Goldilocks and the Three Bears themed breakfast cocoa advertisement from 1873 (Public Domain)
Nazism led to the gas chambers, communism led to the gulags, and neoliberalism leads to soup kitchens.” -Paul Verhaeghe, Says Who? The Struggle for Authority in a Market-Based Society
Surely you recall the fairytale’s narrative logic from childhood. Goldilocks tresspasses in the cottage of a family of bears. First she tries on Papa Bear’s politics, but Papa Bear’s politics are too right. Then she tries Momma Bear’s politics, but Momma Bear’s politics are too left. Finally, Goldilocks tries Baby Bear’s politics, and Baby Bear’s politics are juuuuuuuuust right. And like that Goldilocks becomes a liberal centrist of the Clintonian Third Way variety.
I know that’s not quite how the story goes. Of the things Goldilocks sampled during her uninvited visit to the bears’ cottage, politics wasn’t among them. Nevertheless, if politics had been on her menu, we all know that Goldilocks would have decided precisely as I just described. We know this because we’re well acquainted with Goldilocks’ shtick. When making selections Goldilocks always finds the middle term between two available extremes to be just right. It’s remarkably similar to the way liberal centrist thinking orients itself. Goldilocks and the centrists have more or less the same shtick. Not identical, but close enough to allow Goldilocks and the Three Bears to serve as a remarkably insightful metaphor for exploring and articulating the shortcomings of liberal centrist politics.
The ‘Just Right’ Center
Viewed in a certain light liberal centrism, this moderate, measured, non-extremist, just right politics, seems almost idyllic. Before we dive into its shortcomings, let’s take a moment to make sense of its appeal.
There is nothing inherent in liberalism as such that suggests “I am in the center.” And yet this center orientation has become a key element of its appeal. I take this to be an artifact of World War II and the Cold War, which provided us with the distinctively 20th century political spectrum we use to this day. Fascism, a 20th century invention that communists and liberal democracies joined forces to defeat in World War II, represents the far-right end of this spectrum. Soviet style communism, the liberal west’s ideological rival during the Cold War, marks the far-left end of the spectrum. And sitting in the putative ‘center’ like Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge is liberal democracy (political liberalism) and ‘free-market’ capitalism (economic liberalism). Liberalism predates both fascism and state-communism, so it obviously hasn’t always lived in the fascist-communist in-between. Now it’s hard to imagine it any other way.
There’s often plenty of wiggle room in the in-between. It seems entirely plausible, for instance, that after sampling Papa Bear’s too hot porridge and Mama Bear’s too cold porridge, Goldilocks might have made any number of declarations about Baby Bear’s porridge. It might have been cool (but not cold), or tepid, or just barely cooler than too hot. In other words, it might have been a serviceable porridge. Not great, but just sort of…“meh.” But that’s not what happens. Instead Goldilocks declares that Baby Bear’s porridge is just right. And to make it perfectly clear that this assessment wasn’t a fluke, she performs the same operation with the same results two more times: once with the just right chair bounded by a too hard and a too soft chair, and again with a just right bed bounded by a too hard and a too soft bed. When she does this she makes it clear that we’re dealing in each case with a golden mean.
Something similar is going on with liberal centrism. Virtue, Aristotle insisted, is a mean between two vicious extremes. And so it is apparently with porridge, chairs, beds, and political ideologies. The extremes of our Cold War political spectrum are vicious in just the way the Aristotelian reasoning requires. Travel to the far-right end of the spectrum (fascism) and you’ll end up in the gas chamber. Travel to the far-left end (communism) and you’ll land on the gulag archipelago. Both directions lead to totalitarian horror and mass murder. In the center is the just right domain of freedom itself, manifest in the form of a liberal democracy with a market economy. This is essentially the argument Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger offered in 1949 in one of the early articulations of Cold War liberal centrism: The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.
