The Rise of the Far-Center
A post-liberal center with outsize influence places American liberalism at risk through centralized technocracy.
Liberalism in its American form was once defined as much by its structure as by its ideals. The architects of the Constitution understood that liberty depended not on virtue, but on design—federalism to diffuse power, checks and balances to restrain it, and a system built to frustrate consolidation. Today, liberalism is invoked primarily through its moral vocabulary—rights, justice, equality—while its structural foundations are increasingly treated as outdated or obstructive. Much has been written about the excesses of the socialistic post-liberal left and the nationalistic post-liberal right, but a third faction has quietly amassed more institutional power than either. One might call them the post-liberal center, which has come to embody what could be considered the linchpin of illiberalism itself: the primacy of outcomes over process.
In an era dominated by populist fervor, this far-center sees itself as an anchor of stability but also the scapegoat of frustration with the reigning political order. In response, it has sought a rebrand that pairs the quiet confidence of managerial liberalism with its own form of militant reformism. No longer content to defend process, the far-center now competes in the rupture economy, eager to prove that it, too, can move fast and break things. To that end, it has traded the slow work of trust-building for the spectacle of decisive—and sometimes reckless—action.
To a considerable extent, this far-center consists of often disillusioned members of the center-left, put off by the preoccupation with identity that animated much of liberal politics the last ten years and, seemingly, moved a considerable number of people toward the center. Today, the fashionable thing to do now is to delicately acknowledge that its socially progressive orthodoxies were the dominant excess of the left and now that that’s peaked, Americans can unite around solutions. But what if that center-left is exchanging one excess for another?
The far-center are not a monolith, nor necessarily ideologues, and not all of them fit the descriptors written here. They do tend to be think tank fellows, bureaucrats, academics, pollsters, and journalists who believe governance should be centralized and insulated from an irrational public.
They believe in “institutional design” which usually mean minimizing or eliminating friction within the democratic process in pursuit of specific outcomes which include things like shifting decision-making from democratic bodies toward an unelected centralized bureaucracy and eliminating avenues for recourse for dissenting political minorities, both laterally and longitudinally throughout the U.S. system. They lament the rise of strongmen and express alarm over democratic backsliding, yet admire Hamilton’s autocratic constitutional design and the Roosevelt presidencies. Focused on outcomes, they critique the president more for his policies than his methods — a red flag for anyone worried about how Trump’s Democratic successor might follow the precedent he has set rather than vow to work toward reigning such executive powers in. Their loyalty to institutions is conditional: deep for those that accelerate consensus, shallow for those that preserve dissent. The far-center is a breed of nationalists. The democratic reforms it contemplates during panel discussions—directly or otherwise—usually serve to aggrandize central power. On key policy fronts, they delegitimize state and local institutions and reject multi-majoritarian democracy, believing that a single, fragile national majority is consent enough—and that the only recourse for dissenters is the next election. Crucially, the post-liberal center is guided by a belief that positive outcomes will restore institutional trust—and that once trust is restored, the public will reciprocate with political support. A considerable amount of research and expertise rejects this premise, and any observer of American politics over the last 20 years will recognize this as misguided.
What is prompting the rise of the far-center? At bottom, it reflects a sincere desire to address large, systemic challenges—climate change, inequality, housing, public health—that seem too vast and urgent for traditional liberal structure to manage. The far-center views institutional drift and public disillusionment not just as problems, but as verdicts on liberalism’s inability to deliver. In doing so, it has overcompensated.
A prime example came in early 2021 with the American Rescue Plan. Biden, who had campaigned as a centrist and consensus-builder, pivoted under pressure from progressives and White House economists who argued that Democrats had undershot the last recovery and now had political cover to go big. This, despite Congress having passed $900 billion in relief just months earlier. The White House downplayed inflation concerns, framing the package as both urgent and prudent. Traditional centrists—economists Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, plus, crucially, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia—voiced early warnings about overheating the economy. They were dismissed. The Democrats had their ice cream party, and whatever cash was sent to Americans would be wiped out several times over as inflation spiked beyond expectations, higher and longer than in most advanced economies despite the insistence by 17 Nobel laureates that inflation was transitory. Nevertheless, Manchin was vilified for the remainder of the year by the congressional press corps, progressives, and White House allies alike. Just months later, he was badgered for blocking the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better agenda and refusing to vote to abolish the Senate filibuster to jam through a haphazard effort to federalize state election laws—reforms justified on the dubious premise that voter ID laws were driving widespread disenfranchisement. In this clash, Biden came to represent the assertive, fast-moving far-center, while Manchin embodied the skeptical, methodical tradition of institutional centrism—one suddenly out of step with the party’s new velocity.
We’ve seen the instincts of the far-center play out across other issues.
