Yes, the Centre Held.
Middle America with opposite signs: Image from Google.
"We" is on the upswing.
Earlier this month I reflected on the dynamics of the election and wondered whether “the Centre” would hold, and thereby hold back the acceleration of polarization. Thankfully the election returns did not loose anarchy on the world, as Yeats alarmed. In fact, quite the opposite.
The winner of the election was moderation, as USA Today declared it.
The American electorate voted to keep our national leadership divided. There was no blue wave. President-elect Biden will likely contend with a Republican Senate, while Speaker Pelosi contends with a diminished majority.
Democratic Centrists lost to Republican Centrists, and mostly to Republican women, no less! There has been an outcry in the Democratic conference that the party has been painted as extreme, and that they are losing moderate, middle-class, and minority voters as a result. Both parties will have to pragmatically deal with their middle, not just contend with their wings.
Biden is a deal maker. Mitch McConnell is a deal maker. And a Democratic Congress, even with a Democratic White House, has to deal with states that moved red. Republican state-level trifectas went from 21 to 24, whereas Democratic ones stayed at 15. Red states passed Blue referendums, and Blue states passed red ones.
And radical rhetoric lost.
According to the USA Today analysis:
“If this election mandates anything, it’s a rejection of extremes in both parties. The desire for solutions and consensus is strongest with a group of voters dubbed the ‘vital center.’ These voters are vital because they’ve been a deciding factor in swing districts and key races such as the 2016 general election and 2018 mid-term. And they’re the center because, while pundits frequently observe that Americans are polarized, these Americans, who comprise 47% of the voting public, are closer to the middle than the extremes of the spectrum.
As noted in my previous blog, sociologist and author Robert Putnam argues in his book The Upswingthat America has been going through an “I-We-I” curve, and is possibly about to turn the corner from a focus on “I” to “We”. A society focused just on the interests of the individual cannot persist.
“As Tocqueville rightly noted,” Putnam writes, “in order for the American experiment to succeed, personal liberty must be fiercely protected, but also carefully balanced with a commitment to the common good.”
What won was a populist pragmatism that neither rejects out of hand a possible positive role of government, nor rejects the fundamental American vision for autonomous self-governance and market capitalism.
The American Experiment is dynamic and resilient, and the founders brilliantly structured our form of government as a constitutional federal republic to diffuse power and check extremism. We ebb and flow, and by design allow for a patchwork of approaches in labs called states.
The winner wasn’t actually moderation, it was Middle America.