Do centrists have an -ism to back them up?
by havoc
In the past I complained about “libertarianism” and “socialism” melodrama in US politics.
There’s a broken pattern of thought, where people speak as if the only two economic ideologies are “government good, everyone must have equal everything” or “government bad, night watchman state.” Moderates and centrists are seen as compromising — mixing the two extreme perspectives, and therefore unprincipled. This leads to a lot of slippery slope arguments: “if we go from a 36% to 37% tax rate, it must be because we think socialism is good! we’ll keep going all the way to 95%! run for your lives!”
Do we have to choose between the extremes, and an unprincipled “split the difference”? The words “centrism” and “moderation” imply compromise, rather than higher purpose.
But, there’s at least one principled ideological position that happens to be between the extremes. David Leonhardt’s article today brings it up.
The goal is a free market, but with limits on personal catastrophe. Encourage tightrope walking by putting a net under the rope. The government goes one or two levels up Maslow’s hierarchy and then stops.
As Leonhardt puts it,
Guaranteeing people a decent retirement and decent health care does more than smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. Those guarantees give people the freedom to take risks. If you know that professional failure won’t leave you penniless and won’t prevent your child from receiving needed medical care, you can leave the comfort of a large corporation and take a chance on your own idea. You can take a shot at becoming the next great American entrepreneur.
In addition to encouraging entrepreneurial activity, a solid safety net prevents extreme economic inequality. As many have pointed out, the United States over the last decades has become less and less a middle class nation. There’s a huge gap opening up between the educated knowledge-workers doing well, and everyone else. This leads to crime, riots, gated compounds, political polarization, and all kinds of other badness. While it’s hard to imagine in the United States, there sure are a lot of historical examples where unchecked inequality led to government overthrow and the rise of wingnut dictators.
A centrist, safety-net approach has its own bright line; it isn’t just a hilltop with a slippery slope down to socialism or libertarianism on either side.
The line is: provide a way for anyone who makes an effort to meet their basic needs, even if they have bad luck. But don’t provide more than that. Try to offer everyone the opportunity to succeed, by providing a safety net, public education, and clear, predictable rule of law. But there’s no guarantee of success, it’s up to you and the free market. In this worldview, making it hard to fire underperformers is bad (free market), but the unemployed would have basic food, shelter, and health care while looking for their next job (safety net).
The goal is a “best of both worlds” scenario, a relatively stable society without extreme destitution and misery, and an efficient, productive economy where people are free to do what makes them happy.
This ideology better matches actual United States policies than either of the utopian, purist ideologies.
As far as I know, this pragmatic ideology doesn’t have a name that makes it stand alone. At least not a popularly-known name in the US. The only way to discuss it is to make it sound like a compromise, defining it relative to two extremes.
Isn’t it easier to rally around ideas when they have a good name attached?
This is something close to what UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was attempting to communicate with his “Third Way” phrase/approach.
Though it influenced other politicians around the world, he screwed the pooch in the end (on a number of fronts, but the most damaging to his ability to lead was Iraq).
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/254940/unbundle-welfare-state-jim-manzi is a thoughtful along these lines, though framed a bit more broadly.
Most Europeans would call that ‘socialism’. Which is very much different from ‘communism’.
Bit hard to sell that in the U.S., admittedly.
“Socialism” or “social democracy” or “welfare state capitalism” would all have negative or extremist connotations in the US I guess.
I was thinking the same. The “safety net” you describe is pretty much what social-democrats in Western Europe advocate. Socialism isn’t about abolishing differences between people, it is about having a society that is fair and that cares about people.
It’s sad to still see so much remnants of MacCarthysm today.
Sanitism
To be honest, what you describe doesn’t sound all that different from what most people on the ‘left’ believe in the US. The popular caricature of US liberalism is that it is extremist but I don’t think that really matches reality. It seems to me that what you’re proposing is basically mainstream American liberalism with a different name. Or do you see it as being different in a significant way?
Seems like capitalism-with-safety-net is pretty much the mainstream US politics. Some might call it center right, some might call it Clintonian left, I don’t know. There used to be a lot of politicians in both parties who were more or less on this page, though the parties have been radicalizing and purging the moderates.
What’s weird though is that people think of the government we have as an averaging of two extremist principles, instead of something supported by its own principles and coherent rationale.
There’s a name for people who believe in this capitalism-with-safety-net policy prescription (“centrist”, “moderate”) but there isn’t really a popular name for the philosophy behind their beliefs. I’m not sure what you say in the blank “I’m not a socialist/libertarian, I’m a ____”; “moderate” says what you aren’t, but doesn’t say what you stand for.
I disagree with you saying “parties”. Essentially, one party is radicalizing and the moderates have moved either to the other party or are independents.
