Centrist political strategy, especially in the US, is a failed, dead-end programme that benefits the billionaire status-quo.
The “popularist” (poll-driven, “focus on popular issues”) pundits insist that the only way to save democracy is to turn politics into focus-grouped corporate marketing that treats voters like consumers of insurance or soup brands. Elite pundits like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias tell us to talk about popular “kitchen table issues” but ignore the fact that the kitchen is on fire and the table is owned by a private equity firm charging you rent for each meal you eat.
Poll-tested moderation is a failed a strategy for the US Democrats and it will fail in Australia as well. It is a slow-motion surrender to a neoliberal status quo, a status quo that is collapsing into far-right extremism.
What’s more, centrism and popularism are defensive positions by neoliberal elites to protect the plutonomy. When a party moves to the centre, it effectively maintains the machinery of wealth extraction from the many to the ultra-rich. By refusing to challenge the structural power of billionaires or the rigged nature of excessive corporate power, centrist parties ensure that the distribution of power remains untouched.
In 2024, the Democratic Party ran a campaign of caution, moderation and “sensible centrism” — the popularist requirements of the finance capital class that dominates the upper echelons of the Democrats. Kamala Harris almost immediately distanced herself from her own past progressive stances, courted figures like Republican Liz Cheney, and spoke the language of the sensible centre. She lost.
The facts show that in an age of nationalised, hyper-polarised politics, the mythical voter-support for centrists and moderates is gone. Of the twenty-two Democratic incumbents who lost competitive seats recently, twenty-one were moderates. This is not a coincidence.
James Baldwin wrote that “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime”. There is a certain innocence in believing that if we just find the right combination of words, the silver-bullet narrative, the “median voter” will finally turn out and vote for the Democrats en-masse.
But the median voter is a phantom. As political scientist David Broockman notes, many “moderates” are actually people with a mix of intense, often conflicting views. Some want to tax billionaires into oblivion while also holding right-wing views on immigration. Others have progressive views on LGBTI rights while supporting eugenics or wanting to de-fund public education. Real people are complicated and very few people have coherent political ideologies for every issue or topic.
You cannot triangulate toward a point that does not exist.
When a party chooses centrism and moderation, it chooses to maintain the “plutonomy” — a system where the economy is entirely dominated by the ultra-rich and extracts wealth from everyone else.
Chasing the imaginary centre reinforces the idea that the current distribution of power is the only one possible. These are the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. We tell ourselves that being “reasonable” will win over the opposition.
Meanwhile, while the opposition is busy bribing supreme court judges, executing protestors in the streets, and creating AI-powered surveillance tech-empires with pedophile billionaires.
The result in the US of popularism and centrism has been devastating. The base is actively demobilised and therefore stays home.
In 2024, the turnout gap between Black and white Americans was the widest in three decades. Youth turnout collapsed. These voters did not stay home because the Democrats were too radical. They stayed home because the Democrats offered them more of the same, failed, neoliberal incrementalism. Moderation and centrism is a tool of class suppression.
We see a similar (although different) phenomenon in Australia. Despite compulsory voting, the number of people who do not vote is growing. The centre-right Liberal Coalition collapsed after the 2025 Federal election, and just like in the UK their supporters have shifted to the far-right, anti-immigration One Nation and Reform UK. The massive win for Labor in Australia (and Labour in the UK) is fragile, and was driven by the proletarian precarity and downward mobility of Gen X and millennials.
Historically, parties of the centre-left represented lower-income, working class voters, but since the 1970s they have transitioned into the party of the “highly educated” elite, what Thomas Piketty called the “Brahmin Left”. This shift created a political landscape where the “Merchant Right” (the party of business and capital) and the “Brahmin Left” (the party of the professional-managerial class) both benefit from the neoliberal status quo.
When leaders like Kamala Harris or Keir Starmer pursue “sensible centrism”, they are essentially speaking the language of that educated elite — they are the handmaidens of imperialism. A centrist party that accepts and maintains corporate power at home is equally enabling the “extractive” logic of the global military-industrial complex and the global wealth extraction machine from the Global South to the Global North.
This leaves workers and the petit bourgeoisie — who feel the system is rigged — with no genuine representative.
The path forward requires that we call things by their real names and actually stand for something. “Moderation” and centrism are just another way to protect corporate and billionaire power, and to maintain the structural control that underpins their wealth. The “culture of imperialism” requires a domestic population that is either distracted or demobilised. This is as true in Australia, the UK, Canada as it is in the US.
You do not defeat far-right authoritarians by being more reasonable, by appealing to a centre that does not exist. The consensus trap will merely hollow out democracy and continue to hand power to the billionaires.
If social democratic parties in Australia or elsewhere, continues to bow at the altar of centrism, they will only open the door to the far-right.