Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”

Democrats and Republicans have spent decades cultivating a political center that serves donors rather than voters. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass Steagall, deregulating Wall Street and paving the way for the 2008 financial crisis. His administration, led by Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, crushed attempts by Commodities Futures Trading Commission chair Brooksley Born to regulate derivatives, a warning that proved prophetic. Joe Biden supported the 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it harder for ordinary Americans to escape crushing debt, a gift to credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. For years, Democratic leaders blocked Medicare drug price negotiation, a policy opposed only by pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists. The Democratic Leadership Council once boasted of its alliance with corporate power, and its ideological descendants still dominate the party’s biggest fundraising circuits.

Republicans have been no less faithful to donor interests. Paul Ryan built an entire career on attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare. The 2017 Trump tax cuts delivered eighty three percent of their benefits to the top one percent. States controlled by Republicans refused Medicaid expansion even when federal funds would have covered most of the costs, leaving millions uninsured and contributing to rural hospital closures. Kansas governor Sam Brownback’s extreme tax experiment collapsed the state budget and nearly destroyed its public school system. Florida removed 250,000 residents from Medicaid in 2023. Texas, despite leading the nation in uninsured residents, continues to reject the program expansion that would save both money and lives.

At this point in the story, it becomes impossible not to see the historical parallel. American politics today resembles the late Gilded Age, a period defined by extreme inequality, corporate dominance, and a political class that insisted everything was stable until the moment it collapsed. Reformers of that era were dismissed as cranks and radicals. Yet the public eventually forced through antitrust laws, labor rights, and the foundations of the modern safety net. Today’s establishment repeats the same mistake, insisting that demands for universal healthcare or affordable housing reflect extremism rather than necessity. History shows that this kind of denial does not preserve stability. It accelerates unraveling.

This is where a single warning from the past speaks louder than anything [that sycophants for the establishment like Bill Maher can say] on air. In his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned that the country must guard against what he called the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex, adding that only an informed and alert citizenry could compel the proper meshing of private and public power. His point was not just about defense contractors. It was about the danger of allowing any concentrated power to shape a nation’s destiny without democratic accountability. That warning resonates today with an eerie precision because the concentrated power Eisenhower feared now resides not only in the defense industry but in the corporations that dominate healthcare, housing, energy, technology, and finance. The danger is not radical reform. The danger is allowing this system to continue without challenge.

The political class hides behind the claim that the center is safe, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The center is where inequality thrives. The center is where corporate power goes unchecked. The center is where politicians tell voters that universal healthcare is unrealistic but record defense budgets are inevitable. The center is where both parties shield themselves from accountability. The center is where incrementalism becomes paralysis and paralysis becomes cruelty.

The people know better. They know that an economic system that produces stable misery is not worth preserving. They know that the wealthiest country in human history has the resources to guarantee dignity. They know that the crisis is not the demand for more but the acceptance of less. The political class insists that change is dangerous. The voters understand that refusing change is more dangerous still.

– Tony Pentimalli
Excerpted from “The Normalcy Illusion”
via social media
November 18, 2025

Related Off-site Links:
The Case for Centrism Does Not Hold Up – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, November 11, 2025).
The Political Spectrum Is a Myth – Andres Acevedo (The Market Exit, December 11, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2025
• A Deeper Perspective on What’s Really Attacking American Democracy
• Progressive Perspectives on Corruption in U.S. Politics
• Cornel West on Responding to the “Spiritual Decay That Cuts Across the Board”
• Why “Revolutionary Love” Gives Michelle Alexander Hope
• Hope in the Midst of Collapse
• Active Hope
• Balancing the Fire

Image: Current Affairs.