We Need to Talk About Reactionary Centrists
Sympathizing with the right while punching left is not the
neutral position pundits seem to think it is
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Apr 25
Wehave a crisis of lopsided political polarization in the
United States.
There are fewer moderates than ever in the Republican
Congress. Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has thrown out the
rule book to undermine healthcare and steal a Supreme Court seat. The United
States is the only country with a major political party that denies the
scientific reality of climate change. Republican state legislatures are attacking people’s voting rights instead of trying to
win their support. And right wing media routinely promotes conspiracy theories,
from questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship to suggesting that the Parkland
student activists are “crisis actors.”
But despite these developments, a great deal of popular
political commentary still approaches our politics with a strange form of
unearned evenhandedness. Opinion columnists, influential academics,
and think tankers feel a need to occupy a middle ground, even if it’s one that
is increasingly a product of their own imaginations. As a result, they wind up
giving the right wing a free pass or accepting its worst impulses as a reality
we have to live with, while reserving their criticism and armchair
quarterbacking for anyone to their left.
I’ve come to call these pundits “reactionary centrists.”
Reactionary centrist (n) — Someone who says they’re
politically neutral, but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the
right.
Reactionary centrism is an ideological stance that isn’t
really centrist at all. It can elevate a speaker in the mainstream media as a
liberal-ish critic of liberalism and make someone feel good about being above
it all and not taking sides, but it’s increasingly a stance that leads
to sloppy thinking, especially as the Republican party continues to lurch
rightward and away from democratic rule. We should identify reactionary
centrism when we see it, challenge it, and ask what reactionary centrists could
be doing instead to more productively contribute to public debates.
Reactionary centrists think politics is about positions,
not actions
Did you know Exxon supports a carbon tax? Well, that’s what they say when
they’re challenged to do something about climate change. But you’d be
hard-pressed to find anyone on Capitol Hill whose ever felt pressured by the
company’s lobbyists to actually pass a carbon tax.
Taking a political position is a cheap form of political action.
But a lot of our thinking about politics is grounded in the idea that positions
are more important than what political actors actually do to build and use
power. Positional thinking leads reactionary centrists to the conclusion that
if only the left and right could meet in the middle, wherever that middle is,
we could settle contentious debates.
For instance, writing in Enlightenment Now,
cognitive scientist Steven Pinker posits that if only the left embraced nuclear
power, they could compromise with the right on climate solutions. But he
doesn’t account for the fact that mainstream environmental groups have been
exploring deals like this for years with little to show for it.
The cap-and-trade emissions trading debate in 2009 and 2010 was an attempt to use a
market-based emissions reduction system to bring businesses and Republicans on
board, including Republicans who supported carbon pricing and taxpayer
subsidies to boost the nuclear industry. A handful of Republicans did come
along, just enough to squeeze the bill through the House, but not enough to
make a deal happen in the Senate. Most of the House Republicans who voted for
cap-and-trade were primaried out of office in 2010 for daring to compromise
with Democrats on anything. The story of Obamacare was quite similar.
When Vox’s Ezra Klein challenged Pinker on these facts during a podcast, it
became clear that Pinker was not familiar with this political history or with
the real advocacy positions of mainstream climate groups. Yet Pinker’s views
still hold sway in the science and tech world, with prominent philanthropists
like Bill and Melinda Gates promoting his book as a must-read.
More fundamentally, Pinker’s book admonishes the left to
change its stances on climate policy. But why not tell the right to change
their stances instead? It’s a question we too often fail to ask because
conservative movements have made antipathy to compromise a key part of their
political worldview. In admonishing the left to find more ways to work with the
right, reactionary centrism does the right’s job for them.
For Pinker and a lot of people who don’t work in politics,
public debates look like this:
And it feels good to believe that there’s a noble compromise
to be had in the center. But the Republicans who are in power right now are
telling us with their words, their actions, and their political muscle, that
they’re not interested in one. Failing to listen to them—and blaming the left
for not doing enough to compromise with them—is a recipe for sloppy thinking.
In political science terms, what the right is doing is
shifting the Overton Window in their direction, trying to make
extreme ideas such as climate denial, undermining voting rights, and
dismantling the social safety net appear mainstream. Reactionary centrists, in
urging the left to compromise with the right, play into this strategy.
