By Mohammed Jinadu
Almost from the moment Joe Biden stepped aside in favour of Kamala Harris, the concern trolling commenced. “Harris’s biggest political liability is that she may be seen as too politically extreme,” fretted very serious journalist Josh Barro before advising the new Democratic nominee to “run to the center.” Former Bill Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen concurred, confidently telling CNBC that “the key for her campaign is moving to the center.” To satisfy New York magazine political columnist Jonathan Chait, a mere “pivot” to the center would not be enough. Rather, he provocatively suggested, “Harris needs to adopt positions that will upset progressive activists.”
Apparently, Harris’s nomination didn’t just unite the Democratic base. It also united a parade of pundits, politicos, and conventional wisdom–mongers of all stripes in urging her to unceremoniously betray the base by swerving to the center—especially on the economy—if she’s to have a fighting chance of defeating Donald Trump at the polls.
Given the divisive state of American politics, that might not sound like such an unreasonable take. But glaringly absent from this allegedly centrist consensus is a working definition of what or where the political and economic “center” actually is. And spoiler alert: On most issues, the center is arguably somewhere in the vicinity of Kamala Harris. Especially on the economy.
To understand why, we need to think a little bit about what would comprise a truly “centrist economics.” But before we do that, we need to define our terms.
The whole left-right dichotomy dates back to the early days of the French Revolution, when members of the National Assembly who favored a more revolutionary path (that is, a republic) took to sitting to the left, while those defending the ancien régime (the monarchists) gathered together on the right. Today, we universally put conservatives on the right and progressives on the left. Policies that favor the rich go on the right, policies that favor working people go on the left. An economic ideology that advocates unfettered free market capitalism definitely goes on the right, while a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat is the sine qua non of far left.
Most people still have a shared intuition about what the political labels “left” and “right” mean, particularly in regard to how competing policy proposals relate to one another. But the “center”? Not so much. For example, most people would instantly agree that a proposal to more than double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would fall on the left or even far-left side of the spectrum. After all, it’s more than double!
