Library:Winging It In Politics

Winging it in politics
Author	Michael Parenti
First published	1980-12-18 The New York Times
Type	Newspaper article
Source	https://www.nytimes.com/1980/12/18/archives/winging-it-in-politics.html

Winging it in Politics is an article by Statesian political scientist Michael Parenti, published in The New York Times on 18 December 1980.

Text

George Grosz

WASHINGTON — Accounts of "extremist" activities abroad and at home are in the news media daily. In El Salvador, the violent repression perpetrated by rightist assassination squads and the military against the clergy, trade unionists, and peasants is depicted as a struggle between left and right "extremists," while "moderates" at the political centre supposedly try to maintain peace. In Greensboro, N.C., Nazis and Klansmen kill Communist Workers' Party organisers, and the episode is reported as an encounter between "extremists on the left and right."

There is a hidden centrist bias in such accounts that is evident not only in the way facts are reported but also in the concepts used to define facts.

Labels such as "left," "centre," and "right" refer to the political spectrum: spatial terms used to signify one's position on social, political, and economic questions. Because of its linear nature, this spectrum can be extended at both ends to allow for limitless left-wing and right-wing extremes. The extreme, by definition, is the "utmost part, utmost limit." Hence, an "extreme centre" is a contradiction in terms, the extremes of the centre being nothing more than the beginnings of the moderate left and moderate right.

But "extreme" has another meaning, one that evokes an image of intransigence and violence. In news reports and common parlance, this second meaning is blended with the first and then ascribed to the left and right, but never to the centre.

Similarly, "moderate" has a purely quantitative meaning, as in a "moderate amount." But "moderate" also connotes "fair-mindedness" and "not given to excess." Again, the two meanings are blended into one, and the political centre is said to be occupied by "moderates" who, by definition, cannot be excessive or immoderate.

Other laudable concepts are associated with centrist "moderation." "Moderates" in various countries are described as defenders of "stability." But whose stability? For whose benefit? At whose expense? Centrist moderates are "pragmatic," "undogmatic," and "free of ideology" (a judgement made by ignoring, say, Chile, where the Christian Democratic centrists supported the fascist overthrow of a democratic government). As our unexamined political vocabulary would have it, the centrists can do no evil, while the immoderate extremists can do no good.

In truth, those who occupy the extremes of the political spectrum (in accordance with beliefs about changing the politico-economic order) are not necessarily extremists in the pejorative sense. And those who occupy the mainstream centre are capable of immoderate, brutal actions.

It wasn't fascists who pursued a genocidal war in Indochina. It was the "best and the brightest" of the political centre. These same "moderates" supported the overthrow of popular governments in Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, and Chile, and helped install fascist military regimes in their stead.

We might ask what is so extremist about landless peasants and destitute labourers in countries such as El Salvador taking up arms against repressive economic and political conditions? What is so moderate about governments that maintain such conditions for the benefit of big landowners and rich investors?

A glance at much of the Third World should tell us that extremism, in the worst sense of the word, predominates in the status quo, not among those who challenge the existing stability. Likewise, we can see that the Greensboro murders were something more than a clash of extremists. Klansmen and Nazis are extreme in every sense. Racism and repression, violence and murder are their operational code. The Communist Workers' Party victims were union and community organisers who devoted their efforts to organising low-income people. The militancy of their rhetoric hardly places them in the same category of extremism as the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic Nazis and Klansmen.

Surely our understanding of politics allows us to distinguish between racists and anti-racists, between those who work with poor blacks and those who want to exterminate all blacks. But the presumptive label of "extremism" imposed by centrists is designed to blur such essential distinctions.

The question of who is and who isn't extremist, then, is far from settled.

The extremists have long been in power. They have given us Vietnam, Watergate, Cold War II, global counterinsurgency, bloated military budgets, a regressive tax burden, huge corporate subsidies, and the promise of a rigorous repression of dissent — all in the name of "moderation" and "stability."