About Us & Welcome
“I have great faith in a seed,” Henry David Thoreau once remarked. “Convince me you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
Well, here is a seed CenterMovement.org sown in the jungle of American politics. We are glad you found us
At CenterMovement.org we aim to be the voice and meeting place of the American Center. By “center” we don’t necessarily mean “moderate.” Yes, we hope to maintain a moderate tone and reasoned approach to politics and public policy. And yes, we will often find ourselves between the right and the left on the political spectrum, and we will look for common ground. But in the end political movements are not built on lukewarm positions. “We demand everything the extremists do, only less of it!” isn’t much of a rallying cry.
Nor is moderation necessarily where we are philosophically. Instead of looking for compromises in every scrap of legislation churning its way through Congress, we seek out the broad center of the American political tradition. We are not afraid of radical structural change when such change promises to restore the spirit of American democracy. When it comes to the currently dysfunctional areas of healthcare, education, and the election system, for examples, we think drastic change is required. Moderate temperament need not lead to timid measures.
See What We Believe.
We know we are not alone in our thinking. Pew Research reports that 36% of all American voters call themselves “Independent.” Similarly, Gallup finds that 35% of us consider ourselves “moderate.” We are more than one third of the electorate, but one would never know it by listening to the media, which increasingly markets itself to one partisan extreme or another. We suspect many in the Center have simply given up.
One sad result of the political polarization of “mainstream” media is the degradation of objective reporting standards and the corruption of news reporting into political spin. Arguably the New York Times is today for the Democrats what Fox News is for the Republicans. At CenterMovement.org we intend to help our readers unspin the news, but must admit that we too will be playing by the new rules of politicized media – the difference is that our biased perspective is a centrist one. We believe our political system would be better off if the American media would return to a place of greater professionalism and take more pride in producing balanced news coverage, but media analysis is not our particular mission.
CenterMovement.org’s focus will be on public policy and government problem solving. Our mission is to “reform, reinvigorate and depolarize American politics and public policy; to pull public policy to the philosophical center; and to improve the general functioning of American democracy and government” (from our mission statement). This internet journal, designed to provide information and foster debate around Centrist politics, is the first of a two-phase strategy. Please bookmark this page, and visit us a couple of times each week.
Our second phase is to use the critical mass of the readership we create on these pages to build a grassroots political movement and lobby organization. See Our Plan. Only then can we reasonably expect to translate ideas into results. Please consider joining us. We are under no illusions that it will be anything less than a long and difficult journey, but let it begin here.
What We Believe
Our Plan
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“I have great faith in a seed,” Henry David Thoreau once remarked. “Convince me you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
Well, here is a seed CenterMovement.org sown in the jungle of American politics. We are glad you found us.
