As Mamdani and El-Sayed rattle the Democratic establishment, a Sri Lankan progressive political commentator argues the political center was never the answer to right-wing authoritarianism.
“The middle is not a strategy. It's an empty room,” Hunter Biden, posted on X on June 24, 2026 as part of a thread listing his “takeaways” from that night’s New York City Democratic primary elections.
The Council of Liberal Democracy of Sri Lanka hosted a seminar some weeks ago, on Friday, July 31, at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo. The seminar was about the life, work, and political legacy of Chanaka Amaratunga, founder of the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka. More importantly, it was also about liberalism — how it has evolved, what it has become, and where it is headed.
I was one of the speakers at the event. I began my speech by reflecting on certain recent developments in the United States, notably the rise of young radical freshmen and freshwomen within the Democratic Party. Arguably the most popular of these figures has been New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In Michigan, we are seeing the ascent of Abdul El-Sayed. As with Mamdani, the latter’s recent win has sent the political right into panic mode. As Mehdi Hasan recently indicated, we will see the most blatant Islamophobia until the midterms in November, though no one, least of all El-Sayed, deserves it.
I began my intervention with the U.S. because we are now witnessing an interesting, though hardly unprecedented, turning point in liberal politics. The firebrands of the Democratic Party are projecting a vision of progressive politics different not just from the political right but also the centrist middle. The latter is represented by what one critic calls the consultant class of the Democratic Party. This was the same group that framed Mamdani as a lost cause and constantly demeaned his positions on the issues that drove the race for the New York mayoralty last year. Now we are seeing centrists make the same claims about Abdul El-Sayed, with one veteran of the Clinton presidency threatening to leave the party, even join forces with the right, “if the Democrats went crazy and the Republicans went sane.”
Many if not most of these candidates were endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America or the DSA. The view among centrist Democrats, who define themselves as progressives, is that their programs go too far and are out of step with the times. Months before Mamdani won the mayoral race, for instance, a leading pro-Democrat centrist journal, Third Way, published a memo that outlined a list of the DSA’s policies. Among the more popular of these were defunding the police, housing for all, universal healthcare, free democratic public colleges and social ownership of industry. Many of these are policies that Mamdani campaigned for and are currently implementing as mayor.
These dissenting strains indicate that the pushback against Trumpism, and the right-wing authoritarianism of which Donald Trump is more symptom than cause, is taking place at a time when liberalism itself is coming under question and often under attack. At the core of these conflicts, I think, is the question of what constitutes liberalism and who is a liberal. The DSA is, by definition, left-leaning. But it may surprise some of us that their ideas were popular among liberals two or three generations ago.
Indeed, at a time of widening wealth and income inequalities, such policies seem sensible and relevant. Centrist pundits, however, tend to bemoan and decry them. Their excuse is that at a time of polarization, we must take it easy, aim for moderation and not upset the applecart. If the focus is on fighting right-wing excesses, we must avoid taking a leaf from left-wing playbooks. This is especially true of economic policies: progressive taxes and wealth taxes are good, and it is reasonable to bemoan inequalities, but we should stop at these and not think about things like rent control for the poor.
The Third Way’s framing of these policies is interesting for me because it points to a certain way of looking at liberalism. Stating that they are “deeply alarmed” by Mamdani’s policies, the editors said that they “sound like they were cooked up in the offices of a Trump-aligned ad maker.” The Third Way concludes by imploring voters to “think carefully” before voting for Mamdani, adding it would be a “devastating blow” in the fight against Trumpism. Judging from recent surveys, I think it’s safe to say that this characterization of Mamdani has not aged well, in light of where he has gone since. Not that it has stopped outlets like Third Way from making biblical pronouncements on other candidates — including, of course, El-Sayed.
Third Way derives its title from Third Way Centrism, a policy of triangulation which liberal parties began adopting in the 1990s in response to what they perceived as the inevitability of right-wing economic policies. Almost no liberal or left-leaning party, in the Global North or South, escaped this trend. The Democrats in the U.S., the Labour Party in the U.K., the Congress Party in India and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party or SLFP in Sri Lanka, all conformed to this trend of moving to the political middle.
