The Center in American and French Politics

Today, a former member of the Sarkozy conservative government who had left to form his own centrist party and attempt to become a viable candidate for the French presidency in 2012, threw in the towel. He said that his candidacy and new centrist party were causing confusion on the right and would not do much more than weaken the position of Sarkozy, without bringing about the centrist reform he sought, i.e., he was making it easier for the left to win the presidency.

There is, however, another French centrist party formed by another former conservative, but one who never agreed with the Sarkozy world view, who continues his battle to become a viable presidential candidate.

This man, François Bayrou, is a former university history professor and politician of long standing, and he spoke on French TV this evening about his reasons for remaining in the race.

Principally, he said, he wants to from a centrist government because having the “disorganized right” and the “disorganized left” attacking each other incessantly produces nothing that helps the French people.  What Bayrou wants is a coalition of the moderates of all parties who will work on a program of economic and political reformation of France, to make her self-reliant by producing the manufactured and agricultural products her citizens buy and consume, and at the same time, to focus the coalition to work on reforming the government so that its function is to provide the political environment that makes French self-sufficiency possible.

Bayrou’s party receives less than 5% of the vote in French parliamentary elections, and he, himself a presidential candidate in 2007, didn’t make it through to the second round of voting (the first round being an elimination of the weakest candidates).

That may seem terribly removed from the problems confronting America today, but perhaps there is something to be learned.

There is no center in American politics and there hasn’t been since 1964, when Goldwater’s deeply conservative Republican majority drove out all moderates, led by Rockefeller and Scranton. From 1964 to today, that conservative vision has dominated the GOP. Moderates have been forced to change or die, so to speak. I feel sure Mitt Romney, John McCain, George Bush senior, and perhaps even Ronald Reagan, were more moderate than they could admit in order to pass the GOP conservative “litmus tests” of their times.

And, today, when we need a new voice in the GOP, it is not coming from the center but from the populist right - the Tea Party in all its forms.

One could build the same history for the Democratic Party. From Franklin Roosevelt, no Democrat has been able to secure his party’s nomination for president without passing the leftist “litmus tests” of their times. The one exception was Adlai Stevenson, who was sacrificed by the party in the face of an unbeatable Eisenhower.

Yet, Americans do not live and die on the positions - left and right - taken by their parties. They do not really care about most of these obscure arguments. What they want, and need, is better education, more jobs, freedom from burdensome taxes and from excess regulation of their daily lives.

Thomas Jefferson understood this. He wrote, “The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.”  

And, another time, Jefferson wrote, “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretence of taking care of them.”

These two ideas capture the American dream, and its capacity to turn sour when government gets too big and forgets to listen.

And, forcing government to bend too far right or left does not help Americans or America. It only increases their frustration with government and makes the concept of “America” less able to compete in the world.  

George Washington got it right. For him government is force and if not restrained by its citizens, it will assume a life of its own, unable to distinguish its goals from the goals of its citizens:

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

That may sound like a call to conservative action, but perhaps it is also a call to finding the middle ground, to compromising so that all Americans are better off and freer, so that government does not exist to propagate itself but to serve the people who created it and who must always agree to its continuation.