"The Centre Must Hold" - what role can centrist politics play in a polarised world?

Yair Zivan, author, ‘The Centre Must Hold’: Politics isn't a spectrum. It's not the left here and the right here. It's a horseshoe. And the extremes are the ones who are furthest away from the centre. The more you can broaden out the centre, the more the centre can dominate politics, the more you can have those arguments and have them be positive.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week we are talking about politics and democracy. As populists are on the rise in many countries, how should the moderates respond. We hear from the author of a new book called "The Centre Must Hold".

Yair Zivan: If populists and extremists try to govern and try to campaign through fear, there's no point us competing with that. We're never going to be able to out-fear them. And so what we should be doing is offering an alternative. And that alternative is is a message of hope.

Robin Pomeroy: Author Yair Zivan says that centrism must not be defined as simply being the mid point between two extremes; it’s not the “lukewarm water” of politics trying to maintain a status quo; but is something far more radical.

Yair Zivan: Centrists absolutely aren't about status quo. I think the idea of pragmatism and moderation and nuance and complexity and seriousness in politics is as far from the status quo as possible right now. And that's one of the reasons we see so many challenges.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister programmes, Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at politics and democracy, we test the words of the poet W.B. Yeats who wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”

Yair Zivan: "The Centre Must Hold" comes from William Yeats's poem: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Robin Pomeroy: Welcome to Radio Davos. And this week we're talking about democracy. In a year when billions of people are voting on the shape of their government it often feels like politics is more polarised than ever.

So my guest today is Yair Zivan, the editor of a new book called "The Centre Must Hold". Yair, how are you?

Yair Zivan: I'm good, thank you. I'm impressed that you pronounce my name right.

Robin Pomeroy: I didn't even ask you before, did I?

Yair Zivan: You have put together this book, which I read with rapt interest, I have to say.

Robin Pomeroy: Thank you.

Robin Pomeroy: You're the editor of it more than the author of it. Because it's a collection of essays by political thinkers. I'm going to ask you in a second to describe what the book's about. And you know what you're aiming, why you've done it, and why you've done it now. But I'm just going to read one sentence from it. You allow yourself to write the conclusion to the book, and it says: "This book is a call to arms. Centrists of the world unite."

And this is I, you know, I guess there's an element of irony there, because this idea of centrism being this passionate thing that a group of committed people can gather around is something that's really tackled in this book. So I'm sure we'll get into that.

But just tell us what the book is about and why you've written it now.

Yair Zivan: So like you said, the book is called The Centre Must Hold. So it's it comes from William Yates's poem The Second Coming.

That's the headline and there's two lines in that poem that really strike me. And I think of the motivation behind the book. And they touch on that centrists of the world unite, which you're right, of course, is ironic. And they are: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."

And those two lines of of that poem should resonate with all of us today.

And when I think about the best and the worst in politics, the worst for me today in politics are the extremes. And they have passionate intensity and they have a clarity of message. I think they're wrong about almost everything. But they have that passionate intensity about them, which I think the centrists lack.

So the idea of this book was really to say, wait, from my from my personal experience, I think there is a thing called political centrism. I think it's coherent. I think I know what it means. I think I know how to describe it, and I try and do that in the introduction and in the conclusion to to the book.

But it's not enough if just I think it. And so I started reaching out to people who I thought were were political centrists as well, and asked them to write essays on different things. And throughout the book, you'll see that there are essays on a range of topics, whether that's climate change or economics or the developing world or, technology. You know, we cover the whole range of political issues.

And I asked each of them to write about centrism and something else, to see if it became coherent. And I'll be honest, and I don't know if this is such a good idea, but every time a new essay came in, I slightly felt myself nervously opening it, worrying that somebody who I thought shared my political worldview was going to write something that made absolutely no sense to me and sounded completely different.

And actually, what happened was it was clear that the essays were incredibly coherent. I had more than one occasion when I'd open an essay, and I'd realised that they were quoting somebody else who had written an essay for the book without knowing that they were also a contributor. So these people who I gathered, who had never been put together in any sort of framework, it's the first time they're all together in one book, were feeding off each other already.

And so the, the idea of the book was to say, wait, there is this thing called centrism. We've never articulated it before. We've never tried to put it all together in one place to show that it works. And it's time that we did that for two reasons.

