Things to think about #5

There’s been a lot of talk about the political center* in Europe in the past few weeks, in the wake of the French parliamentary elections and the landslide victory for Labour in the UK. Is it reinvigorated, complacent, or perhaps just lucky? I offer two thoughts on this.

Firstly, sometimes a long-in-the-tooth incumbent is sacrificed on the altar of change no matter how reasonable or uncontroversial he or she is. In the context the most recent elections in Europe, this applies mostly to France, where the people has a tendency to throw their leaders under the bus, for no other reason that they’ve been in power for a bit too long. But I think it applies to England too, to an extent. Rishi Sunak and his cabinet weren’t that bad, or more specifically, the Sunak government was a lot of less controversial and risk-seeking than its Tory predecessors. But in the end, the weight of dissatisfaction and disillusion with previous iterations of Conservative cabinets were too much to bear. The Tories received the drubbing they deserved, having put their faith in a toxic mix of volatility and incompetence under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The doomed political and economic project of Brexit looms large in this story too. Whatever Labour decides to do with this smelling carcass of a political legacy, it brought the destruction of the Conservative party, and the right in UK politics, as we know it. Perhaps for that reason, Starmer will be inclined to leave it smelling for a bit longer, to remind people of what they’ll get should they consider jumping back into the Tory fold.

Secondly, the smugness that the center-left currently is feeling in England and France is justified, but it has a short shelf life. It has hardly escaped any political commentator that the right did rather well in both England and France, if only in terms of popular vote and compared to previous results. I don’t give much for the pearl clutching on the right that they got short-changed under the UK FPTP system, or that the rest of the parties ganged up on them in France; hate the player, not the game. If the right can’t translate popular support into political power under the democratic systems they operate in, they must find a way to raise their political ‘ROI’ or stay sobbing in the corner. The rest of the world won’t care. That said, the numbers don’t lie. Underneath the surface of a center-left triumph in France and England, the politics of Europe are fragmenting.

Antón Barba-Kay, a US political scientist, has a great synopsis on the disappearing center in the Spring 2022 edition of the Hedgehog Review, a publication that I think everyone should subscribe to. Fair warning, this article is walled for non-subscribers, but below I pick out the key bits.

Kay writes with a US political lens—even predicting that Biden’s presidency has been no more than a stumbling ‘senior moment’ before Trump 47—but the key points apply more broadly. He begins by noting that the idea of a “bipartisan” center does not preclude vigorous disagreement. It welcomes it. The center, according to Kay, is not populated by people aspiring to civil and deferent debate for the sake of it, or as Kay puts it “high-minded people”, reluctant to fight dirty in the political arena of ideas and spirited disagreement. The center emerges, and survives, in its own right when it is the position from which to most effectively solve the problems that people care about, a position that is has been on many occasions. This is an important point. The significance of the center is diluted if we see it merely as a synthesis of the best ideas on the left and right, even if in practice, that is how a centrist politics often governs. The center is a mode of being, an ideal in its own right, and a centrist is no more afraid of getting her hands dirty than the radical left or the far right is.

Is such a center now dead, or dying? Kay stretches the interpretation of his ideas and argument by noting that even if a center as described above is now a “retrospective fiction” it still exists as an “ideal measure of political difference”. If the political center is a myth—we’re invited to believe that it is—it is a space where “disagreement”, “pluralism” and even “multiculturalism” are core components of democratic politics and measures of “civic care”. This is controversial, especially on the right, where such a centrist ideal will be seen as no different than a position halfway down a slippery slope towards a leftist takeover. But I am inclined to let Kay get away with this. If, for example, the idea of multiculturalism is a concept that should be rightfully balanced by national identity, cohesion and even ancestry, it is no more the center’s responsibility to wander off to the right of the median to appropriate such ideas as it is the right’s responsibility to make such an idea workable in the world such as it is.

Kay goes on to describe was has gone wrong concluding that the center’s virtue also is its greatest liability. The center is boring, complacent and ultimately weak. It lends itself to attacks from left and right ideologies, both of which comes with promises of action, greatness, and even salvation, in both religious and secular packaging, depending on people’s preferences. But these Kay warns are empty calories without the center. The center, although in Kay’s words “not uplifting in itself”, is the lens through which we perceive and interpret political ideas from the left and right alike. Any difference between left and right can only exists in the presence of a viable center Kay reminds us, noting that if the center is sometimes hobbled by slow and piecemeal decision-making, it remains unclear how either the far left or far right accounts for the fact that we all live under one metaphorical roof. The answer, as I am sure Kay is aware, is they they don’t, and that this is a feature, not a bug. All the more reason why a viable center must be carved out from the rubble of our increasingly fragmented politics, one way or the other.

