Vetoing the collective bargaining bill, observing court orders, and honoring MOUs on data center tax exemptions isn’t pivoting to the center — it’s muddling through.

by Shaun Kenney

The Washington Post — alternately condemned for being a fascist propaganda machine now that it no longer reflexively agrees with the political left, alternately praised as defending democracy behind paywalls — seems to believe that in the span of just one week, Governor Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) has rediscovered her mojo and is returning to her moderate roots.

How is she doing this? With one-word answers as to whether or not the Virginia Department of Elections will obey the rulings of the Supreme Court of Virginia, with a veto of collective bargaining, and with the slow walking back of repudiating the MOUs signed with data centers on tax exemptions. Is this the standard of moderation?

If the argument is that nothing has changed, then yes — we are indeed moderating, but not because of anything Spanberger is actively doing to calm waters nor because Spanberger didn’t do her utmost to change things.

Instead, she is merely being presented with a series of facts by an objective reality. One of those realities is math. State Senator Mark Obenshain (R-Harrisonburg) laid out those realities, in terms of both political and electoral cost:

Let’s remember what actually happened.

The General Assembly passed a bill deliberately designed to delay implementation until 2028 — safely after the 2027 elections and after the next budget cycle — so Virginians wouldn’t immediately feel the tax increases and financial consequences.

Governor Spanberger didn’t oppose the policy. In fact, she made clear she was willing to sign it. Her only objection was that the delay wasn’t long enough.

Her amendment would have pushed implementation all the way to 2030 — an extraordinary attempt to kick the consequences entirely beyond her own term in office so another Governor and another General Assembly would be left holding the bag.

When lawmakers rejected her effort to avoid political accountability, she vetoed the bill.

This veto was not about protecting taxpayers, local governments, or Virginia families from the costs of forced collective bargaining.

It was about protecting Abigail Spanberger from the blame.

There we have it.

Then there’s the whole plowing up of the Memoranda of Understanding between the Commonwealth of Virginia and the burgeoning data center industry. Depending on which metaphor you would prefer — the shearing of the sheep, the killing of the golden geese, or a mafioso-style extortion — not only do such actions put pressure on the one engine that could fuel collective bargaining, but it puts into question whether or not Virginia can be trusted to keep her word. Given the relative vale of humility that is North Carolina, a Democratic party willing to rip up MOUs and trample its own constitution to get what it wants isn’t exactly the best and most stable place to do business.

Not moderation, but centrism?

Now, Barry Goldwater isn’t exactly anyone’s definition of a centrist, but his admonishment that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice often excludes the follow up, that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

The two terms moderate and centrist are often thought to be interchangeable, but they are far from it. Moderation can look like pragmatism, but too often it becomes vacillation in the face of serious choices. Centrism is the business at hand, and sometimes it can rock the boat when it forces the powers-that-be to own up to the hard choices they create. Pragmatism and centrism are near neighbors, yet where pragmatism looks to stabilize, centrism takes a longer view.

For instance, former Speaker Bill Howell (R-Stafford) saved the Virginia Retirement System. You’ll never hear about it nor read about it because it simply isn’t as sexy as raiding it, but hundreds of thousands of families will rest easy because of that hard work.

The whole idea of the “honorable middle” is contrary to the old William Butler Yeats poem:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
. . .
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yet there is something to be said for the Burkean ‘little platoons’ who do all the working and living and the dying in this town which hold the worst at bay:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.

By contrast again, Henry David Thoreau in Walden reflects on how too many of us are distracted by the pragmatics of treating symptoms (our moderates) while too few of us are truly committed to addressing cures (our centrists):

“For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root”

My long experience in politics teaches me that too many of us are distracted by hacking at the leaves of perceived evils — and if the definition of evil is a privation of the good, then what most people are railing against is an old saw: life ain’t perfect.

Of course, we live in an era of explosive wealth. We have more material tools at hand to alleviate suffering and poverty in the world than any generation of human beings before us. So much of our policy is directed towards hacking at the leaves of want, ignorance, need, injustice, and so forth. Too little of it is directed at the root of the thing — and addressing that, those who are begging to have the symptoms treated by government and the god-that-fails refuse to share the trough with long-term solutions that actually address the cures.

No small wonder why the center has a hard time holding against the passionate intensity of the worst.

Now, moderation might incline you to compromise, but centrism is going to focus on core things for the long haul. Centrism isn’t popular, and in many ways it is alternately both very liberal in the pursuit of things good, beautiful, and true and also quite conservative in the defense of those same things. In this, there is a sense of tradition passed forward in spite of those demanding moderation in the face of an injustice.

Acta Non Verba: Actions, Not Talk

Of course, striking out for the center means giving the extremes and demagogues — the cancers that eat a democracy — a firm and unquestionable “no” and for damn good reason. Ideological reasoning masks itself as a panacea, but it is nearly always a lie that converts people into things in the pursuit of power:

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”

— H.L. Mencken, “Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks” (1954)

And there it is. Centrism is realism in practice. Centrism sets boundaries, fulfills already given promises rather than invents new ones, and clarifies the demagogues from the doers in the public square. Centrists focus on the mission of any good government — public prosperity and human flourishing. Centrism has no space for those grifters who, under the guise of providing some public service, strive only for mediocrity and then fail to produce even that.

In short, for Spanberger to “not do” the super extreme things she previously championed is no move towards the center, but rather the acceptance of a cold hard reality.

No one doubts that Spanberger will not bring back collective bargaining for localities next session — but can we afford it? No one is surprised that Spanberger re-joined RGGI which will raise energy costs in Viriginia by hundreds of dollars a year — but is that the definition of affordability? No one believes that observing a court order from the state supreme court is a move towards the center — but are we really done with gerrymandering and raw power grabs in Virginia?

For Spanberger to recapture the center, she is going to have to actually do centrist things, buck the extremes in her own party, and find the big idea that will establish her as a centrist.

One early test will be the new constitutional amendment that will abolish parental notification and parental consent for abortions, transgender surgeries, and a host of truly strange stuff. Will we see yet another multi-million dollar push on a constitutionally questionable amendment with Spanberger championing the dangerous and the weird? Or is Spanberger in a condition — having spent a ton of political capital early — to recapture a fraction of it by saying the words “too far” to her own base?

Time will tell.

Yet the question still remains. How many more mistakes can Virginia Democrats afford as we head into 2026 with an arguably bankrupt DNC? For all the screeching over Trump, Democrats are still trailing five points behind the president in terms of popularity, and as Virginia heads into 2027 with the Virginia State Senate within grasp of the GOP? Democrats themselves are recognizing the problem, and short memories turn into long memories the more Democrats rely on the switch rather than the bait.

Words aren’t going to be enough this time.

Shaun Kenney is the senior editor of The Republican Standard. This column is republished with permission from The Republican Standard.