The Way to the Center

An interesting interplay this morning between Joe Trippi in The Wall Street Journal and David  Brooks in The New York Times.

Trippi writes, predictably, about what the Kerry campaign could have learned from the Dean campaign, and what the Democrats need to learn from it now.  The argument in a nutshell – Kerry would have done much worse if not for all our groundwork, which is roughly like saying that if fewer people had voted for Kerry, he would have done much worse.  Uh, yeah.  What he said.

He also calls for an appeal to the grassroots and a campaign of ideas.  Hard to argue there.

And then there’s a moment in which Trippi attacks the centrists:

Finally, what is the purpose the party strives for today? What are our goals for the nation? You couldn't tell from the election. Very few good ideas come from the middle, and they tend to be mediocre. Consultants have become adept at keeping candidates in that safe zone. But the time has come to develop bold ideas and challenge people to sacrifice for the common good. Experts will tell you that you can't ask the American people to sacrifice individually for the common good. Those experts are wrong -- it's just been so long since anyone has asked them.

That’s a standard-issue ideologue’s take on centrism –that it’s a sort of averaging system.  Apt if true.  But the time will come when centrism turns out to be itself the bold idea – not a canceling out of extreme viewpoints, but a combination of the best of both extreme camps, and a willingness to do without the worst.

How might that work?  Brooks offers a glimpse.  In a profile of British evangelist John Stott, he writes:

There's been a lot of twaddle written recently about the supposed opposition between faith and reason. To read Stott is to see someone practicing "thoughtful allegiance" to scripture. For him, Christianity means probing the mysteries of Christ. He is always exploring paradoxes. Jesus teaches humility, so why does he talk about himself so much? What does it mean to gain power through weakness, or freedom through obedience? In many cases the truth is not found in the middle of apparent opposites, but on both extremes simultaneously.

Putting aside for a moment concerns about Stott – about which more below – let’s note that effective centrism will be exactly that – something that partakes of “both extremes simultaneously.” Such a centrism might, for example, acknowledge a role for government in public life, but argue that it ought to play that role via market mechanisms as opposed to huge clanking bureaucracies, for which, by the way, funding won’t be available.  It might take advantage of the good things about markets, without the right’s passion for the market alone as the solution to all problems;  it might dedicate itself to the vision of the New Deal, without trying to recreate big, slow-moving New Deal-like institutions on shoestring budgets. 

In so doing, it might even satisfy Trippi and Dean.  And maybe Brooks, too.

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