Centrism Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be…

Oh, wait, it’s totally failed.

A couple weeks back I argued that the careers of Kristin Sinema and John Fetterman provide strong evidence that centrism—especially a reactionary centrism built on anti-left branding and across-the-board compromise with the right—doesn’t deliver the massive electoral benefits its proponents claim. Since then we’ve racked up even more data points, and also some strikingly bad centrist special pleading.

Let’s take the data points first, then the special pleading—and then I want to draw some conclusions not just about reactionary centrism, but about the whole project of hyper-focusing on policy polling as a way to win elections.

—

Everything Is Horrible is having a sale! If you value my writing, this is a great time to become a paid subscriber. It’s 40% off, $30/year.

—

Jared Golden, losing in Maine

Reactionary centrists generally argue that the right—and even the far right—wins elections because they speak to real, reasonable concerns and prejudices, and that Democrats need to rush rightwards to co-opt those issues.

For example, reactionary centrists often argue that too much immigration is a serious, dangerous problem and that we must secure the border and ramp up deportations in order to steal the thunder of the right. (As Daniel Denvir explains in All-American Nativism, this has been the approach of the Democratic party for 20 years now, but reactionary centrists want even more of it.)

Reactionary centrists also believe trans people should be sacrificed to electoral concerns—thus Gavin Newsom eagerly agreeing with far right MAGA asshole Charlie Kirk that trans people should be barred from sports. Pundit Matt Yglesias (a reactionary centrist spokesperson of sorts) has also argued against fracking bans, against repealing the Hyde Amendment, against ending deportations, and has generally chastised activists for asking candidates to do anything that the median voter in Pennsylvania might not embrace enthusiastically.

Reactionary centrists generally act as if they are always the outsiders, always giving the Democratic party a path away from its failures. But in fact we do have examples of reactionary centrism in practice. And…it’s success rate is not impressive.

For example, the most pro-Trump, anti-left Democrat in the House this cycle, and for some time past, has been Jared Golden. Golden is one of a vanishingly few Democratic reps who support Trump’s tariffs; he was one of the handful of Democrats in the House who voted to end the recent government shutdown, handing Republicans a win.

Golden claimed he was retiring because of growing incivility and because he worried that the Democratic party was, like the Republican party, being taken over by “extremists”. That’s the reactionary centrist playbook—never blame the GOP for something you aren’t also willing to blame on Democrats; punch left; always validate GOP voters in the hopes that they will pull the lever for you.

But Golden’s reactionary centrist talking points have not let to electoral conquest. On the contrary, before Golden dropped out, former Maine governor Paul LePage led him for the seat by solid margins in several polls.

Golden had also drawn a serious primary challenger. One poll showed that 57% of his constituents didn’t think he deserved reelection. His numbers were weak with Democrats—36% didn’t think he deserved reelection vs. 51% who thought he did. But they were catastrophic with independents, at 66%/ who thought he didn’t deserve reelection and only 27% who thought he did.

It’s understandable that Golden has been a moderate; he’s in a +9 R district. And his triangulation worked for some time, since he’s held the seat since 2018. But embracing Trump, and especially perhaps Trump’s tariffs, at a time when the president’s approval is in free fall destroyed his support with Democrats and, crucially, with independents, without attracting the hoped-for Republican windfall (75% of GOP voters did not believe Golden should be reelected.)

Centrism, at least in this cycle, didn’t ensure Golden’s reelection; it alienated his base and prevented him from taking advantage of an environment which has wrecked havoc on the GOP basically everywhere else in the country.

Labour, losing overseas

An even more striking exercise in reactionary centrist failure is visible in the UK. As writer Toby Buckle explains, after gaining power for the first time in decades, Labour under PM Keir Starmer has swung hard to the right, largely motivated by a reactionary centrist ideology which contends that, as Buckle puts it, “the right must be understood, but never blamed.”

In an effort to cater to right wing voters and defuse culture war election issues, Labour has launched a vicious attack on trans people, reversing a promise to make it easier to obtain legal IDs, banning puberty blockers, and making it effectively impossible for them to use public or private bathrooms. Labour has also embraced extreme anti-immigrant policies—most recently suggesting that the government strip jewelry and valuables from asylum seekers.

Again, these are exactly the sorts of policies that reactionary centrists claim should lead to surefire popularity and electoral bonanzas. Is Labour more popular than ever?!

You have probably guessed that the answer is “no”. Labour, like Jared Golden, is bleeding support to both their left and right. In a recent poll, Reform, the UK’s fascist nativist party, is at 33%; Labour has fallen to 18%, its lowest level since 2009, while the lefty Greens have risen to 15%—their highest ever. The Lib Dems—a center left party which is now to the left of Labour, are at 12%. (The Conservatives, the former leading right party, have also lost ground and are at !6%)

Again, like Golden, by embracing right wing talking points, Labour has alienated and disheartened its base and energized its opposition. It has validated fascism and bigotry as a reasonable consensus, empowering the worst people on earth at the expense not just of its values, but of its electoral coalition. Is this really a good path for Democrats to follow?