One, because centrism is really important to the world that we live in. It plays a key role in politics across the world. And two, because it's not doing anywhere near as well as I think it should be doing things, centrism should be much stronger, should be much more effective, across the democratic world at least.

So those were, I guess, the two main reasons for, for writing it.

Robin Pomeroy: So give us an idea for those who have not read the book of, you know, a handful of the contributors. Who are the kind of people who are writing here?

Yair Zivan: So we have a really a whole range of people from from across the world. We have, Tony Blair has written for the book. Michael Bloomberg has written for the book. Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister of Italy, Malcolm Turnbull, former prime minister of Australia, Yair Lapid, former prime minister of Israel. And full disclosure, also my my boss.

So, you know, we have those sorts of groups of politicians. Stéphane Séjourné is the foreign minister of France today. Marco Buschmann, the justice minister of Germany. So active politicians in the world today. We have some incredible thinkers and writers from from across the world. Andrés Velasco from the LSE who's written a really powerful piece, I think, Jennifer Rubin from The Washington Post, and Bill Galston from the Wall Street Journal and Brookings. Micha Goodman and Polly Bronstein from from Israel, from where I'm from, who I think have written some fantastic essays as well.

So the idea was to get really as wide a range of people as possible. And I'm really pleased that we've managed to do that. And Arne Duncan, I should mention as well, he was, Obama's education secretary, has written about education and centrism. So a real range, there's scope for a second book though.

Robin Pomeroy: We should also also mention Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum.

Yair Zivan: I was going to get to that separately.

Robin Pomeroy: We can come back to him.

Yair Zivan: We should.

Robin Pomeroy: So the first thing that struck me, you know, the title of the book, is just what is centrism? Because presumably you've got people on the right. We need to define what that is. People on the left. And then the centre is some a midpoint between them. If that is the definition of centrism, it's almost not even a thing, is it? So I don't think that is your definition, is it? What what is centrism?

Yair Zivan: I think what you defined just now is the middle, and the middle is a geographic point where you take a spectrum of left and right. You decide where you think the mean voter is and where the middle point is and you place yourself. Now there are plenty of politicians that do that. But that isn't centrism, and that isn't what being a centrist politician or centrist figure is about.

Centrism, I think has, it has some very clear, principles and values which which tie it down. And actually, when centrism defines itself and articulates itself properly, then the rest of the political spectrum has to adapt to centrism rather than the other way round. That's, I think, the key difference between centrism in the middle.

And so what are some of those those things? First of all, I think, an embrace of complexity and nuance and understanding the politics isn't simple. There isn't a five word slogan that really solves any of the major problems we face in the world today.

A belief in equality of opportunity. So there are people who I think deeply on the left who believe in equality of outcome, the idea that we should strive for everybody to get to exactly the same place. And there are people on the right who say, we don't believe in equality at all. Everybody should do whatever they manage to do. Where a centrist would always say it's about giving everybody the same opportunity and then they choose to take it or not. That's really up to them.

There's liberal patriotism, liberal nationalism, if you like, which is says we can be proud of all of our country. We can be proud of our identity, our community, who we are, and connect that to liberal values.

I think throughout the book you see an unswerving, unflinching commitment to liberal democracy, something which is sorely missing from too many places in democratic politics today. But a sense that those institutions, and we can talk about that a little bit later in more detail, but those institutions that hold liberal democracy together are critical for the success that we see and the success that we want.

And the other thing I would say about centrism against some we can go into in a bit more detail a bit later on, maybe, is it is fundamentally a hopeful political approach. Centrism talks about hope, talks in hopeful terms.

And if you think of some of, I think, the most obvious centrist kind of figures, that, you know, that appear in the book a lot as well. Bill Clinton, perhaps one of the most successful campaigners we've seen in the modern era in politics. And what people remember from his election campaigns, this amazing 60 second ad about called A Place Called Hope, which is about where he came from. Barack Obama turned Hope into his entire, first town campaign strategy. People were going around with t shirts with the word hope written on them. I work for a party called Yesh Atid, which means "there is a future"

In essence, centrists are hopeful. And that, I think, is an enormous point of contrast with where so much of politics is today, which is a politics of fear and division and hate.

So I think those are some of the things that define political centrism and you see throughout the essays in the book.

