When the political center becomes a swamp for discussion

If the social imagination has resorted since ancient times to spatial concepts—"those above" and "those below"—to make hierarchies intelligible, the political imagination resorted to these concepts in recent times when, in September 1789 , during the debates on the royal veto in the French National Constituent Assembly , the deputies who supported granting Louis XVI the absolute right of veto over laws sat, from the point of view of the assembly's president, on the right side of the hemicycle, while those who opposed this right, or at least wanted to limit it, did so on the left. The terminology quickly became established: by 1791, the terms "droite" and "gauche" were in common use in the French political press. It was therefore only natural that the missing concept, the center, would soon appear. And indeed, on a precise date, January 31, 1831, Louis Philippe of Orleans consecrated this intermediate position, that of the “golden mean,” the juste milieu : “We seek to maintain ourselves,” he said, “in a golden mean equally removed from the excesses of popular power and the abuses of royal power.”

The political center, however, was soon discredited , and not without reason: if politics consists of displaying conflict in an attempt to resolve it, this form of moderation seemed more likely to conceal differences or prevent their resolution. It was not for nothing that the French themselves coined the expression that accurately describes the immobility produced by the political center, calling it the marais , the swamp.

But in another of the traditions from which our politics draws, the center has a completely different function, and therefore a completely different value: in the Greek world, what is at the center is, as Marcel Detienne writes, "what is common and what is public." Therefore, it is also the place to which the orator must address the assembly: "Taking the floor entails two gestural actions: advancing toward the center, on the one hand, and, on the other, taking the scepter in the hand [...] To speak at the center of the assembly is to speak, if not in the name of the group, at least about that which concerns the group as such," it is to speak about "common affairs." The center as a political figure is thus what founds civic equality , or rather, the various equalities: equality before the law; equality of the right to speak, of the right to speak before the assembly; and equality of place within the whole, the civic equality that gives everyone the same status.

The center, which founds democratic equality, is also what, already in modernity, gives rise to the public sphere, the area in which everyone has both the right and the responsibility to use reason autonomously and without restriction for the purpose of participating in the formation of the collective will.

The diverse forms of polarization that, in our country and around the world, increasingly invade the political scene aim to destroy both the notions of democratic equality and the public sphere in which that equality is exercised. They are the manifestation of the resurgence of an opposition to the simultaneously political and normative legacy of the Enlightenment, which views with horror the end of social hierarchies. Not necessarily the end of class hierarchies—whose limits have changed very little for at least half a century—but rather of hierarchies of prestige and recognition, the questioning of certain positions that, from gender to race to belief systems, were perceived as threatened. Instead of turning to a shared space in which differences are negotiated with arguments, in polarization the “interest of the group as such” (what, in a more familiar expression, we called the common good) ceases to exist. Society is thus divided into factions that confront each other along certain lines that function as trenches, presenting conflicts as insoluble, the result of worldviews so antagonistic that any attempt at conciliation or agreement is a futile artifice: a "discursive civil war."

Strikingly, there are those who downplay the prevalence of verbal violence that characterizes politically polarized regimes. In an attempt to sustain the benefits they derive from certain government policies, they attempt to differentiate between facts of reality and facts of language, ignoring the fact that what distinguishes us is not so much the material world in which we live as the symbolic world we inhabit. The validity of ideas of dignity, respect, recognition, friendship, and trust are what truly make societies better or worse . Furthermore, to pretend that verbal violence is not real violence ignores the very substance of human life, in which language transmits culture and culture transmits the values ​​through which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. Language is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Advocating a policy of moderation, advocating for the political center, in no way implies concealing differences or disagreements, nor renouncing the will to implement reforms as radical as each person may deem appropriate. But it does imply that these disagreements be resolved among equals, through arguments that recognize the dignity of each person participating in the political community. It implies that we return to speaking of " what is common and what is public" and are willing to cooperate for mutual benefit. Failure to do so only augurs destruction.

Alejandro Katz is an essayist and editor