Can the Center Hold?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
    Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats (1920)

Many reference Yeats' phrase "the center cannot hold" published in the aforementioned poem "The Second Coming." Sages use this phrase to express their fear that a fragile political order is vulnerable to the lunatic fringes appealing successfully one time too many to the masses. The sage de jeur usually expresses this fear believing he is uniquely gifted to identify and warn us that the center faces collapse resulting from some demagogue whipping the masses into a frenzy. A broad review of current political "analysis" has sketched an image of our political culture that was formed around an implied center. This formless "center" shows that political analysis also faces collapse. Would the political sages' collapsing expose a healthy functioning political order? Or would such a collapse occur because the political culture is diluted by fragmented formlessness that renders impossible an accurate recognition of the size, scale, and shape of its polarities?  

The Center cannot hold because it defies being pinpointed. Nonetheless, the "left" and "right" are more often straw men stored in the wings awaiting strategic placement into the sage's worldview. Yes vivid examples of left and right are detectable in the anti-anti-immigration reform protests and the Tea Party protests. Both groups’ protests issue easily soundbited in each news cycle (i.e. Arizona's recent bill approved by voter referendum and Obamacare). These movements feature people carrying signs shouting slogans. These protests have the theatrical props allowing their being easily identified within the left and right polarity. But, the criteria identifying left and right existed before either movement became newsworthy. Was the criteria conceived long before Arizona and Obamacare accurate? Where is the analysis exposing the genealogy of the left/right polarity? 

The right is fungible, enabling its seamless grafting onto all incendiary rhetoric promoting the most apparently vile yet contradictory movements. For instance, these contradictions include pre-World War II isolationism, post-World War anti-communism (et. al. support for the Korean War, Vietnam War, NATO, McCarthy, insurrections in Iran, Indonesia, and regimes facing overthrow by Marxist movements in Cuba, Nicaragua, the Philippines, etc). 

Moreover, each of these movements used galvanizing forces that were incompatible with each other. For example, America First, which was founded to oppose intervention into World War Two included Charles Lindbergh, included Anti-Semites while American neo-conservatives (a modern stronghold of the "right-wing") strongly support the Likkud party.  Henry Wallace, former governor of Mississippi and poster boy for segregation, campaigning for U.S. President in 1972 led the right wing as a populist crusade fighting the elites in Washington and Wall Street. While to the contrary Ronald Reagan carried the torch, redefining right-wing activism in part as a liberator of an exceedingly regulated Wall Street. The Moral Majority supports prayer in public schools, while Robert H. W. Welch Jr, the founder of the John Birch was raised a Southern Baptist but later abandoned it in favor of Unitarianism. The defining of the "right" reveals a paradox. The right is historically a reactionary movement, seeking to preserve certain institutions believed to preserve their preferred social order. But, the constant redefining of the "right" contradicts its image as figurative defenders of the Bastille. Rather, the "right" are chameleons whose colors change to mask their true intentions from the mainstream. 

Right wing movements can exist within different milieu, explaining why they indeed have galvanized around different agendas. But, their existing in so many milieus expands the definition of "right-wing" too broadly. Consequently, the right wing tag is applied too frequently to be a term of clarification anymore.  

I cite random examples but many more are available, showing a pattern of mythologizing a center that is flanked by equally mythological left and right polarities.  Find the center in this reductionist mode. Check opinion polls. Read "Time" magazine. Watch Fox or CNN. Yeah right. Of course looking elsewhere to locate the center is equally challenging. This review focuses on the use of the term "right." 

A historically emblematic moment of the right is often found in its isolationism as shown in the America First organization, Robert Taft, and Russell Kirk. Paleoconservative Kirk's isolationism was so strong that he actually voted for the Socialist candidate Norman Thomas in 1944. Those were the days.   

Forget the right's inherent isolationism they advocated in hopes of concealing itself from the diseased non-Western world, the right wing's organizing principle could advocate viewing foreign states themselves as assets awaiting plunder.  Naomi Klein suggests this view that the right's natural position and purpose was to support Milton Friedman and free market ideology: " In the United States of the 1950s, access to those kinds of riches was still decades away. Even with a hard-core Republican like Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, there was no chance of a radical right turn like the one the Chicagoans were suggesting-public services and workers' protections were far too popular." 1 Klein's analysis implies that from a short span of 11 years from America First's disbanding until Ike assumed the U.S. Presidency in 1953, the right morphed from isolationist to an aggressive advocate of international plunder, willing execution of Milton Friedman’s Chicagoan ideology. 

