Is "centrism" making a comeback? OK, sort of — but blink and you'll miss it

Who wasn’t mesmerized by last week’s epic, if profoundly embarrassing, catfight between Elon Musk and Donald Trump? No one, that’s who. I browse a lot of random publications from all over the world, and the online feud between the president of the United States and the richest person on the planet (along with the associated memes: “high-agency males going at it”!) was front-page news in Finland, Italy, Kenya and Argentina, just for starters.

So I’m not here to tell you that the Musk-Trump throwdown was some kind of calculated distraction or, as in the vivid imaginations of some right-wing influencers, a 5D-chess gambit meant to force the “Big Beautiful Bill” through the Senate and compel the release of the so-called Epstein files. Seriously, can you believe the stupidity of the times we live in? I recently read a lengthy book extract about the devastating impact of the asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out nearly all life for millions of years after that, and found myself wondering whether that would be such a bad idea.

But “the girls are fighting” — no disrespect to girls, or to fighting! — definitely obscured a handful of disconnected but related events whose consequences might last a lot longer. Much of the Elon-related pseudo-news emerged from one of Trump’s hair-raising Oval Office encounters with a foreign leader, in this case newly-elected German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Before that meeting devolved into chaos, it had in fact already gone off the rails: Trump clearly assumed that Merz must be sad about the Nazis losing World War II, and seemed mildly puzzled to learn otherwise.

MERZ: Tomorrow is the D Day anniversary, when the Americans ended a war in Europe TRUMP: That was not a pleasant day for you? This is not a great day MERZ: This was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 5, 2025 at 12:15 PM

There’s certainly room for historical cynicism about postwar Germany and the role of Merz’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, in laundering the reputations of many former Nazis or collaborators. But please don’t try to convince yourself that Trump knows anything about that. He is simply too ignorant, and too small-minded, to imagine a scenario in which you’re glad your country didn’t conquer all of Europe, or to understand that the avowed purpose of the CDU, over its eight decades of existence, has been to rehabilitate Germany as a modern democratic state, free of antisemitism and ultra-nationalism.

Merz put a brave face on this moment of grotesquerie, because that’s his job; the European media was justifiably horrified, because that’s theirs. But there was an intriguing undertow below all this that wasn’t readily discernible; bear with me for a minute while we work through it.

As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Merz is in an unlikely position and he knows it: He’s a finance-capital multimillionaire from an aristocratic Catholic family who emerged from an indecisive federal election as the accidental leader of European democracy. In more innocent times he was described as the most pro-American politician in Germany. Now, with Trump back in the White House, Britain self-extracted from the EU and French President Emmanuel Macron fading into irrelevance, Merz more than anyone else is tasked with charting the course of European independence and fending off the continent-wide rise of the far right.

Merz’s electoral victory over the somewhat-fascist AfD — which has been the object of transatlantic mash notes from JD Vance and Elon Musk — coupled with recent wins by center-left parties in Canada and Australia, suggested something of a global "centrist" comeback. (Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether that deliberately meaningless word actually means anything.) This wasn’t entirely an illusion, and for those with a candle burning in the window for democracy, it was a sign of hope. The grandiose overreach of the second Trump regime has clearly fueled a normie backlash in many parts of the world, pumping new life into mainstream political parties that had seemed to be in terminal decline.

As it happens, Merz’s visit to Washington coincided with a strange only-in-2025 event taking place in a nearby hotel basement: WelcomeFest, a day-long series of speeches and events billed as the “largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.” (There’s that word again!) I wasn’t there, and reports from the no-doubt-riveting scene were decidedly mixed. It sounds like a blend of entirely reasonable debate about how Democrats can craft a broadly popular message and a full-on declaration of war on the Bernie/AOC left and “the groups,” a codeword used to denigrate social justice movements of many varieties without quite naming them. The groups in question would seem to include LGBTQ activists, the climate justice movement, police and prison reformers or abolitionists, and anyone who utters the word “Palestine.”

As Aída Chávez of The Nation reports, pundit Matt Yglesias — pseudo-intellectual poster boy for this entire phenomenon — still thinks it was a bad idea for Democrats to give a crap about Kilmar Ábrego García’s illegal deportation to El Salvador. Pollster David Shor told Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, according to David Weigel of Semafor, that “voters really hate electric cars.” Slotkin, who clearly hopes to be the Democrats’ centrist savior in 2028, politely demurred: What voters actually hate is too much regulation, blah blah blah. Talk of “abundance” was abundant — speaking of meaningless catchphrases of the moment — and in some cases deployed to attack labor unions or suggest that left-wing rhetoric about oligarchy and corporate power was strictly for the kids’ table.

So is this the centrist moment? Is neoliberalism back from its remarkably brief and partial ideological exile, under the inspiring and all-unifying banner of not being quite as bad as Trump? Are we about to witness the end of the end of the end of history? I’m sorry for posing such dumb questions, especially since the answer to all of them is “kind of.”

In domestic politics, the agenda of WelcomeFesters like Yglesias, Slotkin, Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington is clear enough: They want to party like it’s 1992. They want to make sex less fun, freedom less free and state repression more repressive, on the endlessly disproven hypothesis that surrendering your principles, cowering in fear and giving hateful people most of what they supposedly want might win the next election. I try to avoid overt editorializing in this space, but as my Uncle Fred would have said: F**k that for a game of darts.

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More specifically, the centrist vanguard wants to use the Democratic Party’s post-Kamala crisis to cancel the 2020 peace treaty between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and return to the time-honored ritual of punishing and purging the left. God knows there’s enough blame to go around for the failures of the 2024 Harris campaign, but the not-so-hidden message here is a thoroughgoing rejection of the former president that basically all these people claimed to adore until about this time last year: Biden was too old, too stubborn and too woke, and led us into this disaster.

On the global stage, there are already signs that the centrist renaissance may be a transitory phenomenon, not much more than “kicking the can down the road,” as Armida van Rij of Chatham House wrote last week in Foreign Policy. Poland’s presidential election ended in a narrow victory by far-right nationalist Karol Nawrocki, a conspicuous Trump ally in one of Europe’s largest and most strategically important countries. Poland is deeply divided along lines of class, culture and geography (not entirely dissimilar to America’s), and Nawrocki’s win shouldn’t be simplistically understood as a referendum on Trumpism, even if Kristi Noem, without the slightest idea of where she was or what she was doing there, showed up to campaign for him. This is likely to mean several more years of political paralysis in between authoritarianism and democracy, and increasingly fraught relations with Ukraine, which is directly to Poland’s east.

Meanwhile, the Dutch government has collapsed (once again) after anti-immigrant agitator Geert Wilders pulled his newborn far-right party out of an already wobbly coalition, clearly hoping to win a greater share of power in an October election. It’s entirely possible, as many analysts believe, that Wilders has overplayed his hand and that the migrant crisis is no longer the dominant issue in European politics, largely thanks to Trump 2.0.

But Wilders’ chaos-agent antics, along with the Polish result and the startling gains made in recent British local elections by Nigel Farage’s shambolic Reform UK, should make clear that reassuring narratives about the global demise of the Trump-style far right — politics is healing itself! — must be taken with several kilos of salt.

"Centrist" leaders like Merz, Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer have repeatedly tried to triangulate toward some democracy-salvaging consensus by repackaging the right’s most seductive ideas and offloading all remaining vestiges of left-flavored economic populism. Whether that’s hard-headed realpolitik or deep-seated cynicism and corruption is up for debate, but it should sound familiar to anyone acquainted with the Democratic Party’s 40-year trajectory. Look how well that has worked.