Robin Pomeroy: One of the essays here talks about disinformation, which is one of the reasons, one of several reasons why politics feels so polarised right now. Another reason might be social media. But a lot of disinformation happens through social media, where it's quite tribal, you know, it's us versus them. But someone here is quoting someone else, says "Russian disinformation is not about positioning left versus right, but about using the left and right against the centre."

I think that says a lot about what it is. And for me, having read this book, it struck me that centrist is a broad church. It includes people who, as you say, accept kind of democratic norms. So centrists are going to man the barricades of a revolution usually. They accept democratic norms and they accept facts. This this seems to be a thing. You can have opinions, but you can't have your own facts. Another quote I think he's mentioned several times here. That that seems quite important to me as well in, you know, a post fact or a post expert world. Is that an attraction, perhaps, to centrism, that we all accept certain norms? Things can change. Things can be reformed one way or another, but the basis is there in a democracy, and there are certain scientific we just can't make up another version of.

So it's creating a place where you can have rational and meaningful and respectful debate - is that the centre?

Yair Zivan: I think that's absolutely a part of it.

One of the things you see with populist and illiberal leaders is they start to go after particular institutions. And where do they start to go? They they go after the judiciary because it acts as a restraint. They go after the media and try to shut down independent media because it acts as a counterbalance. So it allows you to control the narrative.

And often people don't notice, but they go after things like national statistics organisations, so they can actually control the flow of facts that come out, or adopt them, or change them or alter them to create a reality that's more convenient for them, rather than the reality that's actually out there.

So yes, centrism embraces facts and embraces science and embraces I guess the rationality. But it has to do that with emotion. We can't separate those two things.

And sometimes, you know, you said, I think centrists are less likely to be manning the barricades in a revolution. Well, that's true, and I think centrists prefer, instinctively prefer a kind of a slow, progress, towards a better end goal and a constant progress. That doesn't mean that centrists can be without passion.

And there are examples throughout the book, I think, where you see that. So, Baroness Ruth Anderson, who's the CEO of Index on Censorship, writes very passionately about freedom of speech. And I think that's somewhere where centrists need to grab that agenda and say we're the ones that protect freedom of speech. The right likes to talk about freedom of speech now, and they're very pro freedom of speech, except when it comes to views they don't like. And the same is true, I think on the far left.

And that's a place where centrists say, wait a minute, we're the guarantors of freedom of speech. And we're going to protect that passionately.

The same is true of liberal democracy. The same is true of the embrace of technology, the idea that that we can wish AI away or wish technological progress away and hope it doesn't come, because it genuinely does create fear, because people are worried about the impact, so you can't wish it away. And so you have to embrace it and decide how you're going to manage it. And centrists can can lead that fight and they can do it passionately.

And the other place where I think centrists need to be the most passionate voices are against the extremes.

You often see these kind of pitched battles between the far right and the far left, but all that does is help both of the extremes, whereas actually the ones who should be leading that charge should be centrists who say we reject both of you. I have plenty of ability within me to say to the far left and the far right, you're both wrong. I have no time for either of you, and I think I'm going to push both of you outside and build a broad centrist church wherever I can, that can actually manage the complex problems that we face today.

And so while it's true the centrists, by and large on revolutionaries, that shouldn't be confused with lack of passion or lack of intensity, to go back to Yeats's poem of the at the beginning.

Robin Pomeroy: It's mentioned several times in the book by the various authors that centrism has a brand deficit. Well, it's probably not even a brand until, I think this book tries to establish centrism as a brand.

And so some of them say, for example, balance and moderation and pragmatism, which are some of the things you're talking about, can be synonyms for the status quo. Basically, let's just leave things as they are. You know, rumbling along. Also, another person said, I've never heard this phrase, but he talks about a 'centrist dad'. So a bit like dad jokes are bad jokes. "A centrist dad is only a notch above gammon or imperialist in terms of a slur."

So for anyone with the passion for politics of the kind you're talking about, they might look at centrists and say, you just, you don't have any passion. You just want things more or less as they are, and you don't want people shouting at each other from the extremes.

I mean, how do you counter that notion, if centrism really is a thing that passionate people who want to engage in politics can identify with, how do you counter that brand deficit?

Yair Zivan: Well, I think that's part of the challenge, and that's part of what I hope the book addresses. And that's part of the that the message, I guess, of, of my my conversation with you today and others - is to say we should be proud of that passion. We should be loud about it. We should be clear about it.

