Dan Williams
The centrist consensus between neoliberals and neoconservatives that has steered the country at least since the millennium is fracturing.
The consensus was always unseemly. William Jefferson Clinton’s repeated assault of women, deemed irrelevant to the highest office of the land, signaled to some that moral integrity was not in the blueprint of the Washington consensus.
Then George W. Bush’s mysterious Florida win, in which the Supreme Court was called upon to choose our next president. Another chip on democracy’s marble face.
Wars, then more wars. America’s “holiday from history” now over. A president who did his job by serving as the eminent punching bag of the republic, a useful distraction while matters of consequence churned in unseen depths of the state.
Then Barack Obama, who promised “change.” Obama, whose very presence was inflammatory to an increasingly belligerent crowd, who either lost his nerve or just played a poor hand poorly in the face of Wall Street, who spoke of “one United States of America,” not “many,” and yet ceded the office to a man who won by exposing the repressed tribal identities of “the forgotten.”
A man who won by saying whatever mix of thought and emotion flitted through his head. A man who didn’t even have to be clever in his insults but who could appear “straight talking” simply by smearing everyone else. The handicapped, veterans, liberals, conservatives, Europeans, Muslims, Mexicans, Asians, everyone but himself and, apparently, Vladimir Putin. A man who appealed to a public disgusted with its leaders and, ultimately, itself. A public tired of false righteousness, who wanted a leader rotten as the system they had been living under, as subjects, consumers, or otherwise (anything other than “citizens”), so that they could confirm its rottenness.
And so, this was the election in which a large enough percentage of people “charged the cockpit” of the political system and hopped on the Trump plane aimed at the White House.
“Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorism. Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance.” So said Bruno Latour in 2004.
Millennials are children of these wars. And do not think there have not been casualties. Wars over the souls of men have left many warped, confused, mentally incapacitated, lost and roaming in ideological junkyards.
Politicians are not exempt. They are the ones fighting with old, useless weaponry. And the public always likes a fight. Trump just had the biggest, shiniest gun in the ring, imported from Russia. What’s next?
Can there be a new consensus, a new center? The first step in forming any coalition is to have a direction in which to lead. This new direction must be a moral one. There is a craving for spiritual food, palpable everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Who will feed this waif?
We speak of religion, community, shared cultural practices, a world weariness for the newfangled. We also speak of shared humanity and wield an unrelenting optimism for human ingenuity.
The moral center is where these two opposing ideologies meet. Do not let the moral center be a contested ground, another battlefield. Do not let it remain a desolate “demilitarized zone.” We must recover it for public use once again. Defuse or otherwise remove the land mines of political correctness. Assume a dignified bearing. Assume good will.
