Centrist Pragmatism: It's Time to Be Honest about Where the Center Really Stands

Points to ponder today: Katrina vanden Heuvel exposes the media game of labeling spokespersons for the far-right fringe as "centrists," while progressive viewpoints that now represent the center of American political discourse continue to be treated as beyond the pale:

At this moment -- when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day -- the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform.

So why does the media keep ceding them the label of "centrist" or "moderate" as if they are the guardians of mainstream values?

And Daniel Schultz names liberal "pragmatism" for what it really is--a willingness to give in, over and over, to a small but powerful coterie of noisy thugs whose sole goal is to stop progressive change in its tracks, because such change threatens the wealthy elites who ultimately empower these thugs in American society:

We have allowed the pragmatists the run of the nation for decades now, and what has it gotten us? A frayed social safety net, crumbling infrastructure, massive inequalities in income, health, and opportunity, and a financial system that makes a den of fire-breathing pirate vipers an appealing alternative. Oh, and the finest (and most expensive) military ever known to man.

More properly, we have balanced the ideological insanity that is modern conservatism — don't argue with me, when Ann freaking Coulter is the voice of reason in your movement, you know you're in trouble - with a bunch of mush-mouthed hacks dedicated to compromise at all costs. The result is that the allowable spectrum of opinion now runs from the insane to the not-so insane, and the people who actually want something to be done for the poor get labeled the "far left," as if they were going to bolshivize inner cities across the nation.

The future of the nation--the continuation of our democratic experiment--is at stake. And many of us had hoped the new president realized that, when he talked about hope and change in his campaign. These days, the health care reform debacle seem to be yet another reminder that many of us have hoped in vain.