Every political movement, every political group or approach has critics and that's okay. And one of the things that was important to me in the book was we take those criticisms head on. We try and give them the seriousness that they deserve. Some of them, I think, deserve more seriousness than others.

Philip Collins, from The Spectator, has written a whole piece answering the critics of centrism, and that's up front in the book, so you can see what the major criticisms are.

It's a challenge today. Daniel Lubetzky, who's written one of the essays, the founder of Kind snacks and a big believer in centrism, I think he says, radicals wake up in the morning thinking about how to change the world. Moderates wake up in the morning thinking about what they're going to have for lunch. So part of our challenge is to change that and say, actually, if you care about the state of the world, then it's not enough just to think about lunch. You have to think about how you want to make the world better.

Centrists absolutely aren't about status quo, I think the idea of pragmatism and moderation and nuance and complexity and seriousness in politics is as far from the status quo as possible right now. And that's one of the reasons we see so many challenges.

Politics has gone to a place where where we've lost those things and we need them. And it is more difficult. It's harder to, to get people excited about something that's more complicated in a tweet or in a five word slogan, than it is about a simple solution or something divisive. And we see the algorithms of social media.

Now, if you're a political actor, you have two choices. You can complain about it and say how terrible it is, and that's okay. Or you can try and do something about it and say, well, we're going to try and take that on and challenge it.

And I mentioned this before, but I think it's one of the most important ways the centrist can do that. And that is to say, if populists and extremists try to govern and try to campaign through fear, there's no point us competing with that. We're never going to be able to outfit them. And so what we should be doing is offering an alternative. And an alternative is is a message of hope and the message of hope, says, Rabbi Sachs, who was the chief rabbi of Great Britain, I think one of the great philosophers and writers. And I quote him in the introduction to the book as well. Talks about hope as opposed to optimism. Hope is an act of virtue. And so hope is, is our antidote to fear.

We go out and we say, actually, we believe in human nature. It's not naive, but we believe that people have the ability to make the world better if they choose to. We can give people that hope about where the world is going, where their country is going, but where things can progress to that's better. Rather than try to scare them about how terrible the other side is or how everything's falling apart.

Robin Pomeroy: So how do you do that? Because you've already acknowledged that the extremes or the one issue parties are quite successful in communication. Several essays in your book mentioned things like, patriotism. You've just mentioned it as well. And tradition, things that are probably seen, you know, as the reserve of what we call the right wing, also identity politics. I don't know when that phrase emerged, but that's become something unavoidable now, perhaps on the left wing more. But they're quite similar things. It's who you perceive yourself to be, I think. And we could call it tribal as well. But I think you and some of the contributors here acknowledge it's kind of fair enough to feel you are part of a group or a part of a history or a tradition, and that's something some of your writers say, don't reject that, embrace it, but in a different way.

Yair Zivan: Yeah, absolutely. There's a difference between, I think, a core difference in patriotism and nationalism, the idea of patriotism that you love your country, that you're proud of it, you're proud of its history and traditions and its cultures, as opposed to nationalism, which tends to be outward looking, and how much better you are than others. And, and Orwell writes in his Notes on Nationalism defines that brilliantly.

So, one of the things about centrism, one of the things in this book, is that I'm not willing, as a centrist, to give up on patriotism to the right. Patriotism doesn't belong to the right. It belongs to to me as much as it belongs to. Then, I think it's it's a centrist virtue.

And so, just like we shouldn't give, empathy to to the left, is something that only the left cares about people. Only the left worries about people who are worse off. Neither should we give up on patriotism to the right.

The centre can say those are those are our values, and we'll fight for them. We'll do it in a better way, in a more productive way.

Tony Blair and New Labour in the 1990s talked about, New Labour, New Britain, Cool Britannia, the whole, ecosystem around New Labour was about a pride and a patriotism in Britain and embracing that as a positive thing.

I do think that's very natural. People do feel a connection to their local community. People do feel a connection to their country, and we shouldn't try to take that away. There's no reason to it. It's an incredibly positive motivating factor for people. And something that people have a right to be proud of.

So I think when you combine that and you say it's also okay to say, our national history can be complicated, our national history might have things in it that are difficult, and we can acknowledge them and we can adapt our national identity to welcoming new people.

