The clowns and jokers may disagree on policy, but they share a business model.
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.” The line lands with a shrug and a wince—wry, observational, and oddly timeless. Written in 1972, it sounds less like a lyric than a field report from today’s political landscape. The center, once a meeting place, now feels like a narrow ledge. Below it, the noise rises.
On the left, earnest idealism often curdles into moral theater. Language hardens into litmus tests; dissent becomes betrayal. The promise of solidarity can slide into conformity, and compassion—once a bridge—turns into a bludgeon. On the right, performative outrage competes with grievance as a governing principle. Institutions are suspect, expertise is mocked, and strength is confused with volume. Each side insists it alone sees clearly. Each side requires villains to stay coherent.
The center isn’t neutral ground so much as contested territory. It’s not a place for indecision; it’s where trade-offs are acknowledged and consequences weighed. Yet in a system optimized for spectacle, nuance doesn’t travel well. Algorithms reward fury, not footnotes. Cable panels prize certainty, not curiosity. The result is a politics of posture, where applause lines substitute for answers and complexity is treated as weakness.
Those “stuck in the middle” are often caricatured as cowards—people who won’t choose a side. But choosing a side isn’t the same as choosing solutions. The center asks unfashionable questions: What happens after the slogan? Who pays the cost? What breaks if we pull this lever? It insists that values must survive contact with reality. That insistence is inconvenient to movements built on purity.
The tragedy is that many of the problems we argue about—immigration reform, housing, healthcare, education, climate resilience, public safety—are not ideologically neat. They require coalitions, not crusades. They demand patience, not hashtags. Progress tends to arrive through unglamorous compromises that satisfy no one completely but help many enough. That work is slow, and it rarely trends.
Meanwhile, the extremes thrive on the mirror image of their opponent. Each needs the other to justify its excesses. When one side overreaches, the other side recruits. When one side mocks, the other hardens. The feedback loop is profitable—for donors, for influencers, for media—but corrosive for governance. The clowns and jokers may disagree on policy, but they share a business model.
Being “stuck” in the middle doesn’t mean standing still. It means moving deliberately. It means rejecting the false choice between apathy and absolutism. It means believing that democracy is less a war to be won than a process to be tended. The middle understands that compromise isn’t surrender; it’s how plural societies function without tearing themselves apart.
There’s also a humility in the center that our politics sorely lacks: the admission that no faction has a monopoly on wisdom. Good ideas can come from anywhere; bad ideas do too. The center borrows freely, discards ruthlessly, and measures success by outcomes rather than applause. It’s not flashy. It’s functional.
Of course, the center can fail—by drifting into complacency, by mistaking stability for justice, by fearing change more than stagnation. But the answer to those failures isn’t to burn the middle down; it’s to strengthen it. A healthier center is not bland—it’s bold in its pragmatism, firm in its ethics, and honest about trade-offs.
The lyric endures because it captures a human moment: the feeling of being surrounded by noise while trying to think. In that sense, being stuck in the middle is less a complaint than a calling. Someone has to insist on facts over fervor, solutions over slogans, and progress over performance. Someone has to keep the lights on while the clowns and jokers fight over the stage.
In a politics addicted to extremes, the middle may feel lonely. But it’s where the work gets done—and where the country, quietly, still lives.
I am inclined to agree with the “drivel” remark. One of the problems is the false equilvalence implied between the ICE goons and the resistance. The former are agents of a federal executive which is completely out of legal control and is assuring ICE they will not be held accountable for illegal violence. The latter are brave volunteers who have been amazingly nonviolent in the face of constant provocation. A second problem is the audience: The fascist right is not reading the Minneapolis Times, as far as I can tell, so Tinjun is mainly addressing his sanctimonius pleas for nonviolence at the resistance which has been brave and restrained. Frey, who has been trying to negotiate with the criminals directing the ICE “surge” is finding out, unfortunately, that trying to engage in reasonable give and take, as recommended by Tinjun, is next to impossible with the authoritarians of the federal government. If Frey and other moderates eventually succeed in getting an agreement to rid the city of the ICE cancer it will be because of the resistance, not in spite of it.
For the second time today, I had to go back a reread the article being commented on as a sanity check. In this instance, at least, I passed.
No where in this article did I even allude to ICE and their extrajudicial occupation of Minneapolis. This commentary was focused on the political dynamics, and dysfunctional state of public discourse in this city, state, and country.
BTW – “Drivel,” like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Sanctimony too, I guess. In either case, there’s no need to be uncivil. Those comments are actually a symptom of the problem I wrote about: Two sides hurling insults at each other, with the winner being the loudest, most persistent, or most clever. There are countless platforms that cater to that type of conversation. We’re not one of them.
Well I agree that the endorsement of the words “drivel” and “sanctimonious” was unproductive and vague. And this particular Tinjum post did not mention ICE or the resistance, though previous posts by the same author did with (unnecessary) pleas to the resistance for nonviolence. What is missing from the Tinjum post is any recognition that the kind of ‘middle’ propensity for complex negotiation will not always work. A line has to be drawn somewhere, beyond whicn an evil has to be defeated, not appeased. That happened in WWII and it, in my opinion, it just happened in Minneapolis with the ICE invasion.
It may be argued that some on the left and right declare too often that such lines have been crossed when they arguably have not, but that does not mean that such lines should not exist.
Woods Halley
High sounding drivel. The left brought us the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, the Affordable Care Act, and challenges to costly and deadly foreign entanglements. It may be that “70% of adults (are) not heard.” It’s because they have little to nothing to say.
Nuance is the backyard realm of lawyers, politicians and activists. And as you so astutely point out, the middle is where the work gets done. And where a lot of the bills get paid. Both personally and publicly. One thing that immigrants from the past understood is that our land of opportunity was just that: opportunity. To work for the success and future you were being denied by the place you came from. That scenario is far from today’s reality.
Even poll questions now seem to set up extremes. Somehow the 15% of crazies at each end of the spectrum dominate discourse while the 70% of adults is overwhelmingly not heard.