‘Irritable Centrism’

Sometimes when I can't make up my mind for sure about an issue—I may have a sense where I'm headed but I'm not ready to admit it to myself—the one thing I don't like is listening to people who are absolutely convinced one way or the other. An hour with an absolutist sends me fleeing across the middle clear to the other side.

I suppose immigration is the best example. I've always considered it an endlessly complex subject on which there are no perfect answers. I think I know which way the country is slowly moving: toward tolerance for existing demographic realities and against the idea of throwing millions of illegal residents out, and I believe I'm headed in that direction myself. But all it takes is a strident argument on either side, demanding mass deportation or denying that illegal immigration is in fact a serious problem, to make me want to leave the table or reach for the off button on the remote control.

I'm not in the habit of offering up my personal ideological quirks as a proxy for the views of the entire nation, but it seems to me that my own brand of irritable centrism isn't too far from where public opinion stands on a whole range of sensitive issues as a pivotal election year gets underway.

Notwithstanding some tough immigration laws that have been enacted in several states this year, the electorate is inching its way toward acceptance of illegal workers—if only because it has no other solution for what to do with them. It is tiptoeing toward tolerance of gay marriage; legalized civil unions, once seen as a radical departure from traditional values, are well on their way to becoming the default conservative position in most American states. The voters are similarly moving toward a consensus that free trade is irrevocable and even freer trade in the coming years is inevitable, no matter how obviously distasteful the consequences for the American workforce might be.

I can't prove it, but I'm convinced that, deep down, most of the people who will vote in 2008 understand these things. But that doesn't mean they are comfortable with them, or want to discuss them out loud among their friends. And what they especially don't seem to want is an election year dominated by a shrill debate on these subjects conducted from the far ends of the ideological spectrum.
 
Irritable centrism has shown itself in different guises, all of them consequential, several times in the past several years. It emerged very clearly in the spring of 2004, after the supreme court in Massachusetts essentially forced the state to recognize marriages between gay partners. For millions of people with unshakable convictions on this issue, the decision was either an overdue recognition of an important civil right or a disgraceful repudiation of conventional moral standards. There's little doubt that, in the country as a whole, the opponents of this decision outnumbered those who applauded it. Many still believe that it cost John Kerry the 2004 presidential election. If that's true, though, it's not because of what happened at the ideological poles. It's because of what the decision did to the irritable center: it alienated a middle group in the electorate who sensed which way the country was moving on this issue, who had even begun to accept the situation in some measure—but who did not like being reminded of it in a stark and autocratic way by an unelected court.

Just a few months after the 2004 election, irritable centrism reappeared from a different angle in the case of Terri Schiavo, the long-comatose Florida woman in whose case the state's courts had permitted the discontinuance of life support, at the request of her husband. When Congress met in an extraordinary session and voted to supersede the state court—with the blessing of the Bush administration—it provoked an angry and wholly unexpected reaction in the electorate that spread far beyond the ranks of committed right-to-die believers. It provoked outrage from a huge cohort of centrists who understood instinctively that this was a complicated problem with respectable arguments on both sides, but didn't want the issue forced on them in what seemed like a strident and heavy-handed way. If one had to choose a moment when the Bush administration began to lose its credibility across the country, in my mind it would be March 2005, the time of the Schiavo intervention.