Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
Moderate centrists occupy a place on the political spectrum that sits between progressivism and conservatism, roughly between the two 30 yard lines of a football field. Those 40 yards are neither purely Democratic nor purely Republican yards. They are largely centrist yards. Indeed, according to Gallup, 40 percent of American voters identify as independents; and although not all independents are centrists, most of them are.
Bold centrists can also be placed in the forty yards which sit between the pure Democrats and pure Republicans. They either want some unique synthesis of the left and right or some standpoint that transcends the left and the right. Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel was famous for generating a synthesis out of a thesis and an antithesis. Some Third Way Thinkers like the UK's Anthony Giddens have tried to transcend left and right to create a new democratic point of view.
A moderate centrist would propose a compromise on paid parental leave and child-care: six weeks of paid leave rather than 12 weeks and a child tax credit (which can be used for child-care) of $2,800 (up from $2,000) for children under five rather than $3,600, as well as $2,500 (up from) $2,000 rather than $3,000 for children between six and 17. The higher numbers were instituted as part of the American Rescue Plan Act which has expired. A bold centrist, like myself, would call for 24 weeks of paid leave and a choice of either $15,000 for child-care or a $15,000 tax credit for a stay-at-home parent. The moderate centrist finds a monetary middle ground; the bold centrist, in contrast, addresses a major cultural divide and tries to accommodate both sides with a unique policy solution.
In truth, it is not helpful to think of bold centrists as sitting between progressives and conservatives on some political spectrum. For bold centrists take the same approach to politics as the leading 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took to philosophy. Wittgenstein held that philosophy was not a doctrine but an activity.
To say that bold centrism is not a doctrine is to say that it is not primarily a belief system made up of a set of positions on a set of public policies, including immigration, transportation, health care, climate change, guns, taxes, foreign policy and family policy. Bold centrists must, in the end, take a stance on all of the policy issues. Yet being a bold centrist means you place more emphasis on the activity taken to arrive at the policies than the policies themselves. Being a bold centrist requires imagination, interaction with rival camps, an interest in finding a creative synthesis, and the patience it takes to reach this place.
The current discussion about centrism in Washington is focused on the efforts of No Labels, the source of the influential Problem-Solvers Caucus on Capitol Hill, to elect a moderate centrist ticket for president in 2024 "if the environmental conditions are right." The fear expressed by well-known Democrats ranging from Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution to former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt is that a No Labels centrist ticket -- perhaps with West Virginia Democratic Senator Joseph Manchin and former Utah Republican Governor Jon Huntsman running for president and vice-president -- would lead to a Trump presidency.
We will not find out until April 2024 if No Labels runs (though they will not fund) the moderate centrist ticket. And they have every right to run a moderate centrist ticket. Yet, what this race needs is for a candidate or organization to step forward with a bold as opposed to moderate centrist agenda. Perhaps the Forward Party headed up by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Republican Congressman David Jolly, and former Republican New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman will produce a bold centrist agenda and generate the kind of activity needed to produce viable public policies. To date, the Forward Party seems more on the moderate centrist side than the bold centrist side, but it is too soon to tell.
It is conceivable that President Biden will change course and become a bold centrist himself. Indeed, this may be precisely the kind of development his campaign is going to need for him to be re-elected. But one way or another, campaign 2024 needs exploration of both moderate centrism and bold centrism because our country needs a very serious look at the overall concept of centrism. Thus, it may be best for our democracy if the race for president has two centrist tickets, not one.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.