For a More Perfect Union: Centrism

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

It’s time for extreme centrists in this nation to exert the same courage John Lewis did, to move past fear and cognitive dissonance and hold tight to our nation’s founding principles, to "get in good trouble"...

By Melissa Walsh

I'm an extreme centrist. This doesn't mean that I am necessarily “moderate” on all issues or ever “on the fence.” I'm not apolitical or apathetic (as anyone who knows me will tell you). I strive to center my political propositions in preserving inalienable rights of individuals while remaining true to the duty of protecting the common good, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.

Politics aside, how I aim to treat others is grounded in my belief in and understanding of moral law. To know moral law, I follow C.S. Lewis’ test in checking moral beliefs: they must be accountable to reason, and reason must be accountable to science.

'Cognitive Dissonance'
What moves us off from centrism is what Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris identify as "cognitive dissonance" in a July 12, 2020 article in The Atlantic — "the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings — even when those findings can save our lives." They present this phenomenon in the context of how wearing a mask during a pandemic became politicized. Cognitive dissonance, I would add, is the refusal to dissent from unconstitutional practices or unreasoned or immoral statements and activities driven by prevailing forces, or voices, in a political party, church, or other faction we belong to. It explains why "good" Germans tolerated Nazism and why anti-fascist freedom fighters accepted Stalinism. These shifts to the extreme right or the extreme left, we know well from history, are dangerous, which is why I periodically tweet #makeamericareadhistoryagain. Those who simply read history again, sans identity-politics denial, are bound to have an aha moment about how grave American unrest is today.

We are witnesses in real-time, in living history, to the dangers of identity-based politics, or populism, in the United States. This populism is not driven by a true identity with being American, but with belonging to a special faction of Americans, a sloppy ideology that narrowly divides Americans by identifying each citizen by race or religion or income level or education, etc. In 2016, I forewarned against the ugly events we're witnessing today (and hoped to be proven wrong), as I listened to the statements (and read the tweets) from the hyperbolic fear-based canon of Donald Trump, the regurgitation of hate speech, which was devoured by his base. Trumpian populism initially attacked Latin Americans and Middle Easterners (and continues to). Then it launched an attack on the press (even turning "media" into a singular word to describe a monolith rather than a plural word to describe voices accountable to verification in a free press). It purged centrist judges. It gave legitimacy to the unreasonable, formerly concealed inhumane biases among a base that takes pride in being poorly educated, anti-science, pro-conspiracy theory, so-called “pro-life,” pro-gun, Evangelical, and pro-white power. Five years ago, who in this nation could have conceived of crowds of American citizens proudly waving Confederate flags, Nazi crosses, and AR-15s in public spaces while professing to be Christians and patriots.

It took some time — too long — for centrists with a microphone or many Twitter followers, including Never-Trump Republicans, to grow a backbone and vigorously stand up to this asinine and nefarious take-over of the GOP. Thanks to The Lincoln Project, they've found a forum and gained momentum. Those to the far left were way ahead of these moderate, or reasonable, Republicans, reacting fiercely, courageously even, but also unrefined, many of these activists too young to have cultivated the wisdom that comes with decades of adulting. And Democrat POTUS candidates were unable to achieve commonality on critical issues, most notably on healthcare, and ended up with essentially an incumbent as the 2020 POTUS candidate. I consider Joe Biden a centrist, but what will he do to stop the bleeding? My hope rests in his skill in gathering a great team of thinkers and doers, including those who can see and understand how to meet the economic needs of Trump's base.

Reagan Democrats and Me
I grew up in the land of the (over-analyzed and under-heard) Reagan Democrats in the near-east suburbs of Detroit among the first wave of gen-Xers (our older siblings were baby-boomers) raised by autoworkers. Many of my peers entered one of the last classes of automotive skilled-trades apprentices and moved onto a long career of turning a wrench for good pay and benefits, thanks to the UAW. They have recently retired or are about to retire with pensions, the last Motor City generation to reap the promise of retirement after more than three decades of working in a blue-collar shirt with a Big Three branding. They voted for Trump in 2016.

