Centrism: The Shape of Things to Come

Governor Gray Davis tweaked the nose of his former boss, Jerry Brown, in Sacramento last Monday when he kicked off an inaugural address of narcotic tedium with the claim that "today we begin a new chapter in the history of California: The Era of Higher Expectations." Back in the 1970s, Brown famously use the phrase "lowered expectations" to warn Californians what to look for in the coming years. But in truth Davis unveiled an agenda so meager in content, so timid in political reach, so straitened in its decorum that it made Brown sound in retrospect like FDR in 1933. The "centrist" idiom concocted by Governor Bill Clinton in the mid-1980s has now blossomed in full and hideous flower across the nation. Before Christmas Vice President Al Gore and former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley field-tested their themes for Campaign 2000 in exactly the same terms as Davis: rhetoric as nerveless and soft-edged as tofu.

"I am a moderate and pragmatist by nature," Davis declared. "I will govern neither from the right, nor the left, but from the center, propelled not by ideology but by common sense." This same common sense had prompted Davis earlier that day to meet with a platoon of lobbyists for the state's energy, agriculture, and real estate sectors where the incoming governor assured them of his profound concern for their interests. If there were equivalent encounters that day with farmworkers, nurses and others from kindred walks of life, they escaped the attention of the press. As with Bill Clinton, centrism on Davis's terms means uncritical acceptance of the most abrasive of all ideologies: the belief that the role of government is to promote the corporate agenda.

There's never been the slightest mystery about Davis's beliefs. He exhibited them as lieutenant-governor and freely vouchsafed them during his campaign. But since his victory in California is being advertised as the model for Democrats in the coming millennium, we should touch on some of their practical consequences.

One of Davis' first acts after victory at the polls was to appoint Barry Munitz as director of his transition team. At that time Munitz was head of the J. Paul Getty Trust, having previously been chancellor of the California state university system, where he'd deservedly come under fire for increasing student fees, cutting back on enrollments, overseeing phase-out of affirmative action programs, and excessive generosity to the sales forces of Silicon Valley.

Prior to that, for nine years Munitz served at the right hand of Charles Hurwitz, boss of Maxxam and symbol incarnate of predatory capitalism. It was during Munitz's tenure at Maxxam that junk bonds financed the take-over of Pacific Lumber, thus setting in motion accelerated logging, not to mention looting of the workers' pension fund at Pacific Lumber.

If anyone was entertaining illusions about Davis, Munitz's appointment should certainly have shattered them, and it's worth spelling out what Democratic "centrism" means these days in terms of the environment. In his inaugural, Davis pledged to "preserve our God-given natural heritage" and be "tight with your tax dollars." But at the level of centrist practicality, Davis has endorsed Hurwitz's demands whereby the feds and the state of California will pay over to the Houston-based entrepreneur an astounding $495 million for the Headwaters redwood groves south of Eureka, more than three times the value of the property, according to a federal analysis.

Davis is more than ready to apply this brand of "centrist" environmentalism in other areas: he's vowed to push for tax breaks for the diesel trucking lobby, for pesticide manufacturers and the agro-chemical sector as a way of bribing them to exhibit even minimal respect for the law. He has been a fervent cheerleader for the so-called "habitat conservation plans" that Gov. Pete Wilson worked out with the Clinton-Gore crowd in Washington as a way of helping real estate interests from Disney to the Irvine Development Company get around the Endangered Species Act. Davis has also suggested that corporate sponsorship of state parks might be the best way to nourish California's natural heritage.

There will be plenty of opportunity to dissect the meaning of "centrism" as applied to immigration policy, labor relations, civil rights, the justice system, education. But the environment is always a telling crucible in which to assay political pretensions. One can add up acres destroyed with considerable precision. Through the Reagan administration, led by a man who famously declared, "Seen one redwood, you've seen them all," six million acres of federal forest land were permanently protected from the chainsaw by being designated "wilderness areas." Under six years of Clinton, the equivalent figure is 700,000 acres.

Politics should be a matter of battle, of conflicting philosophies. In such battles in the Reagan Eighties, six million acres of forest land were saved. In the Clinton years much less, precisely because there's been almost no battle. The liberals have stopped fighting. Politicians like Davis can get away with preposterous claims that they are "centrist" only because they are on a battlefield where one side has long since thrown down its arms.