Virtue, Aristotle insisted, is a mean between two vicious extremes. And so it is apparently with porridge, chairs, beds, and political ideologies.
This notion that the center is a virtuous golden mean performs an important function in liberal centrist politics. It keeps us from venturing too far into the radical wilderness. Since the vicious extremes–the fascist gas chamber and the communist gulag–define the terminal ends of a bounded spectrum, you can’t run away from one without running towards the other. The best possible political position under these conditions, the just right position, is equidistant to the gas chamber and the gulag, which is the position furthest away from both. Here we must stay put. And why would we ever want to leave? This position is the home of the political virtues: democracy, equality, economic opportunity, human rights, and freedom. Who wouldn’t want to be a liberal centrist?
The Vicious Center
This idyllic post-World War II liberalism is unfortunately just that: an idyll. It was never just right–certainly not for African Americans during Jim Crow, for example, or for women, or for any number of marginalized persons and communities living as less-than-full, -free and -equal citizens in liberal democracies. Still, at mid-century the liberal position was very attractive. Thanks to New Deal policies and post-war prosperity, the United States had a large and growing middle class, broad access to affordable education, and a fairly generous welfare state. This era of widely shared economic prosperity was also considered a capitalist golden age. Compared to memories of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s purges, and rumors of starvation in the People’s Republic of China, capitalism under liberal democracy looked about as just right as perhaps it ever would.
This is the picture of liberalism that a lot of liberal centrists still think about when they think about liberal centrism. It’s such a powerful vision in the American popular imagination that in 1989–already more than a decade into the neoliberal turn that would utterly eviscerate this manifestation of liberalism–Francis Fukuyama was able to write (apparently in all seriousness) that “the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx.” Wow! Everyone is equal! This is from his celebrated essay The End of History? wherein Fukuyama used the imminent collapse of the Berlin Wall to announce that liberal democracy (and capitalism) has once-and-for-all defeated its ideological rivals fascism and communism.
Here we begin to glimpse what’s problematic about liberal centrism. If it wasn’t obvious in 1989, it’s certainly obvious today: this liberal Eden, Fukuyama’s ‘classless’ egalitarian American society basking at the benevolent end of history, is as much a fairytale as Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
If liberalism looked like a virtuous mean at mid-century, it certainly doesn’t look that way today. The Vital Center that Arthur Schlesinger defended in 1949 was a liberal democracy with a state-regulated market economy (Schlesinger defended it in these terms specifically). That is to say, it was a New Deal mixed-economy driven by Keynesian economics, which took full employment to be an economic goal. Today the state that was tasked with regulating this market economy in the interests of a democratic polity has been fully captured by the market, and market logic rather than democratic politics rules the day. Beginning with the Carter Administration’s Volcker Shock and the deregulation of transportation, and then ramping up in earnest during Reagan-Thatcherism, Keynesian economics was abandoned for the monetarist and neoliberal-style economics of Milton Freedman and FA Hayek. A long, slow dismantling of the New Deal commenced, as well as a relatively fast (during my own lifetime) redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to a tiny, ultra-rich elite.
[T]he egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx.” -Francis Fukuyama
The term liberal centrist as we use it today derives from the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who suggested a Third Way, a centrism that marries center-right and center-left policies into a newly constituted golden mean. What it meant was that the New Democrats and New Labour were signing onto the viciously retrograde Reagan-Thatcherite neoliberal economic program, moving the center distinctly to the right. And to sweeten this bitter porridge, they actively embraced New Left style social movement politics. The resulting liberal centrism is what feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser describes as Progressive neoliberalism: progressive on social issues narrowly inscribed (i.e., in a way that ensures no significant impact on economic policy), and neoliberal in its embrace of market fundamentalism.
