If you had to summarize American centrism’s core value system, could you do it in a sentence? You certainly could with the simplistic and destructive whims of modern conservatism. Definitely with liberalism too, a word like equality could center it, while lefties have two signature policies (Medicare for All and the Green New Deal) that serve as elevator pitches for our value system. But what does centrism actually believe in? Democratic centrists and the donors that support their think tanks held an entire conference called Welcomefest earlier this year to try to answer that question, and as Hamilton Nolan described after attending, “In the most generous reading, their project asks, ‘How much good can we do without changing the existing power structure at all?'”
To hear longtime Washington Post opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin tell it last summer, there are apparently reasons “why centrism might be our salvation.” She opens by counteracting the critique that centrists don’t believe in anything by asserting that “Centrism, rather, is a mind-set… it’s an approach to governance, not a list of specific policy prescriptions.”
Even Matt Yglesias, the famed centrist blogger read by the Biden White House who has staked his Very Serious image on policy, has jumped on board with popularism, which claims its misreading of polling should come before any coherent political ideology. It’s very difficult to assert that you have tangible political beliefs when you explicitly state there is no signature policy that you endorse no matter what. Policies are just how you put your political values into action in the real world. Centrism openly declares that it does not really believe it is for anything, just against what it deems to be extreme.
Rubin fell into a classic centrist trapdoor she was explicitly trying to walk around, writing three section headers for her column with two of them stating what centrists are against. Centrists “don’t start coups,” (the World Bank and IMF would like a word), and they are apparently defined by “ending all-or-nothing politics.” I read the whole thing three times and still do not know what centrism is specifically in favor of, just what it stands opposed to. Welcomefest’s confusing message and Rubin’s column filled with blind spots do nothing to refute the line written by the conservative Bulwark today that “Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do.”
That’s a line that would look right at home here in a blog like this at Splinter, providing a distinct marker of how far the pendulum has swung against America’s preeminent Very Serious brow furrowers. Many centrists have no core political belief central to their ideology, they simply roam the earth as perpetual critics who are always right. Its entire theory of politics is just one big branding exercise. An act. Just like the infotainment made by Very Serious TV show hosts like Jake Tapper. Centrism is a shallow attempt to construct a superficial ideology around negative polarization.
It is explicitly an extension of the McCarthyite project as well. To believe the right-wing and left-wing in America have similarly threatening amounts of power and influence is to traffic in a reality not shared by most Americans. The only way that American centrism can try to justify its wrongheaded and self-serving bothsides view of the world is to perpetuate Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt into the 21st century. Their cynical embrace of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left is simply a modern take on a 1950s classic. How hard Beltway centrists punch left is a revealing indicator of what they actually believe, which is that Joseph McCarthy had a point.
Everyone like this needs to be hounded out of the Democratic Party. These are people who genuinely believe a permanent Trump/GOP trifecta is a better outcome than policy being slightly left of their preferences. They are a major reason why millions of people who agree with Dems don’t bother to vote.
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— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 6:10 AM
But this red-baiting falls pretty hollow when past Iraq War cheerleaders are now joining the left to call for the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security. The right-wing is enacting fascism right now. Their own administration accounts are using the phrase “secret police.” Why are so many centrist talking heads and politicians so stridently focused on the left right now? How can you take yourself seriously calling a bunch of college students a serious threat to America? MAGA proved this week in their revulsion to Trump’s 180 on the Epstein documents that they are more closely tethered to reality than the centrists who think pro-Palestine protesters are an equivalent threat to the people who just passed a secret police budget which surpasses that of the Marines.
This era has exposed Very Serious American centrism as this country’s least serious political ideology. MAGA may be living in a separate reality entirely of its own construction, but they at least clearly believe in something and can be described using conventional political language that man has used for centuries. Centrism’s entire political ideology for 50 years has been ‘both sides are bad so therefore I am good,’ and it has been boosted by a braindead press literally selling this ideology in their political coverage that is increasingly antithetical to journalism.
Centrism is just a TV show. Pure virtue signaling from an increasingly isolated elite to an upper middle class that isn’t quite sure where it exists in American capitalism’s heavily distorted social strata. The whole edifice of elite American centrist thought is crashing down along with the post-WWII constitutional order, as Brad Lander’s description of “fighters versus folders” as the new line in the Democratic Party is an explicit description of centrism as the latter. Ideology has taken a backseat to getting this train back on the rails, and Bill Kristol is a far better ally to that fight than Matt Yglesias.
Centrists are so acutely attuned to this allegation that Rubin dedicated an entire paragraph to assertions like “Centrism isn’t a mushy tendency to compromise. It isn’t a brain-dead fondness for style over substance.” Again, words that could easily come from my fingers are just naturally springing from a major political columnist’s brain. The tide has turned, demonstrated by Rubin’s ham-fisted attempt to rebut the “conventional wisdom portray[ing] the political center as on the ropes around the world.”
It is. Centrist factions across Europe are losing ground. In New York, centrists just lined up behind a disgraced sex pest alongside an Epstein-adjacent sex pest and won a little over a third of New York Democrats, while Zohran Mamdani won more total primary votes than any candidate in NYC history. Out of a million potential candidates in 2020, the centrist faction begrudgingly coalesced around five-million-year-old Joe Biden after freaking out when Bernie Sanders won Nevada, then freaked out again in 2024 when Democratic donors decided Biden had to go. Keir Starmer just tried this centrist heel turn to become more pro-austerity and anti-trans in the UK, and Labour has “hemorrhaged” support ever since, as The Economist detailed, benefiting the right-wing reactionary Reform party, a pattern that has followed feckless centrist rule across the Western world.
Centrists have nowhere to hide anymore. We need solutions to our myriad problems and people proudly stating that they don’t have specific ideas are not helpful to the cause. Red-baiting may have worked in a political era with a polity victimized by Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt, but we are closer in time to 2050 than the year 2000 now. Jennifer Rubin can talk about mindsets all she wants, but centrism’s is clearly fossilized in the 20th century. The Cold War has been and still is a massive driver of America’s politics, but as new generations who were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall grow into the electorate, they are taking over the exalted spot at the center of our politics that Boomers enjoyed for decades, and powerful centrists have failed to take note.
Frankly, no one under 40 gives a shit about the Cold War. Your red-baiting doesn’t work on an electorate where Zoomers and Millennials are on pace to be the largest slice of it in 2028. Joseph McCarthy is a loser nobody, and when centrists throw their childhood Soviet boogeyman at us, many of today’s youth are likelier to think of Social Security and Medicare than the Kremlin taking over the White House.
This is centrism’s moment to choose whether it wants to be a respected part of the political order that comes after this one. New York City just proved how electorally powerful a left-liberal alliance can be, and the only time the Democrats have ever beat Donald Trump was the time they embraced the left with Bernie/Warren policy teams and inspired perhaps the largest youth voter turnout in history. When Bill Kristol’s magazine is writing sentences that Splinter wholeheartedly endorses, you know that the centrist emperor truly has no clothes, and the battle lines among fighters and folders are very clearly drawn. In the midst of our largest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, it is now up to America’s cadre of red-baiting reactionary centrists to determine whether they actually do believe in anything now, or whether they will be swept away by the tides of history like so many others who refused to plant their feet in the ground.
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