“Moving to the center would enable Democrats to confront [Trump] more aggressively and effectively because voters would see them as credible.” — From “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win” by The New York Times Editorial Board
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American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies rooted in white supremacy and open brutality, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists—two exactly equal sides of the same coin. To those of you who are not writing this editorial, moderation probably feels a little outdated.
It is not. So stop thinking that. Candidates who don’t exhibit or reflect real beliefs, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp. From our vantage point as a fundamentally innumerate body of milquetoast thinkers who are wrong about everything, holding fewer sincere beliefs is the key to electoral success.
The evidence is vast because we say it is. Republicans have frittered away winnable races in Alabama, New Hampshire, and elsewhere over the past decade by nominating candidates who believed what they said and ran on those ideas. (One ancient example: Judge Roy Moore.) Meanwhile, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, is the only sitting senator who is regularly mocked by both her opponents as well as members of her own party for being an empty husk of a human being with no meaningful morality driving her decisions. Yet she is gainfully employed. Her example deserves to count double.
On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders, both of whom poll strongly and express their beliefs in clear and concrete terms for their audience. This absence of intra-party popularity mirroring shows that Democrats have wisely pre-concluded that holding real beliefs cannot possibly make a candidate popular. Thus, the higher return on investment falls to candidates who stumble and collapse somewhere unspecifically in the middle—or better yet, candidates who work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party. From our position of definitively not believing in anything, we suspect that a party’s own base loves this.
One way to see the pattern is to examine the seventeen Democrats—thirteen in the House, four in the Senate—who last year won in places that Mr. Trump also won. Not having ideas dominated their campaign messages. For instance, Ruben Gallego of Arizona mocked the term “Latinx” and was hawkish on immigration to curry favor from people who despise his existence. This was smart. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Representative Pat Ryan of New York emphasized public safety and their national security backgrounds because fear is the most powerful of all tools. This was dignified. Representative Jared Golden of Maine spoke of “opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs” despite possessing a complete understanding of how doing that will accelerate the demise of the very planet on which we live. No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these. The know-nothing behavior of the candidates shouldn’t just be replicated, but studied like a book without any words or illustrations.
Left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans have spent years trying to tell a different story. They claim that reaching out to swing voters is overrated and that the better strategy involves turning out the base by running pure, ideological campaigns. Make no mistake: The party that has won elections is right and the other side is wrong, but to us, both are wrong. And yet, our argument contains an element of truth: As the country has become more polarized and many voters cannot fathom crossing over to the other party, persuasion has become harder.
That’s why we think you should try, but not that hard. By offering a position, but not imbuing the position with real beliefs, a (Democratic) candidate can enjoy the benefits of running in the race without risking being criticized for supporting an idea hated by his/her/their political opponents, who themselves manifest beliefs of no coherence whatsoever. It’s a win-win, except where you lose.
Even Mr. Trump highlights the pattern. Extreme as he is in many ways, he moved the Republican Party toward the center on several key issues by not knowing what a coherent line of thinking would actually resemble. We ask: Why aren’t the Democrats looking into candidates who can change the party’s platform primarily by not knowing what was in it to begin with?
Mr. Trump’s victory over Ms. Harris was telling in another way: Not having ideas is the most effective way of having them. To wit, moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober twentieth-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo, but rather a chaotic “six seven” centrism that favors the edges. It is more combative and populist: the silent scream, if you will. This scream tends to be left-of-center on economics and right-of-center on social issues. It’s massive on the inside but tiny when you hold it. It’s smooth to the touch but constructed only of sharp corners. That’s right: It’s nothing, the precise thing that people don’t know they want. And in a political world where it’s appropriate to debate the humanity of the constituency, thinking nothing is positively everything.
Mr. Trump’s rise was possible because he recognized that most voters did not want to forgo eating their cake but also preferred to have it. Where previous candidates understood this contradiction to be a contradiction, Mr. Trump played to the center of those contradictions, where an empty space lies in the shape of party-derived moral character.
Yet this extremism that we’ve referred to as centrism offers an opportunity to the Democratic Party. If Democrats were willing to be less ideological—less beholden to views that many voters genuinely hold, but that the non-Democrats in the population that maybe shouldn’t even be part of this comparison don’t agree with—they would have the opportunity to build the country’s next governing majority of people who don’t believe in anything before they’re asked.
Ultimately, moderation is about respect. Politicians do not need to heed every bit of public opinion. They can sometimes attempt to forge a new consensus. But they cannot dismiss views held by most Americans as uninformed and insist that one day the ignorant masses will come around, because no one really thinks that can happen. When politicians try that, voters usually choose an alternative, even a destructive one. Today that destructive alternative has arrived. The antidote is a sucking vortex of nothing that mainly appeals to people who are not paying attention and toil through existence without intention. The future is in their hands, and frankly, we think they deserve a little respect.
