"Centrism" has become the Rorschach test of British politics—no wonder we can't have a straightforward conversation about it

Right now, centrism is the Rorschach test of British politics. Almost everyone agrees that it exists, but what they see when they look at it varies wildly. In the eyes of some, it’s what British politics needs a lot more of to solve the political and economic crises of Brexit—while to others, it’s something that Britain has already had far too much of and is the root cause of those and many other crises.

At this point in the debate over what a political term actually means, we might normally turn to academia to provide us with an accepted definition of the term. Unfortunately, the general academic way of defining centrism has been to borrow the method of a US Supreme Court justice defining pornography: “I know it when I see it.” For once, academic and populist discourse are united in accepting that centrism exists, but leaving what it actually is to the eye of the beholder.

I would suggest that centrism is actually two concepts that have become overlapped and intertwined but still refer to different things—and one reason some of the recent debates about centrism have become heated is because people haven’t realised they’re talking about two different things. On the one hand we have what I’ll call for now “practical centrism,” and on the other we have “centrist tendencies.”

Practical centrism is essentially a form of political pragmatism that believes the best way to solve political problems is with a mix of the ideas of the left and the right. This centrism has a belief in balance, and a sense that politics swinging too far to the left or right is dangerous for society.

In Europe, it manifests itself most clearly in the post-war Christian Democrat tradition, which sought to industrially develop the continent’s shattered economies and prevent the extremes that had led to war. This balance between extremes was the strategy followed by Christian Democracy in its decades running Italy, and is also behind Angela Merkel's positioning of the CDU at the centre of German politics.

One problem for understanding this form of centrism in Britain is that we often confuse Christian Democracy with conservatism, and associate centrism with liberalism because of its association with the Liberals and Liberals Democrats.

While this form of centrism is ideological, centrist tendencies are related more to electoral considerations and pressures. These tendencies were first explained by the American political scientist Anthony Downs in his 1957 work An Economic Theory of Democracy. Downs argued that because most voters can be found in the centre, political parties will gravitate towards the centre because that’s where the voters are (his full argument is somewhat more complex, but this is the version of it most people understand).

In practice, this led to plenty of arguments within parties between those who wanted to stick in one position and wait for voters to come to them—like Iain Duncan Smith and Jeremy Corbyn—and centrists who wanted to move the party nearer the voters, like Tony Blair, David Cameron or George Osborne.

Because centrism has always been an undefined assumption on most people’s part, discussions of its place in British politics have often confused these two ideas.

Some call themselves “centrists” because they want to claim a pragmatic central position, while others do so because they want to add those voters who place themselves there to their electoral coalition of the right or left.

Those latter centrists get criticised by members of their own party for compromising their principles to chase electability—see, for instance, Owen Jones’ recent cricitism of Labour’s centrists, or the flak Cameron took from his party’s right wing. Meanwhile, someone else conflates centrism and liberalism, which prompts liberals to argue if they want to be in the centre or move to the left or right.

Multiple conceptions of what ‘centrism’ is, with a variety of positive and negative connotations, all overlap. The end result doesn’t shed much light on the subject—but certainly generates heat.

This is why talk of centrism evokes the Rorschach test. Everyone sees their hopes and fears for politics carried within it, assumes everyone else is seeing the same as they are and then gets upset when they discover they don’t.

There surely will be a continuing role for the centre in British politics, but it’d help if we could agree on what we’re discussing before we start to either praise or denounce it.