Politics & Power Quote by Tom Hayden

Hayden’s jab lands because it turns “centrist” from a neutral label into a survival strategy. Coming from a 1960s movement architect turned elected official, the line isn’t nostalgia; it’s an indictment of institutional memory. The 1960s here functions as a political scarecrow: protest, racial conflict, Vietnam, and the fear that moral urgency will look like disorder. By saying Democrats “distance themselves,” Hayden suggests not principled moderation but calculated amnesia - a refusal to inherit the era’s unfinished fights because the optics are inconvenient.

The second sentence widens the blast radius to the press, and that’s where the subtext sharpens. “Journalistic centrists” aren’t merely cautious; they trade truth-telling for credentialing. Hayden implies that legitimacy in mainstream media is policed not by accuracy but by temperament: you get invited into the room if you sound reasonable, even when “reasonable” means sanding off the sharp edges of reality. “Hard truths” hints at structural critiques - racism, militarism, corporate power - that can’t be discussed without sounding “radical,” so they’re reframed as “controversies,” a word that makes injustice feel like a debate club topic.

Context matters: Hayden lived through the arc from street politics to party politics, watching the Democratic coalition professionalize, triangulate, and grow allergic to anything that might recall Vietnam-era rupture. The quote isn’t asking for purity; it’s warning that a center built on avoidance becomes a center that can’t see, much less confront, the crises it manages.