Centrism

This is Both Sides of the Aisle.

I represent the Political Center, and I have John Dougal on the political right.

Hey, it's great to be with you again.

Yeah, great to be with you, John.

Thanks for listening.

I'm John Dougal on the right, and Shereen Gurbani is not here today.

And I'm Natalie Gochner in the Political Center, and we are so excited because we're talking about education with the senior education analyst at the Gardner Institute, Andrea Brandley.

So good to have you with us, Andrea.

I don't know if you're aware of this.

Centrist got mad at Mom Donnie for having a meeting with Trump in New York at Gracie Mansion.

They met for about an hour and then they had what was an impromptu press conference afterwards.

Trump wasn't scheduled to do it.

But behind that, I think, is something much more important if we want to understand what's happening in Germany.

I'm not the first person to say this today, but the political center in Germany has been definitively hollowed out.

I think the sight of Chancellor Merz last night kind of hobbling onto television after his party had received its worst result in its history and just kind of repeating the mantra that, you know, we have to work harder and we have to reform the welfare state and spend less on people who need the money and more on weapons, really no acknowledgement of how completely decimated his political project is, was really emblematic for the state of mainstream German policies today.

Neither the Christian Democrats, nor the Social Democrats, nor the Greens, to a lesser extent, I mean, FDP, we don't even have to talk about at this point, They're pretty much DOA.

And that, I think, is really the core of it.

The fact that those two parties are also much better at social media, that the technical side, so to speak, helps them transmit, transport their message better.

But the real foundation, the real context of this shift is the collapse of the political center.

And that is something that I think is a long-term scenario that's going to have impacts for years and decades to come.

Remember, I just showed you this just last week, just like September 16th is the day, right? It's the 21st now.

Germany's political center is imploding.

AFD and the former East German communist made huge gains yesterday.

And so some commentary, the center needs to stop lecturing and start listening.

Whatever it is, they don't like it and they're having a reaction to it.

Just like in the United States, the voters are going to have an allergic reaction to MAGA in just a little bit.

The political center has neither narrative nor proposals to fix the myriad problems facing our countries.

It's no wonder that people flock to extreme alternatives.

Very reasonable thing.

Centrist said, we will not vote for a coalition if the leftists are in it.

They can't form a coalition if the leftists are not in it.

So...

become swear words to a lot of people.

Centrist is like, you know, admitting that you're, it's like what the right used to say, you're a cuck.

You know, it's like the liberal version of being a cuck.

And I understand why those words got tied together, because they got tied together during several decades in which liberalism had triumphed as a philosophy to such a degree that it That was the establishment, and a lot of people in politics, especially on the Democratic side, and a lot of Republicans, saw it as their job of defending that order while tweaking it and improving it, right? Meanwhile, a whole set of problems were growing, and liberalism was failing to speak to it.

I think...

One of the concerns I have that creeps in as a result of that, because we are a nation that has mandatory preferential voting, which is fantastic and drives parties of government to the centre, is that we're getting really good at talking to Liberal voters who have been abandoned by their party.

And one of the consequences of being really good at talking to Liberal voters being abandoned by their party, sometimes our base doesn't hear what they want to hear.

And so we are building a significant, you look at the federal result here at WA, other places, SA, we're building this very large number of seats, often on the back of Liberals losing their seats, seats they've held before.

And we're forming very strong coalitions at the centre.

and delivering for people in those states and nationally.

And I think we should be very mindful of that potential creep of language, because we are a party of strong values.

And there's no doubt that they've, you know, smashed the Libs vote nationally.