Please Abandon the Myth of the Center-Right Nation
/
Over the next few days, if you pay attention to the election
post-game show, you will inevitably hear them use the phrase “Center-Right
Nation.” They will use it to explain why Obama won. They will use it to explain
why Romney lost. They will use it to explain that Obama won in spite of this
fact. They will use it to explain that Romney lost in spite of this fact.
But it’s not a fact. It’s not even a lie, per se. It’s just
label devoid of context. It’s only a myth in the sense that some Greek deity is
a myth, a character who doesn’t really exist interacting within a pantheon that
doesn’t really exist. Except that’s being too generous, because there might be
a Zeus or an Athena, and they might live on a Mount Olympus somewhere. “Center-Right,”
without some context, doesn’t mean anything, anywhere.
So, every time you hear a pundit use the phrase, shout at
your television. Scream, “BS!” or “Bollocks!” or “Cockamamie malarkey!” (if you’re
Joe Biden). Flip your TV the bird. Take
off a shoe and throw it at the set. Tweet #CallinBullshit and tell people what
network is still floating this garbage. But whatever you do, don’t let this
slide.
Here’s how you know it’s a lie: Imagine someone was trying
to give you driving directions. They told you to go down three blocks, turn left
on Monroe St., and find the third house on your left, the one with the red door
and the white fence, with the number 7597 on the mailbox. You could get there,
right? Now imagine they told you to drive three blocks down to the ocean, then
make a right heading south down the coast, and look for a houseboat that isn’t
tied to the docks. The boat is adrift in a moving sea, it changes its distance
from the shore based on the tide, and it’s generally headed north. It was last
seen in your town about five presidencies ago. Do you honestly expect to find
it there now, just because they waved vaguely in the direction of the ocean and
told you to go to the “Center-Right”? No. Freakin’. Way.
My analogy is actually an oversimplification. If the
houseboat is America and it is drifting slowly to the north on a changing political
sea, the analogy implies that at least the land is fixed and you have control over
your own position on that fixed ground. In fact, there’s an active earthquake
fault line in that area and you have a sever inner ear condition. We can only know
the position of the boat relative to where the land used to be, and we can only
interpret that in relation to which way our ear is causing us to lean that day.
Now, can you honestly say the boat will consistently be found in the “Center-Right”
of this universe?
I’ve tried to give these pundits the benefit of the doubt. (My
wife says that’s a bad habit of mine.) If the statement is meaningful, maybe
they are referring to some kind of global political spectrum in which the U.S.
is near the middle, but slightly to the right, of the other countries in the
world. This just doesn’t add up, though. We’re to the right of many countries,
but their politics are in flux. For example, countries in Europe have
institutions like national health services which imply they are more left-wing
than we are. However, these same countries, when faced with almost identical
economic pressures during our most recent housing collapse and the ensuing
recession, chose austerity programs that were far more right-wing than anything
our citizens would have tolerated. While they slashed government spending, we
developed a Tea Party that quickly grew to focus on social issues and which
succeeded only in knocking moderate Republicans out of their primaries, thus
ensuring the passage of Obamacare and a Democratic majority in the Senate that
could make sure it wouldn’t go away even if Mitt Romney won the presidential
election. In short, our response has been more left wing, and not because of
our President, but because our right-wingers couldn’t capture a majority in a
time when a left-wing program was being enacted. In relation to Europe, America had a left-wing
response.
For that matter, why do we measure our political spectrum on
a continuum that stretches from the Netherlands on the left to Saudi Arabia on
the right? I was under the impression that comparing ourselves to the modern
countries of the “Old World,” or to any foreign country, was somehow
un-American.
Still trying to give these pundits the benefit of the doubt,
I imagined they were putting modern America in a historical context, somewhere
between Mussolini’s Italy on the right and Mao’s People’s Republic on the left.
But this historical model doesn’t work, either. Most positions held by modern
Americans related to the enfranchisement of voters, the role of government in
public life, and the relationship between the state and religion, for example,
would all have been considered wildly left-wing at some point in history. Women
and minorities voting? Crazy liberal idea. Religious pluralism and tolerance?