Some winners who are not centrists

We don’t need to just look at losers, though. Democrats just had a remarkable election cycle with many wins. And one of the most remarkable things about that election cycle was how thoroughly candidates did not follow the reactionary centrist playbook.

The most obvious case here is Zohran Mamdani, who ran for mayor of New York on a democratic socialist platform, promising to stabilize rents and provide free public transportation. He also spoke out forcefully for trans people and criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza—exactly the kind of impassioned moral stances on behalf of marginalized people that reactionary centrists deplore. His opponent, corrupt sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, promised more centrist policies—even earning the endorsement of Donald Trump himself. This cross-party appeal to the iconic MAGA voter did not save Cuomo, however, who Mamdani defeated 50.4% to 41.6% in three way race.

Other victorious candidates didn’t follow the reactionary centrist playbook either. Abigail Spanberger, is to Mamdani’s right on many issues for sure. But when her opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, attacked her with millions in anti trans ads, she did not fold like the reactionary centrists in Labour. She refused to say (as Newsom did) that trans athletes should be barred from sports, instead arguing that these were choices best made by schools. She won the election in recently purple Virginia by 15 points.

Maybe it’s not policy

Reactionary centrists are quick to say that Mamdani is running in a blue city and that his victories are therefore not real victories. They’ve mostly been silent on Labour’s catastrophic implementation of their ideas, though. Matt Yglesias did sneer on bluesky that Starmer hasn’t really implemented reactionary centrism because he’s opposed fracking. If Labour would only go hard against the environment, that would finally win over the fascists and (?) the Greens!

Yglesias’ sad cope is funny because it’s sad. But it’s also telling, inasmuch as it undermines the entire basis for reactionary centrism’s electoral claims. Labour has enthusiastically implemented a slew of centrist policies and couched them in the requisite anti left rhetoric. But, Yglesias argues, they have not done enough. They have not done everything. And if they have not implemented every reactionary centrist policy all at once, they can’t expect to see electoral benefits. They can expect, apparently, electoral collapse.

The thing is, no party in power is ever going to implement every policy any given pundit recommends all at once immediately. This should be fairly obvious. Governing is complicated at the best of times; even in a Parliamentary system, those in power have to balance a range of demands from a range of interest groups. A reactionary centrism which says that electoral success depends on full compliance instantly is simply saying that it has no formula for electoral success.

This isn’t just a problem for centrists, unfortunately. The left also tends to make great claims for the electoral outcomes of its policies. Redistribution and soaking the rich, a lot of progressives claim, will ensure electoral wins.

The problem is that Biden did in fact enact a lot of left goals—cash payments to families to slash child poverty, a ton of student debt forgiveness, the most vigorous antitrust enforcement in decades, a huge stimulus package centering green energy.

None of that won Biden the 2024 election. Progressives will claim that the measures didn’t go far enough—but of course most of the measures didn’t go far enough because Republicans and conservatives in Congress and the Supreme Court blocked them or watered them down. If incremental movement towards your goals has little electoral benefit, then you’ll never get a chance to make more progress towards your goal. That means your program effectively is not going to have an electoral benefit.

Just argue on the merits

The point isn’t that we should stop pushing for progressive goals. The point is that the electoral effects of policy platforms, and policy implementation, is vastly overstated. The 2024 election was mostly driven by inflation, which Biden handled as well as any government on the globe, but which he couldn’t eliminate entirely. Democrats lost because of factors mostly beyond their control.

Trump is deliberately wrecking the economy, and doing that can in fact harm your electoral chances. But no one is arguing that the Democrats should deliberately wreck the economy, and no Democrat is promising to deliberately wreck the economy. Democrats can certainly argue back and forth about which policies are most popular in which places. But when they lose—and sometimes in a democracy you are going to lose, it might behoove us not to panic and run around like headless fascist chickens seeking marginalized some marginalized person somewhere to toss under a bus.

Instead, Democrats could maybe just accept that sometimes you lose elections, and could then focus on developing policies that are, yes, popular, but which also are good and worth doing in themselves—in part, for instance, because they shore up democracy and make people’s lives better.

Student debt relief isn’t necessarily going to win every election, but it’s an important investment in freedom, education, and flourishing, which can pay huge dividends as young people feel empowered to take more intellectual and career risks. People may not vote on ending child poverty, but the moral case for doing so is overwhelming, and there are huge knock on effects in terms of improved public health and long-term savings from reduced spending on law enforcement, health care and other social services. Enfranchising DC isn’t necessarily a huge winner nationwide, if only because most people don’t really think a ton about enfranchising DC outside of DC. But it’s a moral necessity, and one which would strengthen democracy immeasurably by helping to balance the horrifically antidemocratic, white supremacist institution that is the Senate.

We need more arguments for policies on the merits, and less reactionary centrists laundering fascism with the excuse that a little fascism will win every election. There is every evidence that it does not—and a good deal of evidence that fascism destroys democracy, leaving you without elections to win.