As the news headlines continue to screech about hardened positions on the left, right, or compromises extracted as easily as an ancient embedded wisdom tooth, there is one segment out there that doesn’t get much attention:
The political middle. It does exist.
Really, it does.
And columnist Kathleen Parker finally wrote what some have been grumbling about: as the most active members of both parties seem particularly interested in pleasing their “bases” — it is literally “base pandering” — independents and centrists are feeling shut out. The feeling is not so much “Nobody loves me no maw…” It’s more of the feeling an unathletic kid has as he stands in the middle of a ballfield after two teams didn’t choose him for either ball team.
But when the game begins the teams don’t have enough players so they each say soothing things to him so he’ll join their team.
Parker’s column should be read in full, but here are some key excerpts to ponder:
In today’s food-fight environment, where extremes dominate debate and choice is defined by either-or, finding a comfortable place to land is increasingly difficult.
Like most people I know, I tend to run screaming from both ends of the spectrum. Too conservative for the left wing and too liberal for the right wing, I find myself scrambling for the center aisle.
Yet, people in the middle often are held in contempt as fence-straddlers. If you’re an opinion columnist, you’re forced to pick a side. People want to know: Are you conservative or liberal? “It depends” is considered a weak answer, morally relativistic, lacking in backbone.
She then goes into her position on abortion, which has gotten some people angry, and on partial birth abortion. Indeed, we get this all time time. Many people read blogs only if they agree with the writer. TMV admits he is all over the place politically so no one will totally agree with him. Some people get mad if they read or hear “on the other hand” because that phrase is not one of the ones used often used on rightwing or leftwing talk radio shows.
And here is where Parker hits the political nail squarely on the head:
Indeed, given current trends, we may declare that we have reached a perfect storm of political backlash. Americans who cleave to neither extreme – some 50 percent of whom identify themselves as “moderate” – are fed up with the Ann Coulter/Michael Moore school of debate and are looking for someone to articulate a commonsense, middle path. They may have found their voice in John P. Avlon, chief speechwriter for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a New York Sun columnist, whose 2004 book “Independent Nation” has just been released in paperback.
Avlon insists that centrism is the more patriotic political position because it adheres more strictly to American values and founding principles than to ideology. A balance between idealism and realism, centrism is a yin-yang proposition that rejects shrill extremes and embraces reason, decency and a practical perspective. To those who insist that centrism is the death of dissent, Avlon argues that centrism is dissent – from outdated political orthodoxies.
“Extremists and ideological purists on either side of the political aisle condemn compromise,” he writes. “But inflexibility either creates deadlock or dooms a cause to irrelevance.”
That’s from the introduction to “Independent Nation.” The balance of the book is a compendium of short biographies of several U.S. presidents, senators and governors and their personal journeys as they illuminate the theme of centrism. Avlon says his purpose in writing the book was to give today’s centrists a framework for understanding their frustration with extreme politics and a place for the politically homeless to hang their iPods. Or their heart monitors, as the case may be.
Extremists won’t agree with Avlon that centrism is a patriotic position, but who cares? They’ve held the nation hostage long enough. Meanwhile, Independents are the fastest-growing group of voters across the country, especially among the young, hundreds of whom have e-mailed Avlon since his appearance last week on “The Daily Show” with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. A Pew Poll published last week in The Economist broke down voters as 39 percent Independent, 31 percent Democrat and 30 percent Republican.
Socially liberal and fiscally conservative, Independents could be a powerful reckoning force by 2008. Politicians better wise up and tone it down.
We’ll have more to say about Avlon’s book later. Suffice to say we are now read-reading our underlinings of it. He makes the case that the United States is intrinsically a nation of independent thinkers. But as you read the headlines each day, you can see how the people who are in control due to ambition and ideologies — that in some cases assume near-cult character – are the ones setting the agendas.
Two more things on this:
- Several thoughtful centrist weblogs have addressed how moderates in BOTH parties are now being attacked by those within their parties from partisans who demand total loyalty to their party line with implicit or explicit threats to go after them if they don’t. Look here, here and here for more details. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
- The readership of THIS site shows that there are indeed many INDEPENDENT thinkers in both parties. We get emails, comments and suggestions (to that one reader: I tried and my computer won’t fit up there) all the time that prove it. (Our Right Voices and Left Voices blogrolls also have some folks there who may be declared to be left or right but when you read what they write on an ongoing basis you realize they are independent thinkers don’t parrot anyone’s line).
But Parker is right: the person who wants to read more, think more, perhaps take a less shrill and more studied position and not do a one minute analysis that sounds as if it was stolen from Rush or Randi (and oftentimes it is) is distrusted as an a lightweight, at best, an enemy at worst — but John Avlon has documented how many of those folks not only made history….but also went down in American history as among the greatest ever in it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.