Demosophia

Where's the Center?

I'm baaack...

A friend of mine with impeccable conservative credentials observes.

There is a HUGE difference between a liberal and a leftist, as I've said before. The problem is that there are damned few liberals left in the democratic party. Most of the leadership in that party is so totally to the left, that they couldn't find the center if their butts were planted on it.

I think my friend has intuitively hit the heart of the bottom, to borrow part of a line from the immortal Peter Lorre in Casablanca. This is an empirical question upon which I can probably shed some light. The average Democrat candidate is two standard deviations to the left of the average Republican candidate, overall. And that suggests that voting isn't as futile as it's cracked up to be. I know this important detail because I did the math (which involves some rather exotic statistics, like factor analysis of responses to polling data) as part of my dissertation. And the fellow who stands at the exact statistical center of the American electorate is Dick Gephardt. He's at the 50th ideological percentile, dead on. If you want to know what the current mean looks like, "Milky's" your man. Some Republicans are actually to the left of him, like Connie Morella (now out of office).

But the point I really need to make here is that the "center" of American politics is not the statistical mean between left and right. The center of American politics is a set of specific beliefs that could be called "Lockeanism" after John Locke, or "classical liberalism." That's because Lockeanism is the ideology of the founding, and the location of the statistical left/right mean may or may not have much to do with that. So the overall ideology of the country has drifted slowly to the left since 1900, and especially since 1930, and the trauma of current events has compelled us to look more carefully at the real center of our identity, rather than the simple mean of a left/right continuum. That's why the Democrats are in trouble.

And here, it's really difficult to find any current candidates that express that center very precisely. Bush is, basically, too statist to be a classical liberal. He spends too much money, or rather he's insufficiently careful about money. (That's probably a legacy of his having been a rich kid, more than any ideological thing.) What's conspicuously absent from the current Presidential race is a candidate who really expresses the center of the American Identity. I don't think Kerry has a shot at it any more, because he has too much history as a result of his intense opposition to the Vietnam War and his choice to let those associations define his political identity. Perhaps Edwards has a shot. We'll see. I doubt it, because he has that whole "trial lawyer" thing going on. And I haven't heard a single word from the Democrats in decades that indicates they have a clue.

But there's a big hole sitting there, waiting for someone to fill it.

By the way, I've made a fundamental shift in my own identity, with the decision to become "armed." As a result my actions and sentiments have allowed the conviction that possession of a legal firearm and the right to bear arms, fundamentally changes the relationship between the individual and the state. It shifts the citizen away from "implicit trust" in the state, toward "conditional trust." That's a good thing.

As with any complex issue there are tradeoffs, but I find the people who deliberately bear arms reflective and stimulating, on the whole. Those people who regard them as right wing chumps do so at their political peril.

Posted by Demosophist at January 22, 2004 05:45 PM | TrackBack