Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up for the Life & Arts myFT Digest, delivered straight to your inbox.
I once saw Anthony Joshua win the IBF World Heavyweight Championship at the O2 Arena. This month, two men with a combined age of 118 packed the same venue for a single night of political rallies. There are many interpretations of the huge success of The Rest Is Politics, a podcast that pairs former Labor Party adviser Alastair Campbell with former Conservative MP Rory Stewart. But most cite its centrism, its commitment to the middle in a polarized era.
I don’t have this. Campbell is emphatically left-wing in tribal sentiment, if not necessarily doctrine. Stewart is a country romantic and a paternalist who must be perplexed that modern-minded liberals have come to consider him one of their own. (If you think it’s hard to build anything in Britain now, you’ll be glad Stewart isn’t planning minister). Indeed, their listeners saw Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as more or less equal villains. But voters given the choice disagreed. Corbyn was marmalized. So, on what basis do centrists equate these two? The C-word now seems to mean something like “left-liberal” to people who don’t know where the country’s median is.
Why do I care so much about Center Ground? Why does it sound like I want to register it as a Controlled Designation of Origin? Well, it’s lonely here. The number of true centrists is very small. Being one of them is something that almost everyone finds terrifying. If you haven’t put in the hard work that comes with centrism, don’t label it.
It is the bravest position to venture into the political realm. In the middle you are everyone’s pagan
It took me some time to absorb something in and around the world of politics. The reason centrists win, or have won, is not because a plurality of voters hold those views as their first preference. It’s not clear that they would have done so, even during Clinton’s heyday around the millennium. Rather, the center is something that allows multiple people to coexist. In terms of contesting elections, this amounts to the same thing: winning. But that actually means being a centrist is isolated. Your agenda, or something like it, will end up being enacted to the delight of almost no one. This point is best illustrated by the hated and twice-elected figure of Emmanuel Macron.
Therefore, those who speak of the Center as weak-willed and in decline are completely mistaken. It is the bravest position to venture into the political realm. There are big social movements left and right that you can be a part of. (In an atomized age, this is much more important than winning for some people.) In the middle, you are a pagan to everyone. If I’m correct that “The Rest Is Politics” is actually a soft-left congregation, what is the centrist equivalent? There isn’t one. The numbers aren’t there.
So who is considered a centrist? It is foolish to demand that we take an intermediate view on each issue. (I’d be too pro-immigration, and I don’t want a government that’s polarizing on support for Ukraine either.) But a starting point might be this: talk to both of your country’s major political parties for national politics. Did you vote? A surprising number of people who appear to be rational on the surface have not done so and have no intention of doing so. This is an imperfect test in the US, where people under 30 have no support for non-populist Republicans. And in some democracies, a neat two-party model does not apply. But in many parts of the West, testing will tell people. Many self-proclaimed centrists in Britain found Thatcher, Major and Cameron unsupportable, but this is purely coincidental.
Napoleon said that the key to understanding man is knowing what the world was like when he was 20 years old. For me, it was 2002, the heyday of the Center before the Iraq debacle. I really believe in the Blair-esque economist editorial approach to the running of most high-income societies, for the most part. (Poor countries may be better suited to industrial protection and other liberal heresies.) Britain’s fate since departing from Uncle Tony’s policies around 2016 does not deter me. But I could be a mental prisoner to my generation. In any case, like the singularity of a black hole, there is an ever-stronger gravitational pull towards the center, and it is just as fascinating to most people.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
Check out the latest stories — Follow FTWeekend on Instagram ×Subscribe to the “Life and Art” podcast anywhere