A generalized example of an “Overton Window.” Credit:
Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons, CC
BY-SA 2.0
Online leftists jokingly dismiss “horseshoe theory” with
“fishhook theory,” an illustration of how the right, in refusing to compromise,
drags mass perception of where the middle is over their way.
And on issues where political actors disagree about the very
reality of a problem, finding middle ground can not only be impossible, but
actively misleading.
So what does an alternative path look like on an issue like
climate change? In short, trying to win. The climate mobilization last year
showed how interconnected groups can work together to build political power
around a platform of climate, jobs and justice. Organizations like the Sierra
Club and the People’s Climate March, for instance, are doing more work to
protect voting rights in marginalized communities—the same predominately black
and Latinx communities that are the most likely to suffer from environmental
injustice and the most reliable voters for environmental champions.
Map of the NYC Climate Mobilization in 2017. A physical
manifestation of the climate coalition.
This is a tougher, longer-term path to walk than negotiating
a grand bargain on nuclear power. But it has the helpful advantage of
being grounded in reality and enjoying the support of actual climate
advocates. The fact that Pinker doesn’t lead with work like this
suggests that his own politics are more focused on appeasing the right than
building power on the left.
Reactionary centrists need an intolerant left to match
the intolerant right
Pinker is among many scholars who worry that intolerance on
the right is being matched by a different kind of intolerance on the left. To
be clear, reactionary centrists don’t deny that the hard right is bad and
terrible. They see the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, the conspiracy theories,
the voter suppression, the censorship of government researchers, the ICE agents
picking people up off the street. But then they look for something, anything on
the left to balance this out so they can stay in the middle.
This analysis lacks a sense of who actually has power on
each side. Do we really think that a student activist group protesting a
controversial speaker is as much of a threat to free speech as a Republican
president who calls for jailing journalists and firing protesting NFL players?
Of course not, but why then do Pinker and other scholars and pundits keep
coming back to campus free speech debates as an example of lefty intolerance?
Maybe their own positions in and around academia bias them toward caring more
about these debates, but it may also speak to a deep need to perform a centrist
balancing act that isn’t backed up by the facts.
And in some cases, reactionary centrists’ need for an
intolerant left causes them to make stuff up or uncritically pass on obvious
misinformation.
Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psych professor and best-selling
author, came to fame for insisting that a Canadian human
rights law would require him to use specific gender pronouns in his classroom.
There was nothing in the legislation in question that actually did so, and
Peterson’s claims were routinely debunked by law professors, the Canadian Bar
Association, transgender rights groups, and members of the Canadian Parliament.
But Peterson was able to use his criticism of a fictional radical leftist
position to elevate himself as a reasonable middle man, even as he professed to
sympathize with liberal positions on labor and worker’s rights. Peterson has
found himself a welcome guest on the campus free speech moral panic
media circuit, from David Rubin’s podcast to Real Time with Bill Maher,
where iconoclasts can conflate progressive activists disagreeing with them with
having their views suppressed and their rights trampled.
Rubin, a former Young Turks host, says he ditched the left for its purported intolerance of
competing views. But in doing so, he routinely promotes sensationalized stories
about campus protests directed at conservative speakers. And in at least one
case, he’s helped promote an entirely fake leftist critic. The Twitter account
“Official Antifa” lambasted a talk he was set to give, counting him among
“racist, anti-LGBT fascists” who weren't welcome on campus and he took the
bait, sharing their post to mock the left. But as Buzzfeed exposed in 2017, the account is not run by
anti-fascist organizers, but by trolls who are trying to discredit the left and
get amplified by commentators like Rubin. Bari Weiss, an opinion columnist for
the New York Times helped them out when she cited Official Antifa’s take on Rubin as an example of
left wing campus intolerance. The Times had to issue an
embarrassing correction and Twitter, at long last, finally suspended the fake
account.
These incidents are silly, but they speak to the deep
need some pundits have to punch left, even if they’re punching at works of
fiction. They also fail to recognize the outsize power of right wing news media on conservative
politics and how right wing news outlets routinely lie to their audiences about campus
activism, taking out-of-context stories from right wing advocacy groups like
Campus Reform and laundering them them through more staid commentary magazines
like the National Review and Weekly Standard, eventually pushing them into
columns and op-eds in mainstream publications like the Times and Wall
Street Journal.
