Radical centrism not hack-centrism

I identify as a radical centrist. What’s that? The radical centre is about getting things done. Identify your policy problems and implement effective solutions. It is about policy pragmatism rather than normative conviction. It is happy to borrow ideas from any part of the political spectrum if those ideas are the correct solution to present policy challenges. It is happy, indeed keen, to combine ideas from across the political spectrum into hybrid policy designs that achieve bipartisan outcomes.

I define the radical centre in distinction from the political wings and the hack centre. The wings care more about ideological purity than pragmatism. Or rather, more generously, they are happy to make bad deals where they trade off a large amount of one policy objective, say equity, in order to attain a small amount of their preferred policy objective, say efficiency. 

The hack-centre is interested in centrism as a political strategy, not as a source of policy solutions. Rather than combining left- and right-wing policy ideas into viable hybrids, they instead tend to apply left- and right-wing ideas selectively depending on which one will appeal to affected voters. For example, deregulating national labour markets but bailing out a small forestry industry to hold onto a seat. Hack-centrists are interested in triangulation. They want to wedge the wings. This can be beneficial to policy when it is done by appealing only to those aspects of wing voters’ preferences that correspond to sound policy ideas. But it is disastrous if what is done instead is an appeal to the most ideological dimensions of those voters’ preferences. That is of course populism. A great example of such hack-centrism was Shorten’s bizarre advertisement into Queensland about immigration on the heels of Trump’s election. Never mind that immigration has had only trivial effects on wages in Australia—if it polls well, go for it, so say the hack-centrists.

Ideological politicians will always be a threat to sound policy (Wolfgang Schaubel being the most obvious recent example). But I want to argue that hack-centrists are the biggest threat to policy in the 21^st century.

The 20^th century was dominated by ideological battles. Liberalism miraculously emerged out of the conflict between fascism and socialism in the World Wars to become the dominant ideology of the second half of the century. The next fifty years were then defined by a conflict between welfare-statism and free-market structural adjustment. Politics tended to swing between parties representing one or the other. I call this the polarities voting strategy: vote for one side of the spectrum until it doesn’t seem to be working anymore, then switch sides.  

This swinging worked pretty well because most of our policy challenges in the past half-century involved working out where to apply the government (left-wing) and where to apply market forces (right-wing). Nowadays we have these settings more or less correct across most of the OECD (France and the US being cases where these settings are not right). As such, this polarities strategy will not work well for the polity in the coming century because most of our contemporary challenges are complex and require hybrid solutions (combinations of governments, markets and community) to fix.

Fortunately, while our politicians have an ideological hangover from the 20^th century, voters don’t. They’re keen to elect policymakers with solutions—they don’t care about ideology. Yanis Varoufakis and Emmanuelle Macron are clear examples. They are not going to be persuaded by ideological politicians to commit to stupid ideological policies. For example, carbon pricing remains popular with the majority of Australians despite all the ideological attacks on it.  

In this context, hack-centrists are dangerous because they miss the desire for solutions and focus instead on the disinterest in ideology among voters. They consequently spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to be noncommittal, polling people to figure out exactly where to slide between left- and right-wing positions, and how to ‘spin’ their position into a ‘message that cuts through’. They see the notion of finding a solution that works and marketing it as too risky because they conflate taking a position with being ideological. The dominance of hack-centrists among political strategists is a huge part of why our politics is banal, superficial and obsessed with the media cycle.