I grew up in, in a city called Leicester in England. Leicester had it, when I was there, it had a huge Indian population and enrichded the city. We used to do Diwali and Christmas and Hanukkah celebration lights, you know, lights in the streets together because they were three festivals that were associated with lights, that those things can enrich a place rather than rather than weaken it and still keep a national identity, keep a sense of things that people are proud of.

And I think I'll give examples of that for, for different countries. So we do have an ability to take those positive attributes, those positive values, and, and claim them as our own. And and you see it again, some of the people I mentioned earlier, Bill Clinton's campaign was full of hype. Tony Blair's campaign was full of hype. JFK's campaign was full of hope. So I think you take political campaigns and you infuse them with a really positive message, and you get the attention like that.

There's there's an advert I always like to give as an example. And again, I think it's in, it's in the book as well. But of the two governors, two candidates for governor of Utah did a campaign ad together where they stood next to each other and talked about how being from Utah is about respecting each other and about still being neighbours, is still working together. Both them said, I want you to vote for me. I think I'm the better candidate and I think I'm right and I think they're wrong. But we can do that standing next to each other and still be friends.

They took a local sense of local pride, took it into that political message. One of the fascinating things was when you polled people and you survey people afterwards, people who saw that advert were less likely to support political violence. They were less likely to reject election results because they saw two opposing candidates who were able to stand next to each other.

Now, you can't always do that. There are times when a centrist candidate is up against an extremist candidate who isn't going to stand with you and deliver a hopeful message, but there are ways around that, and I think that's the core approach that we should be taking.

Robin Pomeroy: Talking of the UK, for example, we have a parliament that is not a semi-circle. It's a it's got two banks facing off each other. And the same could be said about the US Congress, although it is in a different shape. Basically you've got one side versus the other. And some would say this very combative form of politics is actually a good form of democracy. I've often have my doubts about that, but there's no way you would change overnight that form of politics which exists in many mature democracies, which, when they're at their best, work fairly well as democracies, but they're still combative and antagonistic. Do you think it's time to revisit that for some of those countries?

Yair Zivan: I don't want to portray centrism as an attempt to bring everybody together. It's okay that there are differences. There are centrists in the Labour Party and in the Conservative Party, in the Democratic Party, in the Republican Party, in Labour and the Liberals in Australia. There are centrists who exist across different political parties. And that's a positive thing. And it's okay that they fight and they argue and they try to come out.

In Judaism there's a concept of an argument for the sake of heaven - l'shem shamayim. The idea being that you argue and it's okay. The argument in and of itself is positive. If the goal is to achieve a better result.

And you see models that that overcome it in the in Congress, you have the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is Democrats and Republicans that come together. And they've been a key player in passing some of the biggest bipartisan pieces of legislation in recent years because they say there are problems that we can work together on.

Now, you point out the physical way in which people sit. And I think that's true. And there's an element of something that's problematic in that. But we actually see that is the politics isn't the spectrum. It's not the left here and the right here. It's a horseshoe. And the extremes are the ones who have furthest away from the centre. The more you can broaden out the centre, the more the centre can dominate politics, the more you can have those arguments and have them be positive. Have them be a place for real deliberation about serious issues that it's okay to disagree on.

Not everybody feels the same about some of the most sensitive and complicated issues that that we face . One of the essays in the book by Polly Bronstein talks about the idea of moving us from binary thinking, to a spectrum. So to say, rather than trying to say I'm for or against something, try to put yourself on how far your you are on willing to accept, how far you're willing to go. And then you find that there's room for compromise. When you put people in a position where they have to be either for or against something, then it makes it much harder to to break down some of those barriers.

The centrism that I envisage is a strong centrist faction in multiple - in systems that have two parties, two strong centrist factions that play two key roles. The first is, they say to their party leader, without me, you can't get anything done. You don't have to listen to the radicals in the party, because I'm a bigger faction. I'm a stronger faction. And if you don't listen to me, you won't get any of your agenda through, because this is what I demand. Ideally, the leader is also from that group within a party, but if not, at least they're strong enough.

And the other thing is, they can reach out to the other side and say, where can we find areas of agreement? Where can we build some kind of consensus that allows us to, to move forward?

I think that should be the goal in two party systems.

In places where there are multi-party systems, centrists can build their own platform and drive it into the heart of the political system, as Macron did in France or NEOS in Austria or Yesh Atid here in Israel. They created their own platform and said, this is the centrist platform in the country, and now we're going to try and rally as many people as possible behind it.

