NDP leader Tom Mulcair speaks at the party’s recent convention in Montreal, where it abandoned passages of socialist language in its constitution in a bid to present itself as a party of the ‘centre.’ THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

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“Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

When I was little (which for historical purposes was back in the Diefenbaker-Pearson days) my dad used to say that he was “middle of the road” politically.

That seemed sensible to me and I didn’t give it much thought.

In its most exalted form the idea can be traced back to Aristotle’s via media, the middle way, or if you like the Golden Mean — the idea that virtue is to be found between the extremes. So, for example, on the spectrum from recklessness to cowardice, you find the virtue of courage nestled snugly in the middle.

As a political idea, it’s appealing to think that between the extremes there is always a sensible centre. But clearly that isn’t always right. Not at all. Sometimes searching for the centre can lead you wildly astray.

Take a stark example: the United States in the 1850s and 1860s. On the one extreme there were the defenders of slavery; at the other there were the abolitionists. In between there were all sorts of centrist compromisers, including Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois senator who famously debated Abraham Lincoln in 1858. Douglas argued the “democratic principle” that each state should decide for itself whether it would permit slavery. After 1860, having failed to forestall the Civil War, the centrists pushed for a peaceful settlement with the rebel South, one result of which surely would have been to preserve slavery there.

History has not been kind to the “Copperheads” as the centrists were sometimes called — hardly more than to slave-owners themselves. Nowadays, we’d call them enablers.

This gets to the obvious problem with centrism as a guiding principle. Centrism can only be defined in relation to other ideas. If you are in the centre, you need to state where your centre is — between what and what.

English Canadians tend to think of Jean Chrétien as a classic centrist, and for them maybe he was. He was conservative fiscally, but he also put money into refinancing social programs once the deficit was eliminated. On social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, he seemed always to be searching for the sweet spot where he could be with the majority of Canadians.

Yet in Quebec, where the traditional spectrum of left and right was crosscut by the often more salient issue of sovereignty versus federalism, Chrétien wasn’t in the centre at all. He embodied one of the extremes. Most English Canadian “centrists”, so far as I can tell, are OK with that.

Once you get past our vague memory of Aristotle’s ethics, you are really hard pressed to find much intellectual fibre behind our modern fetish of the political centre.

Socialism, conservatism, fascism, libertarianism, Marxism and, yes, liberalism, all have much more fully-developed principles and ideas than centrism.

And yet many people in the media throw the word centrist around like it was the ultimate compliment. Whatever it is, the Liberals love it, and we are told the NDP and the Conservatives are meticulously plotting a course towards it.

Without ever thinking about the matter explicitly, many journalists hold to a crude version of the median voter model. Put simply, it is that whichever party is best able to represent the “median voter” — the one statistically in the centre of the political spectrum — will win the next election.

Certainly it is possible to think of any number of politicians who crowded the centre with success: Mackenzie King, Eisenhower, Bill Clinton and, of course, Chrétien.

Yet a little concentrated thought serves up many examples of politicans who succeeded by doing anything but. Last week we were all honouring the career of Margaret Thatcher.

Or not.

Other examples of politicians who succeeded not by seeking the centre, but by trying to shift it, include Tommy Douglas, René Lévesque, Ronald Reagan, Mike Harris and George W. Bush. Oh, and Abe Lincoln.

On economic and social policy, what divides Canadians is their attitude towards three decades of market-liberating policies that have weakened our middle class, increased inequality, corroded social programs, undermined the ability of working people to negotiate a living wage, and left us all more vulnerable and insecure.

Although centrism seems to shift its meaning quicker than, say, a flip-flopping politician, there is one use of the term that does have deeper significance in North America. As capitalism — or the “market economy” as we sometimes call it nowadays — exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries, it created enormous new sources of wealth. It also chewed up other, mostly agrarian ways of life, it chewed up towns and villages, and it chewed up people.

In this context, centrism meant finding a way between the cruelty, volatility, monopoly and inequality that characterized raw capitalism and the most commonly offered alternative: socialism or state command and control of the economy.

During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal tried to save capitalism from itself by reining it in, managing it and creating programs to attenuate the insecurity and distress it created. So centrism in this tradition fit between the extremes of socialism and unconstrained capitalism.

But there’s something odd nowadays in thinking about the management of “capitalism with a human face”, as British prime minister Harold Macmillan once put it, as centrism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a viable model of society that doesn’t include a large role for markets — unless you count North Korea, which most of us don’t.

Moreover, it is a long time since any political party in this country argued for abandoning market capitalism as the predominant economic model.

The NDP recently removed some of the most boldly socialist language from its constitution — something that German Social Democrats did in 1959 and the British Labour party did in 1995. These constitutional changes have always been lagging indicators: something parties do long after they have abandoned any intention of nationalizing the “means of production, distribution and exchange.”

In the recent Liberal leadership, the notion of centrism was tossed around without much careful thought. Alone among the candidates, Martha Hall Findlay did seem to offer a definition, which was essentially for the party to cheat right on economic issues and left on social issues — which, when you think about it, isn’t really a definition of centrism at all.

But the truly beguiling sense of centrism for many Liberals — and closer to Justin Trudeau’s intention, I think — is more narrowly tactical.

During the Chrétien-Martin years the Liberal party gravitated towards what was once considered one of the extremes: the ideology that the freer the markets are the better life will be for everyone. It did not completely abandon the old-fashioned progressive ideas that ran from FDR and Mackenzie King through Pearson and Trudeau that there needed to be more to democratic life than markets — but it greatly diluted them.

Stephen Harper, of course, rejects even a diluted version of those progressive ideas. The personal animosity many Canadians have towards him is partly because he is a more ideologically straightforward representative of a trend that has been going on for thirty years. People who are fed up with him and his party are actually fed up with policies that have been pursued with more or less forthrightness by Progressive Conservative, Liberal and Conservative governments federally — and, truth be told, sometimes by provincial NDP governments too.

If Liberals can make Harper and the Conservatives wear all that pent-up rage, then they have just one job left: caricature the NDP as socialist extremists. Then Liberals can carve out some congenial political space for themselves — in the centre.

But the reality of modern politics is that the muddled middle is no answer at all to the issues facing us.

On economic and social policy, what divides Canadians is their attitude towards three decades of market-liberating policies that have weakened our middle class, increased inequality, corroded social programs, undermined the ability of working people to negotiate a living wage, and left us all more vulnerable and insecure.

There is certainly a discussion to be had about how quickly and by what means these policies should be moderated, revised or reversed — and issues of priority, pace and technique may divide the Liberals and the NDP.

But first, both parties need to decide whether they really stand for a change in direction or not.

This is even more starkly true on the issue of climate change. The last time they were in office, the Liberals talked a great deal about it but did absolutely nothing. This is one issue on which finding a middle ground between action and inaction probably means not doing enough and condemning our children to an uncertain future.

To govern is to choose. The Conservatives have made their choice. The Liberals and the New Democrats need to make choices too, and seeking the soothing warmth of the political centre won’t help them.

You can follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton, where he is an associate professor. His new book Power Trap, on the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties, was published in September.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.