The Left is extreme, the Right is extreme. In the middle lies truth and reason.
None of this is true—but it is taken for granted, even by many of those on the Left and the Right. The Left is right about some things, as is the Right, and centrists are frequently, perhaps usually, proven wrong. But moderates control news and entertainment media and thus the narrative. In their telling, which even those of us who don’t believe when we stop to think about it, buy into because we are soaking, nay, drowning in their framing, the range of normal/sane/calm political debate lies in the middle. All else is kookery.
So we are told.
We have so poisoned our planet that a third of all species alive today will be extinct by 2100. We are the poorest developed country. Most people can’t afford healthcare. These are radical problems. They don’t call for a compromise, or splitting the difference, or good-enough solutions. Radical problems call for radical solutions. Oncologists don’t prescribe half chemo.
Radical left environmentalists deserve center stage in any discussion about pollution and ecocide for the simple reasons that they alone understand that the issue is enormously important, the crisis is grave, and anything less than a comprehensive global solution that totally transforms capitalism has a chance of addressing it. They are so sidelined from corporate media that they receive less of a fair hearing in the news than white supremacists.
Centrism is a political leaning. In the U.S., moderates are typically liberal technocrats or center-right pre-Trump Republicans. They have biases and prejudices and they succumb to shibboleths and bigotries. Yet the mainstream media labels centrists/moderates as “objective” or neutral—i.e., they don’t notice those biases because they agree with them. (This is analogous to how Fox News and other Murdoch-owned right-wing media outlets characterize mainline Democrats as “far left.”) Centrist or technocratic talking heads from thinktanks like the Brookings Institution are often identified solely by their professional credentials rather than their political stance.
I listen to a lot of NPR. So many writers from The Atlantic magazine appear as guests on the network that it’s jarring. It’s almost as if there are no journalists working anywhere else. So, while researching this piece, I looked into whether there was a formal partnership between the two organizations. It turns out that there is one with PBS, the staid analysis round-up “Washington Week with The Atlantic” TV show, and there is predictable cross-pollination between NPR and PBS, but no formal deal.
The Atlantic leans center-left—by American standards, which is what we’re discussing here. These days, it cultivates that ideological positioning with domestic news and analysis that reliably criticizes Republican positions. Flying under the radar are foreign policy positions that echo neo-conservative and unreconstructed Cold Warrior views so far right that Trump is to their left on some issues. Because The Atlantic is “moderate,” and adheres to baseline grammatical and editorial standards, its writers go on NPR every day to express opinions that are right-wing by any objective standard but are not only not labeled as such, they are not identified at all.
Say hello to the secret “neutral” right-wing extremists.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic espouses a set of retrograde views of the world that place her firmly in the camp of Bush-era neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. She hates Russia, hates socialism and communism, favors NATO expansion into the former Soviet space, rarely criticizes U.S. actions overseas, supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and pushes for more weapons to Ukraine.
My biggest problem with neoconservatives is not that they’re warmongers. It’s that they’re always wrong. Invading Iraq was never going to set off democratic dominos across the Middle East, there were no WMDs, Ukraine was not a democracy and has become a dictatorship, the people of Iran are in no position to overthrow their government. Left, right, or middle, political analysts should be good at prognosticating.
Like her fellow neoconservative and bestie William Kristol, Applebaum can almost always be counted upon for a right-wing foreign policy take that turns out to have been mistaken. Because she’s at The Atlantic, however, she’s identified as an anodyne “historian and journalist.” Her agenda—an extreme one at that, one espoused by only a tiny minority of voters—is concealed from NPR’s bourgeois audience. She’s entitled to her opinions. And readers are entitled to be informed about the fact that she’s opinionated.
Even when centrism is truly centrism, centrism is not neutral. Nor, when 63% of the electorate self-identifies as liberal or conservative, is centrism normal. It is high time to stop conflating moderation with neutrality.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
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Re “Yet the mainstream media labels centrists/moderates as ‘objective’ or neutral—i.e., they don’t notice those biases because they agree with them.”
