What if one is more right than the other?
There may be no more persistent myth in political analysis than the notion that the wisest, most moderate political position on an issue lies somewhere between the partisans of one party and the partisans of another. It presumes that on any given issue, both parties must be wrong–and by an exactly equal amount—and that the therefore most "rational" voters would therefore gravitate towards a theoretically "correct" position between the two.
The problem is, as David Roberts explains, that's an entirely false notion of who "moderates" actually are:
[T]he relative prevalence of moderates in popular polling is almost certainly a statistical artifact. A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate. What's really being measured is heterogeneity of opinion, not centrism. In fact, most moderates have at least one opinion that is well outside the mainstream of either party.
Much more on this, but let's head below the fold. See you after we've gotten the rest of our night owls duties squared away. Like, for example:
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Unfulfilled goals, but also breathtaking change, 50 years after March on Washington:
"The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." We can't say that, 50 years later, the March on Washington's goals have been fulfilled. But we can mark some simply astonishing, even awe-inspiring, changes. First, of course: 50 years ago, the right to vote was one of the components of freedom that was denied to so many. While voting is still contested, it's not a small thing that this afternoon, a black president will speak at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the anniversary of the march. Or that in 1963, John Lewis was the youngest speaker at the march, and today, he is a member of Congress. From Georgia. The simple existence of this paragraph as anything other than fiction is astonishing, from a 1963 standpoint:
“I am very encouraged about what the president will say,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the last living speaker from the march. “I’ve had a conversation with him. He called me a few days ago and he’s going to say all of the right things, but I believe, I truly believe, that his presence as the first African-American president will be a speech unto itself.” |
In 1963, too, the march was controversial and scary to many; for a window into how it was viewed at the time, you can actually listen to the original coverage from Boston's WGBH.
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Greg Dworkin takes to task the old trope about journalistic "objectivity," and reminds us of Europe's refugee crisis. KY clerk still flouting the law, joining conservatives everywhere who stick taxpayers with the bill for pipe dream lawsuits.
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More from David Roberts:
Moderates also tend to be more disengaged from politics. More engaged voters will tend to follow the lead and adopt the positions of party leaders. People who know little about the landscape of politics or the mechanisms of policy will tend to support positions outside the mainstream, often positions that more experienced political observers will find ludicrous (for good or ill). A voter with deeply informed, mildly center-left positions will code as "more partisan" than a moderate who has ill-informed positions that are all over the map, but that doesn't mean the moderate is more centrist or more rational.
Another way to put this would be that the mythical centrist middle ground is not a point of true ideological balance, but a statistical "fuzz" of political or policy illiteracy that cannot be meaningfully pegged to any point in our already far-simplified left-right spectrum. Roberts focuses on the notorious inability of Silicon Valley tech-types to meaningfully impact policy decisions due to their own willful aversion to engaging in "politics", but so-called "tech nerds" are not alone in this: Among great segments of the population, partisanship in the political process is seen as distasteful. To any given voter, the "correct" positions will presumably be the ones held by the voter themselves. Whether those positions are rationally or irrationally held, however, a voter who truly considers politics beneath them isn't likely to be able to even identify which of the two parties hews closest to their own preferences, much less which individual candidates might.
These aren't voters of the noble, nonpartisan center, but the furious statistical noise of political, ideological, and issue illiteracy. In an ideal world there would be no such thing, but we are not in an ideal world. We are in a world in which people need to have jobs, and care for families, and get a damn break now and again, and you'll have to forgive the average citizen of any nation if they aren't able to pore over candidate statements, party platforms, and the necessary reams of research and literature that might inform them as to which candidates are being honest and which are selling them a load of goods.
But what of that mythical center position, the point of equilibrium between two parties that are both exactly as partisan, exactly as ideological, and therefore exactly as wrong? Why does it persist, especially, among the pundit class, the sort of people who appear on television and write earnest columns on their neutrality?
[I]n practical coalitional politics, the "center" will tend to be shaped not by rational thinking but by money and power. If there is any space left for bipartisanship in US politics, it is around measures that benefit corporate elites.
The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It's a hoax, so we shouldn't do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It's happening, so we should do something about it. The "centrist" position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it's happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. That's not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.
It's also perhaps the most irrational of the three. A climate denier might believe there is no action needed because it is simply impossible for mankind to significantly alter the atmosphere; a do-nothing centrist is willing to believe it is indeed happening just as science predicted it would, but still posits that the upcoming global catastrophe is a more tolerable outcome than attempting to bend the
free market towards preventing it.
Paul Krugman:
When it comes to economics, I try to base what I say on evidence and on models that have stood the test of confrontation with evidence; but I often encounter people who assume that I’m just a left-wing version of Stephen Moore. Why do they believe that? Have they actually looked at my analysis and track record? No, they just know that I’m much more critical of the right than of the left, and they assume that this means ipso facto that I’m biased. But what if in modern America the right is much more wrong than the left? Not a possibility they’re willing to contemplate.
It's far more irrational to consider the two parties identical than it is to suppose differences between them, but the myth of the
invisible centrist is primarily used as a dodge to avoid evidence-based or reason-based debate. There are few top political pundits expertly versed in economic theory, and damn few indeed on climatology, but declaring that all rational
and irrational arguments are, by virtue of the mythical center, likely equally correct and/or equally wrong is a cheap way to turn your own issue-illiteracy into a non-ideological selling point, instead of a deep informational handicap. You may not know
why one touted expert has been wrong in a decade of past predictions while another has been consistently right—and if moderation is the in-between point, you have no need to even look it up.
That's not in any meaningful way ideological "centrism." That's just dressing up your own issue illiteracy as a far more honorable position than those of the people who might have actual skin in the game. If you're a voter, it's a way to shirk your democratic duty to help govern your nation while putting a hipper-than-thou face on it. If you're a pundit, it's a way to get through another day's column without letting on that you have absolutely no idea what any of these other people are talking about.