The results of this neoliberal turn have been devastating, but many liberal centrists–still intoxicated by the Fukuyaman fairytale version of liberalism–stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the transformation has occurred. Recent economic data paints a different picture. In his influential 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century the French economist Thomas Piketty wrote:
“…it is important to note the considerable transfer of US income–on the order of 15 points–from the poorest 90 percent to the richest 10 percent since 1980. Specifically, if we consider the total growth of the US economy in the thirty years prior to the [financial] crisis, that is, from 1977 to 2007, we find that the richest 10 percent appropriated three-quarters of the growth. […] It is hard to imagine an economy and society that can continue functioning indefinitely with such extreme divergence between social groups.”
So much for Fukuyama’s egalitarian classless society. The current level of inequality in America, Piketty claims, is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.” Echoing Piketty’s assessment, a 2012 study by economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson shows that income inequality in America is likely greater than it was in 1774 even if you factor in slavery.
The Oxford, UK-based conglomeration of charitable organizations, OXFAM, publishes an annual report on economics and poverty. In January, 2016 OXFAM reported that the 62 richest individuals on earth owned the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of humanity (3.6 billion people). Only a year later (January 2017) OXFAM reported that this figure had dropped from 62 individuals to just eight men (yes men). Perhaps you’ve heard of some of these men. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos. Amancio Ortega. Mark Zuckerberg. Warren Buffett. Carlos Slim Helu. Larry Ellison. Michael “I might run for president as a Democratic centrist” Bloomberg.
In January 2018 OXFAM reported that 1% of the world’s population pocketed 87% of all of the wealth produced in 2017.
These numbers are the stuff of Dickensian fiction. It’s almost unfathomable to imagine that anyone who looks seriously at these numbers could continue to believe that the liberal center is a golden mean of freedom, equality, and post-war prosperity.
In his book Says Who? The Struggle for Authority in a Market-Based Society, Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe offers an updated description of our familiar Cold War political spectrum: “Nazism led to the gas chambers, communism led to the gulags, and neoliberalism leads to soup kitchens.” Goodbye golden mean. Hello vicious center.
Amazon, the corporation that made Jeff Bezos rich, is valued at over $1Trillion (Amazon and Apple are the most valuable corporations in history). Last year Amazon paid zero dollars in taxes on $11.2 Billion in profits. Contributing absolutely nothing to the society that made Amazon’s success possible isn’t enough though. Amazon extorted the state of Virginia out of a $750 million taxpayer-funded cash subsidy by forcing American cities to compete in a race-to-the-bottom contest for Amazon’s second world headquarters. Imagine if, after sampling Papa Bear’s too hot porridge and Mama Bear’s too cold porridge, Goldilocks found Baby Bear’s porridge bowl empty because Jeff Bezos had eaten it aaaall up.
Goldilocks is a Conservative
“Someone’s been eating my porridge!” (Public Domain)
Consider for a moment the full story arc of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks tresspasses in the bears’ cottage while they’re out. She eats some of their food, breaks one of their chairs, and sleeps in one of their beds. The bears come home and find her. They’re all “WTF are you doing?” and then Goldilocks runs off. The end. That’s it. That’s the story. There’s no real point to it. Nothing noteworthy or meaningful happens. There’s a bit of drama, but it doesn’t go anywhere, just like liberal centrist politics.
The Goldilockean dialectic is a false dialectic. The thesis and antithesis are never sublated. They persist in their unresolved tension–too hot versus too cold, too hard versus too soft. The just right sits frozen in the middle, like an insect trapped in amber. There is no movement. The engine of progress is stuck in neutral. This may be the most scandalous shortcoming of liberal centrism–that is, if you happen to find any fault with the way the world is right now.
The metaphor of a just right center is disastrous to any hope for progress. When you position your politics within a spectrum bounded on each end by horror there’s simply no room for movement–no room for change. The vicious extremes exert inward pressure towards the middle, encouraging the centrist to stay put no matter what. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher famously captured this sense of being trapped in place with the now infamous phrase “There is no alternative” (TINA). Liberal centrism in this sense functions as a conservatism. It’s conservative in the sense that it defaults to a defense of the status quo ante. The centrist can’t chart a path to a better world because all paths lead either to the gas chamber or to the gulag. The centrist is resigned to the conclusion that utopia must be right here, right now (“America is already great!”)–regardless of how vicious the status quo may have become.
