I guess that you can't really edit your editor, but it would have been useful if, before publishing his manifesto on America's center-right nature as a cover story, someone had asked Newsweek editor Jon Meacham to define what and where the center was. Or the right. Or the left. Because it's rather peculiar to read an article asserting America's right-leaning character that uses the compromises of Lyndon Johnson and FDR as evidence. Indeed, when Meacham says that "presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls," at least two of his examples make little sense: FDR and Johnson moved much further left than they ever thought they would, because historical circumstances disrupted the system's natural tendency towards gridlock and opened the possibility for immense and rapid social change. Meanwhile, Meacham also has to admit that "Republican presidents, too, are frequently pulled from the right to the center," but for whatever reason, this paragraph passes by the article's thesis without impact or even interaction. So why are we a "center-right" country? It's not, as it turns out, because we have "center-right" opinions on some discrete set of issues. It's not because we evince dissatisfaction with actual government services like Social Security or Medicare. Rather, it's because "according to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996)." Suggestive evidence, I guess, but hardly dispositive. Since Meacham is using "Republican" to stand in for "right,' surely it's relevant that Democrats have a long and enduring affiliation advantage among Americans, and that they nearly always win generic match-ups. Meanwhile, the last "40 years" sort of gives away the game. Why 40 years? Presumably because that's the time period that makes Republicans look best. In the last 48 years, Democrats have elected four presidents and Republicans have elected four presidents (Gerald Ford never won a national election). And again, the question of what the operational impacts of "center-right" are is hard to assess if you can't define the term. Are we center-right on abortion? On health care? On foreign policy? Or pension programs? On nationalizing Wall Street amidst financial crises? Or does it not matter much at all, because the electorate isn't particularly ideological, and is willing to accept all sorts of initiatives, from airline deregulation to nationalizing health care for the elderly? The problem for Meacham's piece is that he doesn't have evidence suggesting America is center-right so much as divided and incoherent. And this divided and incoherent nation has, at its center, a political system structurally biased against change, and able to repel the large ideas of both Republican (Social Security Privatization) and Democratic (ClintonCare) presidents. In its way, that makes us "conservative" because we tend to retain something close to the status quo. But it's the conservatism of gridlock, not of Gingrich, and thus it exists as an operational reality of the government, but doesn't prove an ideological consensus within the country.
