From Social-Democracy to Social-Liberalism: Centrism, Progressivism, and Political Compromise
This is a third blog post in a series (first post and second post) about my switch from Social-Democracy to Social-Liberalism.
The first post was about specific things I did not believe, to try and dispel misconceptions about why I chose to identify as “liberal”. I tried to glance over several topics — socialism, private property, democracy, meritocracy.
The second article was about markets and uncertainty: randomness and uncertainty are not always counterproductive, and sometimes improve overall efficiency.
This post is about centrism and political compromise. It explores my political position, as well as two different attitudes towards politics.
Why do centrists exist ?
It is tempting to see centrists as syncretic, chaotic individuals with piecemeal beliefs and inconsistent views. Some of these biases are correct, and I will begin by little journey with evidence that points in this direction.
Centrism as inconsistent nonsense
One of the most striking example of this is France's Emmanuel Macron, who said so much stuff we now have this hilarious tapestry of contradictory takes:
There is much to be debated about Macron, arguably this is him just constantly re-evaluating his position to match the center of the french electorate (which has been slowly drifting to the right — as did he). This will probably be the topic of another blog-post.
Centrism as a grift
One striking example of nonsensical centrism was Andrew Yang’s Campaign back in the 2022 US elections. His slogan was close to Macron’s — short but sweet:
Not right, not left, forward.
This might be appealing to many voters, and I am probably in that crowd — a priori — but I was very aware back then this speech was very much not the best bet in favor of progress oriented policies. I will not talk much about Yang, I do not know him much. The only noticeable thing is he supports Universal Basic Income, which is good.
Centrism as a political reality
The most “centrist” answer to this question — which is the one I like the most — is simply the “pragmatic” one (words that centrists often utter). This can be succinctly summed up in the following sentences:
At any point in time, parties and voters are roughly split into 50% of Right-Wing voters and 50% of Left-Wing voters.
It is probably inefficient and counterproductive to never attempt to bridge the gap between these large parts of the population. No matter what you think of each half, they are there, and they vote. You should factor their existence into your political model.
This disillusioned view is perhaps not convincing for every reader, and it also feels lackluster. It is useful as the “tip of the (metaphorical) iceberg” but I will attempt to dig deeper, so bear with me !
Centrism as a “Secret third thing”
It is widely accepted the concepts of “Left” and “Right” politics were born During the French Revolution. This concept refers to nothing more than the seating arrangements within the “Estates General”.
Quoting the Wikipedia article,
Those who sat on the left generally opposed the “Ancien Régime” and the Bourbon Monarchy and supported the Revolution, the creation of a democratic republic and the secularisation of society.
The left at the time were what we would now call Classical Radicals — a subcategory of Liberalism that would arguably be centrist-coded in 2023 France, ironically.
If we follow the Wikipedia definitions, leftism is vaguely coded as follows:
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole
While Right-Wing politics is broadly typified as follows:
Right-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position based on natural law, economics, authority, property or tradition.
What “Left” and “Right” mean is often very loose and subject to interpretation. I especially like this vague definition of Left-Wing politics, because it reminds me I used to be more left, and that it sometimes is correct to be.
What is centrism then ?
Do they oppose social equality ? They’re not strongly against it, but they’re not ardent proponents, that much is true.
Do they support social orders and hierarchies ? I don’t think so, they would certainly wonder why completely changing the social order and abolishing most hierarchies is needed though.
Perhaps more confusing, I have seen people left-of-center justifying some kinds of hierarchies more than centrists, and some people right-of-center arguing for more egalitarianism than centrists. This isn’t helpful.
Yet, and I must confess I relate to this, Centrism is often where you end up when you disagree with everyone. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that you are a left-liberal in today’s France. Hell, go back to the 60’s or 70’s, the point stands. You then ask yourself the unfathomable question:
Whom, in France, is Liberal ?
The short answer is: No one. The right-wing is plagued by Gaullism, and hardcore catholic traditionalists. Gaullism is a syncretic political tradition whose number one principle is having a “strong state”. You can check the wiki, it’s the top 1 defining characteristic. In the eighties, there was a weird hybridization with Reaganomics imported from the US, but it only took the worst bits of pro-business supply-side Thatcherism without any real commitment to building a competitive market economy.
