2005/04/20

Centrism exposed, with bonus foreign policy update

Semi-interesting goons in discussion over here. The topic seems to be what centrism is, and whether it's a value in politics.

So I guess there's centrism as compromise position. This seems to be a fairly good method where consensus-building is impossible or too time-consuming. It's expedient, and so can be a way to enact minor reforms that become entrenched and lay the groundwork for further reforms. As each reform is put in place and becomes the norm, the "center" moves in that direction. Thus, the right has been moving further right and the DLC folks, via "triangulation" that doesn't work without a charismatic leader have allowed the center to follow it. As rightist policy reforms are enacted, the push progress in that direction. Then even small leftward reforms begin to look more and more progressive and even revolutionary/radical and/or dangerous from the standpoint of being large rather than small perturbations to the system.

That leads to the other side of the topic, which is whether there is a preference for extremism in the sense of sweeping change as opposed to conservative which is opposed to change. (Witness the difference between this sense of 'conservative' and the sense in which conservatives a la Libaugh are actually radical pre-enlightenment-gazing rather than keeping up with historically traditional values... when you have to look more than 70 years back to find the values you want, they're not "traditional" anymore--they're antiquated.) In this sense centrism can be seen as a preference for incremental change, the increments allowing for judgments of efficacy and discovery of inevitable side-effects (under various of Murphy's laws).

The interaction of "left"/"right" views on what the world should be like with "conservative"/"radical" views on how we should go about getting there creates, in part, the confusion on what centrism really means. (Let us leave for another time the stupidity of dividing the political arena up into two wide umbrella camps that supposedly can be everything to half of everyone--this is just ridiculous, and I plan to ridicule it.) The "America: love it or leave it" crowd should, to be consistent, insist that nothing in america needs to change, since by definition it is the best of all possible countries. These folks are conservative in the sense that no perturbations to the system could do anything but bring about a sub-optimal situation. (Or, they're rabid nationalists who need to be watched lest they start wearing same-colored paramilitary shirts and arm bands). Other folks think there are places for improvement. This group includes almost everyone in all active political parties--no one runs on the platform "Let's keep everything the same" except perhaps Dubya. The extent to which one thinks reform is required determines how radical or to use the alarmist term, revolutionary one's thinking is.

And further, the above does not take into account what was mentioned first, the "centrism" of pragmatic compromise, where for instance even P. Wellstone would occasionally make a small sacrifice to get an important piece of legislation through, and where on the other hand a FL congressman can sell his soul by allowing oil drilling in ANWR in order to maintain a moratorium on drilling of the western FL coast. Here, centrism has to tdo with one's commitment to making everyone satisfied as balanced against getting things one wants to get done accomplished, i.e. answering the question what one is willing to sacrifice in order to forward a particular agenda item.

My own preference would be for radical reform toward entrepreneurial socialism and environmental restorationism (oh, how we love these "-isms"). But that has to wait.

Also, in national news, how about those clowns at State? What a bunch of clowns. Meanwhile, inside the quagmire we're really earning our exit^H^H^H^H victory via strategery.

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