The center is where the two ends collide, from left and right, which is what makes the center the most interesting place to be.
It's easy but rather dull to be on, and stay on, the left; it's just as easy as staying on the right. Ideologically, I happen to be on the farther end of the left — not the extreme left, but probably farther than your modern, garden-variety progressivism — and my opinions would be far less tangled and, on occasion, less arduously expressed were I to pitch my tent on sentimental ideological ground and stay put. Pragmatically, however, I would bore myself to stupors. Political progress takes place on the pluralistic battlefield, not back in the ideological camps. Heroic action figures intent on effective engagement have always appreciated this and have, in turn, adopted some of the enemy's ideological characteristics: FDR, Nixon, Obama, Reagan, to name just a few — all, at times, were as conservative as they were progressive; as progressive as they were conservative. Otherwise, the thrill of engagement would have been lost to self-satisfaction, and nothing would have gotten done. And so I resist 100 percentism.
Another reason I pragmatically subscribe to centrism (again, pragmatic, not ideological centrism) is that pious ideological camps tend to be populated by — let's
just say it — crackpots. This phenomenon is self-evident on the right (or at least it's self-evident to those of us on the left). The Palins, the Cruzes, the Bannons are a fascinating but offputting, ghoulish bunch who dwell in what is commonly designated the fever swamp. On the left we have, most prominently, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, the former of whom recently degraded my beloved and fundamentally pragmatic democratic socialism by converting it into a wholly unrealizable fantasy. In brief, he took democratic socialism into crackpot territory, promising overnight fixes to sempiternal problems.
Sen. Sanders now has an even bigger problem than having lost the primary race. Only a self-satisfied crackpot would so blindly proceed in the way he's proceeded, which, as the NY Times reports, has ignited a revolt within his political revolution:
While the establishment of [his] new group, Our Revolution, has been eagerly awaited by many of his most ardent supporters, it has been met with criticism and controversy over its financing and management.
A principal concern among backers of Mr. Sanders, whose condemnation of the campaign finance system was a pillar of his presidential bid, is that the group can draw from the same pool of "dark money" that Mr. Sanders condemned for lacking transparency.
The announcement of the group, which will be livestreamed Wednesday night, also comes as the majority of its staff resigned after the appointment last Monday of Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s former campaign manager, to lead the organization.
Who would have thought it? you might sarcastically ask. A rebellion against Weaver, a man of no identifiable charm whatsoever? And a revolt against Our Revolution as a 501(c)(4), perhaps the most targeted anathema of Sanders's entire campaign? Only crackpots can't see outside their self-fashioned bubbles.
And then there is Dr. Stein, who is similarly bubbling with self-unaware, crackpotted derailments. Yesterday, relates Dana Milbank, "she accused the famed leftist" and Stein-supporter Noam Chomsky "of being cowardly," since the good professor has possessed the good sense to urge a nation-saving vote for Hillary Clinton in swing states. The Green Party nominee, groans Milbank, is pushing "a phony equivalence between Clinton, a flawed and unloved but conventional candidate, and Trump, who is running a campaign of bigotry, xenophobia and intimations of violence." And that, as they say, is just nuts.
Thus even if your leftist host were inclined to decamp from pragmatic centrism, where in the name of political sanity would I go? To His Revolution headed up by both a smug martinet and an unreconstructed fabulist? To a demagogic physician (Stein also sensationally claims that Clinton exposed "top secret" intel in her emails) unable to recognize the difference between traditional coalition politics and goofy cryptofascism?
Thank you, no. Pragmatically I am left with centrism — that most interesting of places, where the two ends collide.