Center-Right Nation?

If you see Olympia Snowe as certer-right, then yeah, America is not a center-right nation.

If you see Obama as center-right, Snowe as right and the rest of the Republican party as . . . bat-shit insane, then the proposition that America is a center-right nation is more defensible.

You don’t need to know much about American politics (and I don’t know much about American politics ha ha) to see that the American Right is very very very different from the European Right. In the UK Tony Blair was probably slightly to the Right (in terms of foreign policy) of Obama, but probably slightly to the ‘left’ (because of Gordon Brown) economically. So his political position was not a million miles from Obama’s. And yet, in the UK, no one, ever (on the right) called for Blair to be killed, or claimed that he was a ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ or claimed that the problem with Blair was that he didn’t ‘love’ the UK enough, or claim that if the Tories lost the EU elections then some unspecified ‘disaster’ would face the UK. They aren’t even doing it to the (every so slightly) more ‘left wing’ Brown. The only person who ever toyed with this sort of language was Thatcher, but she was very much an outlier in British politics, as history has shown.

The difference between the American Right and the European Right (at least at the moment) is that the American Right (and the extremist wing, moreover) believe they have a God given (literally) Right (pun intended) to govern. Republican extremists (and it seems that most of them are extremists, from what I can tell) think that Obama’s victory is illegitimate, because they think that all Democrat victories are illegitimate.

Now you can call that attitude what you want, but it ain’t centrist.

“qua American politics – the right has a slight dominance.”

1) The Right “purifies” its ranks of its leftmost members. I went looking for the most recent example, the acceptance of the platform vs the checklist of ten items for Republican party internal support but couldn’t find it. But in the discourse, and largely in practice the Republican is an intransigent ideologically coherent bargainer. This not only limits Snowe’s options, but also the options of Democrats who need Republican support, like Nelson.

2) When the other party (Democrats) has inclusion and “public reason”among its core values and grounds for legitimacy it not only must allow Republicans at the table, but listen to them and adjust their own programs and policies in that direction. See Stupak/Nelson. The Democratic goal is to achieve enough of a consensus that a policy can be implemented. Thus they will always be moved to the right, until a left wing of the Democratic Party starts to exercise a veto point, refuses to compromise, and is willing to walk away and let policy and politics fail.

3) This should be old news. How does a vanguard or minority take over a political party or country? God knows it has happened enough in history. How did the Sunnis rule Iraq?

It may not be the case that the vanguard creates a majoritarian consensus and then takes power. (This is the liberal/Democratic/Gramscian(?) view of how politics is done.) In many cases the vanguard gets a certain amount of power and then creates the ideological consensus thru propaganda and claims its views were the majoritarian opinion all along, rewriting history.

Is this, tho perhaps, very wrong, closer to what you wanted?

IOW, I think it is more about tactics than about ideology.

Stupak and the forced birthers were willing and able to let healthcare die.

The choice caucus were willing to vote for the Stupak amendment, and would have been condemned had they exercised a veto point. The public option Democrats were and are being condemned.

Who is going to win, and which direction will the Overton Window move?

If America is center right, then it must mean that America is right ideologically, but perhaps not that “extreme” as the far right. For all the invocations of Burke or Tocqueville or Oakschott, American conservatism is somewhat distinctive owing to the vicissitudes of history; the regional, ethnic, and religious diversity of the US; and the specific constitutional (partly national/partly federal) form of (limited and representative) government (of separation of powers and checks and balances). Perhaps modern and “liberal” principles like equality, liberty, rights, and consent of the governed place conservatism in America in a peculiar position which makes it somewhat confused.

So American conservatism appears to divided within and against itself in terms of libertarianism, traditionalism, populism, constitutionalism, Christianism, “founderism,” localism, isolationism, militarism, imperialism, and many other variants.

Centrism is a muddled term that attempts to account for this ideological syncretism. Or perhaps centrism simply means a pragmatic willingness to compromise on abstract ideological principles in order to achieve desired outcomes through actual political action.

