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The Center Cannot Hold

Politics

American politics has lost all congeniality, cofraternity, and constructive compromise. Both parties accommodate their extremists and disenfranchise their moderates. What will be the outcome?

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-- from 'The Second Coming', by William Butler Yeats

THINGS FALL APART

In U.S. politics, the word "compromise" has lost all its congeniality and cofraternity. "Compromise" has become a dirty word. If anyone in either party hints at it, they are hissed and booed by their own team. For the last four months or so this has been evident in the general struggle on the part of Democrats to pass sweeping reforms of U.S. Health Care. The "sweeping" part has been the persistent fly in the ointment. Reforms just a bit less sweeping would surely have already succeeded, and would have cost most Democratic representatives less dearly back home.

As Otto von Bismarck said, "Politics is the art of the possible." Giddy with their recent electoral successes, many Democrats have allowed their perception of the possible to become skewed. In their overreaching belief that the whole game has changed, they have underestimated both the resources and the resourcefulness of people with a stake in the existing game, who are comprised not only by the hated insurance companies and other denizens of the business world, but also by affluent people who are satisfied with their present health care arrangements.

The Democrats have done such a poor job of mollifying these stakeholders that they have been unable to put together the votes for a reform proposal, despite having a supermajority in the Senate and a solid majority in the House. They rail against the Republicans, but the Republicans could not do more than sulkily register a principled objection, were there not significant dissent in the Democrats' own ranks.

This dissent comes primarily from 'battleground' states, which too easily could slip back into Republican hands, should sufficient numbers of moderate voters become disgruntled. It is easy to see how a full-on charge toward giant new entitlements could disgruntle moderate voters, particularly when undertaken in the middle of a substantial economic recession. It seems to me that the Dems would have an easier time force-feeding us their program in bite-sized chunks. Being the party ascendant, their representatives could make some sacrifices, handily pass a bill, and probably reclaim the sacrifices via separate bills in subsequent legislative terms. A friend of mine said it well: "I do not understand the Democratic leadership. If the ground shifts under your feet, move the goalposts and declare victory."

I am not sure the leadership's senses are accurately registering the shift. I think the problem is that the ground is shifting in two different directions. A great chasm is opening up, where the center of U.S. politics used to stand.

THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER

Both party bases are over-mobilized: talk about compromise of any kind and hear the screaming start.The Democratic base cannot stand the idea of winning health care reform by conceding anything to Republicans, nor even to the moderates in their own party. Someone epitomized the attitude some weeks back by saying, "Health care reform without a public option is not health care reform at all!"

This is how the over-mobilized base of the Democratic Party feels; this is how they have been made to feel by all the hot air which filled the Party's sails, and won it the race. It is absurd, of course. One can argue for a thousand and one health care reforms which do not include the 'public option' that has been presented. There is a petulant and entitled attitude here: "If we cannot help the disadvantaged precisely how we like, we are not going to help them at all!" It is a take-my-ball-and-go-home kind of attitude that invites skepticism about the original motive.

Nevertheless, the feeling is quite real. Democratic representatives from stronghold states -- i.e., most of the Democratic leadership -- know that if they fail to deliver a bill that strikes the desired blow, that they may be called to accounts. The radical consituency was oversold on Change, on Big Change, and will accept no substitute.

This overselling, this take-no-prisoners agitprop, was deemed necessary to fill young Dems with enough fire and vigor to skip the Death Cab for Cutie concert to hand out pamphlets, and to drive poor folks to the polling-places. In a close race, you sometimes need special fuel to get all your cylinders firing as fast and hard as possible. But overuse of the nitro has fouled the engine. The Democratic political machine cannot make the necessary exchanges to move its wheels. It needs grease.

The Republican representatives are effectively shut out of the legislative process, and have no horse in this race. Therefore, they have had nothing to gain by restraint -- or even reasonableness -- in their criticisms of the reform proposal. Much better to be seen 'sticking to their guns' in the fight against reform; much better to use the issue to mobilize the base and enlarge the war chests in preparation for the 2010 elections. It has been reported that Joe Wilson, the Representative from South Carolina who yelled "You lie!" as Obama addressed the Congress, raised over one million dollars in the forty-eight hours after his (he asks us to believe, 'spontaneous') outburst.