Nutso liberal. Public libraries and schools? Left-wing extremism. But America
didn’t normalize these ideas through a left-wing revolution (well, maybe we
normalized the liberal idea of voting rather than obeying a king through a
left-wing revolution, and maybe we ended slavery through an incredibly bloody civil
war, but most of the mainstreaming of these liberal ideas happened more
peacefully and more slowly). Now these ideas aren’t liberal. They are the norm.
Not only did the country drift on a slow tide toward a more inclusive,
tolerant, and activist political structure, but the culture shifted around
these ideas. Furthermore, we are products of that culture, so we moved around
in that cultural milieu, such that a woman could run as a vice-presidential candidate
and not think of her candidacy as the product of a million liberal victories.
From where she was standing, she felt like a conservative (and looked like it
to the rest of us).
American can’t be “Center-Right,” because wherever America
is, that’s its center currently. A few years ago, the political center was
firmly opposed to gay marriage. Karl Rove was able to use it as a wedge issue
to get his base to the polls and put George W. Bush into the White House. But
that wasn’t a center-right position. That won. It was the center. As of last
night, gay marriage is winning. It is becoming the center. Does that mean we’re
a “Center-Left” nation? No. In thirty or forty years, our children will be
standing on different ground, looking out at a different sea, leaning whichever
way their inner-ear conditions cause them to lean, but I would bet good money
that if they are told where the houseboat of America sailed back in 2012, they’d
say it was a far-right position wherein only a few states allowed gay marriage,
something that will be so normal they won’t even consider it up for public
debate.
In one last, desperate attempt to believe the TV blowhards
were using a term that meant something, I considered the possibility that they
were speaking about the rate of change Americans generally find tolerable.
Maybe they mean we keep moving that center to the left, but we do so slowly
because we’ve got some kind of right-wing ideology written into our genetic
code. Our history doesn’t bare that idea out, either. Sometimes the boat moves
quickly, as it has with gay marriage. Sometimes the boat moves very slowly.
Slavery lasted for hundreds of years in North America, and it was followed by
Jim Crow. Even with a second term African-American President, we still carry
the vestiges of deep seeded racism within our culture. It’s not the law
anymore. It’s not a basis for public policy. It’s not even socially acceptable for
the majority of Americans. But it’s not gone. On that front, we’ve moved very
slowly to the left. Our national xenophobia has refocused on people from
different countries of origin as every passing generation tried to burn the
bridges behind them by calling the next wave of immigrants an unfair burden on
the system. In that way, the ocean stays in place and the land moves. We go
back and forth from isolationism to the flexing of military muscle like we’re
riding the tides. Religious minorities go from cults to the mainstream in
waves. But at every point, whether we’re isolationists who are concerned about Catholic
Irish Immigrants or hawks slamming the doors on Mexicans and looking down our
noses at Scientologists, that’s not left or right. It’s just the center.
As of yesterday, America picked a guy who some portion of
the population consider a socialist. Does that make us a “Center-Left” nation?
Oh, and as of last night, he was still African American. Does electing a black guy still qualify as a
left-wing idea? We didn’t elect the Mormon guy. Does that make us right-wing
evangelicals? And we’re still about as
polarized as we were going into the Civil War. Does that mean the Union and the
Confederacy met in the middle and were all centrists?
Labeling our whole country as “Center-Right,” is meaningless,
and worse, it’s creates a false picture that whatever is right-wing today hold
some kind of sway over the national psyche. If anything, our country is
Progressive, but it’s making progress in fits and starts toward some far off
goal that we haven’t defined and which won’t fall neatly into our current definitions
of right and left.
Elections tell us where we are. Pundits who try to tell us
that we are, at our core, somewhere to the right or left of that position are invariably
wrong. You aren’t to the left or right of where you sit reading this right now.
America isn’t to the left or right of itself, either.
