The Radical Center

One thing that has characterized the early twenty-first century and the affirmation of the online society is a deliberate blend of political terms and ideologies. It is not rare for one to wonder why the left sounds more and more like the right and the right like the left. The popular right supports pro-gay, pro-free speech, pro-Israel ideas that used to be supported by the left; discriminatory woke, pro-Palestine, and pro-terrorist ideas are supported by the left, though they used to be supported by the right (Palestine was never supported by the right except by Iran). Ideologues have stopped being in governments and political party ivory towers but have descended onto social media and University campuses. Discussions are held on social media, not face to face, under online avatars, where dwarfs become giants and giants disappear. The truth is that this blending of ideologies is happening by design and largely to the detriment of the center. The status quo and the defense of institutions don’t generate strong emotions, don’t work up an online audience and as such don’t get clicks. If this blend was by design who designed it?

The same people who have been ruling your life through the internet since the beginning of the twenty-first century are the answer to that question. The owners of the tech companies realized midway through the first decade of this century that dominating and changing the way humans communicate was paramount for their profits. Social media companies now have a monopoly on politics, marketing, and even personal speech. For them, the more radical you become, the better; the more clicks you will generate when you see the transgender Algerian boxer, as a symbol of the “woke left.” This way you will not be worked up about the stagnation of salaries, the destruction of human labor, and the transfer of wealth to those same social media and online conglomerates. Soon people will be receiving their government’s universal income in crypto and blaming it on the radical left or the radical right according to the tastes their social media overlords detected on their metadata. Meanwhile, the ones in the middle are the recipients of all hate. In the 90s there were few sexier expressions in the political lexicon than “I have no idea” or “I am in the center”. That meant you were for the status quo, for the institutions, for the multicultural, multi-ethnic society to move forward with slight progressive slow changes.

The online society and the precariousness of work relationships have centered on politics. According to a Pew Poll from 2014, almost four in ten (38%) politically engaged Democrats were consistent liberals, up 8% from the percentage taken two decades before in 1994. 33% of Republicans expressed consistently conservative views, up from 23% in the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” But a decade ago, just 10% of politically engaged Republicans had across-the-board conservative attitudes. One can speculate based on the advent of Trump how much this tendency has worsened. Yes, there is a clear tendency for the ascension of the far-right over the far-left but this, once again, has to do with the internet. The far left grew in the streets through face-to-face interactions. Environments where avatars allow individuals to say what they think in anonymity favor the right. The ascension of extremes is by design of the economic model; I propose the ascension of the far-right is by design of the ideologies themselves.

In an environment where the extremes prosper, centrism and its unwillingness to change with the times have become extreme. Macron and his support of woke ideologies in the Paris Olympics and Hilary Clinton’s support of a Hawkish US neo-con foreign policy would be embraced by voters, if not ignored, in the 90s. Joe Biden’s middle-of-the-road economic approach would have been an overwhelming success just 10 years ago. Keir Starmer’s return to the Blair glory days would have been welcomed in triumph yet the streets of the UK are literally in flames. The refusal of the center to realize that times have changed is itself extremist. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are making the rules of this game; under their rules, there are no facts, and there is no status quo. The center keeps showing up with a knife to this gunfight. Either the center attacks the design of the system, which is the economic model of the last 24 years, or it plays by its rules.

Ironically, the first politician in the world to understand this was good old Bibi Netanyahu whose Yale education and Sheldon Adelson funding allowed to understand that the perceptions in social media and the collapse of the Avodah (Israeli Labor Party) would guarantee him decades in power. The ones who demonstrate against Bibi don’t shout “socialism” but “democracy”. That’s right, the centrists are now the radicals on the streets fighting the police water cannons. Moreover, like the radicals of yesteryear, these centrist radicals are unable to organize themselves politically and spend time fighting police charges while their adversaries take over the fields of Zuckerberg and Musk to make policy.