INTERVIEW: Antón Barba-Kay on the State of the American Center

If politics abhors a void, what will fill the vacated space we once thought of as “the center”?

This week marks the first anniversary of Current, so it’s fitting that we revisit one of the ideals with which we launched the site: the hope of fostering civic space that is “free, dynamic, divergent, and civil” in its pursuit of “commentary, reflection, and judgment.” In the interview that follows, Antón Barba-Kay, associate professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, reflects on the challenges of cultivating such a space in America’s present moment. Barba-Kay has recently published an incisive essay on these themes: “The Once and Vital Center.” The interview begins with a reference to that essay.

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You refer to “the Center” as a “myth” in both senses of the term: a historical falsity but also a grand (and necessary) unifying vision. Can you briefly describe the way you see these two sides of the mythical American center?

The center is a “myth” not exactly in the sense that it is false but in the sense that it was widely upheld as an unquestioned part of our national self-understanding, of the story that holds us together in place. It is something that, as a consequence, seemed like an objective fact about American government. We are now finding out that there is no such given. 

I think we tend to forget that nations are collective projects that only exist because people are willing to give themselves to them. It’s safe to say that we have found over the past year that Ukraine is really a nation (unlike what Russia initially thought), while Afghanistan turned out not to be one (as we had ourselves wishfully thought). 

Yet the idea of a nation is not simply a noble lie, because it is an idea whose principles only and actually come to exist to the extent that we willingly believe and collaborate in upholding their shared reality. The center is (or was) like that, too: not a procedural feature of government but a principle through which we actually communicated political differences because we believed that we could and ought and should work together to do so. It is a myth that was true in practice because we believed it in theory.

Your point about “what we’ve found out” in the past year about Ukraine and Afghanistan is fascinating. What have we found out in the past year (or five years?) about the American center—besides the fact that it’s not a given? 

When any shared practice or assumption falls apart, it invariably looks hollower in retrospect than it really was at the time. The center undeniably rested on simplifications and omissions. The tremendous appetite for conservative talk radio and for cable news that appeared with the deregulation of the airwaves in the 80’s and 90’s, for instance, suggests that millions of people were not satisfied with the evening news as presented by the dominant three or four networks prior. We have also developed an increasingly heightened awareness of and sensitivity to the relative equality and inequality of many identity categories of which the old center was careless.

While I’m wary of blanket “because internet” explanations, it’s hard to underestimate its force as a Pandora’s Box of all kinds of currents that, while present, remained in abeyance without the occasion to develop through widespread reach and participation. The new problem (as I’ve said in the article) is that, while everyone’s perception of inequality is a lot sharper now (such that we could no longer “unsee” it if we tried), our new media is also such as to destroy the very possibility of some new mainstream consensus from emerging at all, let alone a more “inclusive” or “exclusive” one. 

In your essay you write, provocatively, that “It seems clear at this point, during this breathing space between Trump 45 and 47, that the center is not coming back. The new normal consists not in a new pattern but in the inability of a new pattern to settle into place.” That word “inability” reflects a strong judgment. Has the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the prospect of a new geopolitical moment altered your thinking at all? 

The simplest thing to say is that there will be no new “normal” or “center” so long as we don’t really want one—so long, that is, as we are actively looking to the other side of the American aisle for our existential opponent. I think this mostly happens outside our conscious awareness or intent.

It’s too early to tell whether the invasion of Ukraine represents the return of the sort of conflict that could save us from ourselves. The last few weeks have been rousing and encouraging; a widespread collective response such as we had not experienced in years. But beyond sympathetic flag-waving and a spike in gas prices, I don’t see that it has yet cost the American electorate anything. If and when we are asked to make difficult and long-term sacrifices to make Russia pay—if and when it touches us in the flesh (as Satan did Job)—we will find out how consequential this really is for us. Sustained and coherent commitments to overseas conflicts have not been our strongest suit; I worry our attention to the war is already beginning to flag. 

There’s a sense, I think, in which you’re calling for statesmen who can show us the way back to a center—who can give us the option to choose it again. Who are your top three “statesmen of the center” in our political history since, say, the Civil War? 

I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer. Statesmen have to fight like hell to get anything done—and fighting like hell under the present digital conditions is just the thing that’s tearing us apart. The best approximations I can think of are figures from the various nonviolent resistance movements of the twentieth century (Gandhi, MLK, Havel, Mandela, and so forth). These leaders were committed to non-retaliation not just as a strategic tactic but as a means of embodying a qualitatively higher good that they saw as belonging both to oppressors and oppressed.

Obama made a concerted effort to govern from the center. His continuous failure to speak to the other side serves in retrospect as a bellwether of things to come. But this failure was not due to his lack of trying to reach for higher ground for all. I can think of moments of the Reagan or Clinton or Kennedy administrations that clearly spoke to our better angels and to an uplifting sense of common service. But their appeal to the idioms of the center seems different to me from the thought that they were deliberately guarding or imagining or conforming the center. 

In the Supreme Court, there’s a striking difference between Justice Roberts’ conscious attempt to maintain the Court’s legitimacy by minding the center and some of the other Justices’ damn-the-torpedoes approach.

Is it possible that inasmuch as there actually exists something like a center, it is civic space that ends up being opened up and maintained most effectively by non-elected officials, including, as you say, someone like a Justice Roberts, so conspicuous in his efforts to lead the court from something like the center?

This sounds right now that you’ve stated it. I want to make two distinctions, though. I think there’s a difference between what Justice Roberts takes himself to be doing—which I would describe as trying to perform CPR on the center—and what MLK took himself to be doing—which I would describe as trying to bring into being a hitherto inexistent higher ground. They both share a regard for the center as a civic or moral ideal (in very different ways, obviously), and it may be that they teach us that this kind of center has only ever been something that’s being lost to the past or wrested from the future. 

But there’s a further distinction between that kind of center—the center as civic ideal—and the center as something like “a shared working understanding about what’s right for American government” or “what we can agree on such that we can meaningfully disagree about how to achieve it” (which is how I’ve largely been reading it). This latter sense seems to me what’s clearly dissipating, and I don’t see how any single contemporary statesman could fundamentally reverse or affect the tide.

I was recently invited to present at what I figured would be a low-key event. It turned out that at the last minute that I was scheduled to appear alongside someone—a major figure in American politics—who aggressively campaigns to overturn the 2020 election and to punish the Republicans who have advocated for the Capitol riot probe. The organizers were gracious in allowing me to withdraw as soon as I found out. All the same, they made the point that I should really try to be open-minded to different points of view in order to protect free speech. (It became clear that I was supposed to be there to stand for the “left.”) This was extremely disorienting: I am all for free speech, and I guess a large percentage of Americans regard the outcome of the 2020 election as illegitimate. But I myself don’t think it’s an issue that should or can be reasonably “debated.” Yet here I was, having to decide for myself where I thought the “center” was and, what’s more, being asked in some sense to participate in something for the purpose of “bipartisan-washing” (because some good still seems to attach to the notion of hearing it from “both sides”). 

I say this to observe that, while there is a version of the center that I aspire to embody, I also see that the notion of the center is now itself usually a cudgel, a temptation, or a false equivalence used to justify the unjustifiable. If the center is “where we draw the line,” then each one of us is being asked to do that for ourselves—a sign that our sense of a national bipartisan center is no longer strong enough to establish our political identity. But politics abhors a void: What lies before us?

Eric Miller is Professor of History and the Humanities at Geneva College, where he directs the honors program. His books include Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, and Brazilian Evangelicalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Inside and Outside Look(co-edited with Ronald J. Morgan). He is the Editor of Current.