These developments underlaid a broader historical process, which flowed from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Liberal and left-liberal parties had earlier identified themselves with the center-left, supporting policies like industrialization, nationalization, the expansion of the welfare state and of course, progressive taxation. In the 1980s, though, conservative parties won elections or came to power through other means, like military coups, and implemented free-market policies. The consensus among right-wing economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek was that economic freedom, defined in terms of the rollback of the government, mass privatization and deregulation, and the contraction of the welfare state, would ultimately lead to political freedom.
While there was a pushback against these tendencies from liberal and left-liberal parties, the center-left could not hold for long. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to indicate the impracticality of communism and socialism. The early 1990s saw the defeat of several right-wing parties — the Republicans in the U.S., the Labour Party in the U.K., and the United National Party in Sri Lanka, which implemented free-market reforms in that island long before other South Asian countries — and ascent of the liberal center-left parties. Yet instead of embracing an equitable economic order, these outfits moved further to the right, justifying the shift as an embrace of pragmatism.
It’s difficult to understand why this happened and why even the political left accepted these developments. The most logical explanation is that events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent ascent of the United States — the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer called it the “unipolar moment” — came as a blow for Marxists, and by extension for liberals who had absorbed some of their ideas.
In hindsight, however, one must admit that the strategies of moderates who advocated for these shifts, and who are now demeaning the firebrands of the Democratic Party, have not had their intended effect. Instead of halting right-wing forces, they have actually capitulated to them. The result has been a more vicious far-right, which in the U.S., U.K. and pretty much everywhere else is gobbling up not just centrist and leftist forces, but also the mainstream conservative right. Former U.K. Home Secretary, now Reform U.K. MP, Suella Braverman’s tirade against the Conservative Party — that it has become “too weak to save themselves, let alone the country" — indicates how these ideas have become more vicious and pettier, more strongly defined by an exclusivist and racist agenda.
Even though there has been a healthy reaction against these trends, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, I often wonder whether the proponents of the political middle, the centrist pragmatists, are still stuck in the past. On issues like Gaza, the war in Iran, and the rise of the uber-rich billionaire and soon-to-be trillionaire class, these centrists have been silent at best and retrograde and conservative at worst. One group notes that the Democratic Party has no hostility toward Israel — as if the defense of a state that has evicted and wreaked violence on an entire community is a number one priority for liberal political forces. Ironically, the likes of El-Sayed, demonized as communist and also Islamist, have been much more centrist and have aimed for a true middle ground.
In a commentary on El-Sayed’s interview with The New Yorker last Aug. 3, a day before the Michigan U.S. Senate primary, Forward quoted El-Sayed as saying he believes in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike, and that it is not his job as an American policymaker "to decide what the ultimate peace should be."
“But it is my job to make sure that our resources are stewarded correctly for the people I’m responsible for,” he said. ”Those kids going to those broken schools.”
All this goes back to the point I made in my speech at the July 31 event: that the liberal project, which in itself is laudable, needs to redeem itself and salvage itself from the contradictions that have been bedeviling it for almost 30 years. The solution to right-wing authoritarianism is not a vaguely defined political center, but a strong and robust anti-authoritarian movement which is not afraid of having firm opinions on the key issues of today. The political right today is busy creating a world for itself alone. This is the world that liberals confront. Compromise cannot be a solution.
We must concede that the results of centrism have been ugly. Centrism has led not to free markets and open societies, but belligerent authoritarianism and reckless adventurism, not to mention indecent concentrations of wealth. The lessons for liberals all across could not be starker. We must immediately imbibe a liberalism that is humane and just, one that does not stop at a vague notion of rights but embraces their very practice, especially in economics. After all, as Martin Luther King once reportedly said, “It is very nice to drink milk at an unsegregated lunch counter — but not when there's strontium 90 in it.” This, not the politics of an unhelpful center or middle, is what should constitute liberalism today.
