Moral Centrism Is about Hope, Unity and Shared Values

This site is about the active search for practical ideas, policies and platforms that will unify this great nation around shared values and common dreams

Moral Centrism asserts that the American people, indeed almost all people, share strong common values and principles despite what we may hear in the media and see in politics.

Our first president said it best:

“The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”

— George Washington, 1796

In the USA today, the right and left quote liberally from George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, 1984, on topics ranging from the bureaucracy of the welfare state to increasing corporate media concentration.  The irony of Democrats and Republicans referencing this seminal work on permanent political warfare while engaged in exactly such a war is hard to miss.

Even as these political parties publicly lament the division of our nation into primary colors, they actively seek wedge issues to drive voters out of the enemy camp.  Words have become bullets fired as casually at fellow Americans as foreign terrorists.

We are a nation divided.

Moral Centrism is about the inherently moral framework of public policy in a democracy—and the common, shared morality that can bring us together if we choose unity rather than division.  We are a nation formed in the search for unity, a people who came together “to form a more perfect union.”

But today there is no party or platform that stands for unity or common interests.  Centrists and moderates are seen as pleasantly rational or weakly indecisive, but never have we had a formal platform of moral policies and ideas on which to stand.  Everyone knows what a Republican claims to stand for (lower taxes, free markets and “values”) and what Democrats struggle to defend (everything else), but centrists and moderates have become little more than political fodder in the battle for swing voters.  And we have become sadly resigned to our fate.

Moral Centrism is an audacious shot across the bow of this cynical worldview.  Moral Centrism asserts that we have values in common, and that by focusing on these values we can make permanent structural changes to our nation and world.  And Moral Centrism suggests new ideas based on these shared values to address the problems we face today.

That means Moral Centrism is about hope...

...the fundamental, unassailable belief that our capacity for good and growth is so great, so nearly unbounded, that things can easily be so much better than they are or have ever been.  This is not idealism, not the search for some illusive utopia, but fact—people are capable of infinitely more than we are asking of them today, as are governments, businesses, churches, families, communities and nations.

Moral Centrism asks only that we act on this potential in a focused and productive manner.