A Soulless Center – Tyler Syck

On May 17, 2017, Emmanuel Macron bounded onto a platform in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris and declared both his victory in the presidential race and the end of French politics as we know it. No longer would political discourse be dominated by a perpetual grudge match between the left and the right; instead, the solution-oriented centrists would take the reins of power. The young, dynamic, political maverick promised to solve the economic and cultural malaise plaguing France and, in the process, stave off the rise of the populist right. Fast forward to last spring, Macron’s centrist coalition has just suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the far right and the battle-worn French President has decided to call a snap parliamentary election. Instantly, the Centrists of France began to turn on their one-time leader. The results of the summer’s elections fractured the centrist control of the government and have sent Macron’s administration on a sudden, steep, decline.

The story of Macron is just one among many such political tales in liberal democracies across the globe. Broadly, centrist parties and leaders have faced crushing defeat after crushing defeat—almost always at the hands of populist leaders who reject every single aspect of the moderate, compromising, and pluralist politics that have come to define the political center. In short, centrism is in crisis and its advocates are scrambling to rescue a political position they believe offers the last, best hope of democracy. It is exactly this desire that sparked Israeli politico Yair Zivan to edit The Center Must Hold. Zivan, who personally experienced the center’s decline in Israel, gathered the leading minds of the political movement to try and chart the future of the center. In many respects the book does this—it’s a delightful, witty, read offering a range of defenses for its raison d’etre. Yet, at its heart, it’s unclear if the centrist authors manage to grasp the enormity of the crisis they face and the revisions it may demand of their politics.

What is the Center?

In the 2022 French election, nationalist Marine Le Pen offered a simple critique of her centrist opponent, Emmanuel Macron: “He has no qualities.” By this, she intended to imply that Macron, polished and charming as he may be, lacks any real substance—that he is simply a figure without principles who floats from issue to issue, always choosing the most politically advantageous position. Though perhaps unfair, this attack on the French president is to be expected. Throughout history, centrist politicians have been accused of weakness at best and total lack of conviction at worst. As such, The Center Must Hold, seeks, first and foremost, to address this line of attack. Zivan makes clear from the first pages of the book that the political center is not some contentless vacuum but instead a principled political ideology that pushes past the typical left-right divide to offer a new outlook.

At the heart of centrism is the belief that, at its best, politics should be framed as “the never ending work of managing competing tensions, of settling national priorities that accept those tensions exist rather than wishing them away.” In other words, centrism seeks to find a solution to problems from tension-ridden camps and bring those camps into constant dialogue even though they will never be totally harmonized. This allows centrists to find new solutions within the deep complexities of life rather than paper them over or homogenize them. Yet, the many contributions to the book make clear just how hard it is to organize a political movement around such a principle. Two starkly divided camps of centrists emerge from the pens of the book’s many authors and how such division is to be tamed into a cohesive movement remains foggy.

The hard truth is that conservatism and liberalism have souls where centrism has yet to find one. In other words, centrism has no pathos.

First, are the pluralist centrists. For these centrists, the best way to forge moderate politics capable of appreciating the complexity of life is by fostering a society in which all ideas can flourish side by side. In this book, the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman offers the clearest articulation of this view. He argues that there is some kernel of truth in most positions and that only by bringing together all perspectives can the right answers to the mysteries of life be found. Put more concretely, throughout the book, the pluralist centrists display a deep and constant desire to build a robustly diverse society that stalls cultural homogenization and is capable of confronting the sheer intricacy of modern society without attempting to simplify solutions.

The second starkly different and more common sort of centrists that emerge are the technocratic centrists. The technocratic centrists are exemplified above all by Tony Blair—the former British Prime Minister. Blair and those like him, such as Emmanuel Macron and former Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte, believe that strong institutional capacities are vitally necessary to produce sound public policy. As such, Blair’s contribution to the book tries to chart the path for the creation of a “strategic state” that can use fast-evolving technology to solve the problems faced by society in the twenty-first century. Though less broad-ranging than this, many of the other essays in the book take this generally technocratic approach to politics and thus echo the institutionalist mindset.

These divisions amongst the political center help prove the author’s point: centrism is a rich political tradition with its own history and unique philosophy. Despite this, its divided nature, while interesting, makes it hard for centrists to cohere into a full-fledged political movement that can truly challenge the dominance of the left and the right.

The Problem of the Center

The Centrists are hardly the only political tradition to divide into distinct and discernable camps. This poses an obvious question: if the left and the right are so divided, then how do they manage to win so much more than the centrists? Especially given that centrists are correct when they point to the polling data that shows most voters are moderate on most issues.

The hard truth is that conservatism and liberalism have souls where centrism has yet to find one. In other words, centrism has no pathos. For the centrists, their core belief in addressing the complexity of political life should be enough to win them votes. The problem they fail to grasp is that voters want more than technocratic problem solvers. Voters want the nostalgia of conservatives or the hope of liberals; they want the anger of the nationalists and the restlessness of the progressives. Who wants to buy the pragmatism of the centrist? Looking around, the answer is obvious: no one.

