The Vital Center by Arthur Schlesinger, 1949

“If both the left and the right are mad at me, then I must be doing well” is one of the more tiresome political analyses. The variant used by this book is “If I’m not doing what the left or the right are doing, I must be in the center.” The problem tackled is the post-war anomie blanketing democratic countries, although the ending chapters sharpen focus to post-colonial Asia. The business-oriented right is kowtowing to fascism, and the Marx-besotted left is playing footsie with Communism. After an early chapter on the right and fascism (presumably to establish one side of centerist cred), most of the book goes after Communism, although occasionally alternating between Communism and totalitarianism to be seen as taring with both sides of the brush. The centerist position emerging in later chapters is standard-issue liberalism (civil rights and civil liberties) at home and containment (primarily of Soviet Communism, it perhaps wasn't clear what Mao was getting up to at the time) and development internationally.

I suppose it’s unfair to cast a jaundiced eye on this book after seventy years; it’s a product of its times (the late ’40s) and no more (if I’m reading the Acknowledgments correctly, portions of this book were originally articles in Life magazine about the perils of Communism). Schlesinger, in a new introduction, considers the book a historical artifact. As a snapshot of mid-century American conventional wisdom, the book contains some jaw-dropping, wince-inducing passages: a footnote lands at the bottom of page 16 like a shit someone took on a bone-china dinner plate; the pontificating about America’s relation to Asia is grimly hilarious in light of what eventually happened; the debate between Lincoln and Lenin (although it’s mostly Lenin haranguing Lincoln — those commies, amirite?); the anodyne relations between American labor and capital (a few pages later Schlesinger does concede a little by mentioning some unpleasantness at the Homestead strike). I’m interested in whether the pseudo-mathematical act of splitting the difference has some more convincing justification than gross pragmatism. I read The Vital Center because the title suggested that the book would go into it; I was wrong.