"That is not it at all."

On Reactionary Centrism as Gesture

“Historical ‘understanding’ is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood.”

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

There’s a famous line in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History”: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” He means, I think, that we always articulate the past against the horizon of the disappearance of certain meanings. Those interpretations of history that the rich, those in power, those who design monuments and who dominate the chattering classes like, are at little risk of disappearing. But those aspects that contravene those interpretations, that belie the self-serving stories the powerful tell themselves about themselves, are always on the brink of erasure.

I have been thinking about this a lot, since we also doubtlessly find ourselves “at a moment of danger”. And because many who brought it about will be sure to wash their hands of bringing it about. However we assess what is happening in the United States and across the democratic world, few would claim there isn’t a moment to be met. An unelected billionaire is poised to dismantle the administrative state. The separation of powers appears to be collapsing. The vice president, himself a lawyer, seems intent on turning the judiciary into an appendage of the executive branch.

I think the moment is also defined by how few are meeting it — whether it’s congressional Democrats, our universities, or the media. Their failure to meet it may be outrageous on a moral level, but I think it is also deeply telling. The moment provides the kind of “flash” that Benjamin talks about.

It is a downright spectacular moment, and most of us feel more or less powerless. But I think there are different forms of powerlessness and they are deeply revealing in their differences. Above all, I want to talk today about an ideology that Aaron Huertas, Thomas Zimmer and Michael Hobbes have all described as “reactionary centrism” (I’m sure others have too, but they’re the ones I’m drawing my understanding of the term from.) Huertas described “reactionary centrism” as viewing itself as “hold[ing] a middle, neutral position” while “punching left”.

Notice that Huertas’s description links two things: the consistent ideology of seeing yourself as “holding a neutral position”, and the action of “punching left”. Others have ably critiqued the status “neutrality” and “centrism” hold in this discourse and what they enable. I’m more interested in the “punching”-part, or rather the juncture between the punching and the neutrality. “Reactionary centrism” — and that’s no accident — is an ideology for/of a moment in which our intellectuals almost obsessively create content. Repetition, quick reaction, the clapback are the name of the game. My basic contention is that (1) both Huertas and those he attacked seem to think that the repeated action (the punch left) flows from something stable standing behind the repeated action (the delusional claim to a neutral position); but that (2) I think the current moment suggests that the directionality is the opposite: the ideology is the substrate over time of the repeated gesture of beating up on SJWs or what-have-you.

At the very least, those two — the supposedly neutral position and the punching left — are at this specific historic moment coming apart, precisely because the campaign waged against the vestiges of the civil rights regime in America emulates the “punch left” gestures of the reactionary centrist, or is at least perceptually indistinguishable from them. In his analysis, Walter Benjamin relied on concepts, but not concepts in the traditional sense. He compared his concepts to “sails” you set in order to do what he described above — to “seize hold” of something “at a moment of danger.” This means treating concepts as something more than concepts — he treats them as “images” that short-circuit chronological time.

“It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.“

On a much less sophisticated level than Benjamin, this is what I want to do in this short piece: to articulate what the current moment reveals about the reactionary centrist moment in our intellectual life. What, in other words, we are to make of the spectacle of people whose wishes have all come true — the wokesters running for cover, affirmative action dead as a doornail, “natural” hierarchies reaffirmed —, but who now have to struggle to figure out a way into being J. Alfred Prufrock: “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.” As reactionary centrism’s chickens come back to roost, the cognitive dissonance inherent in this position goes into overdrive.

Broadly, I will argue that this moment suggests that it was a mistake to assume that ideology or thinking was ever all that central to what Huertas identified. In his first essay on the topic, Huertas suggested that the people he was criticizing “ask themselves if what they’re doing with their public advocacy work is actually accomplishing what they think it is”. But what if there was nothing they were actually seeking to accomplish? Not, at least, anything that their nominal liberal or even left-ish credentials would suggest? It surely promotes their own sense of seriousness™️, it implicitly affirms their perspective, judgment and reasonableness over and against all others (especially those beholden to “identity”, of course), and it makes a case for why we should keep paying them money. But what if there’s nothing beyond that?

