Article: The Extreme Center

The reality is that imposing fair and efficient compromises on competing factions in a political, economic, social, or spiritual controversy is one of the most difficult and dangerous courses of action people can take. It requires using enough force to create checks and balances on all forms of power WITHOUT forming a new power-elite that will become a problem in its own right. But the very diversity of opinions represented in the list at 12-O'clock in the diagram points out an excellent way to go about this.

"Who shall watch over the watchmen themselves?" The obvious solution is to have them watch over one-another because there's never a consensus among them. This means that the compromises they impose on the society's institutions are themselves compromises, and that changes in the balance of power within the Extreme Center are natural and inevitable as members enter and leave the group. And the constant entering and leaving are equally natural -- people enter when they are willing to compromise their opinions in order to be taken seriously by those who are making policy for the Center, and they are forced out if they become unwilling to make further compromises ... moving, of course, further down the diagram to either the left or the right.

People who formally belong to the Extreme Center are not expected to share a common ideology or to constitute a political party, but they DO need to have a common goal, which I have called "militant moderation" in many of my writings. This is simply the desire to endorse policies and candidates who represent compromises acceptable to the majority of American voters at any particular point in time. For example, right now, about 70% of those voters would like to see our troops pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they'd also like to see a universal public health care option similar to the present Medicare. So the Extreme Center could NOT endorse any political party that didn't have those two planks in its official platform, nor any candidate who didn't agree to support these ideas...

What I'm calling for, essentially, is that people in the center of the political spectrum develop a sense of identity similar to that of people who label themselves as conservatives, liberals, progressives, etc. However, instead of being based on shared ideology, this identity would be based on willingness to insist on CONSTRUCTIVE compromises that would actually permit faults in the present system to be reformed and more important, to channel the available public money into projects that would benefit EVERYONE instead of benefiting friends and financial backers of the politicians in power...

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