In Defense of Centrism

You ever notice that people at the political extremes are all assholes?

Quick story. Back in 2013 and 2014, I went down the libertarian rabbit hole. I’ve head libertarian leanings since I graduated from college, but with social media I was able to follow a bunch of hard-right libertarian pages, including the execrable Cop Block. I was pretty sure I was right. I was convinced I was right. I was so far down the rabbit hole that I was getting blocked by people left and right, and I didn’t even care. That’s not a very good way to live.

And I was an asshole. I was picking fights with people online and in real life, I had a king-size chip on my shoulder, and I thought everyone needed to hear my opinion. Editor’s note: nobody needed to hear my opinion. And I can tell you something that all these hard-right people have in common: no sense of humor whatsoever. Never crack a smile. Everything is serious, because it’s a life-or-death struggle for freedom. These people are not a lot of fun at parties.

I have moderated quite a bit since then. I still believe in free minds and free markets, but I’m more of an incrementalist—for example, you’re not going to abolish the income tax overnight. You’ll get there over a period of decades. Pete Buttigieg is an actual communist, but he’s also an incrementalist—we’ll get there slowly, rather than all at once.

But this phenomenon is not merely confined to the right, it’s also on the left, obviously. All the communist looters in 2020 were assholes. Another quick story: here in Myrtle Beach, I had an acquaintance that was a communist. I didn’t know he was a communist, and he didn’t know I was a capitalist. But when he found out, he refused to talk to me. I’d say, what’s up, and he’d walk right past me. Wore hammer and sickle T-shirts and the whole deal. Thought everyone needed to hear his opinion. I saw him post on Facebook that he’s show up to protests with a baseball bat. Eventually he dropped out of society altogether. He was a very, very angry guy.

All these assholes on the left and the right, we can go ahead and throw them in the lake, as far as I’m concerned. One thing we’ve been talking about for years is the ever-widening political polarization, where the left goes further left and the right goes further right, and this is actually measurable—lots of studies confirm this. But I am sensing a disturbance in the force. I actually think that polarization is decreasing, that people are moving back towards the center. Not a lot, but it’s a start.

Look at it this way. For most of my childhood, people complained that there was practically no difference between the two political parties. Lawmakers crossed the aisle on votes all the time. Republicans and Democrats actually liked each other personally. And you know what? That period of time was our most peaceful and prosperous since the late 1800s. I think it would not hurt to go back there.

Now, centrism or moderation isn’t a political philosophy. It’s a compromise. But our political system is constructed in such a way that everyone involved must necessarily compromise—all the time. “Extremist” is a loaded word, so let’s use the word “purist”—purists see compromise as failure. If we can’t implement these ideas in their purest form, then they shouldn’t be implemented at all. That is dumb. The battle of ideas is a war of attrition, and even being able to advance the line a little bit counts as a victory.

In 2016, something crazy happened: Libertarians Gary Johnson and Bill Weld made a very respectable run as third-party candidates. Libertarians. Nobody would view the Libertarians as a centrist party, but in 2016, they were. They were the sane centrists running down the middle of crazy Trump and Hillary. It was incredible, and it might have worked, had it not been for Aleppo. Despite getting 3.5% of the popular vote, beating any previous total from the Libertarian Party by a factor of five, the Libertarians viewed that as a failure, and in 2020, returned to their extreme roots, with a platform that you might dream up in a college dorm. Now the Mises Caucus has taken over, and the same genus and species of asshole that were in Charlottesville are now running the Libertarian party. So much for the centrists.

Of course, this phenomenon of polarization would not have been possible without social media. When I went down the rabbit hole in 2014, I followed one libertarian page, then Facebook suggested another. I followed that one, and Facebook suggested three more. Before I knew it, I was drowning in propaganda. Twitter does the same thing. The social media networks figure out what you like, then keep feeding you more of what you like, in order to keep you engaged, because the more engagement you have with the site, the more ads they can sell. Facebook and Twitter have made a lot of money off of radicalization. But finally, that trend seems to be going in reverse. I am seeing a lot fewer political debates on Facebook these days. Part of that could be because Trump is no longer president, and the political fighting will definitely return if he is re-elected, but it seems as though people have lost the taste for arguing on the Internet. Twitter has its moments, but it is definitely more civil than it used to be. The government was talking about regulating the social media companies for a while, but as it is in most cases, these things tend to work themselves out on their own.

I still believe that at its core, America is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. But we end up with these elections where both candidates are socially conservative and fiscally liberal, and then people are stuck. Romney and McCain were two centrist choices, but the country decided to go a different direction. And you have to give Bill Clinton a huge amount of credit for tacking back towards the center after the midterm defeat in 1994, perhaps the most genius political move of my lifetime. Biden has shown no willingness to do so, no matter how bad the polls get. The people I pal around with generally think taxes are too high and disagree with the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion. I don’t know anyone on the extremes, because I don’t hang out with them. When you get off the computer keyboard and meet with people in real life, you find that they are eminently reasonable, and willing to discuss their differences. The wackjobs get a lot of attention in the media, but the media has a propensity to want to make stupid people famous.

Of course, every time I think we are making progress, someone in a position of authority does something dumb that sends us back towards the extremes. Biden’s recent speech where he was bathed in red light like Sauron, flanked by Marines, is the best example of this. Biden essentially accused half the country of being extremists and labeled them as enemies of the state, shouting with fists clenched like some tin pot dictator. This is not progress. The entire purpose of the speech was to divide, and polarize, and for people to view each other as enemies. I would prefer that people view each other as adversaries, not enemies. Chatter about civil war has picked up in recent weeks, and there is a certain breed of dickhead that gets sweaty palms and a woody while tweeting about civil war. I highly doubt it will happen—people are too phlegmatic—but the fact that people have actual conversations about this is not a good sign.

Step away from the keyboard and talk to people in real life. Recently I met up with Chris Arnade, the author of Dignity in Myrtle Beach. He’s a swell guy and very thoughtful. I don’t know Chris’s politics, but I gather they are different than mine. That didn’t stop us from having an insightful conversation about markets, writing, and life, with a little politics sprinkled in. Then something interesting happened. A whole posse of Proud Boys walked into the bar. How do I know they were Proud Boys? They were all wearing matching Proud Boys T-shirts! Chris and I ignored them and paid them no heed. These mooks are diametrically opposed to the communist mook that I met a few years ago. Extremists—just the other extreme. All of them are mooks. And here we are, in 2022.

I am optimistic. But moderation is a very slow process that will play out over decades. Things are certainly better than they were in 2020, when we had nationwide protests and candidates proposing ever-higher wealth taxes in the Democratic primary. I’m hopeful that we won’t lose our minds in 2024.

But then again, we probably will.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

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