The Perniciousness of Centrism

The Left is extreme, the Right is extreme. In the middle lies truth and reason.

None of this is true -- but it is taken for granted, even by many of those on the Left and the Right. The Left is right about some things, as is the Right, and centrists are frequently, perhaps usually, proven wrong. But moderates control news and entertainment media and thus the narrative. In their telling, which even those of us who don't believe when we stop to think about it, buy into because we are soaking, nay, drowning in their framing, the range of normal/sane/calm political debate lies in the middle. All else is kookery.

So we are told.

We have so poisoned our planet that a third of all species alive today will be extinct by 2100. We are the poorest developed country. Most people can't afford health care. These are radical problems. They don't call for a compromise, or splitting the difference, or good-enough solutions. Radical problems call for radical solutions. Oncologists don't prescribe half chemo.

Radical left environmentalists deserve centerstage in any discussion about pollution and ecocide for the simple reasons that they alone understand that the issue is enormously important, the crisis is grave, and anything less than a comprehensive global solution that totally transforms capitalism has a chance of addressing it. They are so sidelined from corporate media that they receive less of a fair hearing in the news than white supremacists.

Centrism is a political leaning. In the U.S., moderates are typically liberal technocrats or center-right pre-Trump Republicans. They have biases and prejudices, and they succumb to shibboleths and bigotries. Yet the mainstream media labels centrists/moderates as "objective" or neutral -- i.e., they don't notice those biases because they agree with them. (This is analogous to how Fox News and other Murdoch-owned right-wing media outlets characterize mainline Democrats as "far left.") Centrist or technocratic talking heads from thinktanks like the Brookings Institution are often identified solely by their professional credentials rather than their political stance.

I listen to a lot of NPR. So many writers from The Atlantic magazine appear as guests on the network that it's jarring. It's almost as if there are no journalists working anywhere else. So, while researching this piece, I looked into whether there was a formal partnership between the two organizations. It turns out that there is one with PBS, the staid analysis round-up "Washington Week with The Atlantic" TV show, and there is predictable cross-pollination between NPR and PBS, but no formal deal.

The Atlantic leans center-left -- by American standards, which is what we're discussing here. These days, it cultivates that ideological positioning with domestic news and analysis that reliably criticizes Republican positions. Flying under the radar are foreign policy positions that echo neoconservative and unreconstructed Cold Warrior views so far right that Trump is to their left on some issues. Because The Atlantic is "moderate," and adheres to baseline grammatical and editorial standards, its writers go on NPR every day to express opinions that are right-wing by any objective standard but are not only not labeled as such, they are not identified at all.

Say hello to the secret "neutral" right-wing extremists.

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic espouses a set of retrograde views of the world that place her firmly in the camp of Bush-era neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. She hates Russia, hates socialism and communism, favors NATO expansion into the former Soviet space, rarely criticizes U.S. actions overseas, supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and pushes for more weapons to Ukraine.

My biggest problem with neoconservatives is not that they're warmongers. It's that they're always wrong. Invading Iraq was never going to set off democratic dominos across the Middle East, there were no WMDs, Ukraine was not a democracy and has become a dictatorship, the people of Iran are in no position to overthrow their government. Left, right or middle, political analysts should be good at prognosticating.

Like her fellow neoconservative and bestie William Kristol, Applebaum can almost always be counted upon for a right-wing foreign policy take that turns out to have been mistaken. Because she's at The Atlantic, however, she's identified as an anodyne "historian and journalist." Her agenda -- an extreme one at that, one espoused by only a tiny minority of voters -- is concealed from NPR's bourgeois audience. She's entitled to her opinions. And readers are entitled to be informed about the fact that she's opinionated.

Even when centrism is truly centrism, centrism is not neutral. Nor, when 63% of the electorate self-identifies as liberal or conservative, is centrism normal. It is high time to stop conflating moderation with neutrality.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

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