But these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes. ~David Brooks

This is so misleading and offensive that I don’t quite know where to begin. There is nothing more precious and absurd than the “centrist” pretense that the political extremes dominate our politics. Please, tell progressives that they dictate the content of health care and environment policy, and tell Rand Paul’s supporters that they are the ones who influence monetary, fiscal and foreign policies. We could use a good laugh. I would expect the people with almost all of the influence and power in this country to mock and dismiss their critics as “fringe” and “kooks” and “extremists,” but it is incredible that anyone in a position of influence can seriously argue that these are the people with the political clout and importance.

This nonsense is particularly rich coming from someone who has regularly lauded virtually every establishment initiative, yearned for a “McCain-Lieberman Party” to embody fully the corrupt, warmongering, corporatist policies that “centrists” favor, and denounced the establishment’s opponents as “nihilists.” Two-thirds of Congress backed the financial sector bailout that both progressives and conservatives hated, and most mainstream media outlets and prominent pundits, including Brooks, rallied behind the forces of socialized risk and the too-big-to-fail rationale for rewarding catastrophic failure. The vote to invade Iraq was even more lopsided, and the opponents of the invasion were dismissed as lunatics and apologists for despotism or otherwise ignored. The political center has been making policy and wrecking this country for at least the last decade. Would that it had become nothing more than a “feckless shell”! Perhaps then our country would not have suffered from so many disastrous, unwise decisions.