No-Labels

It’s silly season.  The non-stop election cycle here in America is moving into its next phase.  Money is pouring in.  Most people are trying to avoid paying attention.  True partisans are plotting how their preferred candidate can get to 270 — the magical number of votes in the Electoral College America’s antiquated and not at all democratic presidential selection clique.  Get to 270 and you win.  Heck with the vote of the people.  America’s election of its president is a relic of its origins as a slave-owning economy and takes place as fifty state level elections.  It is not national.  Not in any modern sense.  Indeed, the Electoral College is an affront to modernity, but there’s no prospect of modernizing American politics.  That racism plays such a structural role every four years doesn’t appear to bother anyone, besides most voters probably have never thought about it.

Another feature of election cycles is the regular emergence of centrists who worm their way out of the woodwork to proclaim a pox on both sides of the political aisle.  This time they call themselves the “No-Labels” faction, unaware, I assume, that “No-Labels” is a label.  This internal contradiction notwithstanding they have issued a lengthy manifesto which is well worth reading.  

It says nothing.

No, really, it says nothing.

It is simply a long statement of the most vapid avoidance of controversy.  It is redolent with what. Its authors argue is “common sense”.  Who can argue with common sense?  No one. Which is why there are no controversial proposals in the text.  I believe it was Pascal who argued that common sense is both the most common and most rare of phenomenon.  Most common because we all believe we have it.  Most rare because we all claim no one else has any.  The pablum that the No-Labels faction advocate fits well into this paradox.  There is nothing there precisely because it has everything.  

Now I think of it, I am not sure the correct word is “advocate” for the activity of the No-Labels folks.  After all, common sense needs no advocacy, it simply exists fully formed out in the ether waiting to be distilled and enacted by sensible and middling people who are decidedly not extremists.  

I wonder whether it has ever occurred to so-called centrists that they could not exist in the absence of others with more defined views.  If there are no edges there is no center.  And, most often, it is the solidity of those edges — their sharpness — that allows the absence of solidity in the mushy middle to pass muster as having some sort of existence. 

Centrism is not compromise.  It is having no opinion or position to begin with.  Compromise assumes that you begin with a hard position and that you then haggle towards some other position.  You give up some things, but gain others.  People who compromise start on an edge.  Centrists start in a puddle of confused self-described mediocrity.  

The No-Labels manifesto wallows in such a puddle.

It says nothing at inordinate length.  It suggests nothing that the reader can latch onto as a potential action or policy.  It is a fog of vague assertions that, since it would be hard define, is incapable of raising opposition.  Which is the point.  If no one can argue against such stolid and middling sensibility it must, surely, be terribly … well, sensible.
Why hadn’t we all thought of this, or that, before?  How silly have we all been?

Compounding this sense is the type of person associated with it.  They are all, by and large, the sort of politician who has fallen by the wayside because they offer no solutions.  They are the grey in the brightly colored texture of politics.  They all seem to exist in a past they imagine as better than the present and much better than the future.  Unless, naturally, they take power to bend the future back towards the past.  In which case the future will suit them just fine.  It was better in the past you see.  Much better.  It was before all this dastardly polarization interrupted the civil discourse that the bland mistake for serious debate.  

Actually, how can there be debate when only the center exists?

Never mind.  Such questions require thought.  We must avoid thinking.  

Speaking of polarization: somehow the so-called centrists imagine that extreme politics exists only in, and is a consequence of, the political arena.  It is a figment of the over-heated minds of the crazy people who argue in places like Washington.  It is not at all a function of society at large.  And it certainly cannot be a consequence of the absurd levels of inequality that stretch the two ends of society so far apart that they have nothing in common.

For how can there be “common sense” when there is little to nothing in common?

When the centrists grapple with that conundrum we can take them more seriously.  Until then we know that their common sense is not at all common.  It is the opinion of a few.  And, a privileged few at that.