As a result of centrism’s soullessness, successful centrists tend to be a hybrid of centrism and a more conventional left/right politics. Tony Blair and Dwight Eisenhower are two good examples. This compounds the soul deficit problem with an identity problem. In the eyes of many, centrism just refers to the moderate elements of each side of the political spectrum. This perpetuates a view—contrary to the basic claims of the book—that there are no centrists, just white-bread conservatives and liberals. Most voters go one step further and define centrists as the establishment wing of each side of the political spectrum—the wealthy, globalist, policy wonks who neither understand the average citizen nor make any serious attempt to do so.

Voters are not entirely wrong in making these assumptions. Without an emotional foundation or historical grounding, the center gravitates to those voters who are most happy with the contemporary moment—with the voters who feel no strong emotions because their lives are going pretty well. The result is that the center loses sight of its goal of appreciating the complex intricacies of human life and instead becomes a prop for established ways of doing things, even when those contemporary practices actually blur the rich distinctions of society.

The Center Must Hold presented a unique opportunity to give some soul to a movement consumed with reason and lost in an ocean of economic models. The authors of the book missed that opportunity. Instead, many of them fall prey to the exact kind of soulless politics that has time and again defeated centrists at the ballot box. Perhaps worse, many—though not all of the authors—seem unable to even grasp the source of their problem. No set of authors in the book are more guilty of this than Lanae Erickson and Matt Bennett who fall into the worst traps of soulless politics.

First, both Erickson and Bennett falsely assume centrism to be more or less a left-wing phenomenon. Far more damning though is the extent to which they simply think that the goal of the center is not only propping up current unpopular social systems but extending them. They acknowledge that previous centrist initiatives—such as NAFTA—hollowed the moderate Democrats’ previously rural base and then, in the next breath, wax poetic about the new suburban moderates whose whole existence is sustained by controversial economic and political practices.

One chapter of this sort does not make the book problematic. But Erickson and Bennet are representative of a concerning hunk of the volume’s contributors. Such authors simply defend the same old centrism that has precipitously declined for the last thirty years rather than attempting to reshape and salvage a struggling movement. Not only do they not find a soul for the center, they do not seem to be looking. In the midst of a crisis that calls for bold action, the leading centrist thinkers of the world are offering up the same tired old dish again and again.

Finding the Center’s Soul

None of this means centrists must fundamentally change who they are. In fact, a hard look at the history of centrism reveals that they have a soul, it has just been misplaced somewhere along the way. Two of the greatest centrist politicians in history are Marcus Tullius Cicero and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Though they lived in drastically different times and circumstances, both displayed a constant, vigorous, refusal to simplify the problems that faced their civilization. Instead, they worked to bring together feuding portions of society with solutions that accommodated, and in fact, relied upon the multifaceted nature of their diverse nations. In both cases, this attitude towards politics made it impossible for Cicero or Eisenhower to be neatly nailed down in any clear political camp. All of this gave them the defining characteristic of a centrist, whatever other political quirks they may have possessed.

Neither Cicero nor Eisenhower were mere policy wonks. Both men grounded their centrism in a soulful sort of politics: an appeal to harmony.

However, neither Cicero nor Eisenhower were mere policy wonks. Both men grounded their centrism in a soulful sort of politics: an appeal to harmony. On first blush, harmony may not seem as good as other emotional appeals, but most voters crave stability. Like nostalgia or hope, this desire can drive a tidal wave of popular opinion and sustain a political movement. It is sometimes easy to mistake harmony simply for maintaining the status quo but a more accurate reading of the history of its political deployment shows that it can serve a double-edged purpose.

First, harmony can mean a simple cooling down of the political temperature. Too often in politics, voters feel like the people who actually care about them are being drowned out by the radical, angry, and simply strange. Thus, harmony can try to restore some peace and normalcy to politics. Dwight Eisenhower’s political career was largely dedicated to restoring a sense of normalcy after the trying years of World War II.

Perhaps more important to centrists is the sort of harmony represented by Cicero. Though the Roman statesman certainly took measures to try and calm the last stormy years of the Roman Republic, the hallmark of his harmonious centrism was not just bringing warring factions together to sing kumbaya in the Forum. Instead, Cicero tried to address the ways in which Roman society itself had become imbalanced: the centralization of power in the hands of a few military leaders, the unconstitutional expansion of the republic well beyond its means, and the contradictory mounting power of both the wealthy and the mob. To solve all of these problems required a careful recalibration of Roman society to bring its various parts back into harmony with one another. Such formed the locus of Cicero’s politics. In a time when many feel left behind by the economic and political system, this is a remarkably moving narrative open to centrists of all stripes.

In the final chapter of The Center Must Hold, Yair Zivan argues that we need an approach to politics that “offers the antidote to extremism and polarization, a set of policies that provide genuine answers to the challenges of the modern world.” For all its problems, the book does much of this. The chapters on public policy are thoughtful and sound; everyone should read about the centrist approach to education, energy, and national security. Likewise, the chapters on philosophy are seriously enriching; Aurelian Craiatu’s musings on moderation and Micah Goodman’s reflections on religion are magnificent. Yet The Center Must Hold does not offer any workable guide for how centrism can find a soul. There is no roadmap for fixing the biggest problem that currently plagues the center, and as such, there is no real roadmap for political victory.