The tragedy of centrism

The wages of loyalty is humiliation

Matt Yglesias is a smart guy who divides his time between writing about all sorts of wonkish policy proposals to make life better for people and trying to gently persuade Democrats not to do mad counter-productive things. His blog is called Slow Boring to convey a general sense of seriousness and attention to detail, but actually it isn’t boring at all, written, as it is, with a pleasant, understated wit. If you want to read a smart liberal saying smart liberal things, you can’t do better. So, let’s take a look at what Yglesias had to say Thursday morning before the debate:

Nailed it!

Let’s try and make Matt feel better though. Another smart guy is Bentham’s Bulldog who is not only very talented at coming up with alliterative noms de plume that instantly clue you up to the content and vibe of his blog, but also writes, both crisply and at great length, about how we have good reason to believe God exists because of Beth-2, which is some Maths nerd thing I don’t understand, (though it’s sweet that mathematicians, at least, care about proper Hebrew pronunciation). That the man is smart goes without saying, but he’s also highly critical, relentlessly interrogating received wisdom using his logical powers honed by years of study of analytical philosophy while you were just watching Seinfeld or whatever. So, what did he have to say just a few short hours before the debate?

Why I think Biden will probably do better than expected in the debate.

There’s a lot of dispute about who is going to win the upcoming debate between Trump and Biden. Many picture a geriatric, forgetful Biden being impaled in a nightmare debate—others picture Trump rambling incoherently and Biden sounding reasonable. My guess: Biden will do better than expected but not by much.

Biden isn’t where he used to be, as anyone who has been following him for a while can easily see (just compare his devastating takedown of Paul Ryan or Sarah Palin to his 2020 debates). That said, Biden is still decently competent, seeming to run things fine as president of the United States.

Lots of people seem to think that Biden is severely dementia addled and his brain has turned to mush. I think that, while Biden’s eloquence has declined a lot more than Trump’s has, this is overblown. Biden stutters a lot and slurs his words, and occasionally goes off on bizarre and confusing rambles—as he often did in the past—but he’s not delusional in the way that selectively edited clips surfacing on right-wing Twitter tend to portray him being.

🤣

The problem with being sane

What Yglesias and BB have in common is that they are centrists. In Unqualified Reservations, it is written that ‘moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought.’ and, like all things in Unqualified Reservations, this is profoundly true, but also kind of false. Yglesias certainly has thoughts. He has thoughts about road pricing, and planning law, and education reform, and immigration, and China, and a whole lot of other stuff too. Some of his thoughts are right-coded, others left-coded, but they are definitely thoughts, backed up with data and reasoned argument. And as for BB: that guy doesn’t just have thoughts, he has become thought. His thoughts contain multitudes, they propagate and boldly colonise every area of human endeavour, even those that are really none of his business at all. 

What is it, if not the absence of thought, that allows us to so easily recognise the pair as quintessential centrists? One immediately plausible answer is that if we take all their views and average them out, we end up with something in the middle. There’s not really any way of rigorously doing that though (how left wing exactly on a ten-point scale is 1 billion Americans?), and if we were to spitball the numbers, I’m not so sure that BB would even end up in the middle. No, the reason we can so easily perceive their centrism is because their centrism is not an intellectual quality, it is a vibe, and that vibe, fundamentally, is loyalty. 

People who are intelligent and have their stuff put together are centrists. If you are, for want of a better term, good at life, then you have a lot to lose: money, a comfortable standard of living, meaningful relationships, a family, a job you enjoy, a place in the world. Any kind of radical upheaval imperils that. If the bullets start flying, you are suddenly in the same place, facing the same risk, as the incompetent, the imbecilic, and the insane. Change means rolling the dice; it is the desire of those with little or nothing to lose. Thus, on average, psychologically normal, conscientious and smart people support the regime, that is to say they are moderates.

The twist, though, is that this is not just true of this regime, it is true of almost any regime. If history had gone differently, neither Matt Yglesias or BB would have become moderate Nazis - but only because the Nazis would have been too petty to let them. Purebred gentile moderates, however, very much would have been moderate Nazis because, once the passions of war had died down, nature’s centrists would, as in our timeline, have picked themselves up and got on with the job of building a decent life for themselves and those around them. The loyalty of the centrist is based, not on the quality of the regime, but his own quality, and that quality can be appropriated by pretty much anyone. The more decrepit and dysfunctional a regime, the greater the proportion of its subjects who will consider the possibility of revolution, but the aristocrat by nature will still defend his liege lord. 

