I was sorry – and saddened – to learn that Jared Golden is not running for re-election for Maine’s Second District congressional seat. Golden was routinely slotted into the “Centrist” or even “conservative” wing of the Democratic Party, while I’m a Bernie, AOC and Graham Platner fan with tenuous links to the party at all. Being in Camden, I don’t even live in Golden’s district.

Still, I supported Golden and felt that the positions he took that were at odds with “progressives” or those in the Democratic Party leadership were often fine with me. And even more often, they often visibly traced the views of most of those in his largely rural district – those he was elected to “represent.”

One of the complex mix of things Golden illustrated for me personally was the confusion too often sewn by the sloppy and divisive way lines are drawn between Left, Right, and Center in American politics. As applied to those “Centrist” Democratic US Senators who followed Independent Angus King into a deal aimed at ending the government closure, it’s mostly a matter of style rather than substance. None of them disagreed with the Democratic Party leadership (also Centrist) in wanting to extend Obamacare subsidies, they just didn’t want to play hard ball to get them.

By my personal definitions, “Centrists” has a more substantive meaning. It applies to those who cling to the “neoliberal” bipartisan consensus of which Ronald Raegan was the “ideological architect” and Bill Clinton the “key facilitator, as American historian Gary Gerstle puts it in his acclaimed 2022 book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. By Gerstle’s reckoning, that bipartisan “order” encompassed all presidents from Raegan through Barack Obama. It was severely shaken in Donald Trump’s first term, returned in partial form under Joe Biden, and ripped to shreds in Trump’s second term.

Its core beliefs are in globalized, minimally regulated markets, including for money (absolute Federal Reserve independence), labor, and corporate investments. This effectively limits the space of political action to what have come to be seen as “culture-war” issues such as gender, race and identity. In theory, neoliberalism favors free movement of labor, so minimal restrictions on immigration. In practice, immigration has remained an open issue in the Democratic Party. Trump has pulled the Republicans squarely into the anti-immigration camp.

The Democratic Party leadership, as I see it, almost all fit into this category. Nancy Pelosi, whose retirement announcement hit almost simultaneously with Jared Golden’s, certainly did – whether you see her as “progressive” or not. She was strong on culture issues. She was supportive of climate (my thing) legislation if it fit within the limits of the “green growth” approach that assumes climate change can be handled adequately by simply replacing fossil fuels with renewable electricity and the electric vehicles, while leaving everything else as is.

This meant she favored limited carbon taxes, for example, and the financial incentives for “clean alternatives” provided under Biden legislation, but adamantly opposed the Green New Deal supported by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, AOC and Bernie Sanders. Green New Deals come in various shapes and sizes, but they all emphasize climate justice and income equality along with the transition off oil and gas.

Trump’s break with neoliberalism did not create an ideologically unified Republican Party, however willing most of its congressional delegations and other elected officials are to support Trump and his on-again, off-again emphasis on being the party of the American workingman. Most Congressional Republicans are still old-style Centrists. That’s why the tax bill written by the Republican Congress is probusiness, pro-wealth, and bad for low-income people, while tariffs and some other moves Trump has made on his own are supported to a degree by even the lefty likes of United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain. Trump himself straddles the fence.

Meanwhile, In Maine…

What does all this mean to Maine? One thing to note is the similarity and, until recently, camaraderie, between Republican Senator Susan Collins and her newly minted opponent, Democratic Governor Janet Mills. Both are firmly in the old “Centrist” camp. Each has been known to take on their respective parties in support of neoliberal positions. Think here of Mills’ determined opposition to a customer-owned rather than for-profit electric utilities in Maine. Or Collins’ opposition to tariffs.

Platner presents a huge contrast to both. He is anything but Centrist and is anti-neoliberal. He is for working people who, as he sees it, have been ill-treated by both parties – something easily supported by the economic data of the last 45 years in this state and this country. Platner talks of working locally with people of all political views and representing everyone in Maine when he goes to the Senate, not just the wealthy and privileged.

In this, leftist Platner sounds much closer to Jared Golden than to either Collins or Mills – although he strongly opposed the government-closure-ending deal struck by King.

As I see it, there are even local applications right where I live, in Camden. Platner’s and Golden’s approaches -- even when they differ on policy remedies -- present a better model for working on tough issues related to our harbor and to local climate resilience than do platitudes about the need for Centrism to bridge our gaps.

The issues that divide Camden do not automatically or easily align with national political divisions, and that’s a good thing. We can and should focus on working with our neighbors to find common ground for managing tough issues such as household energy efficiency, making our harbor resilient, creating emergency plans as strong as the flooding and fire threats we face as the climate destabilizes, expanding town solar in a way that saves both money and the environment, and more.

Politics in America are broken and unlikely to get fixed soon, as Platner points out. Maine can at least be part of the solution rather than part of the national problem if we look for young, inventive thinkers such as Platner for statewide positions. And right here at home, we can lessen the scourge of divisiveness by listening to, hearing, and working with our neighbors in an open, acceptant fashion that doesn’t draw left-right lines -- lines that often don’t match reality on the grounds in any case.