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CENTER-RIGHT?
I guess that you can't really edit your editor, but it would have been useful if, before publishing his manifesto on America's center-right nature as a cover story, someone had asked Newsweek editor Jon Meacham to define what and where the center was. Or the right. Or the left. Because it's rather peculiar to read an article asserting America's right-leaning character that uses the compromises of Lyndon Johnson and FDR as evidence. Indeed, when Meacham says that "presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls," at least two of his examples make little sense: FDR and Johnson moved much further left than they ever thought they would, because historical circumstances disrupted the system's natural tendency towards gridlock and opened the possibility for immense and rapid social change. Meanwhile, Meacham also has to admit that "Republican presidents, too, are frequently pulled from the right to the center," but for whatever reason, this paragraph passes by the article's thesis without impact or even interaction.
So why are we a "center-right" country? It's not, as it turns out, because we have "center-right" opinions on some discrete set of issues. It's not because we evince dissatisfaction with actual government services like Social Security or Medicare. Rather, it's because "according to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996)." Suggestive evidence, I guess, but hardly dispositive. Since Meacham is using "Republican" to stand in for "right,' surely it's relevant that Democrats have a long and enduring affiliation advantage among Americans, and that they nearly always win generic match-ups. Meanwhile, the last "40 years" sort of gives away the game. Why 40 years? Presumably because that's the time period that makes Republicans look best. In the last 48 years, Democrats have elected four presidents and Republicans have elected four presidents (Gerald Ford never won a national election).
And again, the question of what the operational impacts of "center-right" are is hard to assess if you can't define the term. Are we center-right on abortion? On health care? On foreign policy? Or pension programs? On nationalizing Wall Street amidst financial crises? Or does it not matter much at all, because the electorate isn't particularly ideological, and is willing to accept all sorts of initiatives, from airline deregulation to nationalizing health care for the elderly? The problem for Meacham's piece is that he doesn't have evidence suggesting America is center-right so much as divided and incoherent. And this divided and incoherent nation has, at its center, a political system structurally biased against change, and able to repel the large ideas of both Republican (Social Security Privatization) and Democratic (ClintonCare) presidents. In its way, that makes us "conservative" because we tend to retain something close to the status quo. But it's the conservatism of gridlock, not of Gingrich, and thus it exists as an operational reality of the government, but doesn't prove an ideological consensus within the country.
COMMENTS (13)
Jon "The Pastor" Meacham does not need evidence to support his rambling sermons in Newsweek. . . He gets his information from a much higher source than the rest of us!
Posted by: Wisconsin Reader | October 21, 2008 10:22 AM
This article makes no sense. By definition, the political center of America is the CENTER.
However, whites--and particularly white males--are a group more to the right than anyone else.
Therefore, the "real" America must be center-right.
That's all this is. The privileged status of "real" voters in "real" America.
Posted by: anonymiss | October 21, 2008 10:28 AM
Exactly. Most elements of Republican "conservatism" are nothing of the kind; they actively promote the expansion of oligarchy rather than meritocracy, or homogeneity of social custom rather than heterogeneity. It's absurd that Meacham's argument turns on self-identification of political philosophy, given that Americans don't seem to really understand the distinction between liberal and conservative, or how each party incorporates both ideologies.
Posted by: Jeff | October 21, 2008 10:29 AM
I've long hated this argument-- but we've seen it and its cousins a lot this week.
To say that America is a center-right nation is the same genus of argument that makes some Americans "real" and others not, some "Pro" American and other "Anti."
By draping themselves in the flag for so long, Republicans have confused themselves with it.
Posted by: Anthony Damiani | October 21, 2008 10:40 AM
How are we NOT a center-right country?
Certainly, American political discourse takes place on terrain significantly rightward from that of, say, all of Western Europe and Canada. If you throw in Russia and Japan in our sample, the U.S. is certainly somewhere in the center-right.
Perhaps Meachem's choice of EVIDENCE is bad. But I think the U.S., relative to other, similar nations, is pretty clearly at least mildly right-wing. It's the cross we bear.
Posted by: dj moonbat | October 21, 2008 10:45 AM
How are we NOT a center-right country? American political discourse takes place on terrain significantly rightward from that of, say, all of Western Europe and Canada.
A discourse completely controlled by corporate media, which is most certainly a center-right institution.
Posted by: jeebus | October 21, 2008 11:08 AM
Well, the corporate media puts a numbing, conservatarian spin on a debate over a set of issues that is framed by the Constitution. The Constitution builds in a lot of constraints, in turn, that almost inevitably produce a system averse to change. Only massive, massive disruptions in the constitutional order -- the Civil War and the Great Depression -- have given us any real opportunities to break out from its stifling tendencies.
Posted by: dj moonbat | October 21, 2008 11:13 AM
Meacham is an insufferable God-botherer (google "newsweek meacham faith" for about 1000 examples), and his judgment of the contemporary American political landscape is surely skewed by the extra weight he gives to the views of the religious.
Posted by: kth | October 21, 2008 12:03 PM
It's also instructive to consider that people's political mindsets may be shaped by the kind of political activity that is acceptable or possible.
Look at May '68, where 2/3 of France was on strike and out in the streets, and yet less than a month later, the Gaullists were returned to power in elections.
Posted by: ForStudentPower | October 21, 2008 12:05 PM
Didn't the left side beat the right side in the 2000 Presidential Election?
As in, (Gore + Nader) - (Bush + Buchanan) > 3,000,000?
(I do agree, however, that we are a center-right country, in the sense that if you consider the issues that were being fought about 20-30 years ago, the right won just about all of them.)
Posted by: Steve H | October 21, 2008 12:19 PM
If you flip a single election -- 1980 -- the pattern runs eight years Dem, eight years Rep, all the way back to 1944, and God willing that looks likely to continue this year.
Posted by: DonBoy | October 21, 2008 12:59 PM
If Obama wins the popular vote, Democrats will have won the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections.
Posted by: Tyrone Slothrop | October 21, 2008 1:51 PM
Which contributes to Steve H's point above...
What struck me about the Newsweek piece was the author's reliance on the percentage of American's who say they believe in "traditional family values" (or something like that). My first reaction was, I bet lots (if not most) communists, socialists, homosexuals, etc., really DO believe in "traditional family values." These people want to get married, have kids, spend holidays with family, and so forth, just like lots of conservatives. That seems what the debate over gay marriage is about, in part. How does that support this "center-right" nonsense?
Posted by: Tom Joad | October 21, 2008 3:54 PM