Presenting a vicious status quo ante as a utopia of the present is incredibly cynical. We see this cynicism clearly in liberal centrist support for the current batch of establishment Democrat presidential candidates. The substance of these candidates’ platforms boils down to a single objective: Defeat Trump! That’s all they offer because that’s all they intend to accomplish. The reactionary Trump has “papa bear” energy. That energy, coupled with Baby Bear’s ever-shrinking bowl of porridge, is allowing Trump to drag the progressive neoliberal center in the direction of the gas chamber. Hence, he’s got to go. But then what? Then nothing. According to (neo)liberal centrist logic everything magically shifts back to being great again, even though little will have actually changed. The goal is to return to the same vicious status quo ante that drove voters to Trump in the first place.
If that platform seems a little thin, not to worry. These mainstream Democratic candidates will borrow platform positions from the progressive candidates (Medicare for all, Green New Deal, free college, Tuition reform), because these positions are actually popular with voters. However, they’ll do so only vaguely, and after dramatically throttling them back in scope and ambition in that signature do-nothing liberal centrist fashion. They have no intention of actually working to institute them. That would only lead to the gulag.
In our post-Citizens United campaign financing landscape a cynical take on these cynics might point out the political corruption angle here. This simply adds (and certainly not without merit) a financial incentive to the conservative valorization of the status quo. As Labor Institute co-founder Les Leopold has noted, what “unites” these moderate establishment candidates is “their unwillingness to take on Wall Street,” the architects and primary benefactors of our current vicious status quo ante. Because of this unwillingness, Leopold adds, “they are unable to confront the defining problem of our era—runaway inequality,” which, in Leopold’s view, transforms centrism into an “extremist ideology.” On the pretext of defending an illusory liberal Eden from fascists (Trump) and communists (Sanders, Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), centrists are driving the whole world into the soup kitchen.
Goldilocks is a Pessimist
Liberal centrists are pessimists. As progressive journalist and political speech writer RJ Eskow has observed, “The Democrats have achieved their greatest political and policy successes when they have ignored the “centrists” – in reality, ever-present naysayers who cloak their negativity in the pseudo-technocratic jargon of centrism. It’s hard to imagine that the New Deal, Medicare, or the Moon Landing would have ever happened if milquetoast Democrats like these had been in charge.”
Centrists obviously don’t describe themselves as pessimists. Instead they describe themselves as realists, which is how pessimists always euphemize their pessimism. This tendency is constantly confirmed by the centrist’s persistent demand that we be realistic whenever anyone advocates for meaningful political change. Proposals for transforming the status quo into something different–something better–are dismissed as pie-in-sky. It’s a wet blanket that centrists throw over the top of any expression of idealistic enthusiasm.
It’s hard to imagine that the New Deal, Medicare, or the Moon Landing would have ever happened if milquetoast Democrats like these had been in charge.” -RJ Eskow
See, for example, Senator Diane Feinstein explaining to existentially-threatened children from the Sunrise movement that we cannot avert human extinction because it would be too expensive. Doing what it takes to preserve organized human life on earth just isn’t realistic.
See Speaker of the House and professional kill-joy Nancy Pelosi letting the air out of a balloon in February: “We welcome all the enthusiasm that people want to put on the table, and the Green New Deal is one of them, but we have to operate in a way that’s evidence-based, current in its data.” This is forewarning that once we dig into the nitty-gritty of this ambitious save life on earth proposal we’re sure to find out that it’s unrealistic. It’s too bad because we were really rooting for humanity.