If it’s center-right as ideological syncretism then it’s confused in a way that makes political action difficult. It allows specific ideological minority sects to thwart a more generalized policy (this happens on the left too). If it is centrism as pragmatism, then it loses all appeal as the horse trading of the aggregation of interests becomes its only result.

America is a warrior state wedded to corporatism and guided by a Myth of Exceptionalism (an updated Divine Right of Kings). If you disagree, you hate freedom.

Corporatism is the social engineering experiment of our time.

If you recognize the Right as representing ever lower taxes and deregulation (the only bedrock in the otherwise polymorphous agenda), then American citizens are heavily tilted to the Right, even though lower taxes and deregulation, by way of eliminating social capital, don’t help people, or even small corporations, but only vast corporations.

A party to the Left of Corporatism would be Humanism/Labor, which doesn’t exist in America and would be defined as un-American. Even in academia, the decidedly pro-Corporatist country has decided Humanists and Historians are a waste of money (and a threat to the project of continually rewriting America’s past) and their respective Departments are quickly vanishing.

We tend to think America is not fascist, because it is not a police state internally, ignoring that it incarcerates close to 1% of its population and has crafted a Myth that renders heavy-handed self-policing unnecessary. Closer to fact, it justifies its vast military as necessary to police the world on behalf of the safety, not of people, but corporatism.

Does America tilt Right? Do bears shit in the woods?

I think the answer to JH’s question might have something to do with the uniquely contested nature of corporate dominance.

Perhaps European publics and their pre-capitalist history have effectively newtered the political aspirations of its capitalists. In the US, the oligarchs have yet to be able to discern exactly how far they can take their dominance. Thus they continue to lean against public welfare schemes and push right (in both parties) as a tactic.

Yglesias’ argument is almost tautological, isn’t it? If what he says is true, shouldn’t all nations be center-right — or, more accurately, shouldn’t all nations be conservative, in some vaguely Churchillian early-2oth-century sort of way?

On the other hand we have a political system where power at the national level (viz. the Senate and the Electoral College) is skewed in favor of rural areas thinly populated by scared more or less radicalized white people. But just because the median electoral unit is somewhere to the right of center, that doesn’t mean the country is in any meaningful sense center-right — it doesn’t mean there’s any large population of voters near that median. (Except in Orange County.)

David Moles:

“Yglesias’ argument is almost tautological, isn’t it?”

Yes, purposely so. He was criticizing one possible interpretation of the “center-right nation” claim as being meaningless.

He was criticizing one possible interpretation of the “center-right nation” claim as being meaningless.

Exactly so. What’s more, it’s empirically the case that center-right political coalitions are usually dominant in most democratic countries. You can think of a few exceptions (Sweden, post-Pinochet Chile) but in most countries the main conservative parties usually hold power. The world is a small-c conservative place and the defenders of entrenched power tend to have power.

With the exceptions of Alexander and current day America, no country in history has executed Global War. How Rogue (even if potentially virtuous) do we have to be to be labelled Right? Do we now believe in beneficent princes?

Congress is K-Street, the Regulatory Agencies are captured, the executive President reserves the right to declare anyone in the world an illegal combatant and have them assassinated via flying robots or captured and tortured. We ignore international treaties and borrow $1Trillion/year from China and Japan to maintain a military infrastructure that covers the oceans and maintains a footprint in almost every other nation. The fact that we borrow the money is salient … Republican deficits don’t matter “because they defend America” … Democratic deficits are anathema because they are “socialist and betray our self reliance.”

In the marketplace of ideas, and with significant misdirection, Corporatism has won. The repeal of Glass-Steagall and the implementation of NAFTA in the last decades were not simply national statements of corporate power that didn’t solve national problems (agree with comment 18), but international declarations of the rights demanded by corporations and implemented by our Congress. Low taxes and Deregulation are the freedoms that benefit international corporations, not nation states or the citizens that comprise them.

We are now past a tipping point. America (ironically a wealthy country) is purposively in debt so it can’t afford social capital (which includes infrastructure), and the population is so close to poverty it really can’t vote for increased taxes to correct the imbalances (people are persuaded they have to vote Republican to eat).

