US President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address to Congress in the Capitol on March 1, 2022, in Washington, D.C.(Sarahbeth Maney-Pool / Getty Images)
The power of centrism as a political force comes from the fact that it’s not so much an ideology as an ambient mood. It’s the shared common sense of the elite, a set of axioms about the goodness of bipartisanship, deficit reduction, and military spending. Those who adhere to it take it so for granted that they don’t feel the need to even defend it.
Part of the achievement of Luke Savage’s new book The Dead Center is that it makes us see the almost-invisible ideology of centrism and its pervasive ability to roadblock progress. A staff writer at Jacobin and cohost of the Michael and Us podcast, Luke is also a delightful guest on this episode of The Time of Monsters, as we survey the trajectory of centrism from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.