While I’m too lazy to gather the links, I ask any reader who drops by to rest assured this is not the first time I am beating this woefully dead horse. I was moved to this repetion when I stumbled upon this New York Times article in my RSS feed. The header?
Biden Scales Back His Agenda in Hopes of Bringing Moderates Onboard.
The article summary:
President Biden has acknowledged in a meeting with House Democrats in recent days that he and Democratic leaders will need to pare down their plan in a concession to centrist holdouts.
(Emphasis added in both cases)
And, of course, the article goes on to label Sinema and Manchin as centrists.
It should not be lost on these writers that the use of the terms I’ve highlighted implies that those to whom they have applied that label are commendably situating themselves where the bulk of the American electorate also finds itself. They are commendatory labels and amount to an implicit endorsement of the position of these politicians, whether that is the intent of the writer or not.
What is infuriating is that these people are not centrists by any definition of the term, nor are they moderates, if one assumes, as do press types, that the words are synonymous. Let Paul Krugman speak for me:
Corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were all in on entitlement reform but are lobbying furiously against Build Back Better. Indeed, the Democrats trying to scuttle Biden’s agenda are more accurately described as the party’s corporate wing than as “centrists.” After all, polls suggest that the policies they oppose are highly popular, so in that sense they’re well to the right of the political center.
It is also the case that most people, particularly Democrats (and these people even describe themselves as Democrats), recognize the reality of climate change and the need to address it. Not so the “moderate, centrist” Joe Manchin, who is busily scuttling any meaningful movement to address climate change. After all, he’s got a lot of money invested in coal.
Words have both literal meanings and connotations. Both “moderate” and “centrist” have positive connotations. Since the literal meaning of the word does not apply to any of the so-called “moderate” or “centrist” Democrats that are doing the bidding of the Republicans, they are getting the benefit of that positive connotation without earning it.
Postscript: For those not recognizing it, the title of this post is a paraphrase of a line from Walt Whitman, America’s greatest poet.
Post a Comment