A Home for the Liberal Center

Why the Democratic Party is the only game in town

A protest on November 2, 2023 at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station against Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. Taken from a video on YouTube.

Some moments in the flow of time confuse things, blurring accepted distinctions, prompting second-guesses, forcing re-evaluations, hastening changes that were already underway but unfolding so slowly they were almost imperceptible. Other moments accomplish the opposite: Clarifying long-standing assumption and convictions, firming them up and galvanizing them.

The month since Hamas’ terrorist invasion of Israel has been an example of the latter for me.

Since I broke from the right nearly 20 years ago, I’ve considered myself a liberal. Indeed, one way of understanding that break is to see it as an expression of my dawning realization that I’d been a liberal all along—one forcing himself to play along with the conservatism of the time for complicated personal-psychological-spiritual and career-related reasons. In the hothouse of working at one of the religious right’s leading intellectual magazines during the post-9/11 Bush administration, I snapped, realizing I was living (or rather, working) a lie.

From that point on, I’ve defined myself as a liberal—distinguished on the right from conservatism and Trumpist populism and on the left from progressivism.

It’s that distinction I’ve felt firmed up and galvanized since the horrifying events of October 7—and even more so since the illiberal left began to demonstrate to the world, in reaction to those events, how it thinks about politics, morality, and humanity.

But this process of re-evaluation can work at both the individual and collective levels. And I think that over the past month, it’s become clearer than ever before that our politics is now divided into three distinct blocs separated by ideology and civic temperament. I know where I stand. But do America’s two parties?

A Tour of the Horizon

On the left is progressivism. On the right, Trumpist populism. And between them, the broad liberal center of American politics.

But dividing 2 by 3 can be politically awkward.

What’s been clarified over the past month is that the Republican Party is by now thoroughly unified around Trumpist populism—while the Democratic Party is divided between liberalism and progressivism. The latter might sound politically worrying, and as I’ll go on to discuss below, it is in some ways. But there can be no doubt that President Joe Biden stands on the liberal side of this divide, however much his own and his administration’s political instincts drive them to deny and blur the distinction for the sake of party unity. And that opens up some promising possibilities.