As other said, I think current liberalism is what you’re espousing and you’ve nailed the problem completely there is a large gap between the rich and the middle class. It’s hard not to feel bitter as a person who has been active in political circles trying to get people elected. But as long as everybody keeps on espousing rightward policies and falling prey to FUD it will be hard to move the nation in a more fruitful direction.
I also believe that our means are to compete in the free market is in danger due to falling educational standards, distracted by wars while not keeping an eye on what competitors like China and the Russia are doing, and moving our manufacturing base offshore.
sri
I’m confused who you think in the US is to the left of what you’re describing as a centrist position. Like others, I think what your proposing sounds like new liberalism, or social democracy, which are indeed historically centrist or center-left ideologies (between conservatism and radical socialism and communism), but, because of the absence of a more radical left in the US, social democracy is as far left as mainstream politics goes. So, I can’t think of anyone in mainstream politics who would be to the left of the capitalism-with-a-safety-net approach you’re advocating here, even self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders.
A lot of people get accused of being to the left of this. How many actually are in the US, I don’t know. Certainly in other countries, many people are to the left of this.
In the health care debate, a further-left view might be that health care should not be a profit-making activity and should be nationalized; while the safety-net-under-capitalism view might be that people who need it should have help to buy health care in a free market.
There’s plenty of room for interpretation in exactly what constitutes a safety net and what constitutes a “socialist” handout. So where you interpret that might determine how many people are to the left or the right.
Regardless, I think if someone says “liberal” they are emphasizing the government part, without the free market part. Especially if they aren’t themselves liberals.
(One complicating factor in ideology these days is the confusion between pro-free-market and pro-business. Are we trying to maximize competition, or trying to minimize howls of annoyance from companies … who don’t really like competition, and love subsidies…)
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that there doesn’t seem to be a shorthand to point to whatever these centrist ideals are, in the same way that there’s a shorthand to point to the extreme ideals. It’s easy to point to the centrist policies, but not the centrist principles. This leads to the assumption that someone in the center is a socialist who didn’t get everything they wanted, rather than someone who believes in a principled mix of safety net and free market.
I’d call what you describe a “Social market econonmy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy). I guess all democratic countries have this sort of economic model to some degree, some with more emphasis on free market (US) and some with more emphasis on the “social welfare” aspect (parts of europe).
From the Wikipedia article, it sounds like social market economy is a “thing” in Germany in a way that it is not in the United States. Even though US policy seems to roughly follow the political philosophy described there, people in the US mostly don’t know a name or the tenets of that political philosophy, I would think.
I mean, I get the impression from that article if you asked someone in Germany to fill in this sequence:
libertarianism, [whatever germany is], socialism
they might say “social market economy” … but I don’t know what people in the US would put in there.
Most people would probably not consider the US a “social (welfare) state”, although it probably is, but much less than say Germany.
Both social welfare state and social market economy are terms that I guess most (somewhat educated) Germans are quite familiar with; at least for the former I would have also expected that for the US.
Anyhow, since in practice, most democratic countries “implement” that kind of economic model, I think a lot of the discussion then evolves more around the level of safety the net provides vs. who and how much needs to be payed for that (taxes, etc.). In the end, in order to keep being reelected the political parties don’t actually have that much leeway around what is in the “mainstream’s interests”, so it actually becomes fairly hard for joe average to still perceive the differences between political parties, since they are in practice often only nuances. The political melodram probably at least to some degree has the purpose to hide that fact.
Several of the other comments here suggested that at least in the US, we don’t have much more “left” than the position you describe, so it hardly qualifies as centrism. I’d disagree with that: we have a number of extreme left politicians who want something more like what you see in the most socialist European countries and beyond; effectively, they want to get as close they can to “we’ll take everything you own and give you what we think you need, we know best”. Obviously I disagree with that position, but I do want to point out that it exists here.
The position you describe as “centrist” sounds very much like the less extreme views in the US Democratic party.
To give a counterpart, by the way: I consider myself libertarian, but I don’t necessarily want us to get all the way to the “night watchman state” that you describe. I’d consider that state far better than what we have, but I suspect a slightly lesser extreme would work out best. However, all of the politics we have today pull so hard in the other direction that nobody seems to care about the subtleties of how far we need to trim it down, so what does it matter? Arguing for 1%, 2%, or 0.1% of our current government makes little difference when trying to fight against additional expansion.
To use your example: arguing against a tax hike from 36% to 37% doesn’t require a slippery slope argument; it just requires an argument that 36% is already too high, so 37% is obviously going in the wrong direction.
How about pragmatism?
or maybe a variant of populism.
Populism has a fairly negative touch to it (at least in my book), but I guess that’s really what it’s all about. After all it’s democracy, so you need to do popular things, otherwise it’s quickly over with the power…
Sounds a bit like “flexicurity” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
Hayek, who was more moderate than many of his latter-day fans, makes this Safety Net argument in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). I guess he would wish it could be called classic liberalism.