The Center-Right Cannot Hold

Lupino Lane in Only Me (1929).

Shorter David Brooks, "The Center-Right Moment", May 12 2015:

Recent victories of moderate Republicans David Cameron, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Rahm Emanuel indicate that the entire world is now a center-right nation except for the parts of the US that are not Chicago because redistributionist progressivism versus opportunity progressivism quaquaquaqua smash left-deviationist neo-Clintonism follow the Rahmam's line quaqua

I never write this kind of thing, do I? Where I put on this smug smile about how history has finally stopped arguing with me when a socialist candidate wins an election in France or Greece or wherever? If I do, take me out and shoot me.

But Netanyahu didn't win his election because of "bold institutional reforms to modernize the welfare state". And the Scottish National Party thinks it won really overwhelmingly by being more what Brooks calls "redistributionist progressive" than Labour (here's a refreshingly jaundiced view of the latter). And Chuy Garcia's extraordinary challenge to the Chicago Democratic turnout machine, forcing Emanuel into a runoff and taking 44% of the vote then, along with the doubling of the Progressive Reform Caucus in the Chicago City Council, was not a reaffirmation of Emanuel's views, though Emanuel himself got reelected (Emanuel has also upgraded rapid rail transit, made life much easier for undocumented immigrants, pushed a very ambitious environmental agenda, and raised the local minimum wage to $13, so he's not exactly Marco Rubio, or even Andrew Cuomo). And the most significant economic left-versus-right contest internationally since last year's Greek election was surely the shocker in petrostate Alberta last week, where the sort-of socialist New Democrats brought a sudden end to 44 years of Progressive Conservative rule.

This could be his most boring column of the year, in terms of sheer weary repetition of talking points at an NBC News level of analysis or worse, and I don't think I could stand working through the whole thing. There is one amusing detail:

Ed Balls, the No. 2 figure in the Labour Party in Britain, co-led the group from the Center for American Progress that wrote the most influential statement of modern progressivism, a report on “inclusive prosperity.” Balls could not even retain his own parliamentary seat in the last election.

If by "the most influential statement" you mean "the only one I've looked at". This is the same CAP report that he was comparing to Rubio's campaign manifesto last February, written by a committee of 17 economists and politicians under the chairmanship of Balls and Lawrence Summers, in which the sclerotic lords of the Anglo-American center-left attempted (successfully, I think, on the whole) to drag themselves into joining the recently revived concern with inequality and poverty. I wish I could be confident that it would be influential, I certainly hope so, but the main reason Brooks is mentioning it today is Balls; by leaving out Summers as he left out Balls last time, he gets a chance to make inattentive readers think he's read two different pieces of progressive writing so far this year instead of just one.

Driftglass makes a valiant case for the hypothesis that this column has some (vicious bothsiderist) content. Old milk in new bottles. Apparently Ron Fournier loved the column, so that's a sign of something. Neera Tanden of CAP (in defense of CAP's Inclusive Prosperity report) pretends the column is serious, just long enough to destroy it.