"Centrist Extremist Theory and the Marginalization of the Left"

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged.....

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It was McCarthy that first got these intellectuals going, and the intellectual history here is far more complicated .....These "liberal social scientists" were, in fact, establishment intellectuals constructing a narrative to marginalize critics on the left.

Their intent was to characterize both left and right "extremes" as irrational. And doing this was a way of removing political substance, and power relationships.... from any consideration.

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...narratives are equally mistaken in drawing arbitrary lines between mainstream and margins, and in virtually disappearing the real substantive issues of politics and realities of political power that the mainstream/extremist narrative serves to hide.

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Countersubversion theory emerged as the analytical model favored by corporate elites and private security firms to enlist state agencies in an effort to repress strikes and civil unrest aimed at industrial worksites and mines.

Countersubversion theory later expanded beyond its early focus on alleged labor agitation and organizing by communists and anarchists to see all dissident social movements arising not from any real social or economic conditions, but as the creation of outside agitators who comprise a cadre at the epicenter of the movement.

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Centrist/Extremist Theory

Many discussions of right-wing and left-wing popular movements routinely portray such movements as bizarre fringe phenomena fundamentally at odds with the political "mainstream." Generally the premise is that the US political system has an essence of democracy and freedom, but that this essence is threatened by "extremists" of one variety or another.

Centrist/extremist theory was formulated in the 1950s by liberal and moderate intellectuals such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer, David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, Earl Raab, Peter Viereck, and Alan Westin. They were members of the circle that would later evolve into the neoconservative intellectual movement.

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Centrist/Extremist theory, especially as outlined by Lipset, Raab, Viereck, and Bell, sees dissident movements of the left and right as composed of outsiders-politically marginal people who have no connection to the mainstream electoral system or nodes of government or corporate power.

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Their extremism places them far outside the legitimate political process, which is located in the center where pluralists conduct democratic debates. The solution prescribed by centrist/extremist theory is to marginalize the dissidents as radicals and dangerous extremists. Their demands need not be taken seriously. Law enforcement can then be relied upon to break up any criminal conspiracies by subversive radicals that threaten the social order.

Centrist/extremist theorists portrayed the political mainstream as an "open democratic market place" where a rich array of interest groups competed freely and fairly, and where "the sources of power" were "difficult to locate."22 The center was a realm of political civility, pragmatism, rationality, and tolerance.

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The point of quoting this at length is ....the corporate center, and that it was deployed equally against both left and right.

In fact, the false equivalence of left and right is one of it's central and most pernicious features.
This is why, in short, single-payer advocates were given such complete short-shrift in the health care legislative process, ironically opening up political space for the Birthers and Deathers to flood into once the corporate elite special interests had already gotten the lion's share of what they desired.

What happened between the 1950s and today was that the political establishment shifted dramatically to the right--something that happens routinely as an imperial power reaches its apogee and then heads into decline.

The intense concentrations of wealth ....... are but one symptom of this dramatic shift. By it's very nature, the political mainstream filters out virtually all narratives that would serve to critically reflect on this momentous shift. And, of course, the two political parties continue to operate at their topmost levels, almost as if nothing had happened. But the vast majority of the American people have no such luxury available to them.

This is why, for example, we have 47 million people without health care, and a proposed "solution" whose main thrust will be to force each and every one of them to begin paying mandatory taxes--which few, if any of them can afford--directly to the insurance cartel, without the government playing any middle-man role whatsoever.

But it's not just health care policy.

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......the large-scale political dynamic that's unfolding around us today.

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