What is Centrism?

I was preparing a post on the donklephant brand of centrism, but I moved too slowly and Rob made most of my points. I’ll scale it back a bit to two central points:

1) The Ward Churchill thing is important because, as your co-blogger basically conceded, outside of a mildly sympathetic interview with a rather dimwitted quasi-liberal comedian, there is not a shred of evidence that he has any traction on the left. I’ll accept that you didn’t make that claim out of malice toward the left. But why did you do it? I can only assume that you fell victim to the constant right-wing barrage of evidence-free claims to that effect. Right-wingers discovered him, and they pushed the story heavily, Reynolds playing a central role, in an effort to present him as exactly that.
Point being, if you want to be serious about being a centrist, your first task must be to see through the propaganda of both sides. On one major propaganda campaign, you’ve clearly failed. (and again, if you have evidence that Churchill has any ‘traction’ on the left, by all means, let’s see it)

2) Centrists are great, but they’re not exactly rare. If by centrist you mean someone who combines policy ideas and approaches from the left and the right in non-ideological ways, the world of blogs is full of them. Schmitt, Yglesias, Drum, DeLong etc. all fit the bill nicely. THey all, of course, have varying degrees of hostility toward the modern GOP leadership. That’s because they noticed the obvious–that this is an administration and leadership group that’s quite unserious about policy relative to politics. A perusal of the major policy initiatives of the last five years makes this very clear. This has precisely nothing to do with how conservative the administration is. It’s not about the location of the center, but what it’s a center between. A perusal of the major policy initiatives of the last five years makes this very clear. A proper centrist, such as those mentioned above, will have scant occasions to make common cause with modern republicanism. These people have figured that out. They all clearly want dialogue with serious conservatives, and they often try to find it, occasionally succeeding, and sometimes getting burned by tribal republicans in conservative clothing.

I haven’t seen much about actual policy from donklephant in my brief perusals, which is what I read centrists for. I hope that’ll change. But split-the-difference centrism and serious policy centrism may be compatible in some times and places, but not here and now. I hope you’ll decide to be the latter; they’re much more interesting reads.