There’s a long tradition of internal critique on the left (quite likely to a fault) and the half-century complaint about “identity politics” always drew on that internal discourse within, in particular, the New Left. The early critics of identity politics took the pose of: “I’m with you guys, I just want to make sure we get our message out more effectively, and I worry that this ain’t it!” But — and this is important — many of these critics (and, as time went on, almost all of them) rehearsed this critique almost exclusively for the consumption of outside audience. Its participation in any left project was at that point nominal or gestural, the main point was to have an appropriate perch for attacking the left. Their worry “as feminists” that “feminism has gone too far” was no longer aimed at feminists, it was aimed at non-feminists, and — probably — anti-feminists. As this kind of critique migrated to the center, towards people who probably no longer identified as anything left, but moderates of whatever fashion, this gesture remained: they were broadly supportive of your cause, but they wanted to first talk about how your methods in pursuing it. What remained constant, that is, was the gesture itself, which proved extremely mobile and adaptable. Reactionary centrism is the totalization of that gesture.

“Conservatism”, Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination, consisted in his moment “mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas”. What he meant by it was that the objections to the social consensus offered by the Far Right might be “pollyannish or tyrannical”, but they were not intellectual critiques. He intended it as an indictment of postwar reactionary thought, which he took to be a shambolic mishmash incapable of offering the kind of unifying vision that liberalism seemed to embody. But it was also a statement about the intellectual structure of the movement: There was no totality to mediate the individual reactionary impulses — presumably when compared to the Enlightenment meliorism of American left liberalism or the “scientific” explanatory matrices of Marxism.

On first glance, this would seem like a bad descriptor of reactionary centrism, which — if anything — is hung up on ideas, abstract principles, and the value represented by the mere activity of thinking. There’s a column Jonathan Chait wrote about the label back in 2023 — which is unintentionally deeply revealing. In it Chait criticizes Thomas Zimmer “whose ideology,” as he writes “is organized around preventing thought”. Apart from the fact that this is an insane way of characterizing Thomas’s work: This is clearly the obverse of how Chait sees himself: to Chait’s idealized version of Chait, more thought is always better, promoting thought is an unalloyed good and limiting what is thinkable is always bad. It is noticeable, of course, that the people Huertas criticized usually defend these abstract principles only in very select instances. It is further noticeable that the principle of selection is a mystery known only to the reactionary centrist himself. Why do you care about the free speech rights of transphobes, who shouldn’t be deplatformed just because what they say may be offensive to some, but you are unconcerned about those of pro-Palestine protestors?

The reason this kind of questioning reveals so much about reactionary centrists and not, say, about Trumpists is the supposed universalism of their big principles. Oh, do you think a Trumpie might apply different rules depending on who they’re applied to? Well yeah, that’s sort of the name of their game, isn’t it? There are those the law protects but doesn’t bind, etc. etc. But it’s far more awkward when those who take themselves to defend the vaunted universalism and neutrality of Enlightenment reason clearly can’t ever bring those principles to bear universally and neutrally.

Which, in a funny way, has these high-minded intellectuals’ high-minded efforts very much resemble the “irritable gestures” Trilling made fun of. After all, on a purely phenomenal level, what does it matter whether my apoplectic injunctions have no coherent basis, or whether they supposedly have such a basis, but don’t stick to it? Present Stephen Pinker with a thing that happens a few times a year, and how he interprets it — whether that’s just noise, whether it’s important data, whether it’s silly to fixate on it, or whether it’s important to fixate on — will depend very much on what it is. Hate crimes? I’m sorry, unless it’s happening to thousands of people, it’s really not that significant in the grand forward march of progress. Disinvitations from college campuses? Oh, well that’s a different thing — even one of those is one too many!

Going back to Chait’s column on all of this: “The actual standard, and the term’s most commonly applied usage,” Chait complained back then, “is an insult for liberals who sometimes criticize the left.” Chait plays off an essential disposition — a liberal one — against individual actions — “sometimes” criticizing the left. Aaron Huertas responded in detail to the misreading Chait’s critique represents, but he didn’t really dwell on that “sometimes”: the charge against reactionary centrists is, as I understand it, that the “sometimes” just happens to coincide with every time they write a column. If, as Hegel claimed, “the periods of happiness are the empty pages of history,” then the reactionary centrist’s moments of agreement with liberalism are the columns the reactionary centrist doesn’t write.

In The Cancel Culture Panic, I called attention to what I called “the essayistic principle” of cancel culture-texts: In them, “there is a performative subjectivism,” as they take you on “a wild ride through whatever books and historical events the author happens to care about.” And in the end, the subjective element is not about destabilizing our shared social pieties, but in a covert way about reinforcing them:

I think I let my own pique show a little too much in that passage, but my pique was about the kind of “pollyannish or tyrannical” subjectivism in texts like this. You are very much at someone’s mercy. You stand in slack-jawed awe at the sheer act of choosing what they care about. What they elevate to an epoch-defining civilizational struggle (pronouns in my kids kindergarten!) and what they wave away (yes, yes, people are being forcibly detransitioned in prisons… we all oppose that) follows a logic that is at once too subjective and too objective. It’s too subjective because the writer doesn’t explain why he cares about one and not the other; and it’s too objective because what an individual writer cares about and what he doesn’t may be fully informed by the power structure of the society in which he finds himself.

