Center-Right the Natural Fulcrum?

Jon Meacham argues that the United States is a center-right nation, based on the observation that recently we have tended to elect Republicans to the White House. But the matter is more complex than that one barometer would indicate. During the period of Republican presidential ascendancy, the American people have also tended to elect Democratic congresses, suggesting a center-left nation. What does it mean for a voter to prefer a Republican president and a Democratic representative or senator?

This may be more a matter of social psychology than of political or economic ideology. While there is in the American character a deeply patriotic, traditional and libertarian streak, there is also a strong bent for progress, change, increasing democratization and reinvention. This schizophrenic voter preference—for Republicans in presidents but Democrats in legislators—reflects both tendencies, which together comprise a paradox at the heart of American character. This has been the case from the beginning. At the very founding of the nation, there were many conservatives who would have preferred to have a King George rather than a President Washington. That throwback to a pre-republican sensibility suggests how our presidents have always symbolically embodied for us our most traditional sense of national identity. The president’s policies and principles are important, but he or she is also important to us as a quasi-royal embodiment of the national self. We invest our feelings of identity and safety more with them than with our legislative representatives, whom we tend to vote into office to invent solutions to current national problems and make progress in national policy.

This being the case, the Republican playbook in presidential politics appeals to our existential fears and sense of national identity more effectively than does that of the Democrats. The Democratic presidential playbook has during the recent Republican dominance of the White House tended to emphasize policy. These existential and patriotic themes resonate most vibrantly in the center-right of our political spectrum, and Americans look more to the executive sphere of our tripartite system of government for assurance in these matters. The Republican run in presidential politics may be more a matter of political and sociological savvy in catering to these primal needs, in contrast to the Democrats’ inattentiveness on this score, than of where the fulcrum-center is in our political spectrum.

A good part of the political talent of Barack Obama consists in neutralizing the Republican advantage in this regard, and that political talent dovetails with a potential for ingenious statecraft, inasmuch as he and his advisors seem to understand the symbolic function of the presidency as well as their Republican counterparts recently have. He cedes no advantage to the Republicans on the importance of national identity and religious faith. He is campaigning in a way that provides assurance to the nation’s psyche, despite Republican attempts to paint him as the un-American other. His assuring bearing in symbolic and psychic politics will allow him to govern from the center-left, leaving citizens’ sense of national pride intact, appealing not to fear, but instead to hope (much as Reagan in some ways did, by the way) and massaging the electorate toward a more inclusive, less divisive, less jingoistic patriotism. At the same time as he is careful to embody a healthy American self-regard, he will pursue innovative and progressive policies. His approach perhaps represents a decisive and psychically safe shift away from the center-right toward the center-left, or the true center, in presidential, symbolic politics, which is where the nation tends to settle in legislative, policy politics. He is working concertedly to make it symbolically and psychically safe for citizens to support executive efforts to do what needs to be done in policy.