuclear energy, and even hydroelectric power, but collect obscene profits as the attendant regulations create barriers that only the biggest multinationals can navigate.

The rhetorical weapons of globalist politicians do not withstand close examination, but they don’t have to. It is enough to declare anyone who wants to stop exporting jobs and importing welfare recipients as an economic ignoramus and a racist. It is enough to declare anyone who wants to deregulate in order to restore affordability to homes and utility bills as a climate holocaust denier.

In all of this, there is only one question that matters: Can a nationalist centrist realignment hold? And in answer to that question, there is only one variable that matters: Will nonwhites start voting for authentic nationalist centrist candidates, or will they continue to be voting fodder for the globalists?

Shown below are four maps that graphically illustrate the current voting trends by race in the United States and the United Kingdom. The first one shows the United States distribution of votes by county in the 2016 presidential election, with the blue representing those counties that supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and the red representing those counties that supported Donald Trump. The second one shows these same counties according to their concentrations of nonwhite residents.

As can be seen on this second map, below, the concentrations of nonwhites in the United States are depicted by a spectrum from very light green, which are counties that are 90 percent white, to deep purple, which are counties where over 50 percent of the residents are nonwhite. The correlation between these two maps is striking. On both maps there is a crescent running through the South from Northern Louisiana down through Alabama and Georgia and up into the Carolinas, where blacks voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Similarly, on both maps there are concentrations of Hispanic voters supporting Clinton in a line starting on the Northern California coast and running south and east along the border all the way through to Gulf of Mexico. Washington DC, which is 90 percent black, and Miami Florida, which is majority Hispanic, went for Clinton, as did most urban centers where there are significant nonwhite populations.

The most recent data on voting patterns by ethnicity in the United States verify what is evident from these maps. According to Pew Research, in 2018 U.S. congressional races, 69 percent of Hispanics voted for Democratic candidates, as did 77 percent of Asians, and 90 percent of blacks. Only 44 percent of whites voted Democrat.

Before speculating on what this all means, it is instructive to view similar maps for the recent parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom, because the trend of nonwhite support for the globalist agenda is equally evident in that country. The visual evidence, in fact, is uncanny, despite needing to take into account several political parties instead of just two. As the map showing the distribution of votes by party, setting aside the regional parties in Scotland and Northern Ireland, there were three major parties vying for seats in Parliament. Two of them represented globalist interests; depicted in red, the Labour Party, and in orange, the Liberal Party. The sea of blue, on the other hand, depicts the seats won by Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.

As can be seen on the next map, below, apart from significant swatches of Scotland, which voted Liberal because they want to keep the flow of North Sea Oil royalties unimpeded by any potential Brexit related obstacles, the globalist vote is concentrated in precisely the same places where nonwhites are concentrated. The areas where the Labour Party won include the metropolitan areas of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield in the English Midlands. Moving south, Labour was victorious in Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester, along with, of course, nearly all of the area in and around London, where the population of the capital city is now over 50 percent nonwhite.

Data already compiled by the British Parliament confirms what these maps suggest. In the 2019 realignment, with four major parties to choose from (and parties other than these four garnered five percent of the overall vote), white voters preferred the Conservative Party over the Labour Party by a margin of 45 percent to 38 percent. Nonwhites, on the other hand, supported the Labour Party by an overwhelming 73 percent, with only 19 percent supporting the Conservatives.

What Does This All Mean?

The significance of this is already clear to anyone paying attention. In the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, there is a consensus among nonwhites in favor of loose immigration policies, generous welfare and entitlement programs, along with support for favored elements of the liberal agenda such as strict gun control legislation, and laws restricting free speech if it is deemed hateful or offensive. All of these political preferences, to the extent they have become policy, are threats to national sovereignty.

A partial solution for those concerned about retaining national sovereignty would be to restrict immigration. In America, President Trump has worked hard to reduce illegal immigration and he has called for merit based legal immigration which at least would reduce the percentage of immigrants dependent on taxpayers. But birthrate statistics by ethnicity indicate that the percentage of nonwhites in the United States (and the United Kingdom) will continue to increase even if immigration were stopped entirely.

With American realignment in favor of nationalism hanging by a thread, it isn’t enough to stop immigration, even if that were possible. It is also not likely, and probably not desirable, to succeed in polarizing the vote completely according to race, where, for example, 90 percent of whites supported a nationalist agenda, and 90 percent of nonwhites supported a globalist agenda. Such a campaign would inevitably drift further and further towards extremism.

The solution, if there is one, for nationalist centrists is to emphasize the centrism equally with the nationalism. This worked in the United Kingdom, where Boris Johnson was able to convince wary Labour Party voters that he not only did not intend to dismantle the National Health Service, he intended to invest in it. It will be interesting to see how he does that, because centrist solutions to America’s healthcare challenges do not involve a national health service. On the other hand, however, in February 2016, it was Trump, and only Trump among the other 16 libertarian beholden GOP candidates, who said in response to a question about alternatives to Obamacare, “I am not going to let people who need healthcare die on the streets.” Trump is a centrist.

Defining National Centrism

Centrism in 21st century America doesn’t have to rely on historical precedents. It can be defined in terms that many on the far left would consider to be far right, because what used to be moderate, mainstream political sentiments are now tainted by the Left as far right. For example, a politician might consider themselves to be a centrist even if they are in favor of gun rights, merit based immigration, free speech even when it is offensive or hateful, and endorse tariffs if that’s what it takes to enforce fair trade agreements.

Why shouldn’t endorsing development of fossil fuel and nuclear power as part of an “all of the above” energy policy be considered centrist? Why shouldn’t a centrist be willing to encourage publicly funded new roads and freeways so new suburbs can be built, leading to affordable home prices in precisely the same way as back in the 1950s and 1960s? Why wouldn’t a centrist be in favor of slowing down a bit, and not spreading panic over “climate change,” when, despite media hysteria to the contrary, the science does not suggest any sort of looming catastrophe?

And why, for that matter, should it not be centrist to support not a wealth tax, or a return to confiscatory tax rates, but at least closing the carried interest loophole that allows money managers to treat their commissions as capital gains? Who cares? Find one super wealthy political donor in America who is willing to put hundreds of millions into backing nationalist political candidates. Find one super wealthy political donor in America who puts any political agenda in front of their support for lower tax rates for the highest tax brackets, “free” trade, and open borders? Any?

Can National Centrism Attract Nonwhites?

It isn’t clear that a centrist agenda will attract nonwhites in the same proportions that it attracts white voters, but there is no alternative but to try. An encouraging fact is it will not take a seismic shift in nonwhite voting patterns to deliver elections to nationalist candidates in the future. If 20 percent of blacks vote for Trump in 2020, instead of the 10 percent who voted for him in 2016, he will be elected in a landslide. Similarly, if Trump attracts a third of Hispanic voters, instead of around the roughly 20 percent who supported him in 2016 (the percentages are disputed), he will be elected in a landslide.

Ultimately, nationalists who are concerned about changing demographics have to ask themselves tough questions. Do you believe that a community of sovereign nations is a better international model for the 21st century than the globalist vision, where corporations and supranational institutions run the world? Do you believe that the Western values of individualism, property rights and free speech are values that should appeal to everyone regardless of ethnicity? Do you think the emerging citizens of the world will eventually embrace a set of values that is very close to those pioneered by Western nations?

Nationalism, tempered by centrism, offers a political pathway towards a multi-ethnic future that should not be written off as an impossible sell until the sales pitch has been made.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *