Reclaiming the Middle

When did the mainstream become so conservative? To listen to the radio, or watch TV these days one would just assume that we are a nation of conservatives. Yet every day I see people I know not to be conservatives, and the last couple elections have been so close really the fact that one side or the other won doesn’t prove anything.

Makes me wonder a few things.

The first thought is that perhaps there should be a required margin of victory in federal elections of more than a majority. We all know it is actually possible to win with a minority of the popular vote, but maybe we ought to require a supermajority of the electoral vote. Prove you engaged some people. Just a thought.

The next thought is that really this has nothing to do with conservative and liberal. That is just one continuum, but in reality many of the things that divide us don’t fall anyplace on that continuum. Abortion rights aren’t a liberal or conservative cause. Campaign Finance Reform isn’t a liberal or conservative cause. Conservation of the environment isn’t a liberal or conservative cause. Education isn’t a liberal or conservative cause. We keep measuring candidates with this scale and yet the scale we are using doesn’t meter the things we care about.

We might as well be measuring a room for carpet using an hourglass.

I think this is more dimensional than we give notice of. Certainly there are liberal and conservative agendas. But equally certainly there are issues that transcend those labels. We need to be looking at more.

Equally as telling I think is progressive versus traditional. Do we want things to be a’changin or do we long for the way things used to be. Some might say that liberals are the party of change, but I believe that if that ever did apply it doesn’t any longer. Maybe this should be slugged “Momentum vs. Inertia” to take the flavor inherent in the other words away.

Lately I think there is a religious vs. secular tension manifesting in our government. Again, people might label all religious politicians as conservative. And once again I think in this time and place that that is close minded.

The thing that has really got me thinking though is that the current lib vs. con, right vs. left, red vs. blue set up is really working for the people that do the promotions and the media. I believe one of the reasons it does work has to do with ridiculousness, counterpunching, and the middle.

See, somehow the people the media has taken to calling the left have got themselves in almost an exclusive counterpunching mode. They’ve made a full time job out of critiquing and highlighting problems with the people on the right. This is problematic for many reasons, but the dimension of it that is most troubling to me is the definition of the center.

The political center is something that is perceived when you look at the discourse as a whole. A person takes in everything they are hearing, judges what is on one end of the spectrum and what is on the other, and then determines from the extremes where the center is.

Right now the American Left, the blue people, the libs, the Democratic Party, however you want to name them; right now these people have ceded the middle. And truth be told, in my own somewhat untrained opinion, the middle is where the engine is. If in some way you are able to move the middle to the right of the absolute spectrum, then the average person is going to be less inclined to do anything to defeat policies that appear to be in that middle (but as I think we will see are actually well to the right of the absolute center). If you want to energize the populous against many of the initiatives and the policies of the current administration you have to move the center to expose just how right of center they are.

This brings me back to counterpunching and ridiculousness, both of which contribute to our current situation. Starting with the latter, one cannot argue that the middle of anything owes its position to the extremes. Drag one end of the spectrum further out and you shift the middle by half as much. It’s sort of a leverage thing, or a torque thing, the greater the radius the less force is required to do the same work. Put simply, the far right opinion makers are way farther right than the far left opinion makers. That all by itself shifts the center to the right. For some reason we do seem to see and hear nutjobs out on the right end, and yet never really hear anything truly insane from the left.

I think this is because somehow far right wing opinion doesn’t seem as ridiculous to media outlets as far left wing opinion. Mostly I think because the people espousing this sort of thing from the right all seem to have either Rev. before their name of $$$ under their name. Occasionally we hear something from someone that has Prof. in front of their name that would qualify as left wing ranting, but rarely. I guess all in all the people who have been the most successful this way on the left would be PETA. But I’m not sure they really are a liberal group. From time to time actors and other celebs take up vocal positions that might be left wing, but they carry little weight as they are too easy to dismiss. People have much less difficulty discounting what is said by a film star than by a preacher, and frankly I don’t know if that is wrong.

So where is the liberal extreme? Could part of the problem be that that is a linguistic tautology: liberal extreme? It’s a contradiction in terms. But not secular extreme, not progressive extreme perhaps part of the problem is in the nomenclature. Another part of the problem though is that if in fact it is a liberal media, it seems much to hesitant to embarrass itself. They have no problem putting Falwell on a major network news show and setting the right up to soil itself, but rarely if ever do they let that happen on the left. The curious thing though is that that embarrassment would probably help rather than hurt. It would give a voice to the left extreme and just by virtue of its presence it would both slide the middle to the left and let people toward the middle see the extreme right in reference to the extreme left and see it as the lunacy it really is.

When they trot out someone telling us there should be no taxes, we have to trot out someone that thinks the government should have all the money. Anyone know any communists? We need them for Meet the Press. When they trot out someone that says there should be no abortion we need to trot out someone that believes that congenitally ill newborns should be put to death. Hello? Calling Dr. Kevorkian. If they trot out someone that wants to commercialize public lands, we need to trot out someone that favors seizing private land and turning it into wildlife reserves.

It isn’t enough to counterpunch, we have to balance. The current people on the left spend all of their time basically legitimizing the ideals of their opponents. They would be better served building the proper perspective regarding those aims rather than simply opposing them at face value.

Nobody has to actually believe that the ultra-left solutions are what we want. We just need to remind the people that those opinions are there, and not really so they can evaluate them for their merits, but more so they color the opinions all the way at the other end of the spectrum – and help us more accurately place the middle.