The Center

This piece today in the NYT by Timothy Snyder is brilliant and fairly disturbing. It paints a clear but dark picture of what is being attempted in this country right now by far right extremist groups and the 45th president, the attempted rise of naziism and white nationalism aided and abetted by the administration and its media arms. 

I've kind of gone off on a tangent with it, though. And this is why.

In the Europe of the interwar years, the growing sense that politics was defined by two “sides” came to consume the broad political center, where people can think for themselves and confront the tests of politics as responsible citizens. If everyone was on a “side,” then no one bore responsibility for society as a whole, and the center could not hold.

A simple statement that has startled me into a new understanding of the importance of the center. I'd just never thought about it that way--that by putting yourself in the center you are taking responsibility for finding ways to get things done in spite of the unyielding ideologically driven edges who are important for consideration of the full spectrum of ideas and possibilities of any idea or political solution, but often intransigent when it comes to compromise or getting anything actually done. 

The center has been forced to the left in response to the insanity of the right. This is not balance, and it has to change. 

It's easy to think of the center as where the grown-ups live. That's where I've been. But that's too easy. I do believe, however, that the center is the place for pragmatists, realists, those with a recognition of the need for change that might not fit their own idea of what should be. 

Change will happen not when the left beats back the right, but when the center reemerges and gets to work.