Don't Just Let Radicals Dictate Your Opinions
A road forward for the center left.
It is common to think of politics in terms of a one-dimensional political spectrum. There are people on the left, people on the right, and people in the center, and we can sort people by where they fall on that spectrum. There is a grain of truth to this, of course, but it’s an overly simplistic way of thinking about politics, and taking it seriously is a recipe for distorted thinking in a number of ways. One such distortion is that it cedes too much ground to political extremists for setting the terms of political debate. The left is the left; the right is the right; the center is the midpoint between whatever the left is saying and whatever the right is saying; the center left and center right are whatever the left and right are saying, but less.
As someone on the center left on social and cultural issues, I find this dynamic very frustrating. For the last few years, discussion of cultural issues has been driven by a succession of left-wing social movements. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the current tangle of controversies over gender have been driven, in large part, by demands from left-wing activists that are far outside of what was considered mainstream a decade ago. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Activists should pursue whatever goals they think important. But it has put the center left in something of a bind.
Left-wing activists benefit from a framework where “center left” just means “whatever the left says, but less,” because this gives them the power to alter what it means to be on the center left just by advocating for more extreme views. If the left gets more extreme, the center left must follow them at least part of the way, or risk being labeled as “on the right.” That can be an effective rhetorical cudgel against those who care about being “on the left.” And it raises the question: If your position is that you support what we do (just less), why not go all the way? Not only does this framework provide too much power to activists, it also harms the electoral prospects of center-left political parties, like the Democrats. If the best account the Democrats can give of their stance on cultural issues is “Whatever activists say, but less,” they’re setting themselves up for defeat. That message alienates everyone.
To resist this dynamic, those on the center left must defend a positive vision of what it means to be on the center left. To that end, here are three principles that can provide a unifying framework:
Liberalism is the first principle.
Inequalities are problems to be solved.
Absolutes are unwise.
I don’t pretend that any of these ideas are novel. But they’re no less important for being familiar. Let’s look at them in more depth.
Liberalism is the first principle
The word “liberalism” has lots of meanings. Here I mean the common usage within political theory: a politics that places primary importance on freedom and individual rights. People prefer to live in different ways, and, as a society, we should not try to make value judgments that privilege one way of living over any other. Eat what you want to eat, pray how you want to pray, love how you want to love. As a matter of principle, by default, the way that other people want to live is none of anyone else’s business.
I emphasize both “as a matter of principle” and “by default.” First, this is a matter of principle. Liberalism is not an attitude of indifference towards how people live their lives. Liberalism doesn’t require us to not be judgmental in our hearts. I have some very strong opinions about the best way to live, and think that some lifestyles are substantively mistaken in important ways. Liberalism doesn’t mean giving up on those judgments. It means a commitment to not treating them as matters of public concern. We should not use our public institutions to encourage some ways of life and punish others.
Of course, some ways of life create burdens for others. We are a society and not a collection of atomized individuals. Accordingly, there are some burdensome ways of life that have to be curtailed in the interest of peaceful coexistence. But acknowledging this doesn’t mean discarding a commitment to not interfering with the lifestyles of others. Unless there is some strong, particular reason to do otherwise, the default presumption of freedom still holds.
This commitment to liberalism includes not just a negative duty to not interfere with the lives of others, but a positive duty to accept and invite others into civil society regardless of how they want to live their lives. I may disapprove of the way you live your life, but that disapproval is not good grounds for excluding you from my school or my business. The institutions of civil society should be open to all.
Inequalities are problems to be solved
Liberalism is the first principle, since that is the most important idea for the center left. But liberals care about inequality as well. As both a personal and political matter, we should be doing what we can to lessen inequalities of wealth, status, and opportunity.
Unfortunately, many of the inequalities in society are entrenched by a complex variety of social forces, as the progressive left has argued. But the center left does not take this fact as a blanket condemnation of society. Rather, it understands entrenched inequalities as difficult problems to be solved.
Thinking of inequalities as problems to be solved has three important implications. First, it means that the nature and sources of inequalities need to be understood before we can do anything effective about them. “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this” is bad reasoning at the best of times, and it’s not an effective approach to problem solving. The problem of structural inequality is knotty, and it can only be solved through patience, study, and experimentation.
Second, problem solving is difficult because there are constraints on what counts as a solution to a problem. In the case of solving inequality, the constraints are both moral and political. Moral because the impulse to eliminate inequality will conflict with other moral imperatives, primarily the liberal imperative to allow people to live their lives as they see fit. And political because people will resist changes that will lessen inequalities. That political resistance must be managed through persuasion, not force.
