The Political Center, Borrowing Now from Left and Right

I nstead of dividing the world into a simple left and right, one way of looking at politics in many Western nations since the end of the Cold War is that “the center” emerged to defeat its populist rivals on either side of it. In broad strokes, a portion of traditional left-leaning parties made their peace with capitalism as the Cold War ended. And some right-leaning parties, particularly the Tories in the U.K., but later also the Christian Democrats in Germany, ditched their commitments to social and moral conservatism. The Republican Party offered ineffective opposition to the center on moral and cultural questions.

This ascendant center, which tended to straddle the inherited partisan divides, landed on a few major policy ideas, or — more accurately — tendencies. The center was committed to the ever-freer movement of people, goods, and capital. In the European context, this meant the embrace of the euro, the expansion of the European Union, and the hoped-for withering away of what Irish taoiseach Micheal Martin recently called the “backward-looking idea of sovereignty.” In America, these commitments expressed themselves in support for NAFTA and for the creation of the Chi-merica economy, marrying capital-rich American business with a labor-rich China. Finally, the center was committed to an American-led world order, with active intervention against malefactors such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. The center was technocratic. And because the centrist elements in both parties sought the favor of the college-educated and upwardly mobile, it tended to leave behind forgotten constituencies — even forgotten national regions.

A motley new assortment of left and right dissenters protested against this. On the right, Pat Buchanan and a handful of others opposed freer trade. On the left, it was the anarchists in the street who launched violent protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999. Likewise, Buchanan opposed mass immigration. Bernie Sanders did as well. Until recently, the Vermont socialist denounced open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal.” Left and right populists came to oppose the Iraq War. Growing opposition to the Iraq War began transforming political thinkers into populists. So too did the financial crisis and the euro crisis. And finally, populists started breaking through. First at the peripheries: right-wing populists in Poland and Hungary; left-wing populists in Greece. By 2016, populists were achieving victories in contests where the stakes really mattered: the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election.

These electoral earthquakes and the intense reaction they provoked made the center look brittle. In the United Kingdom, Remainers turned up the snobbery and became almost openly and proudly anti-democratic. In the United States, Trump’s election was met by a center that seemed devoted to consoling itself with nonstop conspiracy theories about Trump colluding with Russia to steal the election or increase his personal fortune by illegal means.

But something unexpected has happened on the way. The center is starting to adapt. The left-leaning populist writer Angela Nagle noticed this shift and began to document it in her recent essay “How the Libs Owned Us All.” She notes that the Biden administration is borrowing heavily from the high-spending aspirations of the Left, and from the populist right for a nation-renewing infrastructure-improvement plan: “Their policy proposals have included major national infrastructure spending, including expanding the train system, a capital gains tax increase and a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan,” she writes.

She could go further. In borrowing from the Right: French president Emmanuel Macron, a centrist who beat the right-populist Marine Le Pen in his last election, now tries to get to Le Pen’s right on issues of domestic security — and even culture. Macron is extremely “anti-woke” and speaks about woke orthodoxy as a threat to the French Republic. He has adopted tougher rhetoric on this issue, if not exactly very tough policies on immigration.

Biden’s team talks up “intersectionality” and has loosened up on immigration, but it has half-reconstructed Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” asylum policies as a “Wait in Mexico” policy. His administration claims to be chiefly concerned about climate change in their trade relationships and foreign policy, but he borrowed Trump’s belligerence with China in the first meeting of Chinese and American statesmen in Alaska. Much was made of the long line of insults hurled at America by the Chinese delegation, but these were practically invited by Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his team, who hosted the Chinese in the most peripheral part of America’s continental landmass and began the meeting by criticizing the Chinese delegation for human-rights abuses. The Biden team expanded the Trump rap sheet against China: Not only were the Chinese stealing intellectual property and mishandling COVID, but they were violating human rights as well.

Nagle thinks the center is consolidating its hold over politics. And she writes in nearly conspiratorial tones about how the centrist liberals seemed to give in to the far Left, in order to further weaken and demoralize the populist Right:

The anarchists in particular, were unleashed as a fanatical vigilante force, permitted to indulge all of their sadistic and violent fantasies on a proscribed Trump-voting white working class, to enact a campaign of terror and de-Trumpification on behalf of the elites. This came in the form of rioting, burning things down, getting people fired, getting the media to attack ordinary citizens and so on. The whole “cancel culture” phenomena was also a form of purging the non-compliant within the elite institutions. Now that their services are no longer required however, because the libs are back in power, you can already see signs that they’re being decommissioned.

I’m less certain than Nagle that the woke genie can be put back into the bottle, and I’d dispute with her that the center is succeeding in adopting the best of the criticisms leveled against them from both ends of the spectrum. Biden’s majorities in Congress are large enough only to throw a redistributive “party” for a weekend: passing out checks for COVID relief and infrastructure. What they cannot do is rebuild the welfare state to match its new demographic realities, nor can they reform the global economy to save distressed regions. Similarly, Macron is at the mercy of events. The ongoing decomposition of the Christian Democrats in Germany presents new opportunities for populists left and right. And the growing ability of the Chinese Communist Party to exercise political power through the free-trading system that the center still defends presents massive opportunities for Left and Right to humiliate the center once again.