Main-Stream Media is a bit more cynical and treacherous than you are willing to give it “credit.” It clearly “notices” those biases because they have created and promulgated such terms “centrist” and “moderate” (but hardly ONLY those) precisely to obscure the “negative-for-all-life” political reality of their biases … and those of their corporate overseers.
Your revelation of the elevated and respected(?) class of professional Russia-haters is much appreciated. While this class is ably represented by the execrable Ms Applebaum, it is quite robust and includes the likes of Fiona Hill, Kaja Kallas and Hillary Clinton, creator of the 4-year, giddily media-enabled, hallucination know as Russiagate.
This leads directly to … there is no more possibility of a “transformation” of capitalism than there is half-chemotherapy or the biological state of being “a little pregnant.”
For general illustration of media memes: a video by recently deceased Michael Parenti: “The Fake Philosophy Behind Capitalism.” Summary: ” … Parenti exposes the ‘rag-to-riches’ mythologies and the ‘prosperity gospel’ of modern corporate capitalism. He argues that no ruling class rules nakedly; they instead adorn their power with symbols and myths to justify their privileged positions at the apex of the social pyramid.” URL: https://tinyurl.com/3tuz8xxz
“Capitalism” means very different things to different people and no retrospective on the historical use of the word is going to close that gap. Many would say that Bernie Sanders’s “democratic socialism” is a form of capitalism. Many would say that his ideas do represent some concrete steps towards a just economy. (I’m not saying that his approach is perfect nor that there isn’t much hard work ahead of us to make these ideas better ….)
What I am saying is: please do go ahead and continue to bash the that which you call “capitalism” that need to be bashed — you are doing us a good service — but please give us the details rather than the umbrella term “capitalism.” I worry that if you summarize your bashing as against capitalism, half of your audience won’t understand what you are bashing, and may think that you are actually bashing ideas that can play a role in a just economy. In short, please continue, but with details.
(There may be more than one version of this comment ultimately appearing)
Of course Sanders “democratic socialism” has to be a form of capitalism because he has been revealed as a cynical shill for the DNC corporate capitalist sycophants and, therefore, he must be a shill for capitalism itself. (Have you taken the opportunity to ask him what he means by “socialism” … he certainly has, or had before he threw it away, an actual audience.)
Capitalism is the ownership by the few of the means of production. This implies the control of the entire economy and the “natural” selection of the most avaricious of the population to be the select few. In practice, at this point of capitalism’s historical development, it has not and will not tolerate competition either from other capitalists and certainly not from other economic systems. The issues are, by definition: capitalism a) can NOT be democratic b) MUST demand always more consumption, the cause of the climate threat to the survival of OUR species and c) uses essentially continuous war as a more “efficient” substitute for the former cute and cuddly system of European colonialism for obtaining labor, resources and profits.
Socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers who actually DO the production. This doubles the workers’ democracy/day from their 8 hours of it in after-work “free-time” by the additional 8-hours of it AT the work place (assuming “-ism” neutrality during the 8-hours of sleep time.)
There would remain “markets” and their goods for sale to be used privately by their purchasers as now. Contrary to the standard, well-disseminated lies, the workers would be seeking profit from sales of their work. However, since the workers can now determine what, and how much, is made, there is a chance, heretofore demonstrably impossible under capitalism, that production of dangerous and/or useless items or those of planned obsolescence or for killing others in mass quantities, will drop precipitously. Why? Workers could refuse to raise their profits by endangering their children directly now or their futures, for example, by continuous war and/or climate catastrophe.
Of course this would not be easy … precisely because, as Ted puts it above, we are “drowning” in the self-perpetuating, and apparently well-absorbed, propaganda that capitalism spews continuously to distract the masses from the exploitation, on many levels, to which they are subject.
Additionally, the laws of the land are made by and for capitalists and, as a class, they have made any hint of allowing the realization of alternative attitudes about economics very difficult, at best.
No, this is NOT “utopia” but, rather, would make possible the mere achievement IN REALITY of the “values and goals” of the USA of which we HEAR so much and so often … as opposed to the meager, abusive and insulting version of said values and goals afforded by the terminal avarice of the few.