The Informationist

The Age of Nixon

Stirling Newberry posted a great essay on ”The Age of Nixon.” He compared Jackson and Nixon, and found numerous similarities. His upshot? Bush is the end of the Nixonian era, and the Republican’s dominance is about to end. I chimed in:

Great post. Well written and (most importantly in my view), thought provoking.

I do question the notion that centrists have abandoned either the Republicans or the Democrats. From where I’m sitting--a world vastly overpopulated by technocratic centrists--no one has done much abondoning or shifting. Both parties have pushed centrists out of positions of national leadership, but the voters remain intact.

I believe that there are many Republican voters more in tune with Schwarzzeneger or Giuliani (or even Stevens or Souter) Republicanism than with the Republicanism of Frist and Delay. They see no reason to leave Frist and Delay, however, to rally behind Dean and Reid. The reverse is true among technocratic centrist Democrats. We stopped feeling that Howard Dean or Ted Kennedy represented us long ago--but even if their wing consolidated its party leadership, we know that there’s nowhere to go.

Over among the populist centrists you describe, the situation seems to be the same. People laughed at Nader when he said that he expected to pick up as many Republican supporters as Democratic supporters, but they shouldn’t have. Nader’s platforms overlapped with Buchanan’s in significant ways. Neither party is closer to the Nader/Buchanan populist ideal than they are to the Giuliani/Liebeerman technocrats.

Your discussion of freed exchange rates, though, does raise some interesting questions. There is an entire branch of macroeconomic determinsts who trace history’s greatest instabilities to bad monetary policies. Robert Mundell’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, is a great example. Most of the folks in this camp have long argued that Nixon’s abandonment of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system ushered in the stagflation of the 70s, and remains an error in need of correction. Perhaps the subtle organizing theme of the future domininat coalition should be fixed exchange rates--and all that it implies.

(Two problems: First, Dems would have to overcome the notion that fixed exchange rates are somehow a “conservative” policy. Second, we would have to admit that China is right).

Someone named CDR Adama put me in my place. Who am I, after all, to claim that I’m more centrist than Dean and Reid? I backed off:

You are correct, and I apologize. The word “centrist” is being so abused these days that it will soon convey as little meaning as do “liberal” and “conservative.” Stirling added to the confusion in his article, and I only made the matter worse.

I suspect that the only thread common to all of the folks who today (and many recently) claim the mantle of “centrism” is the belief that our political leaders all place party above country, and spend more time trying to score cheap points than to solve the nation’s problems. We believe that the leadership of both parties is much more polarized than are the American people, and that they are all trying to turn the country into two warring camps--confident that if they could, their side would be the larger.

Beyond that, I don’t particularly know why I think that my beliefs are somehow more centrist, mainstream, or representative than are anyone else’s. I do know, however, that I have a fair number of friends--self identified Democrats and Republicans of long standing--who share both my perception of our political leadership and my general policy stances.

Centrism--or just discomfort with the current alignment of Americans into two major coalitions? Perhaps others are better judges than I.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 06/20 at 11:35 PM in American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies