Egocentrism

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Brookline, MA, United States
I'll post rants here, and musings; articles and thoughts about articles. I'll keep it quite complex and yet astoundingly simple: whatever it is I am interested in at any given moment.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Chiseling Away at the Middle

The notion of the disappearing middle ground has become a bit of a cliche in discussions about religion, culture, and politics. I think people - real people - still inhabit the middle, but the media of discourse have shifted the conversation to the extremes (thus, Rush Limbaugh is the de facto spokesperson for the Republican Party, as James Carville rants). I think that was part of Karl Rove's grand plan - one that functioned for the better part of thirty years, from "government is bad" to the death spasms of the (second) Bush presidency.

Part of Obama's freshness is a tilt towards pragmatic centrism - something indicative of a broader American phenomenon. It seems that the United States' amygdala is reactionary and conservative (as perhaps it should be), and so a conservative age is defined by a push to the extremes. The essence of the nation, however, is its liberalism - a slow and deliberate move away from a monarchic system and an oligarchy of the landed white male gentry towards expansion of civil rights and active input on governance to all. One way to understand this is that, at some fixed point in time after a given wave of immigration, those immigrants come to feel equal and assume power. See, for example, Jackson's ascent to the highest office of the land after a Virginian faux-monarchy and Kennedy's ascent after practically uninterrupted Protestant hegemony. Slavery - that most "peculiar" of institutions and one that faced generations of American leaders with a stunning, recalcitrant tension between ideals and realities, between morality and economy - may have ultimately made African-Americans the exception that proves the rule (note the sentiment that Obama's lack of American baggage - read: anger and memory - enabled him to achieve what others could not [link to be added shortly]), although a different way of understanding Obama's election is as the ascendancy of the post-WW II immigrants from every corner of the world who came to the intellectual superpower as graduate students or professionals. In this model, Obama primarily does not represent black America, per se, but the upper-middle class engineers, doctors, and scientists who flooded the country from southeast Asia and elsewhere in the last two+ generations. But I digress.

What the liberal victory of a new segment of the population finding itself emphatically represented in the Oval Office indicates, I would suggest, is a return to national pride and pragmatism. Having been so recently an outsider, this type of leader is less concerned with "culture wars" (which we can find in discussions of eugenics, evolution, and more stretching back to Reconstruction if not well before) than with effective governance - pragmatic centrism with a liberal foundation. This combination, then, allows us to move forward - always slowly - in ways that playing the "extreme liberal" card never would. It is, I might suggest, a "punctuated equilibrium" approach to American political movements.

The best example of this phenomenon I've seen is a powerful graphic the guys at 538 put together to show the shift in congressional districts in the past few election cycles. What you'll see is that the ideological middle very much exists, and that, somehow (and Obama himself should not be credited fully for this shift, though he is likely the best example of a positive force in this direction), these middle districts have moved quite quickly from electing Republicans, in general, to Democrats. The districts themselves have not changed so quickly, but somehow the combination of the generational end of Rove-Atwaterism and the emergence of Obama to fill the vacuum have calmed their fear centers and allowed the American signature - liberalism - to emerge.

I'll add that, throughout writing this, I've been tempted to add the religious parallels as well. Such is the move away from Conservative Judaism by a small zealous crowd towards orthopraxy and by the larger, behaviorally defined segment of the populations towards the Reform. The middle ground, I'd suggest, still exists, and has not changed much (forty years ago most members of Conservative congregations, I suggest, were no more believes in JTS's Conservative Judaism than members are today). Et c. Et c.

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