A Reactionary Centrist Passes (RIP DiFi)

Dianne Feinstein has died, and she leaves a decidedly mixed legacy. I’ll link to a long obit by historian and cranky gadfly Erik Loomis, who counters the usual hagiographies with a critical take. I don’t have strong feelings about DiFi except that it was manifestly clear she shouldn’t have run the last time—and I’m doing so pretty seriously tarnished her legacy. 

One small detail from her life does warrant some attention because it’s an example of a profound force that has governed politics my whole life. In the late 60s and early 70s, left wing activists had gotten out of control. It was the tail end of the FDR progressive era, and all the massive change convinced a lefty fringe that revolution was about to happen. They used extreme methods to forward their (uniformly half-baked) schemes, including violence. As DiFi was coming up, they targeted her, even (haplessly) planting a bomb at her house. 

The legacy of this era has been fifty years of what some people have called “reactionary centrism.” It existed in both parties, but became a huge governing principle for Dems. In a world of many grave dangers, you can always depend on the reactionary centrist to focus most of their energy on anything vaguely left-wing. As Loomis writes: “Feinstein took a lesson out of all of this—the counterculture caused problems and so did leftists. She believed that tough rule from the center—whatever the center meant at a given time—was the way to promote order.”

That impulse has dominated the Democratic Party my whole life. It has also been the hand guiding media coverage. Having learned the lesson that lefties are an existential threat to democracy and order, it’s the one threat they always guard against. It’s a fundamentally conservative view, meaning that any time progressives attempt to advance a new agenda, from health care to gay rights to environmental rights, *Dems* will be policing it for any hint of radicalism they need to stomp out. The leadership of the Party has come from the elder generations (Boomers and Silent Gen) for decades. Even someone like Nancy Pelosi, truly one of the great leaders in US history, spent her Speakership tamping down her left flank. 

Of course, this makes them blind to the dangers of right wing extremism, and worse, means they are the wrong antibodies to fight it off. 

If there’s a sliver lining to this detail in DiFi’s life, it’s that the current generation are learning valuable lessons, too, ones they’ll guard for the next half-century. They will see the dangers in both right-wing extremism and the reactionary centrism that enables it. If the republic survives, a wave of people will internalize the dangers of the racism, misogyny, homophobia, and greed that animate the GOP. They are looking at the GOP campaign for 2024, the boiling planet, at the draconian laws restricting health care for pregnant people (and abortion), at the dysfunction in the House represented by Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, and they see an entirely different existential danger. 

May they sooner rather than later come to power in the halls of Congress and editorial rooms of media outlets. It can’t happen too soon.