The centrist dads are back in town. The British granddaddy of so-called centrism, Tony Blair, all but formally anointed prime-minister-in-waiting Keir Starmer as his political successor during a love-in at the Future of Britain summit last week. Elsewhere, his erstwhile spin-doctor Alastair Campbell has been busy — along with former Tory Rory Stewart — taking the top spot in the UK news podcast charts and selling out West End theatres.
Former chancellor George Osborne and former shadow chancellor turned Strictly Come Dancing star turned morning TV presenter Ed Balls, meanwhile, are launching their own podcast in the autumn. “Ed and I are frenemies — once bitter foes, and now firm friends,” said Osborne. It’s all so breezy and self-assured. Almost as if everything that shook the establishment to its very core in 2016 has already been forgotten.
On the other side of the Atlantic, things are moving in a less chummy direction. In next year’s election, Joe Biden — a natural centrist who has embraced a more progressive ideology during his presidency — looks very likely to face a twice-indicted (and counting) man who still calls the 2020 election a “massive fraud”. The two other frontrunners are the Florida governor waging a “war on woke” and a man who airs conspiracy theories about Covid-19 having been “ethnically targeted”.
But some believe America’s cure also lies in centrism. Step forward No Labels, a political organisation that supports bipartisanship and centrism. Last week, the group said it would consider fielding a third-party ticket in 2024 and published a 72-page manifesto entitled “Common Sense” — a favourite term of centrists, because how can anyone disagree with that? This offered lots in the way of problems and little in the way of solutions. Its big “idea” on abortion, for instance: “America must strike a balance between protecting women’s rights to control their own reproductive health and our society’s responsibility to protect human life”. (Why did nobody think of that before?)
I have sympathy for many of those who either call themselves centrists or else appeal to the “centre ground” of politics — indeed, I share many of their views. I am critical of illiberalism on both the left and the right and I often (though not always) favour moderate political candidates. I consider trying to find some kind of balance between clashing value systems and interests very difficult but incredibly important. And yes, I too wish we could all just get along.
But centrism is not going to get us there. For one thing, it’s not very interested in getting stuck into the arguments — centrists tend to think of themselves as above all that messy wrangling. Their “common sense” doctrine suggests that incredibly complicated problems have obvious solutions that all “sensible” people would surely agree with.
Centrism is really defined only by what it is against. Leon Trotsky, writing in 1934, was right when he said that centrism is “characterised much more by what it lacks than by what it holds”, and that it leads a “parasitic existence”. Without all the hard-fought intellectual battles around it, centrism — which dismisses some of those arguments without taking them on — couldn’t exist.
Centrists tend to stake a claim to a space in the political middle that is not actually there. Nietzsche wrote that “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force”. Where is the centre when the political spectrum has become more horseshoe-like than linear? Where is it when no one can agree on what is truth and what is fiction?
“There’s this idea that you, as a centrist, have an overview of the whole system and so you can see where the centre is,” Christopher Clark, regius professor of history at Cambridge university, tells me. “You’ve navigated it all and you’ve created a kind of cartography of politics in which you occupy this space of virtue. There’s a kind of arrogance about it.” Centrists often have a reputation for being smug, and they have earned it.
I would much rather think of myself as moderate: a more modest and less fashionable appellation. A moderate might sometimes find themselves agreeing with those who claim to occupy the centre ground but they arrive at their positions after having considered and engaged with the arguments rather than simply rejecting any ideology as extreme or non-“sensible”. Furthermore, because being moderate is an approach rather than a fixed position it does not lend itself to groupthink or to tribalism — a scourge even when the tribe is made up of nice middle-aged men.