Klein's recasts the "right wing" from dull isolationists petrified into a Paleolithic condition into global executors of a Shock Doctrine that destabilizes already weakened economies. Once weakened into utter powerlessness, this recreated "right wing" can empower a dictator keen on experimenting with Friedmanite market-ideology. Before the green eyeshade dries on these polished Paleolithic relics, another global though non-pecuniary agenda begs for "right-wing" action. Professor James Petras demonstrates this other useful application of the right wing: 

"The turn to a totally “unbalanced” militarized foreign policy, promoted on behalf of Israel, has completely unhinged the link between US military policy from its overseas economic interests.  Paradoxically Israel’s fifth column has been an important factor facilitating China’s displacement of the US in major world markets. What had been historically a “stateless” people (citizens of secular non-Jewish states) primarily defined by their entrepreneurial capacities, has in present day America, been redefined by its mainstream leaders as the principle upholders of a doctrine of offensive wars (“preventive wars”) linked to Israel, the most militarized country in the world.  As a result of their influence and in alliance with rightwing extremists (my italics), Washington has forsaken important economic opportunities in favor of projections of military power"2.   

So Klein's right wing are proto-capitalists zealots, while Petras' version forsakes economic objectives for military might. The right wing performs other mundane tasks that, nonetheless, show observers their functional diversity. This diversity ranges from the aforementioned pursuits to shadow boxing and sucker punching leftist historical revisionism of various episodes that occurred during the Cold War: though an historical era the Left and Right's constant battle to shape the definitive interpretation of it have transformed it from this historical to the eternal. Notice the right's juxtaposition shown by constantly purveying both historical delusions and by falsely promoting the current Academy as a subversive institution:

"Though regarding the revisionists as politically errant, Haynes at least did not exaggerate their power to warp the minds of fellow Americans. The same cannot be said of some of those who have taken up Haynes and Klehr's side in the debate over the meaning of the VENONA/Moscow documents. (These refer to the documents that chronicle the Soviet and Communist attempts to subvert the U.S.) In the pages of Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on various right wing Web sites and talk shows, the 'paranoid style' reasserted itself time and again. If left-wing conspiracy was not necessarily the motive force of history, it was certainly the motive force behind the writing and teaching of the subject in the nation's institutions of higher learning" 3. The right wages its eternal battle to create a certain historical consciousness of the Cold War. This imperialistic contingent of the right continues its efforts to shape the understanding of contemporary conditions as well, taking common cause with the non-isolationist neo-con President George W Bush: 

"We write at a moment when university faculties are being maligned as the 'weak link in America's response to the attack' of September 11, when right-wing Web sites report on dissenting voices in the academy as the "fifth column," and when President George W. Bush has branded those who question his explanations for the U.S. invasion of Iraq as 'revisionist historians'  4. 

The right can juxtapose itself between different periods, and can divide and conquer by attempting to preserve traditional hierarchies while in a populist tone oppose them. Thomas Frank discusses how the right splintered between a "backlash" right and the "corporate right," resulting in market populism muting the former while the latter used market populism to dethrone hierarchies and satisfy the popular will:

"The nineties were, of course, a time of populism generally in American culture. Even as the remnants of thebacklash right rallies for family values and traditional culture, the corporate right was developing a market populism that identified the will of the people with the deeds of the market, that agreed with the cult studs (Cultural Studies professors) on the revolutionary power of popular culture and the wonders of subjects who talked back, that gloried in symbolic assaults on propriety, on brokers, on bankers, on old-style suit-wearers of all descriptions, The populism of the microchip, not the populism of Pat Buchanan, was the truly hegemonic ideology of the 'New Economy.'  And it bore at least a superficial resemblance to the pedagogical populism of cultural studies. Cult studs reveled in recounting their persecution by backlash right-wingers driven to apoplectic fury by their sassy questioning of aesthetic hierarchies; but as the back lash dried up, as its leading figures abandoned the field, and as it was supplanted by market populism, it made more sense to ask whether or not the politics of the cult stud were in fact as revolutionary as they seemed." 5.

In this context the right shows the flexibility to be conservative and subversive, and, albeit inadvertently, to concur with the institutionally populist Cultural Studies departments who by their own account are persecuted by that same right wing. Who can find the center navigating through these cultural twists?   

The right wing exists in so many sinews that they remain within our immediate reach, and they pursue such contradictory goals that they assume identities of opportunistic equivocators. Regardless whether the right contributes to a healthy body politic, the vastness with which they are defined defies reliable identification of what is truly "right of center." With no right easily identifiable, our body politic experiences constant centrifugal shifts. A clearer understanding of the underlying myths used to identify the left/right/center is needed to improve the overall quality and communicative potential of our public discourse. Right now we have no center to hold onto. 

1. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 57-58. 

2. Professor James Petras, "War with China? The Dangers of a Global Conflagration: Rising and Declining Economic Powers: The Sino-US Conflict Deepens." Global Research.ca. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18913.

3. Maurice Isserman and Ellen Schrecker, "Papers of a Dangerous Tendency," in Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, ed. Ellen Schrecker (New York: The New Press, 2004), 171-73.

4. Ibid.

5. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 287.