Why would they support a whiney narcissistic blue-blood like Trump? Mainly because he’s the alternative to Democrat candidates who have been talking over them and past them for decades. They feel seen by Trump. They feel unseen by the Democratic Party. The truth is that they remain unseen by both parties. They’re misunderstood. They’re undervalued. Trump strategists, including the Breitbart and FoxNews ilk, seized this void, and these Reagan Democrat heirs were sucked into believing the hype, the fear-mongering, the need to build a wall, the need to make America great again.

My Eastside Detroiter, Reagan Democrat instincts were radically altered and sharpened while earning my degree in International Studies. (I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree.) During and after college, I lived briefly in different European cities. I spent a semester in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1988. (I also had spent two weeks in Sarajevo in the summer of 1987 and travelled there a few times while living in Vienna, Austria, in 1989.) In 2016, this pre-war Yugoslav experience gave me foreknowledge of the decline our nation would sustain if this sleazy real estate mogul and populist with no government experience were elected. On social media and during cocktail-party conversation, I could not be silent in 2016. I sensed a calling to warn against the fear-mongering and hateful scapegoating of the other spewing from Trump’s campaign. So I posted and stated my observations that Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric struck me as gravely similar to the hate speech, dressed as ethno-religious nationalism, I heard among Serbs and Croats in former Yugoslavia.

A handful of hearers of my warnings agreed that Trump was bad news, but said, “Well, that (ethno-religious violence) can't happen here.” I responded, "If the economy fails, the violence will follow."

Several others revealed themselves to be Trump supporters and broke ties with me, or I broke ties with them due to their posts and statements that I viewed as ignorant and hateful.

​In 2020, it IS happening here. Our American union grows more fragile.

Smrt fašizmu... ('death to fascism')
I saw 2016, 2017, and 2018 from the perspective of my young-adult self in 1987, 1988, and 1989. I saw 2019 from the frustration and pain of watching footage from Sarajevo in 1992. I grieved before the images and tragic accounts of families separated at the U.S. southern border and of immigrants rounded up at their homes, schools, or places of business for incarceration and deportation — many of them my neighbors here in Detroit who have lived in this nation for decades after leaving their middle eastern homelands.

Today, in 2020, with more than 140,000 American lives lost to the pandemic, which the Trump administration denied and did little to contain, I'm weighted down by the overwhelming sorrow of so many souls who lived and then died so suddenly that we can't even list all of their names on the newspaper obituary pages. Now the Trump administration seeks to control that information — the data on those who remain to be infected by the COVID-19 virus, an invisible non-partisan enemy that Trump seeks to will away with despotism and whose effects he wishes to conceal from scientists.

Concurrently with the federal government's coup and dismissal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Trump unleashed paramilitary troops wearing unnamed military swag and egressing from unmarked vans to arrest citizens in Portland, Oregon, at will, without charge, and without regard for the U.S. Constitution or moral law. As in Sarajevo in 1992, a city known for youth, art, progressiveness, energy, and hope, Portland is being attacked from the outside by irregulars sporting camo and clutching ammo.

And if that wasn’t enough to bring a tear to your eye, the news broke that John Lewis died.

'Get in good trouble'

It’s time for extreme centrists in this nation to exert the same courage John Lewis did, to move past fear and cognitive dissonance and hold tight to our nation’s founding principles, to "get in good trouble," as he defined it. To do that, we must vote Trump out. We also must support the non-partisan pro-Constitution advocacy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is good centrism that insists on pursuing common sense, reason, and care for one another as we stand against the identity politics that are obstructing the cause of America.

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in January 1776. “Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is”

Trump’s America is unAmerican. Make America Great Again today is the Make Germany Great Again of 80 years ago and the Make Croatia Great Again and Make Serbia Great Again of 30 years ago.

Looking forward from the past and today's ugly present, the inclusive, universal call to action ought to be what Thomas Paine urged, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” For after all, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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As Americans, we are obligated to strive for a more perfect union. The key word here is “union.” American extreme centrists must remain steadfast to the cause of America by knowing and revering the U.S. Constitution. They must boldly reference it as the premier primary source to defeat the defective opining by those with ulterior political motives rooted in power and greed (in Trump’s case, power and greed plus narcissism).
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​And as citizens of the world, we must live in harmony with a moral law that does not divide our shared humanity or scorn science.
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#AmericaOrTrump

​​​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

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