The Best Summation of Centrism
Donna Brazile has gifted us a classic definition of centrism: ceasefire between Main Street and Wall Street ’cause #StrongerTogether.
There are plenty of terrible ways to defend centrism, but we may have hit a new level of absurdity and, incidentally, clarity yesterday with a tweet from former DNC interim chair and now Fox News contributor Donna Brazile. In response to a tweet from Bernie Sanders saying “The question in this election is simple: which side are you on? The side of Wall Street or working people?”, Brazile decided to break out this election cycle’s greatest call for unity: “We need each other. Main Street and Wall Street must come together. We are #StrongerTogether.” Which is basically like if a bank carpet bombed your house and airdropped a sticky note telling you to go fuck yourself and then a Fox News contributor said “Woah woah woah, there’s only one way to fix this mess” and told you to go worship the bank every Sunday because #StrongerTogether. Replace bombing with foreclosing and worshipping with not asking banks to stop stealing and actually contribute to society and you have the literal meaning of the tweet.
What’s most amazing about the statement, though, isn’t the absurd call for unity or even the resurrection of the Clinton 2016 campaign slogan (“Stronger Together”) but the fact that it’s probably the most honest summation of centrism by a proponent of centrism out there. Because for all well-paid, professional class centrists like to posture about wanting to help ordinary people but being “realistic” about the prospects of doing so, they really don’t seem too concerned with fighting for ordinary people. At a certain point, after hearing a smug, well-off centrist trot out the 9,000th excuse for why we can’t achieve basic reforms other countries have had for decades, the inevitable conclusion about centrism has to be that the goal isn’t to help ordinary people; it’s to protect the status quo and the wealthy elite from serious reform, to at the very least lessen the blow of any major reform by watering it down or delaying its implementation.
After all, the term centrism as it’s used in the U.S. doesn’t refer to the middle point between the far right and the far left. Instead, it’s more like the point halfway between clown fascism and the mildly left-wing. Consequently, to borrow from Ralph Nader, with today’s centrist-controlled Democratic party, the reality has become that “The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door.”
And here’s the thing: Brazile’s call for unity between Main Street and Wall Street is essentially what Democrats have been pushing for a couple decades. This urging of unity is transparently not about organizing the 99% to join together to fight for dignity and justice; it’s about reconciling the 99% to subordination and oppression. And this work of placating and serving rather than challenging the wealthy elite, including Wall Street, has been carried out effectively by recent Democratic administrations.
Bill Clinton, as Thomas Frank has put it, “had five major achievements as president: NAFTA, the Crime Bill of 1994, welfare reform, the deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the balanced budget. All of them — every single one — were longstanding Republican objectives.” Barack Obama certainly was not that bad, but still served Wall Street faithfully enough to rake in a speaking fee of $400,000 at a conference organized by a Wall Street firm shortly after leaving office (maybe we can consider this a delayed, uh, “exchange” for the “get out of jail free” card). At turn after turn, Obama decided to give in up front, to prefer accommodation of powerful interests over confrontation, leaving us with piecemeal advances like the Affordable Care Act.
And despite the common centrist defense that centrism is the only way to consistently win elections, outside of the presidency Democrats did pretty poorly under these presidents. Shortly after Clinton took office, Republicans secured unified control of Congress for the first time since the 1950s and maintained that control through most of George Bush’s presidency. In 2016, towards the end of Obama’s second term, Democrats held “fewer elected offices nationwide than at any time since the 1920s.” With these results, maybe it’s time to start asking if striking a balance between helping people and screwing people is a winning strategy.
In any case, if centrists act as honestly as Brazile from now on, it won’t be long before we get a new centrist slogan like this: “Main Street and Wall Street, poor and rich, homeless people and multiple yacht owners, end this divisiveness and fight the specter of fundamental change.” Martin Luther King said that, right?