Robin Pomeroy: So some of those you mentioned are kind of recently emerging centrist political parties, but others you've mentioned, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton. Critics on the right, or conservatives, would say, oh yeah, so your version of centrism actually is this kind of Social Democratic, it's definitely not where the Republican Party is right now or indeed the UK Conservative Party. How would you counter that, that you're talking about a kind of a soft left or a moderate left rather than. How does that differ from centrism?

Yair Zivan: So one of the good things about centrism is you get attacked often with exactly the same arguments from both sides. So you're right that the people on the political right, conservatives look at centrists and say it's just basically a soft centre left. These are Social Democrats who realise they can't get elected, and so they position ourselves a little bit further in the centre. At the same time, the left says, listen, these guys are basically just right wing neocons dressed up as something more moderate in order to try to pull people away.

So the argument comes at you from both sides. It's the same argument and it's wrong on both counts. In two party systems, yes, the centrist leader comes from one of the two major parties. But you look at someone like Macron and he has pulled people together from both the Socialists and the Republicans in France and brought them together into one party. So I think that it doesn't really meet reality, but the criticism is is always there and it comes from both sides equally.

Again, it's up to centrists to say, this is who we are, and we wear our badge proudly, and we aren't trying to dress up as somebody else. And we're also not willing to let you define who we are.

Part of that is, again, the goal of the book is to say, here's a coherent argument for what we are. Here's how we approach lots of issues. Here's the way how we are different.

And there are plenty of things in the book that I think people on the left will find very difficult, and will dislike. And there are equally things that people on the right will find that they don't like. And that's, I guess, how we know that we're that we're in a different place.

Robin Pomeroy: I asked you at the start of the interview, why now for this book, and a couple of the writers mention technology and the technological revolution that we've all lived through the last few decades. And we're probably at the start of of a new one. Someone says the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is a term favoured by the World Economic Forum, is also a political revolution. Why is that?

Yair Zivan: So there's a few things I'd say about technology.

First of all, it's a fundamental change in how societies operate and how societies work.

So the idea that algorithms today might dominate what you see on your social media feed is a very easy example to understand how it can affect your politics. If you control the algorithm of Twitter or Facebook, you can control what people see and you have an outsized influence on on the political process.

When we get to a place where technology can maybe suggest where constituency boundaries should be, that is inherently political, there will be a political element within that. So technology isn't just about the fact that we're advancing very quickly, but it has real effects on the political process.

The second thing is it has an effect on the structure of society. More and more of us are working from home. This interview that you and I are doing would probably not have been possible 30 years ago. And we would have had to meet in person to do it. There's changes in how people work. There's changes in the kind of jobs that they have.

Haley Stevens from Michigan talks about the shift that Michigan has to make now in terms of its industry. This is a state that is famous for building cars. And now it has to change its whole industry to something that's fitting for the modern world.

So the impact of technology is so deep and I don't think we understand it enough yet. It's so dramatic, both on the political process and on society, that it really is a political revolution.

I think one of the challenges that we have with the pace of technology and, and Jamie Susskind, who wrote the piece on technology and how we should think about governing technology, how we think about regulating technology - one of the major problems that we have is elected politicians, particularly older elected politicians, don't have a background in technology. They don't understand the pace of change. It's very difficult to keep up with the pace of change, even for somebody of my age, the things that my, my children might be doing and I might be doing it already completely different. But we have to find a way to allow those that govern to have a deep enough understanding of technology to know how to help us regulate it, if at all, how to govern it, and how to bring it into society in a healthier way. It's a huge challenge that we face.

Robin Pomeroy: Are there other issues that you think cannot be solved without centrism? I think this book argues that centrism is necessary to maintain democracy. Without it democracies can't function and will disappear. But are there also particular issues that we need centrism to achieve solutions for?

Yair Zivan: I think almost every issue. I think almost every political issue that you could think of, if you try to solve it with an extreme from one side or the other, it won't work. It requires a centrist solution to almost any of the big, complicated issues that that we face today, because there's so much complexity in those issues.

