In a development that will surprise precisely nobody who has been paying attention, a gaggle of Australian independent MPs have launched a new centrist party. The announcement was met with the kind of tepid enthusiasm usually reserved for a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey. The party, we are told, is for those who are tired of the ‘extremes’ of left and right. Because nothing says ‘bold new politics’ like splitting the difference between two already rather similar flavours of managerial technocracy.
Across the pond, British political strategists are nodding sagely, seeing ‘parallel trends’. Of course they are. The same intellectual rot that hollowed out our own political discourse has infected the Antipodes. The rise of the ‘radical centre’ is not a sign of political maturity. It is a symptom of intellectual decadence, a retreat from ideology into a grey sludge of focus-grouped pablum. We have seen this before. In the late Roman Republic, as the old certainties crumbled, a host of ‘moderate’ factions emerged, all promising to unite the ‘sensible’ citizens. They succeeded only in clearing the path for the strongmen.
The independent MPs in question have distinguished themselves primarily by being not quite as objectionable as the major party hacks. This is the bar we have set for political virtue: the ability to avoid outright scandal for a full parliamentary term. The new party’s platform, as best as I can discern from the vapour emanating from press releases, amounts to ‘nicer politics’ and ‘evidence-based policy’. As if the major parties don’t already claim to be evidence-based. As if the entire problem isn’t that what counts as ‘evidence’ has been captured by a narrow, self-serving élite.
But let us be honest. The real appeal of centrism is not its policies. It is its aesthetic. It is the promise of politics without the mess, without the conflict, without the need to actually argue for a vision of the good life. It is the politics of the management consultant, the HR director, the diversity officer. It is the politics of people who think that history ended in 1989 and the only remaining task is to optimise the administrative state. They are wrong. History has not ended. It has merely entered another of its cyclical phases of decadence before collapse.
Consider the Victorian era, that great age of progress and stability. It was also an age of smug, self-congratulatory moderation. The great issues of the day were debated in drawing rooms, settled by gentlemen in clubs. And what did that moderation produce? A political class so detached from the suffering of the masses that they almost destroyed the country through sheer indifference. The Irish Famine, the exploitation of child labour, the horror of the workhouse: all products of a ‘sensible’ centre that saw ideological passion as an embarrassment.
The new Australian centrists are cut from the same cloth. They will offer fine words about climate change and mental health and ‘listening to communities’. They will win a few seats, form a few committees, and achieve precisely nothing of substance. Because the centre cannot hold. It never has. It is a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. What will fill it? Something far less pleasant than a bunch of well-meaning independents. Ask the Romans. Ask the Victorians. Or wait a few years and see for yourself.