See small-dreaming non-visionary Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer justify his refusal to support Medicare for all. “I’m going to support a plan that can pass,” he explained. Chuck can’t see a path from here to there, so instead he’ll chart a path from here to here. That’s more realistic.
This is what happens when you adopt the status quo ante as your North Star. There is nowhere to go because you’ve always already arrived.
Liberal Centrist Post-politics
It gets worse. The centrist’s insistence that we remain realistic about politics isn’t simply a reflection of pessimism. It also reflects a deeply internalized post-political orientation. That is to say, it reflects a belief that political change is not only improbable, but impossible. Politics are over. There is nothing left for us to do but to allow elites (who know better than us) to administer our neoliberal utopia of the present.
Politics–the means by which human beings collectively manage their affairs–unfold historically. When Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989 that liberalism had vanquished its ideological rivals fascism and communism, heralding the end of history, he was also declaring the end of politics. In doing so, Fukuyama, a member of the Reagan Administration at the time, was giving expression to one of neoliberalism’s ideological first principles. This first principle was most famously articulated by the Thatcherite expression we’ve already mentioned. To silence any debate about the shortcomings of global capitalism, free trade, and unregulated markets (i.e., neoliberalism), Thatcher would simply declare, “There is no alternative” (TINA for short). She kept saying it until it stuck. This naturalization of neoliberal economic policy, like Fukuyama’s attempt to ossify history, had a clear aim: to create the illusion of a politico-economic necessity such that it would no longer occur to people that they were free to pursue alternatives to neoliberalism via political means.
In the course of the gradual neoliberal neutralization and capture of liberal politics, “There is No Alternative” or “TINA” ended up getting internalized by liberal centrists. They’ve drunk the neolibral Kool-Aid, unwittingly in most cases, and now they believe it. They think this bit of ideology–this post-politics–is reality. This is what cultural theorist Mark Fisher meant in referring to neoliberalism by an alternative descriptive name: capitalist realism.
In his book by the same name (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?) Fisher notes that “[a]n ideological position can never really be successful until it is naturalized.” What it means for an ideological position to be ‘naturalized’ in this sense is that the ideology ceases to be thought of as a value or an idea and instead is perceived as a ‘fact’, as a part of reality itself. Capitalist realism (aka neoliberalism) is ‘reality’ in just this sense–as a naturalized ideology.
When a liberal centrist politician suggests that ambitious progressive political programs are unrealistic, we shouldn’t mistake this as a simple plea for moderation or an incremental approach to change.We have every reason to believe that what they mean is that these programs are literally impossible. Until they awaken from their capitalist realist ideological slumber, we should view their half-hearted gestures to partially or “pragmatically” support these programs anyway with skepticism.
Baby Bear is a Baby
“Sleeping in my bed!” (Public Domain)
Consider the story arc of Goldilocks and the Three Bears one more time. Goldilocks tresspasses in the bears’ cottage. She eats their food, breaks a chair, and sleeps in one of their beds. The bears return and are alarmed to find what Goldilocks has done. Goldilocks runs off. The end. It doesn’t seem to have a point.
This pointlessness was not lost on the Austrian-born American psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. In 1976 Bettelheim published a book entitled The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales. The value of fairytales, Bettelheim claimed, was in encouraging children to deal with the existential puzzles they must confront in the process of maturing into adults–problems like how to cope with separation anxiety and how to deal with oedipal feelings and sibling rivalry. Much to Bettelheim’s consternation one fairytale fails to fulfill this important function: Goldilocks and the Three Bears. As author John Updike noted in his 1976 New York Times review of The Uses of Enchantment, Bettleheim reports in “a rather grumpy tone” that in Goldilocks and the Three Bears “nothing much happens.”
