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The Radical Center - Review
Washington Monthly, Sept, 2001 by Bruce Reed
THE RADICAL CENTER by Ted Halstead and Michael Lind Doubleday, $24.95
NOT SO LONG AGO, "CENTRIST" WAS practically a dirty word in politics. Democrats roared every time Texas populist Jim Hightower said, "The only two things you'll find in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos." For three decades, Republicans marched like lemmings to Goldwater's credo, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
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Today, the lemmings are dead, and the middle of the road is getting awfully crowded. The bipartisan Senate Centrist Coalition has 41 members. In the House, Republican moderates--thought for years to be extinct--now routinely rebuff President Bush on offshore drilling, campaign-finance reform, and regulations left over from the Clinton administration. Even Tom DeLay (R-Texas) couldn't stop himself from voting for a centrist education bill, sheepishly promising to resume his right-wing jihad later.
Centrists used to be inescapably bland, like Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). Not anymore. Now left and right are a snooze and centrists make good copy: John McCain, Jesse Ventura, Bill Clinton. Even some centrists who used to be dull aren't dull anymore, like Jim Jeffords, who's writing two books about his late-life switch from Clark Kent to Superman. These days, the political world yawns at another Al Sharpton hunger strike. We're waiting for that Jeffords diet book.
Pockets of extremism survive on cable channels and in the first drafts of Bush administration policy papers. The Bush crowd still seems to think triangulation means checking with Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Grover Norquist. You have to give them credit. They promised a more efficient White-House, and they have delivered. In the Clinton administration, it took us two whole years to lose the Congress. The Bush team did it in just four months.
Bush campaigned as the accidental centrist, whose one political achievement in Texas--education reform--coincided with his party's greatest political weakness. In office, his advisers have traded centrism for catechism. They chose Spain for his first state visit, Mexico for his first state dinner, and an audience with Pope John Paul II for his first state of purgatory. When John Kennedy ran for president, Protestants used to worry that the pope had a secret plot to take over America. Now Catholics should worry that Rove has a secret plan to take over the Vatican. If the Spanish Armada invaded Miami, Bush would have to tell his brother: "Sorry, Jeb, we can't send troops. We're trying to make inroads with Hispanics."
Still, you don't need a puff of white smoke to know which way the wind blows. Whether the president realizes it or not, the times are a-changing. As Ted Halstead and Michael Lind make abundantly clear in their provocative new book, The Radical Center, compassionate conservatism is out. Passionate centrism is in.
Halstead founded the New America Foundation, a think tank that several leading writers from Generations X and Y call home. Lind, a senior fellow at New America, is a prolific writer and lapsed neo-conservative, who got out in 1995 while the going was good. "The future of American politics," they write, "may well belong to the major party that is first to renounce its more extreme positions, and embrace a new Radical Centrist agenda." On behalf of "armies of disaffected, independent-minded voters," Halstead and Lind lament what they call "our rigid two-party cartel," and openly pine for a third party.
Their political critique, if not their agenda, echoes the Third Way rhetoric Bill Clinton and Tony Blair used to reform their respective parties. With impressive historical sweep, Halstead and Lind write of "the First Three Americas" (from Independence to the Civil War, Reconstruction to World War I, and the New Deal to the present); the "three tidal waves of creative destruction" (the steam engine in the 19th century, the internal combustion engine in the 20th, and the information technology and biotechnology revolutions today); and the three looming divides (racial, generational, and genetic). As a journalist said after one Clinton-Blair Third Way summit, "That's the most discussion of three-ways since Hugh Hefner retired."
Halstead and Lind call for a new social contract, invoking the same timeless FDR lines that Clinton quoted a decade ago in proposing his own new social contract: "New conditions impose new requirements upon government and those who conduct government."
Their plan is radical indeed. "You sometimes need to sever the branch in order to save the tree," they say, and gleefully offer up a chain-saw massacre: national equalization of school funding, a national consumption tax to replace state sales taxes, an end to the home mortgage deduction, progressive privatization of Social Security. One of the most promising ideas they champion, endowing a savings account for every newborn, was part of Blair's re-election platform. Another idea, abolishing the corporate income tax, is a favorite of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. As with most policy cookbooks, some of the recipes take too long, and require too many costly ingredients. Candidates seeking a platform for 2004 may regard The Radical Center as the point on the ideological spectrum where good intention meets fat chance.
