"What is Centrism?" An Examination of Centrism as a Conservative Political Philosophy

Abstract

"What is Centrism?" takes up the issue of the ambiguous and disputed term "centrism" as it has existed in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, and attempts to clarify what it meant intellectually and in terms of its particular political positions, and how the latter in particular have evolved. The paper concludes that, while commonly termed "liberalism" in American discourse, it is actually classical conservatism, updated for a twentieth century liberal society by technocratically-minded professionals. While the adaptations were not insignificant, the derivation is evident in its fundamental premises as its attacking radical and revolutionary ideology on the grounds of society's presumably analysis-defeating complexity and the badness of human nature, which made dramatic social a danger worse than any problem it could ameliorate; counseled acquiescence in the existing order that kept the danger of revolutionary upheaval in check, with change considered cautiously and conducted with an eye to preserving what exists rather than deliberately constructing new arrangements in the name of emancipatory ideologies; and championed the privilege of elites as necessary; with all this evident even in more novel features of centrism such as the pluralist and civil politics of compromise and consensus, and the technocratic conception of its favored elite. The paper also traces how centrism, interacting with the concrete realities of the mid-twentieth century and after, leading it to a New Deal-Cold War moderate-civil rights politics then, but as the century drew to a close leading it toward a substantially neoliberal-neoconservative-identitarian stance.

Keywords: Centrism, classical conservatism, conservatism, liberalism, Keynesian Fordism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, identitarianism, political philosophy, political ideology, economics, political economy, American history, 20th century, American political history, 20th century, New Deal, Cold War.