The Trouble with Being in the Middle

By Thomas Griffith

The middle, it is generally agreed, is the right place to be. To the Greeks, moral wisdom was to be found in the golden mean. Modern political candidates, positioning themselves where they think the voters want them, shrewdly head for the middle. So if the middle is both the sensible and winning place to be, why is it also so boring and in some ways so discredited?

To be middle-class or middlebrow, even for those prop erly defined as belonging to either group, often seems conventional, complacent and confining, which may be why their tastes in books and movies run -- at a safe distance from reality -- to behavior or opinions more blatant than their own. Middle leads naturally to mediocre, a word that takes its roots from what is middling and therefore ordinary. Yet Aristotle, judging the temperaments of men, exalted the intermediate and argued that anything more extreme was either excess or defect. To him there was, for example, a desirable quality called bravery, and on one side of it cowardice, and on the other, foolhardiness. There was pride, and on one side of it boasting, and on the other, excessive modesty. This sort of cataloguing, while admirable, soon begins sounding as platitudinous as Polonius -- morality by characterization.

In politics, the great modern exponent of the wisdom of the middle was, of course, Eisenhower. Summoned to office when American politics had become excessively cantankerous, his above-politics politics proved to be the winningest of all. His imitators have been striving for the same tone ever since. In his first State of the Union speech, Eisenhower (or his speechwriter) did a semantic balancing act that would have impressed Aristotle, promising to steer a middle course in foreign affairs "between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly." The poet Robert Frost, growing impatient with Eisenhower's repeated middle-of-the-road metaphor, complained that "the middle of the road is where the white line is -- and that's the worst place to drive." But Eisenhower had a wider middle in mind, which served him well as a political credo. He deplored categorizing people "as liberal or conservative, rightist or leftist, as long as they stay in the useful part of the road." The people he despised were those who "go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center."

Ike's successors have been striving to emulate his tone and position in the Great American Center. Lyndon Johnson dearly loved talking about the virtues of consensus, until he lost his. Richard Nixon early in office developed a rhetorical style that he has not yet shaken: defining two abhorrent extremes, which might be the easy or popular courses to take, and then -- with the air of a man saying "politics be damned" -- asserting that he will daringly follow a middle course.

Conventional wisdom now judges politicians by how fractionally they veer from the center: Barry Goldwater and George McGovern stand condemned for their inability or unwillingness to come in from the extreme; Nelson Rockefeller is studied with fascination as he carefully calibrates his evolution away from seeming too liberal for his party. Senator Charles Percy, advised to adopt a similar course, recently objected that "a swing to the right would devastate my credibility." Such maneuvering, such manufacturing of new credentials by politicians in dogged pursuit of the shifting middle, adds to the current cynicism about office seekers. It also adds to the confusion about just what the middle stands for. But that confusion is already there, inherent in middleness.

Intellectually, the middle encourages a convenient fuzziness of attitude, for it defines itself by letting others declare the extremes that it will compromise between. When this is the attitude of society as a whole, there is much to be said for it: a stable but not static society adjusts itself by listening to recitals of grievances, striking balances between competing passions strongly held, heeding complaints of injustice and responding to, if nothing else, the weight of numbers. In such a canceling out of conflicting claims and in such readiness to compromise, society finds a mean that may not be golden but works. The confusion begins when people think of themselves as embodying these balancing qualities and consider themselves disinterested while all about them are self-seekers and partisans. Smugness is the peculiar vice of the middle, the hardest of all qualities for anyone to detect in himself.

A person wanting to be understood as commonsensible and undoctrinaire will describe himself or herself complacently as middle-of-the-road. So loosely defined a term, as with the similar pride in being an "independent voter," invites a lot of freeloaders. The middle is thus the natural hiding place for the uninvolved. It includes in its domain hordes of the indifferent, who call themselves tolerant, and of the uncaring, who think themselves pragmatic and flexible. Such people are apt to congratulate themselves on being superior to those who strive, who get worked up, who agitate for causes, who make demands and air grievances, and who disturb the public tranquillity.

Of course, the middle public sometimes gets worked up too, but having more interest in preserving than in changing its way of life, it does not so much embrace causes as nurture discontent. When so wide a public feels frustrated--by inflation, for example--its collective fury is greatly feared by politicians. Since it has not paid attention to issues and details, it can be sweeping and unselective in its revenge, throwing out incumbents--competent and corrupt alike.

The indifferent among those in the political middle usually take their cue from attitudes, not arguments. By objecting to someone's manner they are freed from having to consider his ideas. Granted their distaste is well founded toward those flamboyant types in every community who too readily take up a succession of fashionably unfashionable causes and as quickly lose interest when more practical people get interested. But it is hard to accept the accompanying assumption of the passive middle: that low interest and low involvement in public affairs are proof of superiority. The fastidious who deplore the kind of people engaged in politics or wrapped up in causes have in fact left the field to those whom they condemn. They may think themselves the backbone of society and the ultimate arbiters of change, but history is apt to judge them differently. For change conies from those who care, who propose and agitate, modified by those who care differently and oppose; the rest is inertia. The inert middle is not what Aristotle meant to extol.

Since he recognized that "not every action nor every feeling admits of a mean," Aristotle would hardly esteem more highly those who get worked up about nothing than those who get worked up about everything. In fact, if he were updating his polemics today, Aristotle might well find himself saying something like "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." There was never all that much wrong with Goldwater's famous formulation, except that in the climate of 1964 this wordplay was correctly understood as a winking endorsement of right-wing extremism.

Nowadays among voters the three most fashionable places to be are probably middle of the road, conservative and "slightly left of center." Old labels have become so blurred that, as Barry Goldwater recently remarked, "when you lay a real liberal alongside a real conservative, there's not enough difference to put in your hat." But without doubt the middle is now gathered at a point farther to the right than it was a decade ago. For this there are many familiar reasons, including: the disillusionment with "throwing money" at social programs without evident effect (though it has not been proved that failing to spend money on problems works either); the heavy increase in taxation when everything else is going up in price too; the fatigue with experiment at a time when so much else that is uncontrollable seems to be changing too fast.

In the U.S., as in Western Europe, faith in bold and broad solutions has waned; exhilaration with politics has all but disappeared. Publics may be disillusioned with their governments but do not show themselves adventurous when it comes to considering alternatives. Political arguments are now less about ends than about pace and process.

Yet even when issues are narrowed, important political, social and economic choices are constantly being made or not made, affecting valuable programs that may not be continued or promising new solutions that are not even tried. The man in the middle is not entitled to think of himself as all that disinterested and above the battle (the impulse to keep his taxes low is just as clearly self-interest as someone else's clamor for a subsidy or a handout). It is the not caring and not choosing that gives the middle its bad name. The middle would be a smaller and more satisfactory place if only those who worked at it were eligible to wear the Order of the Golden Mean.

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