Reactionary centrists also elevate these incidents, in
part, because they believe that intolerance on the left somehow causes
polarization on the right. But the mechanism by which this occurs is never
explained. Amy Chua, a Yale law professor who has written a book about
political tribalism, blames the left for the rise of Trump and the
so-called “alt-right” white nationalists. In her telling, if the left had more
tolerance for mainstream right wing views or tamped down discussions of topics
like cultural appropriation, the right wouldn’t be as tribal. In making this
argument, Chua ignores the role that right wing media plays in misrepresenting
views on the left and stoking resentment on the right. But as evidence, she
offers a handful of blog comments around the 2016 election purportedly written
by conservatives who were troubled by Trump and the hard right, but who were
somehow more troubled by campus activists and so-called “identity politics.”
Chua never seems to have asked herself if these comments are genuine or simply
a form of right wing concern
trolling based on messages propagated in the right wing press.
Indeed, if you only watched Fox News, you would think that
Black Lives Matter is a violent street gang, not a wide-ranging civil rights
movement with a detailed
policy platform and community anti-violence initiatives. You might
also think that students activists spend all their time trying to deplatform
right wing speakers. You’d never hear about the widespread activism among students to reduce their
debt load, increase their wages, and organize their peers. And you’d definitely
never hear about religious colleges that routinely fire employees and suspend
students for violating right wing forms of political correctness.
The truth is that if everyone on the left followed the
advice of Peterson, Weiss, Rubin, and Chua, Fox News would still lie to its
base to keep them whipped up about something. It’s just what they do. And
taking right wing propaganda at face value is perhaps the worst error
reactionary centrists make.
But when questioned on another Ezra Klein podcast about the pervasive power of Fox News on the
American political right, Chua refused to engage with how the network spreads
resentment, fear and misinformation. Instead, she said cable news generally was
bad, keeping herself firmly in the middle.
Even more prosaically, professional centrist groups like No
Labels have found themselves misrepresenting the
ins-and-outs of wonky policy debates on healthcare premiums to paint Democrats
as if they’re as ideologically hardwired and compromise-averse as Republicans.
Not only were they wrong in that instance, but political scientists would scoff
at the notion that the parties are equally polarized.
These are hard political realities to acknowledge. Our
national political system is deeply different than it was in 1985. But
retreating into a fantasy world where the right can heal itself through the
power of centrism or noble compromises exclusively made by the left is no
solution at all.
Reactionary centrists have to prop up the
moderate right
Reactionary centrists often enter into political debates
with the presumption that they should always be cool, level-headed, and
respectful. And that’s nice, but politics is a very contentious field precisely
because it’s how we resolve otherwise unresolvable conflicts. Further, a lot of
reactionary centrists are part of a chattering class in publishing and academia
that views respectful discussion as the central goal of politics rather than
the building or use of power, the granting of rights, or the distribution of
resources and wealth. Thus, they work overtime to elevate the views of what
they consider moderate or reasonable voices on the right, even though those
voices have very little power in policymaking. And they give far too much
credit to actual powerful political actors on the right for being reasonable
when they’re actually quite extreme.
This leads to some truly strange commentary. For instance,
Conor Freidersdorf, in attempting to criticize The Atlantic’s
decision to fire the incendiary right-wing blogger Kevin Williamson, ties the
incident to the literal destruction of the American project.
More specifically, I dissent from the way that Williamson
was dragged, regardless of his position. That dragging would be a small matter
in isolation, but it is of a piece with burgeoning, shortsighted modes of
discourse that are corroding what few remaining ties bind the American
center. Should that center fail to hold, anarchy will be loosed.
But what is the nature of this anarchy and its loosening?
This is left to the reader’s imagination. I doubt most Americans even know who
Kevin Williamson is.
Similarly, Sam Harris flipped out at Vox Media for publishing a criticism of
an interview he did with Charles Murray, a right wing political scientist whose
uses data about race and IQ to argue for dismantling civil rights programs.
Harris’s beef? One day science may say something inconvenient for the left,
therefore liberals have to demonstrate that they can respectfully discuss race
science with Charles Murray while ignoring Murray’s policy goals. For Harris,
being able to avoid criticism from outlets like Vox is more important than the
public policy debates he wants to participate in. And he’d rather invest his
time, energy, and considerable podcast platform into presenting a moderate
version of Charles Murray’s views than elevating the voices of civil rights
activists or scholars who work on ending racial discrimination.
