, of Sen. Edward Muskie of Maine, who tried for the Democrats' presidential nomination in that year, that he "could say, out of his own life, 'I have an ancestral belief in this system. I inherited it from my father. I'm a man of the center, but the center gradually moves left, and it's the Democratic Party that does it.'"
oldstyleliberal agrees with Muskie in part, and disagrees with him in part.
Yes, it is good to be a "man of the center." There are too few men or women of the center in politics today.
But no, I don't think the center "gradually moves left."
What actually happens, I think, is that change happens at the center. It emerges from the center, and over the long run that change tends to be good. If there once was slavery and now slavery is no longer, that is change, and it has been for the good. If grinding poverty was once the lot of most human beings and now the majority enjoys middle-class economic aspirations, that is change, and it has been for the good.
The change which emerges at the center and tends to be for the good makes it seem like the center "gradually moves left." Why? Because for the most part the good change that gradually emerges at the center has originally been advocated by the left. If there was once racism encoded in Jim Crow laws in the Old South, it was "liberal" agitation by Martin Luther King and others that called it into question and paved the way for change.
Thus, while change must emerge from the center, it has to be summoned forth by action at the ideological extreme.
Here's where the situation gets tricky. Sometimes the extreme gets its way too much.
That's what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. The left grabbed so many levers of power — though it never won the hearts and minds of President Nixon's "silent majority" — that America was not coaxed but jerked leftward.
In reaction, the movement we today know as neo-conservatism was born; neo-conservative pioneers said they were "mugged by reality" as the peace-love ideals of the mid-1960s degenerated into violence, and the so-called New Leftists of the day revealed themselves as anarchist proto-dictators. The late-'60s radicals — Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the rest — wanted to disrupt "the system" so they themselves could seize control over it.
With the 1980s Reagan Revolution, neo-conservatism summoned forth a healthful, center-seeking response from the American politcal system. But then it was the conservatives' turn to overreach in the mid-1990s. Remember when Rep. Newt Gingrich wanted to shut the government down rather than give Pres. Clinton the budget he wanted?
Gingrich was trying to jerk the country rightward. Oh, he was for the most part quite clever about it, claiming he and his fellow neocons had signed a "Contract with America" to do so. It took a while for some citizens to see through that, but see through it they did.
The moral here is that we need the political extremes, both of them, to summon forth constructive change when it is needed, and to keep the pendulum swinging. But, more than that, the message is that the polity as a whole makes best progress when it is centered.
Not statically centered, that is, but dynamically centered. Think of your hips when you walk. Unless you walk like a fashion model, with no hip sway all, your weight shifts from hip to hip as you march forward, and your hips wiggle. Maybe not a lot. Maybe not in an exaggerated way. But they move from side to side.
That's how God-blessed America ever moves into a better, brighter future: dynamically centered, with a fair amount of hip sway.
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