August 25, 2006
More Elephants and Donkeys Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:05 PM EST I have been mulling over Fred Schwarz’s post on elephants, donkeys, and gnats. Fred observed that “economically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as middle-class, and politically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as centrist.” I think the first claim is true, barring fringe cases, but the second is tricky. In current American electoral politics, people generally move toward the extremes to win primaries, then scurry back toward the center to win general elections. This is proverbially true of people running for the Presidency, but at all levels the likeliest primary voters are seen to be more ideologically committed than are members of the electorate at large, and significant numbers of them are assumed to look for fire-eating politicians while scorning the ideologically timid. Current thinking, especially among Republicans, is that if you want to get into the game at all, you have to mobilize the voters who are least centrist. Similarly, modern and very effective gerrymandering of Congressional districts means that incumbents and challengers may worry more about the primary fight than about the general election, and they do not often have to move as far back toward the center as a presidential candidate does. Senate races are different, since you cannot gerrymander a state. The voters who are looking for a fire-eater may still describe themselves as centrists under some circumstances, but they also have a passion for seeing themselves, and their chosen champions, as the opposite: as people with an intense passion for one notion of justice. In their eyes, centrists can be seen as shabby compromisers. But at the level of both small-group psychology and working politics, Fred is surely on to something. My experience may be unrepresentative, since I have spent most of my adult life working in colleges and universities, where large majorities are, by national standards, somewhere on the left, and will proudly so describe themselves. People who call themselves centrists, and in my experience there are not too many, will usually be assumed to be using a cowardly euphemism, seeking to conceal their conservative politics. This might seem to refute Fred’s assertion, but closer examination in fact confirms him. At the level where local politics actually happens—faculty elections for standing committees, disputes about policy, hiring, etc.—many people do like to depict themselves as centrists. Colleges and universities are closer to democracies than are normal work places—tenured faculty cannot be fired, and still exercise one or another degree of self-governance—and if you are out on the fringe, you can be fairly easily isolated and defeated. Democratic politics tends toward compromise, unless the electoral mechanism rewards (or at least fails to punish) people playing to the extremes. As Fred Schwarz also observed, people with a strong sense of political commitment generally miss a lot of variety when looking at what they dismiss as house organs for the other side. In this regard, I was a bit startled when John Steele Gordon described The New Republic as in effect a hardcore left-liberal magazine (I do not recall his precise words), because I have recently been advised to spend more time reading TNR by friends who thought that various heretical remarks suggested I’d feel comfortable there. This did not feel as if it was offered as particularly friendly advice. Indeed, a number of friends on the left consider TNR to be rightist, often odiously so, and have thought this for decades. In the same vein, I was struck by some recent posts on an interesting academic blog (Crooked Timber) describing Michael Walzer and Dissent, which Walzer edits, as apologists for the Bush administration. Last I’d heard, Walzer remains a democratic socialist. My guess is that John Steele Gordon would not find a description of Dissent as viciously rightist entirely compelling. From John Steele Gordon’s perspective, these may look like classic sectarian controversies: minute differences invisible to the vast majority of the political community, taking on fantastic significance when debated by competing factions within a cult. Similarly, I have friends who dismiss differences between social conservatives and libertarian conservatives as irrelevant in practical terms: Both groups are imagined to very faithfully support the administration on almost all questions, for party discipline has almost always trumped clashes of principle. In that case, the support by libertarians for, say, gay rights is scornfully dismissed as close to a bad-faith position, because its advocates are in alliance with political forces that are exploiting illiberal passions on the same question. Are most differences within camps our equivalent of theological controversies in early Byzantium, so that posterity will be astonished that people would become savage over what look, in retrospect, like trivial points of difference? Not necessarily, and to the extent that they are, the possible incomprehension of posterity doesn’t mean that the differences aren’t very important right now and for the foreseeable future. What exercised those bloggers at Crooked Timber was Walzer’s qualified support for the Israeli military response to Hezbollah’s most recent raid into Israel; TNR’s initial support for the war in Iraq has had a similar effect on some of my friends. For a lot of people the debate over American intervention in Iraq makes for a bright line separating angels from devils. This is true for a number of people on both sides of those questions, some of whom will have long memories, and if the vast majority of Democrats come out strongly against the war, the ones who came out first may continue to blackguard the latecomers. When politics gets superficially simplified by overwhelming passion over single issues, and fewer people insist on seeing themselves as centrists, the pleasure of indignation trumps the taste for seeing oneself as moderate. This happens among politicians, as well as among the most committed voters: recent politics within the Republican majority in the House is a case in point.
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