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The myth of the 'sensible middle' in politics

By Tim Dunlop
Three men vote at a polling station in Hobart, Tasmania.
The so-called "middle" is always a contested political position.(

Brigid Andersen: ABC


In an environment filled with partisan hectoring, the wish to retreat to a "sensible middle" is very tempting. The only problem is, no such "middle" exists, writes Tim Dunlop.

In an interesting piece on these pages last week, freelance writer Claire Lehmann voiced concerns that I'm sure are felt by many who follow politics in Australia.

Her basic complaint was that political discussion has descended into partisan name-calling; that serious issues are ignored; and that all the rewards in the public sphere are tilted towards loud-mouth polemics rather than the objective consideration of the facts:

Too much of our discussion insists on obsessing over personality, instead of wrestling with ideas. Lazy ad hominem attacks are de rigueur; with anti-Abbott T-shirts, "frightbat" polls, and vulgar skits involving dogs, coming to dominate an increasingly vapid landscape.

While publications in Australia vary widely, from the trashy tabloid to the first-class broadsheet, almost all newspapers are transitioning from a model of paper subscription to that of digital. And page-view journalism, whether it exists in Australia or overseas, incentivises polemics that are of questionable quality.

No-one who pays any attention to these things would dispute much of this.

Where I think Lehmann alights on less stable ground is when she discusses what she calls "the sensible middle":

Those engaged with political issues are few in number, but they are rancorous. Because of the rancour, moderates eventually disengage, having better things to do than argue with strangers about politics. The sensible middle is thus drowned out by the vitriol of those inhabiting the extremes: those who are adept at rapid-fire, shallow commentary, often in 140 characters or less.

In an environment that we can all agree is filled with partisan hectoring, the wish to retreat to some sort of halfway point between the extremes and to define that as a "sensible middle" is very tempting.

The only problem is, no such "middle" exists, and I think it is important to understand this if we really do want to address the issues Lehmann identifies.

The problematic nature of Lehmann's preferred position -- the so-called "sensible middle" -- is underlined by the fact that in the whole article, she makes absolutely no attempt to define what she means by the concept; it is just offered up as some sort of settled notion that everyone understands.

Well, it isn't, and you only have to look at some of our key political issues to realise how meaningless the phrase is.

What is the "sensible middle ground" on the asylum seeker issue?

On education funding?

On pricing carbon?

On gay marriage?

Yes, it is certainly true that on each of these issues some sort of compromise is ultimately possible, but the idea that there is some pre-existing "middle" to which all such arguments should gravitate is bogus.

Take the example of gay marriage. In the recent past, the issue was pretty much settled, or so it seemed: marriage was seen by a majority as something that happened between a man and a woman and the very notion of same-sex unions was considered extremely extreme!

The "sensible middle" was: no marriage for you, gay people.

However, we now know that the "centre" has shifted, that a majority of Australians support same-sex marriage; 72 per cent of them, in fact.

And the reason opinion has changed is because people who were previously described as extreme in their views continued to argue their case and were able to convince their fellow citizens that what they wanted wasn't so extreme after all.

This new "sensible middle" on gay marriage was not some uncontested, pre-existing condition, but something that had to be argued over many years.

Yes, we can decry the partisan nature of some of that argument, its vitriol and trashiness, but in a democracy we don't get to bypass it altogether.

Lehmann also talks about political "moderates", but again, "moderate" is not an unproblematic category whose meaning is self-evident.

Recent work by David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, found that even when people identify as "moderates", they actually tend to hold views that are at the so-called extremes.

What happens is that such extremes are averaged out in polling data and thus the "moderate" position is nothing much more than a statistical remnant.

As was explained in a recent Vox article:

The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle - and so they're labeled as moderate.

But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream.

...Digging into a 134-issue survey, Broockman and coauthor Doug Ahler find that 70.1 percent of all respondents, and 71.3 percent of self-identified moderates, took at least one position outside the political mainstream. Moderates, in other words, are just as likely as anyone else to hold extreme positions: it's just that those positions don't all line up on the left or the right.

So here's the bottom line: the so-called "middle" is always -- always -- a contested political position, and to call it "sensible" is to engage in a sort of sleight-of-hand that seeks to disguise its contested nature.

I think it is reasonable to wish for a less cantankerous debate, one with less abuse and less vitriol. It is reasonable to wish for fact-based discussion, where expert opinion is used as a guide to democratic decision making. It is also reasonable to wish for a media that better reflects the variety of views that exist on any given topic, and one that is less beholden to shallow caricature.

But it is completely unreasonable to define yourself as a "moderate" and your position on everything as the "sensible centre" and to presume that nearly everyone else is simply "extreme".

You can't complain, as Lehman does, that we don't "wrestle with ideas" enough and then merely posit some vague notion of a political middle ground. And to say that "moderates" have "better things to do than argue with strangers about politics" is to miss the point of politics itself.

In a democracy, the "sensible middle" is just another position on the political spectrum, and "moderates" have to argue their case as much as anyone else.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @timdunlop. View his full profile here.