Is the Mainstream Left, Right, or Center?

Why, mainstream is centrist, of course, by definition. What else could it be? In America, the word has historically been synonymous with the views of the majority, and the majority is always of the center. President Eisenhower, considered in his time to be as mainstream as they come, didn’t even find it necessary to claim the word; he simply called himself “middle of the road.” The middle of the road, he said, was the widest part, “where most Americans live.” In Ike’s world, middle of the road, mainstream, and centrist were interchangeable.

So why in the last few years, and especially since the 2018 midterms, have known leftists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez become ever more insistent upon calling themselves mainstream? How can avowed “democratic socialists” even attempt to identify as mainstream? In America you can’t be both leftist and mainstream. End of discussion. Or is it?

Can you be both rightist and mainstream? Some would say no, not any more than you can be leftist and mainstream. The mainstream is the center. Others might disagree, arguing that America has moved so far to the right that the mainstream is now itself located there. Ronald Reagan told the 1988 Republican convention that the choice that year was “between the policies of liberalism or the policies of America’s political mainstream.” Given such conflicting perspectives, how does one decide where is the correct place to locate the mainstream on the linear spectrum? And do the labels matter?

Yes, they do. Labels confer power. In a world where many have neither time nor interest to pursue detailed policy analyses, labels are a convenient shorthand, a way of summarizing without examining details. Many never get past the labels; they make their political judgments based upon their reactions to the labels themselves.

Moreover, political labels are not neutral. They are both descriptive and evaluative. That is true whether they are used by politicians, media analysts, or in supposedly unbiased news articles. Labels evoke intellectual and emotional responses, and thus carry great weight in determining how people will react to them. Otherwise, why would politicians pay so much attention to them, whether their own or those of their adversaries? Specifically, why would Sanders and AOC, as she is now known, even want to be called mainstream?

As their efforts suggest, political labels, including the word mainstream, have no have fixed, “correct” definitions. They have popularly accepted definitions for greater or lesser periods of time, but are still subject to non-stop competition among those wishing to control those definitions. What Sanders and his colleagues are attempting is nothing less than to change popularly accepted usage of the word mainstream. They are arguing that their policies entitle them to claim it as their self-designation. The “political revolution” now includes a linguistic revolution.

Has any prominent politician ever used the word mainstream as an epithet? An example from the current occupant of the Oval Office:

In this context one can more easily understand current efforts by Sanders, AOC, and supporters to identify as mainstream. It is a key part of their effort to claim support of the majority. Sanders cites polls showing that Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free college, and environmental reform, ideas which in his words were only three years ago considered “radical” and “extreme,” are now supported by a majority of Americans.

For her part, AOC has taken the lead in summarizing her legislative program under the term Green New Deal. This is likewise integral to the linguistic strategy. It identifies the new challengers with the legacy of the President who, more than any of his peers in the 20^th century, shaped majority views regarding government involvement in national economic life.

Rounding out the strategy is another traditional label which, after decades of disuse, has regained prominence, namely the progressive label. Ever since Reagan referred in 1988 to the “dreaded L-word,” it has been hard to find a politician willing to identify as a liberal. Even now the word remains a kiss of death. Thus the term progressive has re-emerged as a viable substitute.

Can self-styled progressives claim to be mainstream? Elizabeth Warren has done so for years. The 2008 economic collapse and subsequent discrediting of “Wall Street” politics gave such impetus to the resurgence of progressive rhetoric that by 2015 the two front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination were actually competing for the label. In a striking illustration of the power of this linguistic evolution, by April 2019 even Speaker Nancy Pelosi was telling 60 Minutes interviewer Lesley Stahl, “I’m a progressive.”

When we look at the overall linguistic strategy of the insurgents, we thus see a linking of the Rooseveltian legacy, the progressive label, and a determined effort to identify as mainstream.When we look at the overall linguistic strategy of the insurgents, we thus see a linking of the Rooseveltian legacy, the progressive label, and a determined effort to identify as mainstream.Medicare for All, a livable minimum wage, free college tuition, and environmental responsibility: all Rooseveltian, all progressive, all mainstream. That being said, why do these challengers also identify as “left” and “socialist”? Don’t those labels undercut their efforts?

The answer is they don’t identify in those ways. Just as one searches in vain for politicians willing to identify as liberal, so can one search in vain for self-styled progressives willing to identify as left. That is not what they call themselves; it is what opponents in both parties, and the media, call them.

Even before her 2018 primary victory over incumbent Democrat Joseph Crowley, who, she noted, took money “from the same people who finance the Trump presidency,” AOC remarked: “it’s . . . not as much about left versus right as it is top versus bottom.” She reinforced this during the summer, tweeting: “I’m not running from the left; I’m running from the bottom.”

There’s a reason the challengers do not identify as left. Given the extremist, authoritarian connotations many Americans still attach to the word, their opponents are happy to hurl it at them as an epithet.¹ Ignoring AOC’s own vocabulary, including her “top versus bottom” definition of the situation, her opponents continue to label her as left. Equally important, supposedly neutral media routinely validate such attacks by repeating the labeling as if it were merely descriptive rather than pejorative. The challengers know better.