But I'll give you one example that's maybe a really sensitive one and one of the kind of hot button issues that's difficult for people. Lord Jonathan Evans, who was was head of the UK security services, writes about centrism and counter terrorism. If you ask the political right, the far right, how to deal with terrorism, they'll tell you crush it with force. As much force as possible, as much force as is needed. Crush it completely. Speak to people on the far left, there's a very, intrinsic desire, I think, to to understand the causes and where it comes from and why people feel that way. And maybe if we compromise with them a bit more, maybe if we give them a bit more than, then they'll stop, with no sense that maybe people are driven by something else.

If you don't approach something like the fight against terrorism with an understanding that you do need to use force, there is a need for force in that fight, and there is a need to try to deal with some of the underlying issues, create alternatives for people, deal with the challenges that people face, pull them away from extremism with things that aren't just military force, but also require, diplomacy and governance and policy, you're never going to be able to deal effectively with a challenge like, like fighting terrorism and protecting that national security.

So I think, you know, that's just the one example that I would take. But it's true for everything. Look at debates around health care, and you see that you need to find that kind of centrist solution.

And one of the reasons, I think, why it's so important beyond the policies themselves, and this is something that maybe goes a little bit to process, but, an example that I give people is centrists are inherently in favour of compromise. Why are we in favour of compromise.? And I'll give it as an example, if, if I was a political actor, if I have a policy that I believe in 100% and I can get it passed through my parliament wherever I am in the world with 51% of the vote, or I could water it down from 100% to 80% and that allows me to broaden the support from 51% to 75%. I'll choose the second option. Not because I have to. I have a majority. I can pass exactly what I want, but because I think by broadening the consensus, by approaching it in a centrist way, by broadening the support for it, I do a few things.

First of all, with modesty and humility. Maybe the people who disagree with me have something to add to the conversation and to the solution that I haven't thought of. And maybe it's worth taking on board something that people other than me in my political camp think. Maybe there is something that we can learn from other people.

That's the first thing. Second thing is, if you don't build a consensus around something, if you don't build broad support around something, it won't last. The worst thing for public policy for any issue you can take infrastructure or health care, education, any issue you can think of, the worst thing is a constant dramatic shift from one side to the other. If I can build a broad consensus, I can build things that last. I can build things that will go beyond the time when I will lose the next election because that's how politics works. There'll be times that I'm in power and times when I'm in the opposition. But if I build things that have a broader consensus, they will last beyond my term in office. That is much more likely to create long term success.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you have any hope that this idea of centrism will take hold and will, as I think someone said, centrist centrists need to 'take back control' to use a three word slogan. Do you have any hope for that, for the future around the world?

Yair Zivan: I do, but I think part of my centrism and part of centrism that that comes out in the book is also a very pragmatic approach, which says that there isn't an end point. We're not working towards a utopia. It's a constant process. And so there will be times when the far right or the far left, rise in power, rise in appeal.

And by the way, and I should have said this earlier, some of the the reasons that they rise to power, all because of genuine fears that people feel well-founded, fears that people feel that. We shouldn't dismiss the reason that people support the the extremes. Macron, in one of his first speeches, talks about the fact that we have to give you a reason to never vote for the extremes again. It's our responsibility to give you the answers that are better than their answers and to pull you away from it. But that isn't us judging people who feel the way they feel, because the fears are are understandable - fears of technology, fears around immigration. I understand why people feel those things, and it's up to us to try to provide better solutions that that that work.

But part of it is an understanding that it's a constant process. And if you want centrism to be successful, you need to build something that has deep roots. You need to build something that lasts. You need to build political parties that have a broad base of support. You need to understand that there'll be times when you're up and times when you're down, and you need to keep going and keep fighting it.

I don't think we're ever going to get rid of the extremes from from politics. I don't think we're ever going to be able to completely rid ourselves of populist leaders. But the idea that the challenge is to constantly keep going, to try to maintain as much support for what we believe, for what I believe, is the right approach to politics.

Robin Pomeroy: The book is called The Centre Must Hold. It's really, really fascinating. I think if you've got any interest at all in politics and democracy and in some ways philosophy even, there's going to be something in this book for people to read. Yair Zivan, thanks very much for joining us on Radio Davos.

Yair Zivan: Thank you very much.

Robin Pomeroy: Yair Zivan.

You can read the chapter from his book written by World Economic Forum President Børge Brende on the Forum’s website. It is called: Why a centrist approach can restore global cooperation - links to that in the show notes to this episode.

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This episode of Radio Davos was written and produced by me, Robin Pomeroy. Studio production was by Taz Kelleher.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.