And third, the existence of a problem doesn’t guarantee the existence of a solution. A society where disparity is entirely eliminated is a lovely aspiration, but it’s substantively impossible. We can do much to lessen social inequalities of various kinds, but inequalities will always remain. This is not a failure, it is simply a concession to reality.
Absolutes are unwise
In spelling out the last two points, I’ve been somewhat vague and, some might think, unhelpful. People should be free to live their lives how they want, unless they shouldn’t. We should try to lessen inequalities, unless we can’t. Freedom and equality must be balanced, somehow. What concrete guidance does this offer?
The third principle is that looking for absolute guidance is a mistake. The center left should take a page from the book of ancient virtue ethicists like Aristotle and Confucius. According to virtue ethics, morality isn’t a matter of following a particular set of rules. It is, instead, a matter of exercising the sort of sensitive moral judgment that comes from an understanding of the relationships between oneself and others. The tangle of human interests and relationships is too complex to draw straight lines through it.
Being in the center means being willing to make compromises. But this doesn’t mean being willing to sacrifice the good in response to the demands of the bad. It means realizing that justice itself is a matter of compromise. The flexibility that comes from being in the center is a sign of wisdom, not spinelessness. We should listen to those on the far left, the far right, and everywhere in between in order to understand their concerns and interests and use our best judgment to find the middle road.
However, as the first two principles show, this flexibility is not unlimited. Liberals are committed to a politics of freedom and equality, and that commitment is not up for negotiation. Rather, we need to use our best judgment to work out the exact nature of political freedom and equality, and the way those two virtues should be balanced against each other and against the legitimate interests of the various people with whom we share a society.
The far left has traditionally had similar but distinct concerns. While they value both freedom and equality, they tend to see equality as an overriding moral imperative. When freedom and equality conflict, it is freedom that must be sacrificed: we shouldn’t be free to perpetuate inequalities. Accordingly, the far left tends to understand freedom in different terms, as freedom from particular oppressive institutions that perpetuate various unjust inequalities. This leads them in more revolutionary directions, and they see the dismantling of oppressive institutions as key to their political project. And they are generally more inflexible in their approach, and less willing to recognize other values that need to be balanced against equality and freedom from oppression.
To see how this plays out in practice, consider the debates over gender that are among the most vitriolic in today’s discourse. The far left is concerned with a variety of social inequalities that make transgender individuals worse off; they are, for instance, subject to greater rates of violence and homelessness than others. The far left sees these disparities as rooted in a grand social structure of cisheteronormativity and the idea that there is a gender binary. The freedom the far left preaches is a freedom from these social structures, which implies a revolutionary project to remake society in a more trans-inclusive direction. This project will only end once complete social equality for transgender individuals is obtained along every dimension. To maintain that there are any other interests that could compete with this project is to legitimize continuing oppression.
The center left, on the other hand, should begin from a position of liberalism. People are free to live their lives however they want, dress how they want to dress, and present themselves however they want to present themselves. The ongoing inequalities to which transgender individuals are subjected are cause for legitimate intervention; the causes of those disparities should be understood and, if possible, eliminated. But in this project, the interests of others should be kept in mind. For example, inequality in sports eligibility may be justified by the need to protect the interests of biological women to fair competition.
Because the differences between the center left and the far left are largely differences of emphasis and interpretation of contested terms (“freedom, equality”), it makes sense to see the two views as occupying different points on a spectrum. But that does not imply that if the far left becomes increasingly unconcerned with freedom and uncompromising in their pursuit of a particular kind of egalitarian vision, then somehow the ground has shifted underneath the feet of the center left, and we on the center left must shift towards their position or risk getting left behind in the center or (gasp!) the right. We can stand on our principled convictions. And if those convictions include a commitment to liberalism, to solving the problems of equality, and to using practical judgment to find just compromises, then we stand firmly on the center left.
Matt Lutz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University and writes the Substack Humean Beings.
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Although most of the time I think of myself to the left of center left, I basically agree with you. In my case, I have a healthy respect for the theory of private property, and I am aghast at the notion of eliminating it. I see the tragedy of the commons in so many places, and my estimation of the intelligence of our species has rapidly declined.
Love this essay; it clearly and carefully lays out the position of a sort of "liberal left" in its, as I see it, sensible values connected fairly strongly to the founding values of the United States.
(I don't very much like the locution "center left" because it's not really occupying some center point between a left extreme and a right, as the author has noted, but I suppose we must at times adopt the label that everyone seems to want to use.)