I think something similar happens with reactionary centrists: you as their reader are at the mercy of what they happen to care about. In general, I share Thomas Zimmer’s sense that reactionary centrism (like “cancel culture”-discourses, incidentally) is above all a coping mechanism, a form of what he calls “elite status quo fundamentalism.” These people see themselves as broadly liberal, but they are uncomfortable with societal change, especially when that change implicitly implicates their own status within society, within the institution and (above all) within public discourse. We are watching their self-soothing happening in real time, but under the thinnest of disguises as social critique.

When reading these writers, you are at mercy of their neuroses and fixations, at their unearned self-confidence and very poorly hidden self-doubt. You are at their mercy not just in the sense that they only cover, discuss, weigh in only on things they care about. This comes with the territory when we’re reading columnists and essayists, and is ultimately understandable. But in the broader sense that things only exist in their universe insofar as they allow them to, and that so much gets waved away with a “yes, yes” in order to move on to the point they really care about.

Yes, yes, what Donald Trump is doing to the federal bureaucracy does look a bit like a coup. But might left-wingers be overreacting to it in ways I find unproductive? Does it look like the people constantly going on about “academic freedom” are now poised to deliver a death blow to academic research? Sure, but maybe the profs “were asking for it”? This is why this genre of thought thrives in the essay form: because there you always get to center the seemingly extraneous. In fact, in really good essays that’s all you do: register your own thoughts and impulses vis-à-vis events that might (ideally) point to a broader truth about those events. But in repetition, these omissions can also be pretty revealing — and indeed reveal a politics (just read a Didion travelogue for the presence of non-white people and … well.)

There’s a funny thing about this sort of critique that occurs to me as I’m making it: I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. I’m trying to get us to be more explicit about something we already sense and to think through its implications. I think a lot of people have picked up on the not-so-subtle point these sorts of reactionary centrists make by how often they write texts focused on very specific sub-issues of major issues — the point at which the essayistic principle calcifies into something like a politics, even if those politics are never openly acknowledged. If column after column fixates on this tiny sub-problem of a major problem and refuses to move on, the repetition itself makes a point. And when two or more editors at, say, the New York Times, fixate on specific debates and those are then chosen by reactionary politicians as the linchpin for their campaign against already set-upon minorities,

Here is the New York Times’s Editorial Board op ed on “Trump’s Shameful Campaign against Transgender Americans”. It is wonderful of course that the Times notes the horrific attack against this set-upon group. It’s good that they call out the immorality of the assault on their rights.

The op ed notes how large the anti-trans movement is, how well financed and how well-connected. It points out that public fixation on trans people seems wildly disproportionate to their actual presence and power in society. But then the op ed gets to the bad faith “debates” by which Trump’s hateful actions against trans people have been legitimated (usually explicitly so). And here … well, see for yourself:

As I read this paragraph I thought: They just can’t help themselves, can they? And this compulsion is the kind of irritable gesture I was talking about. If you rewind the tape, you’ll note that the “shameful campaign” the Times is criticizing here mostly involves five (by my count, as of this writing) Executive Orders from the Trump White House: one involving the military, one involving prisons, one involving schools, one involving school sports, etc. Note that the op ed goes out of its way to legitimate a bunch of these as “fiercely debated, even by those who broadly support trans rights”. Imagine writing about another civil rights issue that way: “sure, they have a point and legitimate questions on all these manufactured panics, but surely they don’t have to be so cruel about it?”

Two things are important here: fierce debaters nevertheless “broadly support[ive of] trans rights”? Meet the New York Times editorial board’s self-portrait, except one executed in the rosiest of rosy hues. This is how they see themselves and this is how they seek to whitewash what has been their true legacy with regards to these Executive Orders: they helped make them happen, prepared the discursive ground for them, threw up just enough dust for people not to be able to regard them as what they clearly are. But no, they were just having a debate! While being “broadly supportive” — presumably in their heart of hearts which they never had time to express in writing — of trans rights! Of course, who wouldn’t be!

