How Very Centrist Of You

I just participated in a discussion with thereisnospoon and hekebolos from Daily Kos about the terms "moderate" and "centrist" and how they played out in yesterday's debate on Meet the Press between Markos Moulitsas and Harold Ford (there's a good writeup of that here). You can listen to the discussion via podcast over at Political Nexus.

I thought Markos did a great job against a fairly stacked deck. David Gregory (sitting in for Tim Russert) framed the debate as an ideological battle between liberals as represented by the blogosphere and centrists as represented by Ford. It was an imprecise way of describing it. Markos himself is pretty moderate, and the opinion on the blogosphere ranges over a whole series of policy stances. There are plenty of "moderate" Democrats, as defined by an ideological stance on policy positions that is in the middle of the extremes on the left and the right, that have earned the support of the blogosphere. "Centrist" is actually a code word that means the type of person determined to preserve the status quo and suck up to the Beltway establishment elites, the Broders and Ignatiuses and Slaughters and Quinns of the world. This "centrism" is more about blurring the lines between the parties completely and arguing for "bipartisan solutions," which really means "shut up all dissent and do what we, your sensible elite overlords, tell you to do." Adversarial democracy demands vigorous debate in public so that a well-informed citizenry can make choices between a range of alternatives. "Centrists" do not want the people to have those choices, and would rather make the choices for them. The debate between the DLC and the blogosphere for the soul of the Democratic Party is not one about liberal versus moderate; it's about inside versus outside, about a few oligarchs versus a panoply of voices.

I also think that this insistence by the elites who rule our discourse for "sensible bipartisan solutions" ends up narrowing the bands of opinion, at least on the left. The belief from these elites is that we live in a fundamentally conservative country where "real Americans" can only be found in the center of the nation, literally and figuratively, and that voices on the far left represent some sort of fringe element instead of the mainstream of America on many issues (health care, getting out of Iraq, etc.). The nutjobs on the right can literally advocate anything and it isn't met with as much fervor, because they are typically arguing for an entrenchment of the status quo. Where anyone argues for REAL change, the elites see them as unserious and silly and unfit for public discourse (see Kucinich, Dennis).

It was a pretty good discussion, go have a listen at Political Nexus.

UPDATE: Thereisnospoon has further thoughts on this here. And yes, Harold Ford did make a real cheap shot calling Daily Kos an anti-Semitic site, then turned around and said he would appear at the NextGen Yearly Kos Convention. Harold Ford: pro anti-Semitic sites! (and to be clear, Daily Kos is most certainly NOT that.)