Perspective: Why Democrats — and all Americans — should embrace centrism
President Dwight Eisenhower talks with the Reverend Billy Graham during a White House visit on May 10, 1957. By Derek Chollet Derek Chollet is executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense. His next book is about the shared foreign policy legacy of Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Written over the last weeks of 1968 while the 78-year-old Eisenhower lay ailing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, this essay was an attempt to come to grips with a country he struggled to recognize, rocked by assassinations, riots, student strikes, cultural upheaval and deep fractures.
In his twilight, Ike made one final appeal. Expressing his worries about the “emergence of a new extremism in our land,” Eisenhower refused to be pessimistic. “The effect of these voices,” he wrote, “few in number but strong in decibels, is to create the impression that our country no longer heeds the rule of reason and tolerance.”
Eisenhower’s homespun wisdom may seem old-fashioned or even wrongheaded at a political moment when dangerous extremism seems to be growing in appeal. How can one not condemn, for example, the self-proclaimed white supremacists influencing our politics today? It may not win the news cycle. Yet other presidents have found success by following this tradition — by steering a middle course between the extremes with a combination of ambition and humility, recognizing that there are rarely perfect answers or absolute wins. They pursue the politics of the possible over the politics of purity.
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