The precise expression of right and left will vary nation by nation.
That’s John’s point (and, I guess, yours too, Hix).
To sink us even deeper into relativism, how’s this: how useful are ‘right’ and ‘left’ as explanatory concepts when viewed across these kind of boundaries?
The right in Britain was opposed to the european Constitution, on the grounds that it represented a power grab by unrepresentative international politicians and bureaucrats, violating norms established nationally and in the private sector.
The French voted against the Constitution, on the grounds that it delivered power to an international elite of finance and capital, at the expense of the protecting nation state – a line that was as likely to be taken by a hardcore Gaullist as by a Left Bank lefty.
It seems to me you’d have an easier time explaining that little puzzle if you divide by public/private or centralised/devolved, rather than right and left.
(In an effort to remain on topic, here’s the first American example I can think of that might illustrate the point: Given that it defended labour-intensive agriculture against expansionist Yankee capitalism, exactly how right-wing was the Confederacy?)

Yglesias’ general point that the rich and powerful have an inbuilt advantage in using and retaining power has to be accompanied by lots of finegrained specifics about the degree to which this is disproportionately the case in the US, and about the extent to which the balance may have changed over time. Broad distinctions between left and right are part of such a discussion, but posssibly not the most interesting part.

This begs the question of how the USA might become more democratic.

Skipping quickly over this use of “begs the question,” one approach might be to drop the cut-off for representation in the US House to much closer to the population of Wyoming. Fixing the total number of representatives at 435, while guaranteeing states like North Dakota one seat, just turns the House into another version of the Senate. Now, the Senate is the worse obstrution point in Washington, but more representatives from urban America would tilt the lower house in a more center-left direction, so that the inevitable “compromise” position might not automatically be a right-wing one. And as an added bonus, all it would take is repealing the Reapportionment Act, rather than amending the Constitution. It would be interesting to watch the cloture debate on how un-American it is to have the average member of Congress represent a lot fewer than 700,000 people.

do not seem to have a model according to which, in effect, the left is just disenfranchised.

I seem to remember, somewhere or other, reading someone or other who implied that the function of the political left as it exists in the US is to challenge the status quo. The right is thus, truly, “conservative,” in that it resists change. This seems compatible with a wholly nonpartisan system in which every idea and institution, naturally, is open to criticism–you just can’t expect the status quo party to criticize the status quo. So the left challenges the status quo by giving good reasons, and either (1) the right adopts its policies little by little, or (2) the left occasionally gets power and institutes needed policy changes while in power.

Can’t remember who I was reading this from, unfortunately.

But this would be more or less to deny the existence of a left (or anything outside the establishment ideology). At best, the “democratic left” gets to lobby the “political left” to get its issues included. To call this the disenfranchisement of the left doesn’t seem so far off to me.

This is not, I think, exactly the same as saying that most people are conservative and also centrist, making them “center-right.”

Multi-party system with proportional representation would be a good start.

As well, the United States never developed a labourist/social democratic party, so their political dialogue retained the Liberal/Conservative dynamic, where social democratic policies had to sneak their way into the Liberal party/faction of the day’s program.

I have nothing much to add on the specific point, but Stephen Fry delivered a lecture on America, which in part addressed its contradictions:

http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/07/04/americas-place-in-the-world/

It’s quite good.

Often times, folks can benefit from the wisdom of those who behold from afar. In Grade 6 Geography, we were taught that the American governance system was purposely designed to protect Americans from a central government. It seems as though the history of the US over the last four decades confirms that teaching.

Matt

Perhaps it is more that the great rump of Americans live cheek by jowl with all races and religions at street level, rather than from from behind college lecterns. Your point about Reaganism is well made. If you read, for example, Paul Krugman’s blog, it is clear he is still traumatized by that era. ;)

Turgut

Given we are making comparisons with Europe, you might want to reflect on the fact the UK has a state established religion, while the dominant ruling party in post-war Germany has been the Xian-Democrats. This does make the US separation of church and state look a bit silly.