It seems the die is cast. Both parties are in the grip of their own over-mobilized bases. Representatives from 'safe' states and districts cannot compromise, for fear of outraging constituents and losing the next primary against a critical challenger. On the face of it, this is good old-fashioned American gridlock, which the Founding Fathers built into our system of government to protect it from too much progress. But I think the associated anger is something we have not seen in this country since the Civil War. As Patrick Buchanan put it in a recent article, "We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats."

This vicious game of political tug-of-war should worry us. What should worry the Republican and Democratic parties even more is the great dark chasm across which the game is being played. All the moderates in America are falling into this chasm. Their voices are drowned by the cheers and jeers of the opposing sides. Neither team is seeing them disappear.

THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE

Historically the Republican and the Democratic elected representatives, after paying a certain amount of lip service to their radical fringes, have exerted a good deal of energy on the fight over moderates in the Center. In recent years, both parties seem to have turned away from their moderates. The Republicans have largely turned away from fiscal conservatives who do not harbor strong traditionalist religious views or militantly conservative social values. The Democrats have largely turned away from moderate adherents who are socially liberal and who see a need for some 'social safety net' but do not favor extreme leftism, like radical socialization of whole sectors of the economy. As a friend of mine pointed out, it is hard to imagine a Pat Moynihan or a Richard Nixon coming to prominence. They would be too close to the middle for their respective parties to swallow.

Both parties have ignored populist concerns from the political center in ways that are stunning. First and foremost, with the astronomical spending that was rushed through in the name of economic stimulus. Also, by their continuing refusal to address the very high levels of illegal emigration from Mexico. Both of these issues are potentially decisive ones for the future of the United States, and both are issues that moderates on both sides of the political fence have voiced concern about. Note that these are ways both parties are ignoring the center in more or less the same way. Then you have a number of ways that the center is being ignored through a familiar kind of false dichotomy: i.e., one party wants to overhaul the health care industry in a sweeping way, and the other party wants to do virtually nothing at all. There is a lot of middle ground here that both sides are studiously avoiding. I daresay that in the realm of health care the middle ground -- more modest but targeted reform -- looks comparatively attractive to most educated Americans.

If the parties are not careful, they may still be playing their vain game of tug-of-war when from the chasm sounds a great deep noise, and something staggeringly large and unmistakably angry starts to climb out of it.

WHAT ROUGH BEAST, ITS HOUR COME ROUND AT LAST

It is my conjecture that there is a great mass of Americans who are substantially disengaged from politics, not out of apathy or ignorance, but because of the present state of the two dominant parties, and because of the vicious social climate they (and the 24-hour "news" cycle) have engendered around politics. "Silent majority'" probably would overreach as a description of this group of people: call them instead the Quiet Plurality. They are not silent; if you try you can hear them out there. They are not a majority; but I suspect there are significantly more of them than there are hardbitten adherents to either (but not both) of the dominant parties. That 'hardbitten' qualifier is important, because members of this Plurality are definitely NOT necessarily registered Independents. The number of registered Independents has not risen dramatically. The number of politically disenfranchised moderates in both parties has.

I believe that as long as the Quiet Plurality is ignored by both sides it gains political potential, like a capacitor. The first leader (and I mean a specific person) who the Plurality feels truly represents them, will probably establish the course of the next epoch in American politics. For a while during the 2008 election I thought Barack Obama might be that leader. He said a lot of things that indicated he respected the need for bipartisanship and compromise, for bridging the chasm between the left and the right. Obama has however done little to fulfill these promises. And if not Obama, I see no one on the political stage right now capable of pulling the sword from the stone.

Who will slouch along to scoop up the nation's Center? What rough beast? What hour?

"We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals. And even the necessity for the right kind of compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists and reformers who keep our compromises moving ahead, who prevent all political situations from meeting the description supplied by Shaw: "smirched with compromise, rotted with opportunism, mildewed by expedience, stretched out of shape with wirepulling and putrefied with permeation."

Compromise need not mean cowardice."

-- John F. Kennedy

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