(C) Common Dreams
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The Center Cannot Hold, and It Doesn’t Seem to Care [1]

['Daniel Finn', 'Shawn Fain', 'Brent Cebul', 'Lily Geismer', 'Isabella Weber', 'Jared Abbott', 'Branko Marcetic', 'David Broder', 'Cedric De Leon', 'Georgios Samaras']

Date: 2025-01

Over the last ten years or so, the idea of a vital and virtuous political center that simply must hold in the face of irresponsible, demagogic populism has become one of the great clichés of Western political commentary. Armed with a few half-digested quotations from W. B. Yeats — a truly eccentric choice as the bard of moderation — politicians and pundits have claimed to be fighting the good fight against symmetrical extremes of left and right: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. As the century’s third decade passes the halfway mark, the fundamental mendacity of this rhetorical framework is clearer than ever. The task of holding the center ground was supposed to lie in the hands of traditional parties of government that dominated the electoral field before the crash of 2008. Yet the mainstream right clearly has no interest in battling against the likes of Trump, Farage, or Le Pen. “Never Trump” Republicans and their European counterparts have been one of the most ineffective political tendencies in modern history, for all the attention they have received from the media, while the big battalions of conservatism gladly embrace ideas and individuals once considered beyond the pale. Center-left politicians, on the other hand, have been ready to fight, fight, and fight again when faced with a challenge from their left flank. But they are unable (or simply unwilling) to muster the same combative spirit against the Right. Instead of stabilizing around a rejuvenated center, political life on both sides of the Atlantic is steadily moving rightward. This dynamic will not change unless the left-wing forces that have been aggressively pushed to the margins can regain some of their lost influence.

From Third Way to No Way During the golden age of the Third Way, politicians like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder based their pitch on the claim to possess “electability.” Their supporters had a simple message for left-wing critics: you might not like the compromises they insisted were necessary to win power, but the alternative was to remain trapped in opposition for an indefinite period of time. Media commentators delivered countless homilies about the need to choose between principle and pragmatism if you wanted to get things done. During the golden age of the Third Way, politicians like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder based their pitch on the claim to possess ‘electability.’ Whatever you might say about their record of achievement in office, the Third Way figureheads certainly seemed to have sussed out the business of winning elections. Clinton became the first two-term Democratic president since the 1960s after more than a decade of Republican rule. His vice president, Al Gore, won the popular vote in 2000 and would have kept hold of the White House for the Democrats if not for shady maneuverings by Republican apparatchiks in Florida. Blair matched the achievement of Margaret Thatcher by winning three consecutive elections — the first Labour leader to do so in Britain. Schröder beat Germany’s Christian Democrats twice and only fell narrowly behind his party’s main electoral rival in a third contest. That all seems very remote from the current political moment. Joe Biden was on course for a heavy defeat when he reluctantly bowed out of last year’s US presidential election; his hastily drafted replacement, Kamala Harris, promised joy but could only deliver the most comprehensive Democratic setback since 1988, losing the popular vote as well as the electoral college. Barely three years after Olaf Scholz became Germany’s first center-left chancellor since Schröder, his coalition government has collapsed, and the Social Democrats are expected to trail far behind the Christian Democrats in next month’s election; they may even fall below the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. At first glance, Britain seems to be an exception to the rule. Last July, Keir Starmer led Labour to a parliamentary landslide on par with those of 1997 and 2001. But Labour’s vote share was almost 10 percent lower than it had been when Blair first came to power. It was the collapse in support for the Conservative Party that gave Starmer such a commanding position in the House of Commons. After the 1997 general election, it was more than three years before Labour slipped behind the Conservatives in the polls, and that was a temporary blip before a comfortable victory in 2001. It had already happened to Starmer several times before his first Christmas in Downing Street, with Labour consistently polling below 30 percent. The British press has started publishing articles that ask how Starmer “fumbled his first months in power,” while the Reform UK party of Farage has the wind in its sails.

