Patrick Lawrence: The Centrists Cannot Hold

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

Alot of us are familiar with these lines from Yeats’s thoroughly anthologized and often-quoted The Second Coming. How can they not come to mind as the French government of Emmanuel Macron, the centrist par excellence, falls in a heap of high-handed hubris? 

Everyone in Paris is blaming everyone since the Macron government’s energized opposition in the National Assembly forced Premier Michel Barnier from office with a vote of no confidence last week. The truth is that Barnier is a casualty of his own political camp — an arrogant “center” that is not, in fact, the center of anything. It is composed of neoliberal ideologues who hold themselves as high as falcons above voters, refuse to hear them and wage war to remain in power even when they are voted out of it.

What is unfolding now in France is unfolding one or another way across those Western powers that form the walls of the neoliberal fortress. You see variants in Germany, Britain and, understood properly, in the United States. The center is not holding but the center insists on holding. Neoliberalism, after decades during which it has prevailed without effective challenge, is now critically threatened on all sides. And its defenders are fighting a ferocious battle to preserve its ideological primacy.    

In effect, the Emmanuel Macrons and Michel Barniers of the Atlantic world are destroying what remains of democracy in the name of defending it. It is important to understand this in the clearest possible terms, given what is at stake. It cannot lead anywhere other than some form of authoritarianism unless the Macrons, the Barniers and their kind are turned back or otherwise subdued. Isn’t this already evident? It can lead, to look at the question another way, to what could easily turn into political anarchy, and this will not be so “mere” as Yeats imagined a century and a few years ago. 

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Macron, a former merchant banker, “president of the rich” as the French call him, is a laboratory specimen for his imperious insistence on the neoliberal orthodoxies. He decided to risk snap elections last summer after his Renaissance Party was trounced in European Parliament polls. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National won 30 seats, with 31% of the vote. La France Insoumise, France Unbowed, Macron’s leftist challenger, took nine more seats. Renaissance went home with 13 seats, 14.6% of the vote. Macron, ever out-of-touch, calculated that snap legislative elections would restore the balance of power in his favor.

In the National Assembly elections last June and July, Macron was outdone once again. The Nouveau Fronte Populaire, a leftist alliance formed just weeks before the polls, won 188 seats, Le Pen’s National Rally 142 and Macron’s centrist alliance 161. In sum, no party had the 289 seats required to achieve a legislative majority in the 577–seat Assembly. The leftist front was the surprise winner, and National Rally had the most votes of any single party. Both then demanded, altogether rightfully, the president name a new premier from their ranks.

So did Macron’s anti-democratic defense of French democracy begin — or continue more pointedly, better put. He refused for two months to name anyone to Matignon, the prime minister’s residence and office. And his eventual choice of Barnier, a conservative dedicated to neoliberal austerity and the European Union’s technocracy, was an in-your-face rejection of last summer’s election results. 

It is interesting to consider what Macron charged Barnier with accomplishing. In the Assembly he faced hostility to Macron’s centrist regime over both shoulders — either from the left (the Nouveau Fronte Populaire) or from the populist right (Le Pen’s Rassemblement). Barnier’s job was to navigate this stony political terrain while sustaining Macron’s neoliberal economics. I would have called this a mission impossible, a fool’s errand, given the two opposition blocs held 330 seats between them. But it is difficult to overstate the arrogance of a president who operates with so profound an indifference to his electorate. 

The inevitable moment of truth came when Barnier had to present a budget. He did so on Oct. 10. After a lot of performative bargaining with his left-side, right-side adversaries, during which he, Barnier, made a few minor compromises that left intact what was a budget obviously hostile to the Assembly’s majority. It called for — past tense here, as the proposal is now dead —€60 billion in tax increases (70% of the total) and spending cuts (30%), most of which would fall on working people and the French middle class.

Barnier’s efforts to dress up these aggressive numbers are worth noting if only as a case study in the kind of political chicanery we all know well. He drew the direst possible picture of France’s finances before presenting the budget — a tiresome resort to “There is no alternative,” the ruse Margaret Thatcher made famous. And he prettified the figures by including in them €12 billion in taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals — but with the proviso these fair-at-first-glance levies were temporary and would be cut in the course of the 2026–27 fiscal year, at which point bingo, ordinary French men and women would bear all the burden of fiscal adjustments favoring said corporations and the wealthy. 

The interesting thing about the Macron–Barnier standoff with … with the majority of French voters is that everyone knew well in advance that their budget would not pass. And everyone knew in advance that Barnier would then push it through the Assembly without a vote, a legal peculiarity in the French system but one that usually prompts outrage when invoked. And everyone knew Barnier would then face a vote of no confidence, lose it and be forced to resign.

And now all sides condemn the other side for this national debacle. Le Pen described Barnier’s budget as “violent, unjust, inefficient,” which holds up well to scrutiny. In a widely dismissed speech last week, Macron charged his opponents with “choosing disorder,” which holds up well only if you are an orthodox centrist who equates order with neoliberal primacy. “I will never shoulder the irresponsibility of others,” the grossly irresponsible Macron saith.  

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The French case is easy to read for the openly belligerent conduct of its protagonists. Macron is a remote figure who speaks to the French public with dignity but whose contempt for the people to whom he speaks rarely fails to come through by way of the various “reforms” he imposes or attempts to impose. These may be a rise in the retirement age, cuts in the health care system, increased fuel charges, or higher taxes: It is always the same. France’s fiscal position is weak, but the burden of repair must fall on the electorate, not the various elites above them. Macron the centrist, to put this point another way, is at bottom a “trickle-down” man, a Reaganesque supply-sider.  

