How Reactionary Centrism Brought Us To This Moment

Thomas Chatterton Williams today bravely adds another to his accusations against liberals. No, I’m not linking it. It’s the same thing he’s said before and before and before. “You may have some good points, but you are doing it wrong.”

Of course, he shares that with Pamela Paul and the bedbug and David Brooks and Jonathan Chait and any number of New York Times and Atlantic editorialists. They are the reasonable centrists and there would be no problem about trans people if only “the groups” were not so insistent on that issue of women’s sports. Or if Oberlin college students weren’t so performative about their cafeteria food. Now Williams, unsurprisingly, says that Trump’s current rampage against the Constitution is, of course, all the fault of all those people who weren’t reasonable like him.

Adrian Daub has an excellent essay that brings together all the intuitions and not-quite-worked-out thoughts I’ve had about the reactionary centrists. We make fun of them, but they bear significant responsibility for our current situation. Their picking and choosing of issues to highlight, of norms to uphold, has encouraged the further-right reactionaries to put their repressive program into action.

It’s a great essay. Some selections:

There’s a long tradition of internal critique on the left (quite likely to a fault) and the half-century complaint about “identity politics” always drew on that internal discourse within, in particular, the New Left. The early critics of identity politics took the pose of: “I’m with you guys, I just want to make sure we get our message out more effectively, and I worry that this ain’t it!” But — and this is important — many of these critics (and, as time went on, almost all of them) rehearsed this critique almost exclusively for the consumption of outside audience. Its participation in any left project was at that point nominal or gestural, the main point was to have an appropriate perch for attacking the left. Their worry “as feminists” that “feminism has gone too far” was no longer aimed at feminists, it was aimed at non-feminists, and — probably — anti-feminists. As this kind of critique migrated to the center, towards people who probably no longer identified as anything left, but moderates of whatever fashion, this gesture remained: they were broadly supportive of your cause, but they wanted to first talk about how your methods in pursuing it. What remained constant, that is, was the gesture itself, which proved extremely mobile and adaptable. Reactionary centrism is the totalization of that gesture.

….

When reading these writers, you are at mercy of their neuroses and fixations, at their unearned self-confidence and very poorly hidden self-doubt. You are at their mercy not just in the sense that they only cover, discuss, weigh in only on things they care about. This comes with the territory when we’re reading columnists and essayists, and is ultimately understandable. But in the broader sense that things only exist in their universe insofar as they allow them to, and that so much gets waved away with a “yes, yes” in order to move on to the point they really care about.

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This is what makes this moment such an important one for understanding how reactionary centrism functions (more so than what it “is”). It lives, I think, in the disjunction between ideas and their consequences and implications, even when those consequences and implications are fairly clear. It describes societal change in ways that almost always seem to require some kind of crack-down: on woke universities, on out-of-control teachers, on unions, on federal workers, on DEI, on doctors, and on kids just trying to live their goddamn lives. In fact, if you look over the menu of issues reactionary centrists care about, they are usually (though not universally) amenable to this sort of crackdown logic.

And I think I’ll leave you hanging there, so that you’ll read the whole thing.