The curious case of Biden’s extended Wile E. Coyote moment

Ben Hunt, founder of Epsilon Theory, has an interesting analysis of the spectacular collapse of the Biden presidency in the wake of “the debate” in which Mr. Biden revealed to the world what everyone knew. Namely that he, at best, has speech and motor problems, and at worst, a neurological affliction. Ben distinguishes between private information and common knowledge, arguing that conditions change quickly when the former spills over into the latter. He explains it as follows;

Just like with the Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone in the crowd possesses the same private information — the Emperor is walking around as naked as a jaybird. But no one’s behavior changes just because the private information is so widespread and so public. Nor does behavior change just because a couple of people whisper their doubts to each other. No, the only thing that changes behavior is when the little girl (what game theory would call a Missionary) announces the Emperor’s nakedness SO loudly that the entire crowd believes that everyone else in the crowd heard the news. That’s when behavior changes.

Presumably then, the debate was the tipping point after which the private information of Mr. Biden’s precarious physical and mental state—measured on the curve of being able to run for president—became common knowledge. I have sympathy for this view. More precisely, I think Ben offers a good explanation for the dynamics through which everyone now knows that Mr. Biden is unable to run for a second term as president, or should I say, his inability to beat Mr. Trump. This last bit is important, and I will come back to it below. Still, I am not sure it completely answers Eric Weinstein’s question;

Can someone walk me through the official narrative of how the impartial press *suddenly* ascertains there is a problem that only seconds earlier they were dismissively defaming people for discussing? I can’t even come up with a story. Any story. At all. Thanks in advance.

It is one thing for private information to loom as the elephant in the room unperceived by the commons until it starts throwing its weight around. But plenty of people have been calling out Joe Biden on his lapses, or “senior moments” as Antón Barba-Kay calls them, only to be ridiculed and scorned, most perfectly exemplified in Joe Scarborough’s tirade just four months ago that “This Version of Biden...is the Best Biden Ever”. Fast forward, and the same people dishing out ridicule on anyone questioning Mr. Biden’s ability to hold office, let alone run again, are asking everyone to believe the sincerity of their shock over Mr. Biden’s performance. That doesn’t pass the smell test. As such, I think two things happened at the debate, and both are needed to explain the shift from private to common information, to stay in Ben’s frame of reference. The first is that Joe Biden’s mental lapses, speech difficulties and overall confusion were laid bare for the world to see, but that isn’t enough to explain the shift. The key second condition is that it happened on a stage with Mr. Trump on the other side, thus immediately and ruthlessly linking the two. In short, there is no way that Joe Biden can go toe-to-toe with Mr. Trump and once that became common knowledge, the Democrats had to panic, and they did.

To be clear, this was not a pre-determined outcome. Mr. Biden could have performed better and Mr. Trump, for his part, could have done worse. The low bar for Mr. Trump is low indeed, after all.

What happens next?

For starters, and even before this weekend’s dramatic events in Pennsylvania, I agree with Ben that there is little way back for Joe Biden. Even if he miraculously turned into an orator rivalling Obama and Kennedy overnight, the attention to every little detail in his behavior and demeanor would still hang over him like a shadow. As it turns out, Mr. Biden is still stumbling in key moments, having recently introduced Ukrainian president as “president Putin” at the NATO summit. The scrutiny of Mr. Biden’s mental and motor faculties, however, could well pale into insignificance compared to the ripple effects of what happened in Pennsylvania. Pictures of Mr. Trump defiantly raising his fist to the crowd after narrowly escaping an attempt on his life are doing the rounds. Politics is about emotion, courage and identity as much as it is about arguments and policies. And make no mistake, Mr. Trump’s campaign will seize the initiative now. Paradoxically, this could keep Joe Biden in the race. After all, the Democrats might now have to consider that Mr. Trump is an unstoppable force, and as such that it makes no point trying to change candidate mid-stream. Any Democrat previously confident in his or her ability to beat Mr. Trump will likely fell a lot less confident now. Perhaps Mr. Biden’s Wile E. Coyote moment will last a bit longer.

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* I would normally use the British English spelling here, “centre”, but because Kay uses the American English “center”, I have defaulted to that.