Nor do they identify simply as “socialists.” On the contrary, they are careful to call themselves “democratic socialists,” to underline that they identify with west European and especially Scandinavian countries rather than the failed Soviet Union. Sanders has also been careful to define “democratic socialism” as completely consistent with the New Deal tradition, first in his Georgetown University address of 2015 and more recently and expansively in his June 2019 address at George Washington University. Again, it is critics in both major parties and the media who routinely omit the word democratic as a way of linking Sanders, AOC, and their supporters to the failed Soviet experiment as well as to more recent targets such as Venezuela.

Given this verbal competition, do the challengers have any realistic chance of being accepted as mainstream? Is there any way to overcome detractors’ vocabularies and redefine American political discourse on their own terms?

The short answer is, not so long as they allow their opponents’ vocabularies unchallenged acceptance in the media. In this, they have a huge linguistic battle on their hands, and it is not at all clear that they will win it. Part of the problem is that the challengers face a paradox. Is it possible to explode opponents’ labeling games while still promoting labels of their own? Not entirely. Labels still have a shorthand function, and they still elicit both intellectual and emotional responses. Under the circumstances, the best they can do is elucidate their own labels as much as possible with specific policy details while going on the offensive in calling out opposing vocabularies.

What does going on the offensive entail? First, it means never missing an opportunity to expose unwarranted inferences and omissions, as in the case of the term democratic socialism. Second, and equally important, it means turning their opponents’ vocabulary against them. It is in the latter respect that the 2020 campaign is already looking very different from that of 2016.

In his 2015 Georgetown University address, Sanders pointedly quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. about “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” The implication was that the rich welcome government involvement in the economy when it benefits them, but not when it benefits working people. As a counterattack, it was a start, but one on which Sanders did not consistently follow through during the 2016 primary campaign.

This time, he has been more consistent and far more explicit. In the George Washington University address, after detailing historic Republican usage of the word socialism as an epithet, Sanders went on to state:

While President Trump and his fellow oligarchs attack us for our support of democratic socialism, they don’t really oppose all forms of socialism. They may hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people, but they absolutely love corporate socialism that enriches Trump and other billionaires.

Listing such government assistance as subsidies, bailouts, incentives and tax breaks, including $885 million that went to the Trump family itself, Sanders noted: “That is the difference between Donald Trump and me. He believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful; I believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country.” The next day, responding to an attack by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Sanders tweeted: “I didn’t hear Jamie Dimon criticizing socialism when Wall Street begged for the largest federal bailout in American history—some $700 billion from the Treasury and even more from the Fed.”

For her part, AOC has also been active in calling out opposition labeling. At a recent hearing of the House Oversight Committee, of which she is a member, she set a striking example of linguistic counterattack in replying to a Republican charge that the Green New Deal is “an elitist fantasy”:

You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids . . . have their blood . . . ascending in lead levels, their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist. You’re telling them that those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos?

Apart from Republican vocabulary, the challengers also face major issues with the vocabulary of opponents in their own party. In a July 2017 New York Times op-ed, former Clinton advisers Mark Penn and Andrew Stein argued that “the path back to power” for Democrats was “unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.”² Many Clinton supporters have since embraced this conventional wisdom and continue to claim both the centrist and mainstream labels for themselves while labeling Sanders, AOC, and their supporters as left, therefore non-mainstream. In a 2018 interview, for example, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth said that Ocasio-Cortez is only “the future of the party in the Bronx,” adding: “I don’t think that you can go too far to the left and still win the Midwest.”

Equally important, major media have consistently reinforced this vocabulary by reproducing it as if it were neutral. During the 60 Minutes interview, with no prior prompting from Pelosi, Lesley Stahl noted that AOC was proposing “some out of the mainstream measures.” Having thus been set up by a supposedly neutral interviewer, Pelosi responded: “By and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know we have to hold the center, we have to go down the mainstream.”

By early May, she was already shifting her vocabulary, telling Glenn Thrush of the New York Times that the Democratic Party must “own the center left, own the mainstream.” The shift from center to center-left was significant for two reasons. First, it was an acknowledgment on her part of the growing traction of the insurgents. Second, it suggested that rather than trying to ignore or crush them, she was now shifting to a strategy of co-optation.

As the article made clear, however, Pelosi’s overall goal had not changed. The headline of the Thrush interview read: “Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results.” At the same time, the text noted that Pelosi was “focused on pursuing center-left policies she thinks will help her party out in 2020,” including “pragmatic improvements to health care” rather than Medicare for All, which she has not supported. The combined effect of headline and text was to give Pelosi influential media support by utilizing her own labeling as if it were in fact neutral.

The bottom line: any group wishing to redefine American political discourse must sooner or later challenge not only the vocabulary used by opponents but the reinforcement of that vocabulary by supposedly neutral media. More specifically, if Americans are to reconsider their views as to what qualifies as mainstream, that can only happen in the context of a sustained public examination of the labeling game itself. The question then becomes: In any such examination, which side has more to gain and which has more to lose? The answer to that question may well determine the future of the republic.