Goldilocks ultimately fails to find what is fitting for her. The bears, rather than being touched by her misadventure, are appalled. They don’t accept the outsider the way the dwarves do in Snow White. This might have provided children with a moral about acceptance and generosity. Nor, on the other hand, do the bears eat Goldilocks for her transgressions, as was the case in an earlier version of the fairytale. That might have served as a cautionary tale about respecting other people’s possessions. “[A]t its end there is neither recovery nor consolation;” Bettelheim laments, “there is no resolution of conflict, and thus no happy ending.”
Because of its inherent stay putness, because its engine of progress is stuck in neutral, liberal centrism under neoliberal conditions disappoints in a very similar fashion. There is no resolution to conflict, and thus no happy ending.
It’s significant to observe that the just right selections that Goldilocks makes again and again belong to Baby Bear and that Baby Bear is a baby. By identifying with Baby Bear Goldilocks arrests her development at the infant stage. For Bettleheim, this is what’s wrong with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It fails to encourage children “to pursue the hard labor of solving, one at a time, the problems which growing up presents.”
The political analogue here is straightforward enough. Liberal centrism is the idealization of arrested development itself. As practitioners of capitalist realist post-politics, liberal centrists refuse to pursue the hard labor of solving, one at a time, the difficult problems we all face as members of a democratic polity. This paralyzing timidity even in the face of existential threat (human extinction) is, from a grown up point-of-view, irresponsible in the extreme. To borrow vernacular from the Millennial generation, liberal centrists refuse to adult.
We should add that running to Papa Bear (the solution proposed by Trump and the other “daddies” of the world (Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro) simply perpetuates, rather than solves the problem of refusing to adult. Running to daddy to solve their problems is what children do.
On the Virtues of Disillusionment
When Papa Bear Trump promises to “Make America Great Again,” liberal centrists repeat the tone-deaf refrain “America is already great.” But for many Americans, and more every day, this simply doesn’t ring true. Indeed, plenty of people in the world are losing patience with Goldilocks’ Baby Bear ethos, the refusal to grow up and face reality that it portends, and especially the economic viciousness it masks. Why can’t (or won’t) liberal centrists see this?
Using the Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a metaphor, in this essay I’ve argued that instead of confronting the vicious truth of a world ravaged by 30 years of neoliberalism, liberal centrists insist upon living in a kind of false utopia of the present, modeled after a mid-century liberal fairytale fueled by Cold War ideology. This fairytale, in its most egregious form, insists that the American Dream is alive and well, that most Americans are middle class, that the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest is narrow, and that class mobility and economic opportunity are abundant. In its more sober Capitalist Realist form, the fairytale acknowledges that problems exist, but concludes that there are no political avenues to address them (TINA). Both of these versions are delusional.
This being the case, I want to conclude by making a plea for embracing disillusionment.
Already in 1961, in his classic The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel Boorstein offered the following observation regarding Americans:
“We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very existence.”
Boorstein was among the first to delve comprehensively into the ideologically-distorting power of “the image” (fueled by the 20th century advent of mass media). Since then much has been written about how mass media culturally reproduces not only ideology, but illusions, including what I’ve been describing as the liberal centrist fairytale. Becoming disillusioned, on Boorstein’s telling, entails having the ground pulled from beneath your feet. It entails tearing down the world you inhabit, even if that world is an illusion that keeps you from confronting reality.
Disillusionment is quite understandably painful. Consequently, if you attempt to disabuse liberal centrists of their delusion, they’ll fight you. We see this clearly in political discourse today, during this election cycle. They’ll accuse you of being a toxic bro, a misogynist, a racist, a Russian agent. Anything to keep the fairytale alive.
All of this work to maintain the delusion notwithstanding, however, the world can ill afford to protect the centrist from disillusionment. The future itself may depend on insisting that they embrace their disillusionment so they can begin adulting again in the domain of the political.
This plea is offered not only to liberal centrists themselves, who ought to embrace their own disillusionment. This plea especially extends to those of you who may know and love a liberal centrist. To you I recommend the following: disabuse them of their illusions. Unplug them from The Matrix. Give them the red pill.