Freedom to Fail What stands out is not merely the fact that center-left politicians are struggling to find a sustainable formula for winning elections against the Right. It is the patent lack of urgency they bring to the task of doing so. The Democratic Party in the United States allowed Biden to carry on as its candidate for 2024 when there was ample evidence that he simply wasn’t up to the job. It was only after a disastrous performance in his opening debate with Trump that the party elite started pressuring Biden to retire, after allowing him to inflict enormous damage on their prospects. There was a brief surge of enthusiasm — or relief at any rate — when Harris took over. But it soon became clear that Harris and her team wanted to run a campaign anchored as far to the right as they could manage, while ditching economic policies from the Biden administration that were popular with voters but unpopular with rich donors. The Democratic Party in the US allowed Joe Biden to carry on as its candidate for 2024 when there was ample evidence that he simply wasn’t up to the job. Not only did they carry on with Biden’s line of uncritical support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza, ignoring its deep unpopularity with Democratic voters. They even sent Ritchie Torres, a gormless ventriloquist’s dummy for the Israel lobby, to advocate for that line in Michigan, of all states. Just in case the message of absolute contempt for those horrified by the slaughter of Palestinian civilians had not cut through, Bill Clinton paid a visit to Michigan in the final days of the campaign to drive the point home on behalf of Team Harris. A wise man once observed that you can’t polish a turd. Quite so, but it is not strictly necessary to rub the turd of a policy in people’s faces, either. As it turned out, Harris lost a whole batch of swing states and trailed far behind Trump in the Electoral College. But her campaign had every reason to believe Michigan votes might prove decisive when it dispatched Torres and Clinton to maliciously troll some of the would-be Democratic electorate. The sheer light-mindedness of Biden, Harris, and their associates over the course of 2024 surely helps explain why their warnings that Trump was a fascist who posed a serious threat to democracy proved to be ineffectual. Someone who took those warnings seriously would not be approaching the task of defeating Trump with such a trivial and feckless mentality. If Biden and Harris did not really believe in what they were saying, why should they have expected anyone else to take it to heart?

Someone Else’s Problem Unfortunately, this does not mean that there is no threat to democratic rights from Trump or his political allies in Europe, many of whom are either in government or knocking on the doors of power. The threat to civil liberties is real, but it is not one that high-ranking Democratic politicians will have to worry about, with the possible exception of a few figures on the left of the party whose erstwhile colleagues from the Democratic establishment openly despise them. While the Republican leadership in Congress would no doubt be happy to imprison someone like Rashida Tlaib if only they could find an excuse for doing so, they would certainly have no reason to target mainstream Democrats with whom they could easily find common cause in the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement. After all, it was Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, who launched a malicious smear campaign against Tlaib, ably assisted by CNN news anchors, when she correctly identified the repressive assault on student protesters by Nessel’s office. India broke with the pattern of centrist lethargy in the face of a hard-right challenge last year, as the Indian National Congress put together a serious electoral alliance and campaigned hard to prevent Narendra Modi from winning a supermajority in parliament. It is surely no coincidence that the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi actually has personal experience of Modi’s clampdown on political dissent, having been the target of a vexatious prosecution that initially resulted in a prison sentence. In Europe and the US, self-styled guardians of the center ground only display real energy and determination when it comes to shutting out influence from the Left. In Europe and the United States, on the other hand, self-styled guardians of the center ground only display real energy and determination when it comes to shutting out influence from the Left. Emmanuel Macron based his two presidential victories in 2017 and 2022 on the nature of the French electoral system, which meant that left-wing voters would have nobody else to vote for in the second round if they wanted to stop Le Pen. Last summer, however, Macron made it absolutely clear that he sees the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance as a bigger threat than a government formed by Le Pen’s party. For Macron, raising the retirement age for French workers is far more important than stopping the heirs of Vichy from coming to power. The whole idea of a center ground under siege from “extremists” of left and right breaks down when we look at what the traditional conservative parties have been doing. In some cases, like the British Tories, they have adopted the ideas of their hard-right rivals lock, stock, and barrel. In others, like Italy and the Netherlands, they have formed governing alliances with them, even if that means the far right will be the dominant partner. Having secured a second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has extended the hand of friendship to the ultranationalist bloc in the European Parliament.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2025/01/center-left-electability-far-right

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