It would not seem to be a promising time to be a centrist. Even the most naive observer can see that the establishment is being torn down before our eyes. Yet even deeper than the establishment of political parties and government agencies sits the establishment of The Center, always able to shift left or right as necessary in the moment to maintain its claim. Yesterday DC, a city soaked in laid-off federal employees, played host to Welcomefest, “The largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.” Hosted by Third Way, the Blue Dog PAC, and similar groups—and funded by billionaires including Reid Hoffman, Mike Bloomberg, and the Walton Family—the event drew hundreds of lanyard-draped capital creatures to a spot right next to the Washington Post’s headquarters. Holding an event 50 yards from reporters’ desks is a good way to get reporters to attend your event. Across the street was Franklin Park, a lovely, green oasis for the office workers in surrounding buildings to go decompress at lunchtime, so they don’t kill themselves. I saw a number of Washington Post employees out there.
Unlike most political philosophies, centrism defines itself in relation to other political philosophies. The right stands for something, and the left stands for something, but the centrists stand for “in between those things.” This fact alone accounts for the centrists’ messaging problems, and their solution. The problem is: How do you get people to support a philosophy that doesn’t inherently stand for anything? Their solution is: Attack the other political philosophies as too extreme, leaving centrism by process of elimination. And because this is a contest for control of the Democratic Party, that means, in practice, “attack the left.” (...)
But fascism is on the move, and secret police are snatching immigrants off the streets, and the blog wars feel a little beside the point right now. All of us, left and center alike, find ourselves now in the big, unwieldy boat labeled “The Opposition.” I know what the left wants: To tax the rich, to feed the poor, to increase equality, to free the unjustly imprisoned, to provide food and clothing and affordable housing and healthcare for all, winning the class war and smashing fascism along the way. Great. And… the centrists? What—besides successful podcasts and well-funded think tanks—do they want?
It became clear yesterday that the centrists have two primary messages, which contradict one another. The first message is, “We just need to do the common sense things that regular folks want.” The second message is, “Here are a bunch of highly paid Harvard-educated consultants to discuss what that is, statistically.” The entire event consisted of panels alternating between these two points. There was a presentation from the data engineer Lakshya Jain transmuting politicians into fantasy football participants, ranking every Democrat who had run for Congress by “Wins Above Replacement”—how much their vote share had exceeded statistical expectations for a Democrat in their district. This, he explained, was the definition of a “good candidate.” To drive home the point, Liam Kerr, the pollster co-hosting the event, appeared in a West Virginia Mountaineers football jersey in honor of Joe Manchin, the greatest Democratic candidate in modern history by this measure. What mattered was not “Is this candidate a fucking sellout?” but rather, “How statistically red of a district is it possible for anyone with a ‘D’ next to their name to win?”
Interspersed with all of this data were exhortations to Be Normal. Democrats need to “run people who know how to talk to ordinary people… soccer moms,” Jain said. If you ask anyone in the political world to define “ordinary people” and they answer “soccer moms,” it is a dead giveaway that they never interact with any ordinary people and think purely in branded demographic abstractions. The entire United States land mass would have to be covered with soccer fields and minivan parking to account for the number of soccer moms that exist in the minds of political consultants. Welcomefest consisted of professional consultants telling politicians, “Don’t sound like you listen to consultants!”, followed by politicians saying “Ya know in my district there in the Midwest, I talk to regular folks, not consultants.” This may all be of interest if you are trying to break into the lucrative field of consulting. As a recipe for saving America from dictatorship, though, it is pretty thin soup.
A related problem for centrism is that defining your own beliefs as What Normal People Believe leads to a whole lot of circular thinking. Guess which factions in politics believe they represent Common Sense Thinking? All of them! All of them believe that they speak for the sane, regular people who just want to live good lives and feed their families. I spent all day yesterday listening alertly for actual policy ideas to help me understand exactly what the centrists wanted, to distinguish them from the unrealistic wackos on the left. Matt Yglesias attempted to answer this with a slide deck criticizing allegedly bad Democratic policies including “Prolonged school closures during Covid,” “Paralysis on women’s sports,” “Refusal to discuss record oil production,” “Slow to act on the border,” and “Behind the curve on phonics.” But astute readers will notice that this is not a Data-Based Coherent Political Platform as much as it is just “A list of stuff that Matt Yglesias believes.” Everyone has one of those, and every pundit can stand on stage and talk their own book. What are the underlying principles? (...)
So…so? Is that all? Be normal, do normal stuff, don’t be awful, be decent to people? Does this add up to a philosophy? Is this the platform that inspired all of those billionaires to donate to all of those PACs? Is this the stuff that drew $50 million into the coffers of Third Way? Is this what drew all of these people into this ballroom at such an urgent historical moment? Is this what made me spend a nice sunny day surrounded by pasty lobbyists in all manner of herringbone blazers trying to chat up unfortunate 20-year-old interns? Why the fuck were we here? (...)
Setting aside the personality conflicts and the disingenuousness and the millions of dollars in PAC money fueling this whole charade, the most good faith reading of centrist philosophy is simply that Democrats should, above all, win. They should do their best to determine what a winning candidate and a winning platform looks like in any given district, and then do that, in order to get control of Congress and the White House and the government. As Matt Yglesias pointed out, if five more Blue Dog Democrats had been able to steal away Republican-leaning seats in the House in the last election, the entire destructive agenda of slashing Medicaid and food stamps in order to fund tax cuts for the rich—embodied in the Republican tax bill just passed by the House—would not be happening. In this formulation, subjugating any electorally unpopular political beliefs in order to win more seats is a moral imperative. If Joe Manchin represents the farthest left political position that the Democratic Party can hope to build a successful majority around, well, that is preferable to Donald Trump, isn’t it?
