[...] Today, the choice offered the electorate is no longer that between right and left, but centre-right and centre-left. The distance between the two discourses emerged in the late 1990s when Arthur Schlesinger snapped back at Clinton’s increasing use of the coinage ‘the vital centre’, writing in Slate magazine:

When I wrote the book I named The Vital Centre in 1949, the ‘centre’ I referred to was liberal democracy, as against its mortal international enemies—fascism to the right, communism to the left. I used the phrase in a global context. President Clinton is using the phrase in a domestic context. What does he mean by it? His DLC fans probably hope that he means ‘middle of the road,’ which they would locate somewhere closer to Ronald Reagan than Franklin D. Roosevelt. In my view, as I have said elsewhere, that middle of the road is definitely not the vital centre. It is the dead centre.