When pressed on these issues, again by the infinitely
patient Ezra Klein, Harris demonstrated that while he thinks everyone else is
politically biased, he is not.
That discussion reminded me of so many others I’ve had with
researchers who participate in political debates. They think the middle is
where they’re supposed to be regardless of where the sides stand in a debate,
but they can’t quite explain why. If you point out their political biases and
the effects of their political advocacy, you’ll get a blank stare, a denial, or
simply have accusations of bias thrown back at you.
For instance, Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist who
rose to prominence among climate deniers for criticizing other researchers,
endorses a handful of right-wing policies on climate change, including
revisiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that carbon emissions
endanger public health and creating a “red team” to challenge official climate
science.
When I pressed Curry to acknowledge that she was engaging in
political advocacy, including testifying about these issues at the invitation
of Republican members of Congress and conducting a deeply misleading interview
with Fox News, she insisted that she isn’t really an advocate and doesn’t
have an ideology at all. But in this case centrism — and a particular
reactionary form of centrism—is the relevant ideological stance. In Curry’s
case, it led her to tell Congress to follow the lead of right wing think tanks
on climate science and to tell Tucker
Carlson that climate change could be both good and bad while also, at
Carlson’s prompting, trashing Al Gore. The fact that someone can do that while
still claiming to occupy an ideological middle ground is mind-boggling, but
reactionary centrism persists precisely because it is so often unthoughtful.
Roger Pielke Jr., another researcher who has made a career
out of criticizingclimate scientists for their political advocacy
has made some similarly odd leaps about just how moderate and compromise-happy
conservatives are in the Trump era. For instance, after Trump’s election,
he dismissed Trump’s climate denial and embraced the view
that he was actually quite flexible on climate policy, advising scientists that
they should work with the administration:
Despite Trump’s rhetorical nods to the social
conservative wing of his party during the campaign and his enthusiasm for
convenient conspiracy theories, he is clearly a pragmatist with little worry
about changing his policy preferences.
Needless to say, that hasn’t panned out. More recently, he
has tried to dismiss the Trump administration’s widespread scientific censorship as a form of “neglect,” insisting that a
president who believes climate change conspiracy theories and appoints a
wrecking crew to lead the EPA actually doesn’t care about these issues.
Yet when engaged on these points, particularly the pervasive
nature of climate denial, Pielke Jr. still blames the
environmental left for not being welcoming enough of views on the right.
Although he has liberal values, Pielke Jr. has secured his position as a go-to
expert for right wing political actors, including being called in to testify by
Republicans at the same hearing Curry participated in.
It’s OK to take sides
There is a role for centrism in our politics. But moderation
or centrism as a goal is easily exploitable by the modern
right, especially for public figures who see political debates in purely
partisan and positional terms.
At best, reactionary centrism is a lazy response to
politics. If progressive groups are doing something you can describe as
distasteful or beneath you, or ineffective, that’s an excuse to avoid the hard
work of participating in the progressive political movements that are actually
trying to make our politics better.
But at worst, reactionary centrists fail to critically
assess how the right operates in America and wind up playing along with its
agenda as a result.
There’s always going to be disputes between Democrats and
Republicans that require compromise. But increasingly, the disputes we face are
over basic rights and realities. Is climate change real? Does everyone deserve
the right to vote? Are democratic institutions worth defending?
In this era, taking sides on those issues is of fundamental
importance. The goal of any progressive political program should be to build
power, strengthen democracy, and deliver more benefits to more people.
There’s plenty of room for compromise along the way,
including compromise with committed centrists and conservatives. But one should
never be blinded into compromise as a goal in and of itself. Compromise and
standing in the middle is a tactic and a tool, not an ideology. And in an era
where the right refuses to compromise on anything, reactionary centrism isn’t
centrist at all.
Reactionary centrists should understand these dynamics,
question their own largely unexamined political beliefs and ideological biases,
and ask themselves if what they’re doing with their public advocacy work is
actually accomplishing what they think it is. And I hope in giving a name to
this stance we can debate reactionary centrism for what it often is: an
unthoughtful ideological stance that helps a speaker build their platform, but
fails to make our democracy stronger.
WRITTEN BY
Democracy is pretty cool. We should try it some time. Voting
rights, science policy, political communication and grassroots activism.
