excerpts from
RADICAL CENTER
Mack Reynolds
The thrust of Radical Center is that there are forces at
work generating a feeling of apathy and futility in the electorate. The story
is told through the bumbling work of journalist Lucky Myers who literally,
luckily, falls backwards into the story. Most of these excerpts below were presented in dialogue between characters. Full text of Radical Center.
That's one of the things I'm going
to write up. The growing cynicism of people in regard to anything the
politicians do any more. We've given up expecting anything except a sideshow
from them. Lucky, there hasn't been a real idealist in the White House since
Woodrow Wilson, and he was an anachronism and probably slightly crackpot to
boot.
Public cynicism toward the police
and politicians, the declining percentage of eligibles who voted, that sort of
thing.
Why, anything might happen, with
all the old values almost completely devaluated by our long-term campaigns.
We've been working a long time on
creating voter apathy.
Make the opposition apathetic,
“But what it amounts to, my boy, is
that we're going to take over through apathetic cynicism on the part of the
citizenry. We're going to take over because nobody gives a damn any
longer."
The day of the radical center is dawning. The nation is equally cynical about the radical right and the radical left, but transcending even that is the fact that they couldn't care less who takes over the reins of government. They're too busy living up to the new moral code.
We can easily illustrate this with the trajectory of the Tea Party in America over the last decade. The grass roots conservative movement erupted in 2008/2009 and created sensational attention, on both sides of the political spectrum, for several years. The Tea Party got some old line Republican elected officials run out of office, but the Party had little lasting impact on their fundamental issues of limited government and significant changes in tax policy.
We can easily illustrate this with the trajectory of the Tea Party in America over the last decade. The grass roots conservative movement erupted in 2008/2009 and created sensational attention, on both sides of the political spectrum, for several years. The Tea Party got some old line Republican elected officials run out of office, but the Party had little lasting impact on their fundamental issues of limited government and significant changes in tax policy.
As a result, via the Tea Party movement, conservatives have
essentially “loved and lost” (better than having never loved at all?). Congress
has delivered Obama tacitly unlimited increases in the debt limit, Tea Party
darlings Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio have generated notoriety without
results, and now in 2015, the Party barely exists as a footnote in the American
political landscape.
As America creeps into the 2016 Presidential election
season, it is my opinion that there is considerably more apathy among the
electorate than there has been in the last several Presidential elections -
from the perspective of either party. With strident voices at either end of the
political continuum hushed, with growing voter despair about accomplishing real
change, with pressure toward the Radical Center mounting, what is left to
animate the voting public?
In my next post here at Radical Center > Age of Unreason,
I’ll expand this discussion outside of politics and delve into what the
excerpts above call “the new moral code”. Stay tuned.