The left, aside from a 10% Parti Socialiste minority led by Michel Rocard in the eighties, was also Gaullist, or Marxist when it wasn’t. The two ideologies share a number of things, and the Gaullist-Marxist post-war alliance shows they can cooperate on many issues — they sometimes trust each other more than the “liberal” factions from the left and right.
Centrists are hard to classify, but that’s mainly because they’re not exactly homogeneous. It’s a bunch of people without a (political) home. They side with different people at different times, but they never endorse, or often only temporarily.
Centrists are definitely a very diverse bunch, so it makes sense to look at the many faces of centrism.
Centrists are — sometimes — unorthodox Utopians
In light of the above remarks, it strikes me as obvious that most centrists don’t exactly oppose both Left and Right politics, they usually mean to emphasize that the most important metrics do not always align with the Left’s and the Right’s values. Each has their own metric, but a centrist would very often bring up one metric — say “Wage Increases” or “Scientific and Technological Progress” — and argue this metric trumps others, and doesn’t really fall into either the Right or Left box.
A few folks belong to this box, including the fine people at the Work In Progress Magazine or the Institute for Progress. I personally think they're fine people, and, as a recovering scientist and STEM graduate, I must attest that scientific progress is indeed not (always) political and it should probably remain so.
Centrists are — sometimes — die-hard empiricists
The term “pragmatism” has been overused by grifters, so it is unhelpful to use it at the moment, but there is one ideology that many centrists and moderates appreciate, arguably more than the Left and Right, and it is Empiricism.
The definition can be found on the first section of the Wikipedia page:
Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.
You’ll hear many buzzwords go around, but those to watch are — in my experience :
- Data-Driven policy — Good policies should have robust empirical evidence backing its potential upsides
- Evidence-based policy — which is a synonym for the previous notion
- Results-oriented — politics that cares about results, not ideas or ideologies
- Outcomes-oriented — which means roughly the same as above
These things are not exclusively centrist — hell, I hope every party embraces them. But you’ll mostly hear centrists, center-left and center-right politicians and voters using these words. Very often though, they’re just making stuff up, and aren’t much more evidence-based than the other parties.
This last phenomenon is somewhat connected to Techno-Populism, the notion that the idea of “being competent” and “being evidence-based” are just vibes in themselves, and some parties run on these vibes, without a commitment towards remaining evidence-based after the elections.
About being evidence-based, John Maynard Keynes, in his Bayesian glory, famously said:
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
This — I hope — feels correct to almost everyone. Accepting reality and changing your mind based on data is quite good, in my opinion. Some even go as far as saying having strong idealistic views is counterproductive (I briefly wrote about Ideal Theory in my first blog-post).
So centrists sometimes make interesting points. Now why would you think “centrism” sucks ? Let’s look at it.
The case against Centrism ?
Centrism is often plagued with dumb people, and I quite often complain about french centrists on my twitter account. Centrism obviously sucks in that regard, because centrism is just the home of those who have no homes. You have to share this home with people you think are silly. You might have nailed down the art of being centrist and correct — but you are sitting right next to someone who is centrists for mainly incorrect reasons.
This is true for Left-ism and Right-ism though, people getting to the “good” results with incorrect derivations is very common. Let us look at two main criticisms of “centrism”, there are too many to list, this is just the two I hear most often.
Centrism as bad political strategy
One quote that made me more comfortable with political extremism is also from Keynes, and it goes
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
This strikes me as a fair point. You picture politics are a “big average” of every citizens opinion
$$\mathrm{Politics} = \dfrac{A + B + C + \dots }{N}$$
And therefore, if you aim to push the political consensus to either the right or the left, it makes sense to go further left/right than what you truly believe. It is a basic bargaining strategy.
Two notions help shed light and bring some nuance though: Keynes said “start from an extreme position”. It says nothing about your ability to compromise and shift more or less quickly towards the center.
For the second notion, let me digress on Game Theory a bit.
In one of the most cited papers in empirical game theory, Axelrod lays out the results of a large scale competition between different tactics. The tournament was re-run again a decade later. In both case, the winner was a strategy called “Tit-for-Tat”, which goes:
Tit-for-Tat always starts by cooperating [with the opponent] and when the opponent defects, it thereafter does what the other player did on the previous move. If the opponent cooperates, the program also does next round, and vice-versa.
This is how the first tournament turn out, you can find the full file online as JSON but also in other formats (click these links to download them from my GCS — CSV and Parquet )