(2 of 4)
Of all the varieties of centrist experience, the liberal internationalist is the most significant, and not only because of its pedigree and former dominance. Most centrism is negative: afflicted by on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand passivity that searches constantly for the lowest common denominator, that seeks the neutrality of the center as a refuge from the passion of the extremes. Liberal internationalism is a passion for democratic principles, and for bold interventionist Government to carry them out. It is a standing challenge, a rebuke, to the rigidities and timidities of the newly dominant right and left. That is perhaps why it commands so large a following among intellectuals, even it it has lost ground among politicians. And lost ground it has. In the end, Jackson stood virtually alone. With his death and the abdication of his heir apparent, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has quietly moved to the orthodox liberal fold, the center is now weaker than ever.
But great democracies cannot long tolerate such a void. In stable polities the most powerful forces, those that make for stability in the first place are centripetal. When the major parties pull apart, the political system, abhorring a vacuum, throws up a centrist alternative. In Britain, when the Tories' heart went hard and Labor's head went soft, a Social Democratic Party was born and quickly achieved remarkable strength. The S.D.P., however, had the advantage of being able to coalesce around the nidus of a small, old, still breathing third party, the Liberals. The U.S. is less hospitable to new forms of political life. Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)
If an organic center does not exist, what is to be done? The American answer seems to be: build a synthetic one. The can-do country (its creations include synthetic rubber, artificial flavors and plastic hearts) has come up with a substitute: ad hoc centrism. The mechanism is government-by-commission, and unlike the "commission on the future" of years past, today's commission is not meaningless, temporary employment for eminent and idle statesmen. It is an essential political instrument for improvising a center. And it is the political story of 1983.
There have already been three major commissions, each charged with solving an intractable problem, each problem more complex and treacherous than the last. The first of these, the Social Security commission, had the easiest task. It had only to put together a one-shot arrangement, a mathematical compromise between the purely economic demands of various constituencies. When it succeeded in locating a kind of arithmetic mean of the competing claims, its work was done. It packed up and went home.