Fifty Years Calling the Far Right “the Center’”

Reading Steven Lukes while America mistakes an engineered position for neutral ground.

I may have used this photo before. Comment if you read that article. But it is too apt. Ronald Reagan shaking hands with Donald Trump. Ivana Trump is standing beside. Mary Anne Fackelman. Public domain.

Good morning from the mountains in New Mexico. As I get used to the new altitude, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of power and how Steven Lukes is trying to convince me of all its different dimensions. In his updated edition, he discusses the relationship between exercising power and not exercising power. This is his answer to dispositional theorists like Peter Morriss, who critique Lukes’s formulation as too interested in seeing power move rather than evaluating how it exists in the air. Lukes’s move is to argue that his third dimension holds up against this critique, because if power is the ability to shape preferences, then it doesn’t necessarily need to be exercised in the first place. The capacity is the point. Power that has already shaped what you want rarely has to lift a finger.

The theoretical discussion makes me think of how preferences are shaped in the United States today. For example, how people believe America is a center-right country despite relying on center-left policy more than the average citizen may recognize. And it brings me to a long-held idea of mine, one I want to hold up to Lukes rather than simply illustrate with him, because I’m not sure he’s entirely right and I’d rather test the argument than surrender to it.

American democracy functions when the public has recourse and active input in the mechanisms of government. Its founding and constitutional arguments were always between landed elites who feared the rising democratic energies within the states after the Revolutionary War and those willing to widen the franchise. The central struggle throughout American history has been dragging the political spectrum from the right toward a healthy left. John Quincy Adams wanted bridges and roads for a budding nation; Lincoln wanted to secure land rights for formerly enslaved Americans; the second Roosevelt fundamentally renegotiated Americans’ social contract with each other and their expectations of a safety net.

Here is where I want to be careful, because there are two ways to tell the next part and only one of them is true to Lukes. The easy version says the American public always wanted to fear multicultural democracy, and power merely pressed on a preference that was already there. But that version isn’t really a Lukesian argument at all because if the fear were authentic and primordial, it wouldn’t be manufactured, and manufacture is the whole point of the third dimension. The harder and truer version is that the raw material was available in the culture through the resentments, the hierarchies, and inherited suspicions….but it was not destiny. Power’s third-dimensional work was to activate that material and organize it into common sense, to make one available disposition feel like the natural one. The same public that produced the backlash also produced the Reconstruction amendments, the New Deal coalition, and the Civil Rights Act. The fear was never the only thing in the American character. It was the thing power found most useful to cultivate.

And you can watch it being cultivated in the language. This is the part I find hardest to look away from, because it is the third dimension made audible through a fifty-year project of turning policy questions into identitarian reflexes that fire below the level of argument.

“Law and order” in Nixon’s mouth.

“Welfare queens” in Reagan’s.

“Immigrating the right way” in the 2010s.

“They’re eating the cats and dogs” in 2024.

Each phrase belongs to a different decade and a different messenger, which is exactly the point. The template predates any one man and outlives every news cycle. These were not gaffes or improvisations, instead, they were the steady maintenance of a shaped preference wth each generation handed a fresh idiom for an old reflex.

I want to be fair to the people who bristle at this reading, because the honest version of their objection deserves an answer rather than a dismissal. The thoughtful center-right position is not that racism played no role. It’s that economic anxiety and racial resentment are genuinely difficult to disentangle, and that they weight the former more heavily than I do. That’s a real argument, and I don’t want to wave it away. But I think it underestimates how thoroughly the two were fused on purpose and how often the economic grievance was handed a racial face precisely so that it could be turned against the multiracial labor coalitions that might have addressed the economics. The disentangling is hard because someone spent fifty years making sure it would be. That is not a blind spot I can excuse in commentators who otherwise pride themselves on seeing clearly, even when naming it costs them political capital.

Which lets me name all three faces of power in a single episode, the GOP’s coalitional transformation in the late twentieth century. Underneath sits the third dimension: preferences already shaped, so that “law and order” could read as neutral governance rather than coded threat. On top of that substrate, the first face (the visible decision) is the New Right’s open welcome of neosegregationist voices, the deliberate courting of the backlash as strategy. And in the middle, the second face (the non-decision) is the failure of those Republicans who had supported civil rights reforms to stand up against it, the fight declined, the objection left unspoken because raising it would have cost too much. Shaped preference, active courting, principled resistance withheld. All three faces stacked in one act of party-building.

So reading Trumpism through staged interviews and tweets may be the hobby of the obsessive who feeds every Trump moment to the timeline. But recognizing the power of the 45th and 47th administrations simply in their capacity to hold office and set the agenda takes you somewhere no single scandal or election cycle can. Commentators trapped in the daily grind have to treat every weekly outrage and swing-voter poll as gospel. The long view sees something they can’t afford to: power has already shown its hand, and it does not much matter how a candidate messages or which way a swing voter breaks on a given afternoon.

Because the center was never neutral ground. It was built, and it is defended. What we are taught to call the political center sits far to the right of where the public’s actual needs would place it. It’s a position engineered over generations so that landed capital could profit from it and call the arrangement natural. To move left from there is not radicalism. It is correction. And the unflattering work of saying so indicts a long line of political operatives and tells the real history at the same time.