Today, Keynes and FDR are generally associated with progressive liberalism. This makes sense, because the policy agendas they pursued are very similar to the policy agendas pursued by today’s progressive liberals. Indeed in many respects they were more aggressive — the clarion call from the Bernie Sanders campaigns was for nationalizing health insurance. In the 1940s, Keynes helped nationalize all of British medicine.
But Keynes also had a deep conservative streak. He loved Edmund Burke and feared political revolution, thinking it generally bad for art and letters and all the fine things produced by high culture. And so there is an important sense in which Keynes was also a centrist. He fought off calls for radical political change from the left and the right with an appeal to economic reform.
Critically, this centrism had an active policy agenda. It was committed to new ideas and their implementation — it aimed to actually achieve something through positive action. It did not merely seek to pare down the ambitions of other factions, it had ambitions of its own. This is what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. called “the vital center” in a 1949 book of the same name. It was not his most popular book, but about half a century later, one of its fans named Bill Clinton started appealing to “the vital center” in speeches celebrating the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party. This incensed Schlesinger, an ardent New Dealer, who wrote an op-ed slamming Clinton for abusing his phrase. Clintonism was not “the vital center,” he argued, it was “the dead center.”
The situation with today’s centrists in the Democratic Party is similar, only much worse. Joe Biden is a lifelong centrist who is fighting back progressive calls for structural political change with a commitment to robust economic reform. Adding new states to the union, adding new seats to the Supreme Court, eliminating the electoral college, abolishing the filibuster — Biden has politely ignored them all. But people calling themselves centrists are now attacking Biden’s economic reforms — the very centrist agenda that is supposed to help beat back the demands from the left and right.
Not a single one of Biden’s intraparty critics has offered a coherent policy justification for their opposition. They’ve abandoned centrism as a set of ideas with a clear purpose and embraced an amorphous fear of action itself.