This plausible-sounding argument, however, collapses under the weight of its own execution. Welcomefest was full of data experts and pollsters explaining what was popular in the last election. Politicians were expected to use that data to determine their message for the next election. (While sounding normal!!) But data follows reality. It does not create it. The reason the Democratic Party is so profoundly unpopular today is that people do not know what it stands for. There is simply no way to change this by saying, “We will ask you all what you liked yesterday, and do that tomorrow.” In their pursuit of statistically bulletproof popularism, the centrists have their head so deep in data that it is impossible for them to have a vision. And that lack of a vision is the very thing that turns off the public. This is a political problem that is unsolvable by polling. It requires actual beliefs.
But fascism is on the move, and secret police are snatching immigrants off the streets, and the blog wars feel a little beside the point right now. All of us, left and center alike, find ourselves now in the big, unwieldy boat labeled “The Opposition.” I know what the left wants: To tax the rich, to feed the poor, to increase equality, to free the unjustly imprisoned, to provide food and clothing and affordable housing and healthcare for all, winning the class war and smashing fascism along the way. Great. And… the centrists? What—besides successful podcasts and well-funded think tanks—do they want?
It became clear yesterday that the centrists have two primary messages, which contradict one another. The first message is, “We just need to do the common sense things that regular folks want.” The second message is, “Here are a bunch of highly paid Harvard-educated consultants to discuss what that is, statistically.” The entire event consisted of panels alternating between these two points. There was a presentation from the data engineer Lakshya Jain transmuting politicians into fantasy football participants, ranking every Democrat who had run for Congress by “Wins Above Replacement”—how much their vote share had exceeded statistical expectations for a Democrat in their district. This, he explained, was the definition of a “good candidate.” To drive home the point, Liam Kerr, the pollster co-hosting the event, appeared in a West Virginia Mountaineers football jersey in honor of Joe Manchin, the greatest Democratic candidate in modern history by this measure. What mattered was not “Is this candidate a fucking sellout?” but rather, “How statistically red of a district is it possible for anyone with a ‘D’ next to their name to win?”
Interspersed with all of this data were exhortations to Be Normal. Democrats need to “run people who know how to talk to ordinary people… soccer moms,” Jain said. If you ask anyone in the political world to define “ordinary people” and they answer “soccer moms,” it is a dead giveaway that they never interact with any ordinary people and think purely in branded demographic abstractions. The entire United States land mass would have to be covered with soccer fields and minivan parking to account for the number of soccer moms that exist in the minds of political consultants. Welcomefest consisted of professional consultants telling politicians, “Don’t sound like you listen to consultants!”, followed by politicians saying “Ya know in my district there in the Midwest, I talk to regular folks, not consultants.” This may all be of interest if you are trying to break into the lucrative field of consulting. As a recipe for saving America from dictatorship, though, it is pretty thin soup.
A related problem for centrism is that defining your own beliefs as What Normal People Believe leads to a whole lot of circular thinking. Guess which factions in politics believe they represent Common Sense Thinking? All of them! All of them believe that they speak for the sane, regular people who just want to live good lives and feed their families. I spent all day yesterday listening alertly for actual policy ideas to help me understand exactly what the centrists wanted, to distinguish them from the unrealistic wackos on the left. Matt Yglesias attempted to answer this with a slide deck criticizing allegedly bad Democratic policies including “Prolonged school closures during Covid,” “Paralysis on women’s sports,” “Refusal to discuss record oil production,” “Slow to act on the border,” and “Behind the curve on phonics.” But astute readers will notice that this is not a Data-Based Coherent Political Platform as much as it is just “A list of stuff that Matt Yglesias believes.” Everyone has one of those, and every pundit can stand on stage and talk their own book. What are the underlying principles? (...)
So…so? Is that all? Be normal, do normal stuff, don’t be awful, be decent to people? Does this add up to a philosophy? Is this the platform that inspired all of those billionaires to donate to all of those PACs? Is this the stuff that drew $50 million into the coffers of Third Way? Is this what drew all of these people into this ballroom at such an urgent historical moment? Is this what made me spend a nice sunny day surrounded by pasty lobbyists in all manner of herringbone blazers trying to chat up unfortunate 20-year-old interns? Why the fuck were we here? (...)
Setting aside the personality conflicts and the disingenuousness and the millions of dollars in PAC money fueling this whole charade, the most good faith reading of centrist philosophy is simply that Democrats should, above all, win. They should do their best to determine what a winning candidate and a winning platform looks like in any given district, and then do that, in order to get control of Congress and the White House and the government. As Matt Yglesias pointed out, if five more Blue Dog Democrats had been able to steal away Republican-leaning seats in the House in the last election, the entire destructive agenda of slashing Medicaid and food stamps in order to fund tax cuts for the rich—embodied in the Republican tax bill just passed by the House—would not be happening. In this formulation, subjugating any electorally unpopular political beliefs in order to win more seats is a moral imperative. If Joe Manchin represents the farthest left political position that the Democratic Party can hope to build a successful majority around, well, that is preferable to Donald Trump, isn’t it?
This plausible-sounding argument, however, collapses under the weight of its own execution. Welcomefest was full of data experts and pollsters explaining what was popular in the last election. Politicians were expected to use that data to determine their message for the next election. (While sounding normal!!) But data follows reality. It does not create it. The reason the Democratic Party is so profoundly unpopular today is that people do not know what it stands for. There is simply no way to change this by saying, “We will ask you all what you liked yesterday, and do that tomorrow.” In their pursuit of statistically bulletproof popularism, the centrists have their head so deep in data that it is impossible for them to have a vision. And that lack of a vision is the very thing that turns off the public. This is a political problem that is unsolvable by polling. It requires actual beliefs.