And that’s the second thing that strikes me: it’s funny coming from people who are always so ready to tar everyone else with the “identity politics” brush, but this treats being “broadly supportive” as almost an identity category. In order to be “broadly supportive”, you don’t have to do anything to support. Supportiveness is a kind of inner state that you do not need to be expressing in order for it to be a real, recognized part of your personhood. Perhaps it is about the milieu you’re in, perhaps it is about where you live in the country or how you vote. Perhaps it’s simply about working at the New York Times. When Pamela Paul can complain that she’s been “slapped with every label from ‘conservative’ to ‘Republican’ and even, in one loopy rant, ‘fascist,’” which is so silly given that she is in fact a “pure blue American”, then there are two ways of reading that: yes, perhaps your critics are misunderstanding your actual deeply held belief by fixating on the things you say and do in public; or there might be some value in reflecting on the dissonance between what you take to be your core values and the things you say and do in public.

There is a strikingly similar dynamic playing out in Germany at the moment. As you may have read, Friedrich Merz of the CDU put a draconian resolution about immigration and refugees before the German Bundestag — and decided he’d pass it with the open support of the Far Right AfD. It was widely seen as testing the waters for a possible cooperation between the parties down the line. As a result, and as you might expect, there have been massive demonstrations against the Far Right and against the CDU for tearing down the “firewall” vis-à-vis the Far Right.

The newspaper Der Freitag did an interview with political scientist Ruud Koopmans, in which he explained why he thought the demonstrations (not the cooperation with the Far Right) were a bad idea. I should say at the outset that this is at the beginning of an interview, so perhaps not the most thought-through remark. But precisely as a set of immediate reactions, it’s instructive. Koopmans says:

“One can argue about the CDU's initiatives. But democrats should not demonize and fight each other. The demonstrators are creating exactly the Weimar conditions that they supposedly want to prevent.”

This to me emblematizes three characteristic operations: there’s the “not like that”-injunction (Koopmans is for some kind of “arguing”, he just happens not to like the kind that’s actually happening) that seems to be so attractive to a certain kind of observer. Koopmans even saw some posters of the CDU that had been defaced! Gadzooks! There’s the insistence that if there’s a Far Right takeover ("Weimar conditions”), it won’t be the fault of those who helped it gain power, but those who tried to protest against it. But finally, and most importantly for my argument, there’s the injunction that “democrats should not demonize and fight each other”. Note that being “a democrat” again here is not about what one does, but it is simply what one is. The CDU may be looking to enter into a pact with illiberal anti-democratic forces. That is what people are protesting. Their status as democrats is what is being contested. But it cannot be contested, in that the CDU are a democratic party, independent of what they do and say.

Whether it’s the New York Times or the goobers over at The Atlantic: there’s this idea that your every single public utterance on trans issues can be devoted to cast doubt on them and their self-assertions, on their methods and activism, but that you can still — by some strange metaphysical birthright — be (and can demand to be recognized as) “broadly supportive” of trans people and their rights. I suppose the same surety with which Americans are able to self-diagnose the number of racist bones in their body: by golly, you just know it’s there, even if it so rarely finds expression.

This is what makes this moment such an important one for understanding how reactionary centrism functions (more so than what it “is”). It lives, I think, in the disjunction between ideas and their consequences and implications, even when those consequences and implications are fairly clear. It describes societal change in ways that almost always seem to require some kind of crack-down: on woke universities, on out-of-control teachers, on unions, on federal workers, on DEI, on doctors, and on kids just trying to live their goddamn lives. In fact, if you look over the menu of issues reactionary centrists care about, they are usually (though not universally) amenable to this sort of crackdown logic.

But of course the reactionary centrist never explicitly calls for a crackdown. If a crackdown occurs, as it often does, it will not find his explicit support. It’s his version of evenhandedness: if the conservative stands athwart history yelling stop, the reactionary centrists stands on the platform yelling “no, not like that”. But that injunction has the same speciousness parodied by Anatole France in his famous line that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” Because telling a social movement organizing societal outcasts “not like that” licenses the reactionary violence, while telling that reactionary violence “hey, also not like that” will not change a goddamn thing.

Reactionary centrism at its most basic is the ability to treat these two as fundamentally the same. It works particularly well in the hands of those who have little to gain by change and who may be uncomfortable with the kind of societal change their ostensible or imputed policy preferences are likely to bring about. What is more: It thrives when social conditions are such that the difference between “not like that” said to bra-burning feminists or shouting undergraduates, and “not like that” said politely to the literal police, isn’t noticeable enough to enough people to matter. It comes under pressure when that difference instead gets quite stark, as it does right now.