Extremism is a Boring Rut. Try Radical Centeredness

Why centeredness, and not, say Radical Centrism?  Part of my sense of something pulling me towards "the center" is just that it doesn't pretend to some sort of ideological purity, when I see "-ism", especially some fresh "ism" whose corners have never gotten worn and smoothed by reality, I am on the lookout for the sort of fervent ideology that can lead to disaster, such as Bolshevism in Russia in 1917, and free market fundamentalism in Russia in the 1990s.

Funny thing.  In the comment section of a Jonah Goldberg column, (one which vividly illustrates my point in "Intimations of Bipolarity" about taking "inordinate pleasure in labeling, ridiculing, and disparaging [the other side]" and competing to comes up with the best zinger/put-down ... 60 comments and counting, a real zinger-fest at the expense of Joe Biden.  To be fair, it reminds me of Dan Quale, and all the silly unproductive ink spilled over him) Um, as I say, in the comment section of a Jonah Goldberg column, I read "After [somebody's debunking of Biden] isn't this just one more nail in the coffin of liberals' self-regard as rigid empiricists?".  Yeah, just poll 100 liberals and see how many of them confirm "Yes, I'm a proud rigid empiricist."

Except for the 100% faith based types, don't all stripes like to say "Just look at the facts".  That's "rigid empiricism" in case you weren't familiar with the phrase.  But "rigid empiricist" sounds so much more pompous, and somewhere there must be a style sheet that says "Right-thinking patriots should be presented as wanting to 'just look at the facts' while Leftist rascals should be quoted as wanting to take a "rigidly empirical" approach to the world.

Um, did I just change the subject?  Well, I was thinking of the 50s especially when "consensus" and "pragmatic" were words used fondly to describe the traits of early Americans, as in the work of  Daniel J. Boorstin, especially in his The Americans series.  Back then it was the far left who had no use for lily-livered pragmatism.

Nowadays, the right coalition is more prone to attack "pragmatism" (Not that the Trotskyites wouldn't, but they are down in a deep well where no one can hear them).  Jonah Goldberg has done a good job of this.  I picked up my copy of his Liberal Fascists, and though I haven't touched it in weeks, it happened to be bookmarked to page 52, where he says: "Crudely, Pragmatism is a form of relativism which holds that any belief that is useful is therefore necessarily true.  Conversely, any truth that is inconvenient or non-useful is necessarily untrue.  Mussolini's useful truth was the concept of a 'totalitarian' society ... The practical consequence of this idea was that everything was 'fair game' if it furthered the ends of the state".  By this (crude indeed) definition, I would say there is a tremendous amount of pragmatism in movement conservatism.  For examples, see The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement by Eric Heubeck.

[to be continued?]