Centrist: Mixed-Economy Liberal Center

A worldview that distrusts ideological certainty more than it distrusts any particular ideology, and tries to govern by what works, calibrated to who currently holds power.

Constitutional democracy and largely free markets prop each other up, and yanking out either one collapses the building faster than its critics tend to assume.

Majority rule and a charter of individual rights have to be wired in series, because either one running on its own tends to build the kind of regime its early enthusiasts come to regret.

The political tradition that treats disagreement as permanent and builds institutions to let people who agree on almost nothing still share a country.

Liberal democracy at home and active democracy-promotion abroad form a single settlement, dating to 1945, that has to be defended with force because nobody else will do it; the people who held that line for fifty years would not have flinched the way its defenders have flinched in the last twenty.

It ran the global economy for forty years, lost the public argument in 2008, and still controls the institutions that made the argument; right now it is more powerful than it is popular.

Rights on paper are worth only what people can actually do with them, so a serious state has to keep the conditions of effective liberty in working order even when the bill comes due at an inconvenient time.

A bet that social-democratic ends could be reached with Thatcher-Reagan means. The bet lost a financial crisis, kept the trade and welfare-reform statutes on the books, and now spends its days arguing about what it owes the working-class voters it traded away.

Capitalism keeps the upside, the state insures the downside, and the bargain won so thoroughly that most countries forgot it was ever in dispute.