The Procedural Centrist

When passion is your guidestar, centrism is always going to be seen as soft and wimpy. The passionate right sees centrist conservatives as RINOs and squishes and cucks. The passionate left sees centrist liberals as corporatist establishment tools. Both sides think the centrists are oscillating between positions because, to them, they don’t really hold any passionate political beliefs.

But that’s not quite right. In fact, if you look at it from another angle, centrism can be pretty attractive. The key is to understand it as a procedural rather than a substantive position, to redraw the centrism as omnipolitical rather than apolitical.

A substantive centrism doesn’t work because it fails to make important comparative judgments about the worthiness of various political options. This type of centrism stems from an incapacity to settle on philosophical beliefs, from a failure to adopt a philosophical framework. More simply, this is the “has no beliefs” centrism. What’s left is a pure pragmatism that is not grounded in any enduring values. This is the centrism that gets vilified, and rightly so; this is the centrism of the popular imagination.

A procedural centrism, on the other hand, stems from the conviction that any sufficiently durable political framework is likely to produce solutions that are very much worth considering. This type of centrism registers an openness to the major political traditions, believing that the best response to a political problem could come from any of them.

The first type of centrism—the bad kind—is fundamentally committed to political success, which makes it so that ideas are always subordinated to the goal of winning. If a program can be passed, then it must be good.

The second type of centrism is fundamentally committed to the truth, which is why, despite persistent pressure to polarize, the procedural centrist will retain an openness to the solutions offered by the major political traditions. Far from relegating ideas to a second-class status, this approach honors them.

There is an assumption baked into procedural centrism: The major political traditions occupying the left-to-right spectrum regularly engage in intellectual activity that produces worthwhile ideas.

This happens in two ways: internally and externally. Internally, a tradition undergoes a kind of intramural combat that tends to produce good arguments and an increasingly refined ideological self-conception. Externally, when a tradition is pitted against a rival, both traditions enhance their positions as a result of being forced to meet this intellectual challenge.

Take libertarianism. Within this tradition, there are internal debates among libertarians that function as intramural discussions leading to appreciable intellectual gains. But libertarians also participate in external discourse: by engaging critically with other traditions, libertarians put themselves in a position to enhance their own position, and they give their opponents an opportunity to do the same. Meanwhile, the other traditions are engaged in the same intra- and extra-level developmental process.

As a result of this activity, each tradition produces worthwhile ideas, forged in an intellectual environment that is conducive to reason. To think otherwise requires either believing that some traditions are malicious — and that their proposals are really pretexts for an ulterior motive and that their adherents are pathologically deceitful — or that those traditions are incompetent, incapable of producing incisive analysis and worthwhile proposals. Which, not coincidentally, is how most people view those on the opposite side of the political spectrum in our polarized moment.

Because the truth is, if you find yourself utterly convinced that a tradition’s best arguments seem too ridiculous, then the problem isn’t them. It’s you. Or, as W. V. O. Quine put it: “Your interlocutor’s silliness is less likely than your bad interpretation.”

So why do people succumb to bad interpretations? The single greatest weakness of procedural centrism is tribalism. In fact, you might say that tribalism—not liberalism or conservatism—is the primary intellectual opponent of procedural centrism.

Being tribalistic is not the same as identifying with a political party. It is obviously all right to belong to a party. There’s a sense in which human beings are ineradicably conflictual — we’re never going to shed our differences and disagreements. To paraphrase Madison, if we could do so, politics would arguably cease to exist.

But our intrinsically conflictual natures don’t have to lead to tribalism. We can make room for robust political disagreement without normalizing patterns of tribal withdrawal that make us less likely to arrive at any sort of truth except by accident. Political conflict doesn’t need to look and act the way it does today.

Procedural centrism is not hostile to ideological commitments—if you think conservatism comes closest to getting it right, so be it. But you have to engage with the ideas of liberalism and libertarianism to get there. (And vice versa.) Here is what this centrism is hostile toward: an irrational unwillingness to believe that another tradition could produce the right answer to a given problem.

And this unwillingness is precisely what we see everywhere, from both sides, in our current tribalistic political culture. Nancy Pelosi is against it? Then conservatives are for it. President Trump is for it, then liberals are against it.

We have reached a moment where in order to predict how people will react to a proposal, you don’t need to know anything about the proposal. You just need to know, Who? Whom?

Instead, we ought to appreciate that ideological competition is as instrumental to a successful liberal, pluralistic state, as market competition is to a healthy economy.

Berny Belvedere is editor-in-chief of Arc Digital. Follow him @bernybelvedere.