I mentioned the BNP because I assumed it was the most extreme right-wing UK political party imaginable, but after doing a bit more reading it seems that the “state established” religion of the UK wants nothing to do with the BNP. Compare this with the participants of the US non-state established religion, though tax-exempt, which, judging from the comments of the Robertson’s, Falwell’s, Warren’s, and the like, would do nothing to distance themselves from the sort of rhetoric the BNP is proud to peddle. It seems difficult to seriously equate the UK’s Anglicanism with American evangelicalism when it comes to the political consequences.

Turgut

Here’s a hint. The US was founded by those fleeing England’s established state religion.

I just spent some time at this site ( http://polarizedamerica.com/dwnomin_joint_house_and_senate.htm ) looking at the changes in the U. S. House and Senate over time. (See the movies at the bottom of the page.) Whatever they mean by liberal and conservative, the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian/Democratic parties have been liberal and the Federalist/Whig/Republican parties have been conservative. A couple of things I found of interest: Southern Jeffersonians were at the extreme liberal end of the spectrum, but the South moved to the right over time, so that by 1950 Southern Democrats occupied the center, but were anti-civil rights. Now the South is largely Republican. Minor parties that won Congressional seats have tended to be centrist, including the Populists and Progressives. The U. S. may have been shifting to the right since the 1970s, but only began to become polarized in the 1990s. The center in Congress was thin by the end of the decade, and, with continued polarization in the next decade, has virtually disappeared. The average Congressman may be center-right, but you will be hard pressed to find a center-right Congressman. Maybe a Southern Democrat. By contrast, in 1930 the parties overlapped and there were lots of centrist Congressmen. Liberal/Conservative polarization was greater in the 1880s than now. You have to go back a ways to find that. That polarization lasted for quite some time, which does not bode well for bipartisanship.

Forgive me, Bianca. I was responding to Ted in kind.
You’re right, of course.
The last time we exchanged comments, there was talk at one point about Ulster Orangemen, if I remember rightly. Southern-fried Christianity might be another thing we can lay at the door of the Scots-Irish.

Was America to the center-right during the Bush II years, or was it just right-right?

I think Bianca’s American.
I’ll readily confess to being merely an interested outsider, though.
My comments about the Confederacy were intended to make exactly your point about the usefulness of ‘left’ and ‘right’. A Southern secessionist would typically be seen as right wing. So would a rapacious Northern industrialist. You need something else – perhaps a marxist analysis about successive phases of capitalism – to understand their conflict. I’m sure there’s a better example out there that would make the same point, but the Civil War was the one I came up with.

The people who say that we are a center-right nation are just perpetuating a myth that is force fed by elites. Politicians cite this little ditty all the time and use it as an excuse to oppose or promote a certain idea, or take a position, based on appealing to some imagined center-right ideal. It then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Our nation’s policies end up being center-right, yet no real person ends up being happy about the outcome. Then our politicians stand up on the hill circle-jerking each other as if they did something wonderful for our nifty center-right nation, and everyone else wishes that they took a distinctive left or distinctive right position. Saying we are center-right and legislating as if we are center-right only benefits the people who profit from center-right policies, so ask yourself “cui bono?”, who benefits from the center-right myth… because it is not the average citizen.

Back on topic:
The huge story over the past fifty-sixty years has been the denial of the label “conservative” to large numbers of people who justly had considered themselves conservative and center-right, so it’s not surprising that when someone says “America is a center-right nation,” no one really knows what it means.

Doesn’t ‘centre right’ mean right of centre ? If centre is half way between left and right (perfectly balancing the common good and individual rights), doesn’t this mean a ‘centre right’ nation will be one which tends to enact and whose citizens tend to comply with policies that moderately favour the rights of individuals (right) even when doing so moderately damages the common good (left)? Thus, ever so moderately disturbing the perfect balance noted above?

bianca

Even worse has been the denial of the word “liberal” to the true liberals, while lavishing it on soc1al1sts and campus speech commissars

‘soc1al1sts’

One of those just shat in your bed….alas you were too busy eying up the Social Liberals