Mourning the Middle
The center always rots.
Sometimes it rots slowly, quietly, leaving behind a musty nostalgia for institutions that once seemed permanent. Sometimes it rots spectacularly, collapsing under the weight of contradictions everyone swore were manageable. Either way, the middle rarely dies with dignity.
We are living through one of those deaths.
It’s difficult when political centers shift. For those who inhabited the old one, it feels like the ground itself has betrayed them. Once upon a time, it was credible to rail against “New Deal waste” without reckoning with the way it built a modern America out of Depression-era rubble, for example, roads, power lines, social insurance, and, above all, a civic bargain that told the working man and woman their sweat would not be abandoned. The Gilded Age that came before had privatized the nation’s bloodstream, leaving little but patronage and plutocracy. The New Deal was a forced correction, a reminder that the market, left to its own devices, devours more than it produces.
And yet, here we are, returning to pre–New Deal conditions.
Only now it’s smartphones and TikTok in place of vaudeville and chain-gang songs.
Act I: The Fantasy of Permanence
The current political center, shaky, embattled, and perhaps already crumbling, was built on a rare hubris. It was the hubris of a nation that escaped the world’s deadliest modern conflict largely unscathed, and then flexed nuclear and gunboat diplomacy for decades, until it unraveled the only rival it ever had. But even then, the Soviet collapse was less about America’s invincibility and more about an empire that cracked from its own brittleness.
Still, we told ourselves a flattering story: that democracy was no longer something to fight for, but something to manage, like a utility bill, because history had ended and we were the landlords of the future. This fantasy bred complacency, and complacency is a poor foundation for a republic.
That’s why the voices that once carried weight, like the reasonable technocrats, the bipartisan moderates, the calm columnists, all now ring hollow. The center they defended feels less like a civic commons and more like a mausoleum.
Act II: The Buyout of a Century
The prevailing political movement of our time is not only antagonism toward the Civil Rights Act (though it is that, fiercely). It is also the howl of powerless nihilism, a fury at Main Streets hollowed out, factories sold off, pensions gambled away, labor protections defenestrated while the world of work slid from factory floors to cubicles to Zoom calls.
What was promised as the “endless American century” turned out to be the buyout of the American people, an auction of epic proportions.
Those who feel betrayed the most are not wrong to feel that way. Their mistake is being seduced by the flickering red neon lights that offer blame instead of repair, grievance instead of solidarity, attack instead of imagination.
Every American political center is built on compromise, and compromise often curdles into sin. The Civil War was the violent culmination of a center built on the Three-Fifths Compromise. The New Deal arose from a center that appeased industrial aristocracy while building civic scaffolding. The Cold War was fueled by postwar prosperity and a convenient foreign adversary.
The one we inherited afterward was defined by sell-off: alliances with those who gutted labor, applauded wealth transfers upward, and mistook managerial calm for moral clarity. It was unserious at its core, surviving only on fumes: wealth already spent, enemies already defeated.
Act III: Closing the Mausoleum
That’s why it’s hard to follow the same voices that once guided me. Too many are stuck in the frozen 1990s, when globalization was sold as destiny, when both parties worshiped the “middle class” while dismantling it, when malls were open and pensions were solvent.
History has since reminded us otherwise.
And here’s the truth: it doesn’t make you a mark to have believed in that fantasy. It makes you a human being. We are all marks of history, stamped by the eras we pass through. The question is whether we can admit it.
Because too many still cling to outdated tools: focus groups as scripture, propaganda as data, and polls as prophecy. They cannot see that these methods were born in a vanished center. Clinging to them now is like navigating by stars in an age of satellites.
So yes, I mourn the center. I mourn the sense of permanence it gave my parents, the middle-class mythos that helped raise me. But I accuse it, too. Because it squandered its wealth, privatized its promise, and left us with hollow institutions propped up by nostalgia.
The center is a house, and its plumbing is in disrepair. The attic is full of debts. The termites are real. The roof leaks. To keep pretending otherwise is not pragmatism, but dereliction.
Someone has to climb the stairs with a flashlight, identify the damage, and initiate repairs. Not because nostalgia demands it. Not because history guarantees it. But because the house is all we have, and it’s not yet condemned.
Another fantastic piece Stew. Here I am an 86 year old white man, learning so much from a much younger black man.This piece has opened my eyes Stew. I see things in a different light, but have no answer or cure. You are a gift.
As I read this piece, I imagined the center in Weimar Germany in 1932, and compared it to the center in National Socialist Germany in 1938, Surely the center shifted right, far right, as it is doing today in America.
As regards the Soviet Union. the 1984/85 Annual Report of the Bank for International Settlements, BIS), the central bank of central banks, said in it's report that the USSR was a failed economic experiment and needed to be restructured. Then Gorbachev showed up did the job, for which he was rewarded with a handsome pension, a dacha on Lake Geneva, and hisown NGO, the Green Cross.
In the 1922 Fortnightly magazine, Russia was described as combine of seven trusts, organized along resource lines, human (KGB), forestry, mining, industry, transportation, agriculture, energy, etc
I suspect that in Russia, the center never moved
\With the restructuring the Soviet Union, the trusts were sold off, by the KGB, which never restructured only changed name, to oligarchs who were either KGB or connected.
With the