Tipping the Canoe: The Fallacy of Centrism and Moral Authority

As a Missourian, I have a wonderful access to my state’s incredible variety of river systems and a state park infrastructure that permits frequent summer canoeing. For anyone familiar, an important skill to acquire is that, when the waters get rough, you need to be able to maintain balance or risk being tipped out. My friends and I are all amateurs. We canoe and camp because it is fun and we have the resources and desire to do it. As such, we tend to capsize…a lot.

On my last float, my canoeing partner was a friend who had brought her black lab along. Being a lab, she was not particularly keen on sitting still. By the end of our ten mile float, we tipped around five or six times, three to four of which were directly related to the dog. When traveling through rough or fast water, we would often have to lean in one direction of the other to bring the canoe back to center. This lean was necessary to keep the canoe upright and us out of the water.

Politically, I adopt the label of conservative. I’m change averse, prone to support stability and gradualism, and don’t want to work too hard unless needed. Ideologically, prior to 2009, I was aligned with the Republican Party. I was prone to prefer low taxes, military adventurism, and in general believed Republicans to be morally superior to Democrats. So, when in 2008, Barack Obama was elected president, the backlash from Republicans that evoked a disturbing amount of racially based argument against him. Aside from triggering an immense amount of personal soul searching, I was left with a question of how to respond to an increasingly belligerent form of partisanship and obstructionism following the 2010 midterm elections.

To try and bring the political canoe back to balance, I leaned against the Tea Party activism that I found troubling. I backed center-right Republicans and policies. Over the next five years, seeing the country tilt further and further rightward, I continued to lean left. My basic conservative principles never changed. I simply kept realizing the imbalance was worse than I had initially understood. In 2015, finding the center I had been trying to lean toward still unable to compensate for the tilting of the political canoe, I came to the conclusion that a hard tilt to the left was needed.

Now, when canoeing, if you over-correct, you’ll simply tilt in a new direction and still end up capsized. The key is to tilt, then return to center. However, where that center lies changes vastly upon a wide range of circumstances. When the waters are slow and tranquil, we can be content to float and let the river take us where it will. However, choppy water requires an active involvement in what is going on. With Donald Trump’s entrance into an already choppy political currents of the 2016 presidential primary, the notion of center as being somewhere between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would have put us somewhere around Lindsey Graham.

This burdensome appeal moderation seems, philosophically, to be an unquestioned Aristotelian holdover. That regardless of context, the center is always best. This is firstly, a complete misreading of what Aristotle’s Golden Mean is. If radicalism is your status quo, that doesn’t change radicalism’s definition. As children, Americans are raised to believe there are two parties, Democrats on the left and Republicans on the right, and that somewhere in the middle is the best way. Part of this misreading ignores Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s political idealism. A pragmatist and relative conservative, Aristotle sees Plato’s ideas too prone to abuse by bad actors. Looking at the political climate of Athens from the death of Socrates to Alexander the Great’s conquests. Aristotle was understandably suspicious of both the populism that put Socrates to death, and the tyranny which arose in the aftermath.

If Donald Trump is your perception of “centrism”, then Hillary Clinton is understandably radical by that metric. However, any objective standard of “moderation” would be hard pressed to put Trump as a centrist (even of just compared to the predominantly center-right power structure of US governance). However, the idea of “center”, “moderate”, “radical”, and a whole host of other terminisms is subjective to our own reference points. My geographic designation is in the relative center of a state in the relative center of the lower forty-eight. However, if we look at the totality of the planet, I’m far from the planet’s equatorial center (latitudinally, I’m just over 39º N).

I highlighted this in my “Incivility” piece, discussing Deborah Tannen’s deconstruction of the both sides fallacy in American notions of argumentation, “Yet another troubling trap laid by the two-sides-to-every-issue approach is sometimes there is only one side: truth.” If we are to extend our canoe model to a 1:1 interpretation, then somewhere in the vast spectrum of American politics is some “true” notion of center. However, ideologies don’t like to fit into neat little boxes and are far from consistent. The Three-fifths Compromise was an appeal to the center on the slavery question that perpetuated itself in part because of a long series of compromises still being debated today on just what to do about a population brought to this country in chains to toil for our profit. These compromises may have kept the American ship steady and “on course”, but one would have to be brazenly bigoted to argue that chattel slavery was somehow morally superior to abolition and social integration or the primitive barbarism most advocates of slavery asserted Africans live in without the white supremacist notion of civility.

In framing these arguments about “moderation” and appeals to finding “common ground”, a deep interrogation and contextualization is required. The claim on which this appeal rests needs to be well argued and supported. Reinforcing any such claim with banal stacking of appeals to moderation is simply a circular argument. Before we can begin to lean one way or another to right our canoe, we have to know where the center is to be found.