And what unfolds in France as we speak — Macron says he will shortly name a new premier — is a variant of what we witness across the neoliberal world, if I can suggest this term. Democratic process is to be sacrificed at the altar of power.

In Germany, Olaf Scholz’s centrist coalition took a beating in state elections last summer, and his government is now in a state of slow-motion collapse. The nation’s two insurgent parties are an approximate parallel of France’s: There is AfD, Alternativ für Deutschland, on the right and on the other side BSW, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the party Wagenknecht, the dynamic leftist from the former East Germany, recently founded and named for herself. It is political sport among the centrists to cast these two as neo–Nazis on one hand and Communists on the other — and both as dangerous Kremlin sympathizers. This is not democratic politics: This is self-indulgent smear on the part of insecure ideologues who cannot survive in the context of democratic politics. 

In the Anglosphere you see something different but the same. British centrists effectively colonized the Labour Party as it became clear that Jeremy Corbyn, its leader from 2015 to 2020, would restore it as an institution worthy of its name. Corbyn was forced out by way of crude, conjured-from-nothing charges of antisemitism. Kier Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, is a neoliberal in sheep’s clothing. As this dawned on the British electorate, which did not take long, his approval rating after he became prime minister last July fell by 49 percentage points, a record in British political history, and now stands at –38. 

To keep the ledger tidy, Scholz’s approval rating is 18% and Macron’s—this before the Barnier mess—17%. Both leaders have set records of their own, but neither plans to go anywhere. Scholz intends to stand for reelection next spring, and Macron insists he will serve out the two years remaining in his term despite mounting calls for his resignation. 

We should think about the U.S. in this context. It was the centrists who corrupted one national institution after another in the cause of subverting Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and centrists who, for years, kept the senile Joe Biden in office as the most certain strategy for holding on to power. It was the centrists, of course, who tried to sell Americans Kamala Harris when the Biden strategy failed. Now we must watch closely, for there are already signs aplenty that the centrist elites in Washington intend to do to Trump’s second terms what they so disgracefully did to his first.

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There is something important to consider as we witness the corrupting machinations of the Atlantic world’s collective and tightly knit centrists. Two things, actually. 

In 1937, Mao, while living in the Yan’an caves at the Long March’s end, wrote an essay distinguishing primary and secondary contradictions. The former are the most pressing antagonisms and require those who may have differences to unite. The differences, secondary contradictions, can be addressed after the primary contradiction is resolved. There is nothing too complicated here. Roosevelt and Churchill allied with Stalin to defeat the Reich. Facing Stalin came later. 

This thought is pertinent as we consider the doings of entrenched centrist elites across the West. You may not care for AfD or Le Pen’s Rassemblement National; on the other hand you may not care for the French popular front or Sarah Wagenknecht’s BSW. The important thing is to understand these matters as, for the moment, secondary contradictions. The primary contradiction is the destruction of what remains of the Western democracies at the hands of centrist regimes struggling to remain in power. This is what makes them dangerous and, so, what must be opposed.  

This question caused all manner of confusion during Trump’s first term. There were any number of reasons not to support Donald Trump, just as there are many reasons not to support him now. But there was a greater threat than Trump, as I and a few others argued. This was the rampant abuse of government institutions — the Justice Department, the FBI and so on — and the despoliation of public discourse altogether in the cause of subverting a duly elected president. You got called all manner of names for taking this position back then. There is yet less room to repeat this error now. 

The second matter to consider reads straight out of the first. I have done a fair amount of traveling around Europe these past few months. And I find here and there, especially but not only in Germany, a new givenness to set aside the old distinctions between left and right (such as these may be any longer of use) in favor of drawing together to confront centrist regimes on questions of common opposition. Immigration, the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia are three such questions. It is not clear how far this kind of thinking will go, but it is to be watched and encouraged — this on both sides of the Atlantic.

American liberals have lost their way over the course of many years, and Europeans of similar political stripes have followed them. This is a complex topic, and for now I will keep the thought simple. 

The old liberalism of possibility — the sort one knew in the 1960s, the sort you find Kennedy’s best-known speeches, let’s say — gave way to a liberalism of resignation. An emancipatory liberalism that entertained visions of a different, better future evolved into a liberalism with no vision or promise other than an eternally extended present. Nothing new could be imagined. Nothing else was possible in the world as we had made it.

I was struck by a headline atop a piece in UnHerd the other day: “Keir Starmer has no dream.” How perfectly to the point. None of the centrist leaders holding desperately onto power has a dream, any kind of vision. They offer empty slogans and adjustments at the margin — “an opportunity economy,” lower grocery prices and so on — but nothing in the way of authentic change of the kind electorates are telling them at the polls they want. The UnHerd essay was a critical review of Starmer’s “Programme for Change.” Expect none that makes any difference was the theme. 

We call these kinds of leaders neoliberals now. Theirs is a liberalism of no possibility, one whose enemy is any suggestion of possibility. They ally with conservatives whenever genuine liberals assert themselves effectively. Their grail is “stability” — Macron uses this term frequently these days. Stability can be a fine thing, but it is not universally and always desirable. Stability is a very wrong thing when change — radical or reformist can be debated — is the necessary thing, as it is now. 

In March 1962, Kennedy gave one of those speeches to which I just made reference. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” he said, “make violent revolution inevitable.” It is a famous sentence now. Kennedy lived amid a revolutionary era, when dozens of new nations arose out of the long-reigning colonial regimes. 

Our time is something different, but we can draw a lesson from President Kennedy’s remarkable rhetoric. What centrist figures such as Macron mean when they speak of stability is that they must remain in power. All alternatives must be rendered impossible. And so have they made the rise of alternative parties and ideologies inevitable. So do they lose elections. So does their cause require, at this point, immense damage to the polities in whose interests they pretend to act.