Renata Adler and Toward a Radical Middle: where the phrase 'radical middle' comes from

Every political idea has a first use, and the radical middle's belongs to a magazine writer. The New York Times columnist William Safire credited Renata Adler, a staff writer at The New Yorker, with coining the phrase. She used it in the introduction to Toward a Radical Middle, a collection of her reporting and criticism published in 1969 (some sources, including the bibliography of later editions, date it 1970). Thirty-five years later Mark Satin used the same phrase for the title of his own book, Radical Middle.

Adler was born in Milan in 1937 and joined The New Yorker in 1962 under William Shawn. She was briefly chief film critic of The New York Times in 1968 and 1969, then went back to the magazine for decades. She later wrote the novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and books on libel trials and on Bush v. Gore. Toward a Radical Middle collected her magazine work on politics, war and civil rights. Two of its pieces cover the civil rights marches: The March for Non-Violence from Selma and The Black Power March in Mississippi.

What she meant

The introduction is short and combative. According to the summary in the Wikipedia entry on radical centrism, she presented the radical middle as a healing kind of radicalism, rejected the violent rhetoric of the late 1960s, and called for reconciling the white working class with African Americans. AJ Cohn, reviewing her collected nonfiction in The Harvard Crimson, describes the introduction as staking out room for a political position nobody had yet put into words, a radicalised centrism, and notes that she finds failings in the radical left and the radical right alike. Cohn quotes her list of values, which she was happy to admit were unfashionable: "Our values are corny ones, reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity".

There is a generational argument underneath. Adler belonged to the cohort born just before the Second World War, too young to have fought it and too old to be part of the sixties revolt. Anna Wiener, writing in The New Republic, picks out Adler's claim that this generation grew up without a rhetoric of its own and so became, in her phrase, the last custodians of language. Wiener describes Adler as a woman of the left who was never a leftist, sceptical and always sincere, and warns readers against mistaking her criticism of the radical left for conservatism.

The language point is the heart of it. Katie Ryder, in The Nation, describes Adler's target as political cliché: charged words such as imperialism, genocide, racism and police brutality used as though they meant the same thing. Adler wanted to keep the distinctions between literal statements, metaphors and questions of degree. She was equally hard on the simplicities of anti-communism and the rhetoric of the "free world". Ryder links this to the formative experience of Adler's generation, the war and what it revealed about where inflated political language can lead.

What the critics said

Adler's introduction has had hostile readers. Jonathon Sturgeon, writing in Flavorwire in 2015, found it nasty towards radicals and argued that it misread Black radicalism, and radicalism in general, almost wilfully. Cohn, more sympathetic, still found the political analysis unconvincing because it rested on an appeal to a majority that she could not really demonstrate. Both points are fair, and both apply to plenty of later centrists too. Claiming to speak for a silent sensible majority is easy; showing that it exists, and what it wants, is harder. That is why Donald Warren's survey work, published a few years later, makes such a useful companion to Adler.

What the radical centre keeps

Adler offers no policy programme. Her lasting gift is a habit of mind, and it draws on more than one camp.

From the left she takes the civil rights movement as a moral fixed point and the conviction that working-class whites and Black Americans had more to gain together than apart. From the right, or at least from the liberal tradition the sixties radicals despised, she takes reason, prosperity and patience with ordinary institutions that improve slowly. And the idea that fits neither is her insistence that exact language is itself a political good. When every opponent is a fascist and every policy a genocide, nobody can tell a serious warning from noise, and nobody can make a deal without being called a traitor.

Put together, that becomes a working rule for radical centrism. A politics that wants to build coalitions across camps has to protect the words those coalitions depend on. In European debates in 2026, on migration, housing or Europe itself, the temptation to inflate is constant and comes from every side. The radical middle Adler sketched starts with refusing it: describe the problem in proportion, name the real disagreement, and keep the strongest words for the cases that deserve them. Her values were corny, as she said. They also turn out to be the preconditions for every synthesis this programme is trying to build.