Endorsing centrist politics: Time to end a century-long faux division
Great social or political change sometimes arrives after decades of campaigning in a great carnival of marching bands, face-painting, and rainbow banners all aflutter. Like a spring tide, an idea that can be resisted no longer presses its case in a decisive, final way.
Last May’s referendum on abortion, which led to this month’s enactment of legislation, was such a moment in our history. For so long unimaginable — and forcefully blocked — that vote, in the loudest, most public and democratic way, reset Ireland’s compass, just as the marriage equality vote did in 2015.
Great change can also arrive almost unnoticed, in an almost below-the-radar, silent embrace of new actualities. Though it did not generate anything like the fury around the referendum on the Eighth Amendment, this month’s co-operation agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which, all going well, pushes the next general election well into 2020, is another seismic adjustment of Old Ireland’s compass.
It may, in political terms at least, in time, prove the most significant moment of the year. Such co-operation between once-bitter enemies was for many, many years, and many died-hard generations, as utterly unimaginable as legislation facilitating abortion passing through the Oireachtas.
In a world, at least a small corner of it, awash with Brexit’s spleen and in a wider world rocked by Washington’s implosion, we have turned to the stability that can be offered by bolstering the centre. Our inherent conservatism may be frustrating, and delay the inevitable, but it also sustains the belief that politics can achieve, that it can be a worthwhile actor in the process of improving our world. This hope
endures, despite many huge social challenges today.
Something around three-quarters of the electorate, if the polls can be relied on, define themselves as centre, centre-right, or centre-left and have, despite ample opportunity, rejected hard-left or hard-right alternatives. That moderation may be an inherited understanding of what intolerance and intransigence actually bring to our communities — a rare reason to be grateful for the tyranny of paramilitarism. This consensus is almost absolute. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Labour, the Greens, the Social Democrats, and most Independents
follow variations of the same credo. Those erstwhile revolutionaries, Sinn Féin, have also made let-us-in overtures to Fine Gael and Finna Fáil. Sinn Féin is, after all, as Mary Lou McDonald insists, “a party of government”.
Consensus, a common purpose, is always welcome, but it can generate the kind of over-confidence that is destroying Theresa May’s make-it-up-as-we-go-along cabinet. It takes a particular, steely-eyed self-awareness to guard against that foible. In a short while, we will mark events that divided our politics for a century. Is it possible to hope that those with the power to do so finally recognise that indulgence is unsustainable and that the centre unites in a way that our great social problems and inequities demand? What better vindication of centrist politics and what a powerful rejection of the hardened attitudes undermining social democracy in the West? And what a splendid way to mark a century of independence.