Loyalty in Democracy

In America, your liege lord isn’t a man, not Biden, and certainly not Trump. Indeed, by common ascent of polite opinion, the ultimate form of disloyalty to democracy is excessive loyalty to Trump including, indeed especially, if he is elected. Nor is it loyalty to an idea. Ideas come and go. Democracy today means dismantling white supremacy; for Woodrow Wilson it meant establishing white supremacy, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Loyalty in a democracy means, above all, a belief that the system works. Just like if you think Charles I is a good king you are loyal to him, if you think democracy is a good process you are loyal to it. 

It is, of course, hard to know exactly whether the king is good or not. Sure, everything kind of looks like it’s going to hell, but perhaps it is the king’s advisers, or his adversaries in parliament, or an underground conspiracy of papists who are to blame. To conclude that Charles himself maybe sucks, you would have to actually see him being king in his palace, and you can’t, so best think of something else. But what if you looked through the window and there he was, just smoking crack? Similarly, it is easy to comprehend that all sorts of problems in a democracy are not actually problems with democracy. They are, rather, caused, by other things - Republicans, mostly - but, again, there are limits, some things that can’t be explained away.

America is a representative democracy, and the esoteric meaning of this statement is that elected politicians represent the government. Others have explained, many times, that it does not actually matter very much if the President of the United States is senile, so I do not need to belabour the point. What does certainly matter, though, is that the President of the United States should not present as being senile. Far more important than occasionally arbitrating matters that cannot be resolved though the normal channels of bureaucratic grind, is his job of doing Presidenty things, more precisely, of being seen to do Presidenty things. The conspiracy theorist tells us that Biden is a ‘puppet’; he speaks the truth, but he knows not what he speaks. What is the job of a puppet but to perform?

Ever since 2000, it has been a commonplace of online Right discourse that Biden was chosen because, as a man losing his mental faculties, he was easy to control. Of course, this precisely inverts reality. No-one is harder to control than a mad old person, just ask Tony Soprano. What the world saw on Thursday night was just how truly impossible it is to control Joe Biden where it really counts. Nine days of debate prep, and they might as well have not bothered. If they had just rocked up on the night and downed a few beers, would it have really been worse? What more obvious proof could there be that, lamentably, none of the conspiracy theories are true? If the curtain opens and the puppet just stands there, vaguely twitching, what you should infer about who is pulling the strings? Yet, and not for the first time recently, it is precisely those whose epistemology is most deranged, who are least equipped to speculate about what they cannot see, who have seen what has very obviously been in front of everyone for years.

There are 333 million people in America and not many politicians who ‘matter’. By all rights, it should be an easily solvable logistical challenge to produce a reliable supply of Obamas: candidates who are pleasingly racially ambiguous and, to quote the current President in more lucid times, ‘articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’ Even Obama, with his weird communist past and beard, wasn’t as good at being Obama as America, considered in terms of its wealth and population, deserves. Since then, things have very clearly gone downhill. However, for the natural loyalist, the thought that the system is so bad that it can’t select someone who isn’t literally demented to represent itself is unthinkable, even though there have been no reasonable grounds for doubt on this score for at least two years.

The truth is the system doesn’t work. You were loyal to a lie. Don’t feel too bad about it; it has been the lot of the great bulk of mankind and will be so too in the future. What other things might be equally obvious, but have not yet been sufficiently rubbed into your face? Perhaps you took a vaccine for a certain disease, and then you got that disease, and then you got vaccinated again, and got the disease again? You saw a graph or something that said this is a very effective vaccine, perhaps the most effective vaccine in history, but maybe it’s not only the case that it doesn’t work, but it’s actually really obvious it doesn’t work? 

These are dark thoughts, and perhaps not worth thinking. The tragedy of the centrist is that he is not only better, he is right. If you want to be governed differently, you need a different system of government. If you don’t want to change your system of government - and you shouldn’t! (probably) - then you must accept the way you are governed. You can, and should, try to change what you can, and if you’re a bigshot pundit like Matt Yglesias, you can get stuff done: bike lanes will be paved, voucher schemes will be funded, smart road pricing will be implemented. Sometimes, in a few places, a bit. Only a fool would ask for more, but wouldn’t it be nice if the regime would just make it a bit easier for you, if it would keep the sign of degeneracy and decay inside the palace walls, if it would not make you look like a schmuck?

Too bad. The next debate is on September 10th. Best of luck.