There's Nothing Magical About the Center

Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash

I’ve spent a fair amount of time arguing that some of the most popular cures for our political moment don’t reach what’s actually wrong. I’ve made the case about civility — that lowering the temperature does nothing if the people being civil still view disagreement as evidence of a moral or intellectual defect. I’ve made it about civil discourse initiatives — that teaching people to talk across difference assumes the problem is a communication breakdown, when the problem is that one set of views has been ruled out of bounds before the conversation starts. And I’ve made it about viewpoint diversity — adding conservatives to an institution which codes their positions as bigotry doesn’t diversify the institution’s thinking; it just gives it more people to diagnose.

Each of these is a remedy aimed at a surface — civility at tone, civil-discourse initiatives at process, viewpoint diversity at composition. None of them touches the thing festering underneath.

There’s a fourth remedy I haven’t taken on directly, and it’s one I regularly see proposed confidently. The idea seems to be that the answer to polarization, to democratic decay, to the whole grinding mess we’re in, is for more people to move toward the middle. The solution, in this line of thinking, seems to be to find the reasonable people on both sides, split the difference, and rebuild from there. The center gets treated as a kind of safe ground — the place the fever breaks.

I want to argue that there’s nothing magical about the center. And the reason it isn’t magical is the same reason the other three remedies miss. It’s pointed at the wrong thing entirely.

Moderation is not humility

The center looks like it operates at the level that matters — not tone, not process, not headcount, but substance. The centrist appears to be doing the real work: weighing the evidence, taking the strongest points from each side, landing on the merits. Set against the partisan who appears to take everything on faith, the centrist looks epistemically responsible. That appearance gives the center a degree of moral prestige.

But this rests on treating two different things as if they were one. The first is moderation — a property of your position. It describes where you land relative to the poles: somewhere in between. The second is epistemic humility — a property of how you hold a position, any position. It describes whether you treat your assumptions as contestable, as something a reasonable and informed person might reject.

Moderation and epistemic humility are not the same; they are barely even related. You can hold a moderate position with certainty — certainty that the truth obviously lies in the middle, that anyone out at the poles is a zealot or a fool, that your own balance is simply what clear sight produces. And you can hold a position far from the center with real humility — aware that you might be wrong, able to say why a thoughtful person would land elsewhere, treating the people who disagree as reasoning rather than defective.

Moderation is about where you stand. Epistemic humility is about how. They run on different axes. And it’s the second one — the how — that democratic health actually depends on.

The center has its own version of the move

I’ve described elsewhere (here, here, and here, to name a few) what I take to be a central source of contemporary political dysfunction: a contested position came to be treated as settled, so that disagreeing with it became evidence of a defect rather than a difference of view. Once that happens, dissent can’t be engaged on the merits — there’s no reasoning to meet, only a character to diagnose.

And yet, listen to a thoughtful centrist on the people at the poles — and I mean a genuinely thoughtful one. He doesn’t say they’re stupid or malicious. More likely, he's sympathetic: as he sees it, they've been captured by their information environment, sorted into echo chambers, carried along by currents larger than themselves. He might be quite generous about it. But notice what the generosity does. It explains the strong conviction at the poles rather than engaging it — treats the holding of an intense view as a condition to be accounted for, with a cause, rather than a position that might have reasons worth meeting. The sympathy can be real. It is also a way of not having to take the view seriously, because a view you’ve explained by your understanding of its origins is a view you no longer have to engage with.

So the centrist is not necessarily standing outside the dysfunction. He might be — but nothing about occupying the center puts him there. He can just as easily be committing the very thing that produced the current crisis — explaining the disagreement in his own terms rather than meeting it — while being, by every visible measure, fair, warm, and well-meaning.

None of this is to say the center has nothing to recommend it. Moderate positions, to the extent they favor incremental change, can be wiser when stability is what you're after — rapid change is often destabilizing, and sometimes that's a decisive cost. But that's a conditional advantage, not a standing one. Stability is itself a value, weighed differently by different people for different reasons. The case for incrementalism is strong only once you've granted the importance of the thing that depends on it.

A politics of the middle may also lower the stakes of being wrong, if moderate errors prove more recoverable than radical ones — which matters, of course, only to the extent you weight recoverability over getting it right faster. It may even be that people drawn to the center are, on average, somewhat likelier to hold their views loosely. But notice that this, if it’s true, is a fact about a correlation — not about the center itself. The humility would be the thing doing the work, and the humility can travel anywhere. The center doesn’t manufacture it; it just, sometimes, attracts it. What I’m denying is the stronger and more common claim: that moving toward the middle is itself the remedy. That the center is where the fever breaks.

Polarization was never the disease

Distance was never the disease. Consider what a healthy democratic disagreement actually looks like. Two camps can be far apart on an issue — genuinely, deeply opposed — and the polity is fine, so long as each side holds its position as contestable — as something a reasonable person could reject, held by people who are reasoning rather than defective. That’s not dysfunction. That’s democracy doing the thing democracy is for — managing disagreement among people who don’t have to resolve who’s morally correct in order to live together.

Now consider the opposite. A polity can be highly unpolarized — broadly agreed, consensus everywhere — and be epistemically dead. Everyone lands in the same place; dissent from the consensus is treated as a defect. There’s no distance to speak of. And it is far sicker than the polarized case, because the thing democracy requires — that contested questions remain contestable — has been extinguished. It just doesn’t look sick, because we’ve been trained to read agreement as health and distance as disease.

The variable that matters isn’t how far apart people are on some ever-shifting political spectrum. It’s whether they treat the assumptions on which their position rests as open to being challenged. And that variable runs perpendicular to the left-right axis. You can move someone all the way to the center and not change it at all — you’ll have relocated their certainty, not loosened it. The center is a coordinate on a line. The disease isn’t on the line.

Nothing magical

I get that there is something seductive about the center; I understand the pull. It can feel like wisdom. It can feel like the exhausted, reasonable alternative to two camps hellbent on screaming past each other. But wisdom isn’t a location. The reasonable person isn’t reasonable because of where he ends up. He’s reasonable because of how he holds what he believes — because he can say why someone might see it differently, and mean it.

That person might be a centrist. He might also be quite far from the center. The center has no monopoly on him, and no special claim to produce him. There is nothing magical about the middle of a line that was never the right thing to measure.