Centrism and its implications

There is a good article on “Slate” by Mickey Kaus that puts very convincingly the well-established view that the major political parties in a democracy both have to stay very close to the centre.  Excerpt:

Think of it in ... well, cheap Darwinian terms.  Imagine that we have a two party system, and each party is a collection of status-seeking individuals looking for power by winning a greater “market share” of the vote.  Imagine that they each have their ideological principles—one is more to the left, one more to the right—but these principles are quite flexible in the face of imminent or repeated failure at the polls.  Over time, as each party crafts its message to maximize its appeal—and adjusts its message after each election to regain any lost share of the votes—wouldn’t one expect the system to reach a roughly 50-50 equilibrium, in which every election was a cliffhanger?

This is particularly marked in Australia where the policy differences between the two major parties are so minute that even a dedicated anti-Leftist like myself would not see it as an important change if the Australian Labor Party got control of the Australian Federal government.

The really interesting implication of centrism, however, is that you can only get big change by moving the whole political agenda in one direction or the other.  This happened very markedly after the implosion of the Soviet Union—- after which socialism went out the window worldwide and market-based economic arrangements (particularly privatization of former government-owned businesses) were brought in by parties of every political stripe from Britain to Bangladesh—not even excepting “Communist” China.

This rightward shift in the economic management agenda has been enormously beneficial—with world poverty now becoming steadily “Africanized” (i.e. with India and China both rapidly becoming more prosperous under their new, more capitalist arrangements, populations stuck in poverty are now very largely restricted to Africa).

So the job of conservative/libertarian writers like myself is now to try to expose the destructiveness of government activism in ALL spheres.  If we can convince enough people of that, we will have moved the political agenda in a way that the major political parties (whether Right-leaning ot Left-leaning) will have to follow.

The centrist nature of modern politics helps to explain a minor puzzle.  Note that in this exit poll data from the U.S. election of the year 2000,  there is a preponderance of older people who vote Democrat, even though older people tend to be quite amazingly Rightist in some ways.  So why do so many who do not see themselves as “liberals” vote for Democrat candidates?

In part it is because, ALL successful Presidential candidates (Democrat or Republican) are in fact centrists.  They have to stay pretty close to the political centre (regardless of what their real, personal views might be) in order to maximize their appeal.  No candidate can hope to win unless he appeals to a lot of centrist or “floating” voters and both candidates will try to offer something to everyone.  The candidate can only be Right-leaning or Left-leaning rather than truly Rightist or Leftist.  And there could be no clearer demonstration of that than Senator John “flip-flop” Kerry.  In the 2004 Presidential campaign, he carried the attempt to be everything to everybody to a ludicrous degree.  And George W. Bush too wooed “liberal” voters by stealing Leftist rhetoric and campaigning (in the year 2000) as a “compassionate” conservative.

Another sign of how centrist successful Presidential candidates have to be is that there is a quite respectable case for arguing that the U.S. government was more conservative under Bill Clinton than it has been under George W. Bush:  Work for the dole took off under Clinton and Clinton balanced the budget whereas George W. Bush oversaw a major welfare expansion (prescription drug benefit) and ran the budget into deficit.  So in those respects the two men did exactly the opposite of what the ideologies normally attributed to them would lead one to expect.  Both have been conservative on some things and “liberal” on others.

So while it would be extremely odd indeed if conservative-leaning candidates were not preponderantly backed by conservative people, the correlation is rarely strong (the strongest correlation I have found in my surveys was .5—implying only a 25% overlap between ideology and vote).  So George W. Bush would have got votes from all sorts of people for all sorts of different reasons:  For instance, as well as getting votes from Christians and committed conservatives, George W. Bush would have got votes from centrists who liked his balance of “compassion” (i.e. being pro-handout) and caution about social change and from some genuinely compassionate “liberals” not because they liked his views in general but because they thought he would be most likely to bring about economic betterment for all (through economic growth etc.).  A vote for George W. Bush was, then,  only on some occasions an indicator of real voter conservatism.  And a vote for Clinton/Gore/Kerry was on only some occasions motivated by Leftist ideological beliefs.  In general, then, the centrist orientation of major candidates makes vote a poor indication of ideology.  It is rather a wonder that a vote for a centrist indicates anything at all.  Many such votes could in fact be a result of essentially random factors.

So the fact that a centrist such as President Bush is hated with a passion by the ideologues among American “liberals” (really Leftists. Liberty is a very low priority for them) does at first seem puzzling.  If you look at the legislation and policies that Clinton and Bush have supported and implemented, it would be a hard task to say which was the more Leftist.  With his support for all sorts of expansion of government, I would definitely say that Bush is the more Leftist but the fact that the matter can be reasonably debated shows just how centrist both men are.  But if Clinton and Bush have been so similar in their policies,  why do the Left adore Clinton and loathe George W?  And in the American politics of the period leading up to the 2004 election, I saw nothing directed towards Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry by conservatives that remotely approached the rage and hate that was routinely directed towards Bush by the Left (And still is being so directed.  See here).  Contempt for Kerry’s dishonesty was common among conservatives but that was about all.  So why do American Leftists hate a man who has done much of what they in the past have themselves advocated (e.g. expanded welfare and deposed a Fascist dictator)?

One key to the answer is that, although a vote for the GOP is SOMETIMES a vote for conservatism,  American politics are essentially interest-group politics.  Each party has its client groups (particularly poor minorities in the case of the Democrats and particularly New Testament Christians in the case of the GOP) and it is speaking for them that brings in the great majority of votes—which is why lots of GOP supporters who deplore Bush’s expansion of government will still vote for him in the next election and which is why American blacks who are conservative on lots of social issues almost always vote for the Democrats.  It is only small minority of centrist (swinging) voters who decide which candidate will win or lose and that is a major part of the reason why both candidates themselves have to be centrist.

So, for the ideologically committed,

it all boils down to power

.  Does your team or the people you like occupy the top positions or not?  Do the people in power sound like you?  Are people you can identify with in charge?  As this author put it:

“And unfortunately, in my own mind, when I hear of a gaffe or embarrassment for the party I don’t prefer, I think, ‘Oh good, a point for my side.’ When ‘my side’ is called for a foul, I think that the officiating might be biased. So many recent events highlight the polarized context we are now operating in.”

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, June 3, 2005 at 06:21 PM in Political analysis
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