The short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, formed in 2022 under the Department of Homeland Security, was framed in centrist, procedural terms—tasked with coordinating efforts to combat misinformation related to national security. Even with limited formal powers, the board signaled a willingness to blur the line between public safety and narrative control. The backlash was swift and bipartisan, and to its credit, the Biden administration shut it down within weeks. This example nevertheless raises red flags not just over how bureaucratic insularity can advance such a revolting initiative, but more broadly how intentions to protect liberalism by self-assured technocrats can risk undermining it.
During COVID-19, critics lamented the absence of a stronger federal response, pointing to the virus’s disregard for state borders as justification. But the crisis itself was deeply geographic—marked by uneven outbreaks, localized risk, and divergent public attitudes. Technocratic critics of decentralization never seem to detail what a top-down response should have entailed. It sort of just becomes a reflex. Centralized coordination often functions better in contemplation than in practice. In the real United States where states run public health, decentralization critics never articulate how a stronger federal response would have been executed given historically less trust in the federal government of state and local government, a constantly evolving scientific landscape, furious protests against law enforcement, deep resistance to mandates, — and not to mention misinformation from the federal government itself during both the Trump and Biden presidencies.
On institutions, the contempt for the United States Senate’s equal suffrage and its filibuster arose after it finally set in that Republicans had cracked the Democrats’ post-war advantage in the upper chamber by competing for the center and flipping several blue suburban and rural states since the 2000s. That electoral reality — combined with Democrats’ Rooseveltian policy ambitions after watching the preceding Republican trifecta pull an about-face on fiscal restraint — birthed a thousand essays, academic articles, and white papers calling for the chamber to be reformed or abolished.
Today, critiques of the Senate are curiously muted after the GOP’s (non-binding) popular vote victories for the House and the presidency last year—now tying the Democrats for most national votes won since the catalytic 2000 presidential election. In the Senate, observers see the passage of the GOP’s spending monstrosity and perhaps irreversible dismantlement of some federal offices. They also see Senate Republicans’ absolute disinterest in eliminating Democrats’ check on their power to go even further—which begs the question of who the institutionalists really are.
But no issue has triggered this faction more than the construction of energy and housing. Their occupation with these issues is understandable—these are domains where sclerosis and delay have imposed costs on the environment, the economy, and everyday life. Yet in its rush to prove it, too, has a matching bold vision for the future to counter the populist right, it’s overshooting.
Proposals to empower FERC to override state siting decisions and push interregional transmission lines aren’t a moderate decision. Policies like this assume bottom-up innovation and market coordination are too fragmented. Yet grid operators and private investors — like the SunZia and TransWest projects — are delivering without federal intervention to expand transmission, and emerging technologies—like battery storage and dynamic line ratings—are boosting grid capacity organically.
No issue has activated the far-center more than housing. Despite a string of policy victories where it counts, pro-development advocates—or YIMBYs, short for “Yes, In My Backyard”—are taking a belt-and-suspenders approach to test how much they can constitutionally involve the federal government in local land use on the grounds that zoning laws have paralyzed development. Of course, there are myriad other major factors that influence affordability—interest rates, construction materials, investor speculation, and demand, to name a few. What YIMBYs often overlook is that a disproportionate share of the national housing shortage is concentrated in New York and California—two states with metros disproportionately home to the same media and policy professionals defining the narrative around housing. The irony is that the basis for all this hand-wringing and petulant name-calling over “minoritarian” localism may be moot as the country coasts to a surplus by 2030, when it’s estimated that four million owner-occupied homes will be vacated and several million more constructed—enough to meet and likely exceed future demand nationally.
The trouble with so many political leaders and intellectuals clustered in the ideological center is that their calls for unity and cohesion often come at the expense of the structural pluralism that makes those ideals sustainable. In their effort to smooth over conflict and accelerate consensus, they unwittingly place a uniform hand over the ventilation of American liberalism. When the unit overheats, we hear these same people lament our divisions and suggest, tacitly or otherwise, that more outcomes be determined by fewer people in higher places. It’s an approach that mistakes friction for dysfunction and deference for disorder. A pragmatic federal policy will almost always be deserving of more scrutiny than a zealous local policy.
The rally around centralization has cultivated a political environment that signals to everyone that any progress worth pursuing must needlessly earn buy-in from representatives on opposite sides of the continent, rather than advancing progress and earning trust in their own backyard. If the American liberal order is to endure, it won’t be because it delivered the right policies, but because it made space—for federalism, diversity, dissent, and the slow work of earning trust and restoring legitimacy by allowing the common good to be pursued in more ways than one.
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For better or worse, it sounds very much like the European Union.
This all presumes that there is some sort of central government that is superior to local government. I think you need to back up a step or two and consider the validity and desirability of central government. The USA constitution is pretty specific concerning the powers of the central governmental and they are VERY limited.
Consider that the two political parties have absolute control of every level of government. That isn't even in the general vicinity of constitutional. Don't just solve problems, solve the CAUSE of the problems. That means taking a club and beating both parties into submission. Nothing less than that will solve anything.