What Does "Radical Center" Mean?

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.

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.