Centrism Is A Plague
Vice President Mike Pence visited a detention center in McAllen, TX on Friday. Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey was covering Pence’s visit, and he later tweeted a detailed description of the scene:
Not that it really matters (these conditions certainly qualify as a violation of detainees’ human rights), but it should be noted that this wasn’t a surprise spot-check of a detention facility, either: this was the best they could do. God only knows how people are being treated in the places nobody has bothered to visit.
So how did Mike Pence, Good Christian Man™ react to seeing human beings penned in and forced to endure squalid and dehumanizing conditions, all for the mortal sin of seeking asylum in America? Let’s go to the video.
In case you don’t want to watch, Pence made his North Korea face (at actual human beings this time), then turned his back on them and walked away, seemingly unbothered by what he’d just seen. This is the same man who, in 2017, staged a (planned) walkout of an Indianapolis Colts game when players kneeled for the National Anthem. But yesterday, confronted with the kind of scene that in a just world would see its architects sent to the fucking Hague, Pence’s response was to…glower at these men, as though he found their very existence to be offensive.
The point here is not that Mike Pence is a ghoul and a world-class piece of shit, or that the ideal fate for him is something I hesitate to type because I don’t want to get a visit from the Secret Service. (On a completely unrelated note, have you ever heard of György Dózsa? No particular reason, just wondering.) We know all this about Mike Pence already.
Every prominent Democrat has decried the conditions in these concentration camps. They call press conferences to make their outrage known and tell us that this whole mess is not who we are as a country. This is as true today as it was late last month, when the House voted on an emergency bill authorizing $4.6 billion for the Trump administration to address the border crisis. The request was the perfect opportunity to back up those strong words with action: House Democrats had leverage that they could use to start improving conditions at detention facilities and demand more accountability from the agencies involved in running them.
Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democrats declined to fight for any of those things, opting instead to give Trump the money with no strings attached. The bill passed 305-102; 95 of the “nay” votes came from progressive Democrats who wanted a procedural vote in order to open the bill up for debate and, in doing so, attempt to extract more concessions about migrant protection. If the progressive caucus had been successful, Mike Pence’s little display on Friday might never have happened. The reason progressives weren’t successful is because moderate Democrats refused to let that happen. The moderates – the ones calling press conferences and making the media rounds to anathemize the conditions at these facilities – made clear that if the progressives got that procedural vote, the moderates would kill the final bill.
It’s not unheard of for politicians to play chicken with the welfare of innocent human beings in order to get what they want; the GOP’s entire legislative strategy hinges on that kind of political gamesmanship. Still, it is rare for this tactic to be employed on an intra-party basis, and it is particularly craven and odious for moderates to do so even as they insist the health and safety of detained migrants is their top priority. Every last one of the 235 House Democrats claim to deplore the conditions in these camps, yet only 95 are willing to fight to improve them.
This past weekend, Donald Trump fired off some choice words for progressive Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. By “choice words,” I mean a bunch of racist nonsense, and by “fired off,” I mean the words seeped out of his brain like raw chicken skin oozing down the slide at a McDonald’s Playplace:
There’s more, but honestly, who gives a shit. In addition to being (of course) racist, it was also (of course) incorrect – Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx, Pressley in Cincinnati, and Tlaib in Detroit; Omar was born in Mogadishu, but moved to the U.S. when she was 10 and is a naturalized citizen. The backlash was swift, and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – no fan of the women in question – joined the fray, lending her unequivocal support for I’m just kidding she fucked it up. With her first attempt, she seemingly conceded the premise that the progressive Congresswomen aren’t from America:
…and with the second, she suggested that bipartisanship can cure racism.
Pelosi eventually pledged to put a resolution on the House floor formally condemning Trump’s language, meaning the potential consequences for Trump’s actions have gone from “none” to “effectively none.”
There is no better encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with centrism than these two tweets. Progressives are being subjected to racist abuse from conservatives for defending human rights. As far as debates go, this one’s about as black-and-white as they come: either you believe we should treat migrants better, or you believe we shouldn’t. But in the tumescent mind of a centrist, there’s a Third Way (™), one that can satisfy both parties. What if, the centrist asks, we treat these migrants a little better, but! we also write legislation that makes it more difficult to immigrate to America, so we don’t have to deal with all this unseemliness in the future?
In the moment, the idea of compromise seems reasonable, but in the long term, sweeping changes are made – for better or worse – by the people who refuse to concede an inch to their opponents. Look at abortion: Roe v. Wade was won by people who dug in their heels and insisted that the government should not have a right to dictate their access to abortion, full stop. In the years since, conservatives dug in their heels and insisted that nobody should have abortions, ever; in fact, the GOP started cleaning house, nudging out anyone who didn’t believe the same thing. As a result, the Republican Party is packed to the gills with people who refuse to compromise with their opponents. Democrats, on the other hand, ask no such thing of their members. The result is a party that can’t unify itself and allows its opponents to chip away at everything they don’t like, blithely assuming the GOP will reach a point where they say “This is a sufficient amount of gerrymandering – we don’t need any more, we’re good.”
The centrist motto is that old maxim that “A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied.” To centrists, an opposition party frothing at the mouth to curtail abortion rights is a sign that American democracy is alive and well. To centrists, the constant battles to preserve the few truly progressive pieces of legislation this country has – Social Security, marriage equality, Obamacare, abortion rights – are the desired outcome. Why? Well, as Pelosi made sure to point out, these fights make fundraising easier. But the problem with centrism isn’t just that it views real, life-altering (or life-ending) legislative battles as vehicles to scare up campaign donations.
Centrism prizes consensus-building above all else; to that end, personal convictions are not only not required, they are actively discouraged. A centrist who happens to possess certain deeply-held principles will, at some point, need to compromise (or abandon entirely) those principles and accept a resolution they know to be wrong or insufficient. There is no such thing as a bad deal as far as centrism is concerned – the very existence of a deal means it is good. (“How about this: let’s outlaw lynching…by making it illegal for any hanging to last longer than 10 seconds.”)
Centrists don’t care about what you want. Hell, they don’t even care about what they want. They’re only here to tell you it can’t be done. I say we get rid of them and see for ourselves.