I guess this is what they mean when they talk about “reactionary centrism”: Corruption of government facilitated by enablers in intellectual society

Sometimes left-wing writers use the term “reactionary centrist,” and it always irritates me. Someone’s a centrist, but you’re calling him a “reactionary” just because he doesn’t agree with you on every issue? I get it that people on the left are annoyed by people on the center-left, just as people on the right get annoyed by “RINOs,” but the whole framing bothers me as being so imprecise, seemingly deliberately so. Just as so-called RINOs typically support the vast majority of Republican positions, the so-called “reactionary centrist” aren’t reactionary; they’re centrists, and it should be enough for leftists to disagree directly for those reasons.

But then I came across an article, ‘Zombified’ C.D.C., Hobbled by Cuts, Struggles to Fulfill Scientific Mission, in today’s paper that made me rethink this. The article is subtitled, “The agency has lost its independence and nearly a third of its staff, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates have tightened control,” and there are lots of disturbing details, including what looks like flat-out corruption:

In past administrations, just two or three political appointees had purview over the C.D.C. Now, there are nearly 20 political appointees from H.H.S. who communicate with C.D.C. staff members, sometimes directing them to spend time and funding on dubious theories outside the agency’s scope, according to several officials. Last year, an H.H.S. official directed the C.D.C. to award a no-bid contract — a rarity for the agency — to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to explore whether immunizing pregnant women would lead to autism in their children, a theory that Mr. Kennedy has espoused but that has been debunked by numerous studies. To pay for the research, the C.D.C. took $362,000 from a program that provides free vaccines to about half of American children. . . . Dr. William “Reyn” Archer III, another appointee who previously oversaw the C.D.C., repeatedly asked agency employees to work on screwworm, a disease that mostly affects cattle, even though the C.D.C.’s mission is to protect human health, said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who headed the agency’s emerging disease center before resigning in August 2025. Dr. Archer did not respond to a request for comment. . . . Numerous other instances of political interference in the C.D.C.’s activities have already been reported. Most notably, Mr. Kennedy openly overruled the C.D.C.’s scientists in imposing strict quarantine measures for people exposed to hantavirus. . . .

And this:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who led the agency for six months in the absence of a Senate-confirmed director, squashed publication of a study on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines.

I’ve never met Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, but we’ve had cordial email exchanges. On the other hand, he misrepresented something I wrote and never corrected it, and that kind of annoyed me.

More to the point, I remember when he squashed publication of that CDC internal report. It happened earlier this year, and I posted several blogs on the topic; see here, here, and especially here, where I wrote:

Last week I was at a conference on enhancing scientific integrity (as I reported here), and one of the sessions was an interview of Jay Bhattacharya, the current director of the National Institutes of Health, and Emily Oster, a professor of economics and Brown University. I referred to that session in a post the other day regarding the recent case of a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was pulled by Bhattacharya, in his additional capacity as acting director of the CDC. . . . These are the parts of last week’s interview that bothered me: 1. When asked about some news reports regarding the NIH and CDC, Bhattacharya dismissed them as “fake news.” This annoyed me for two reasons. First, he offered no evidence that the reports were untrue. Second, he was appointed by a man who spews out false statements at an amazing rate, including on the topic of public health. Who are we supposed to trust here? News reports or a political appointee? Also, Bhattacharya himself has a record of being sloppy with the facts, as I happen to know because it happened to me. . . . 2. When the topic of vaccines came up, Bhattacharya came out strongly in favor of vaccination, and he expressed the view that it is better for vaccination to be voluntary rather than mandatory. This could be. I guess it depends on the context. . . . What bothered me was . . . if you are going to go with a voluntary vaccination strategy, I think you’d want a strong strategy of encouraging people to choose vaccination for themselves and their kids. So I think his response would’ve been stronger if he’d also said something about how to vigorously promote vaccine usage. That’s part of public health policy too. Also, Bhattacharya doesn’t have a great track record on this issue: just a few years ago he was part of an anti-vax organization. See here for the ugly story. . . . 3. The un-publishing of that CDC report. Bhattacharya said he stopped the CDC from publishing the report because it was using an approach called a test-negative design, which he thinks is a bad statistical method. When he said this, Oster jumped in and said that she too thought it was a bad method. It was only a brief exchange and there was no time for either of them to give a reference or to explain why they think the method is bad. . . .

Since then, I’m not aware that Bhattacharya or Oster or anyone else has come up with a good reason for un-publishing that report, other than that they did not like its conclusions.

Enablers of corruption

OK, so now let’s return to the title of today’s post. The corruption of government is covered above. What about its enablers in intellectual society? We have two right here: Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health economics at Stanford University (now on leave while he does his government service), and Emily Oster, a professor of health economics at Brown University.

I have no reason to think that either Bhattacharya or Oster is personally corrupt in the sense of funneling no-bid contracts to their friends and relatives in the manner of the current U.S. government; promoting junk medical supplements in the manner of Dr. Oz or Dr. Huberman; being bought and paid for by Big Tech or Big Bet or Big Pharma; or whatever. Nor do they seem super-ideological (in the sense of having political views that are so strong that they impair their judgment).

That’s why I characterize Bhattacharya and Oster as enablers of corruption rather than being corrupt themselves.

How is it they are enabling corruption? They’re doing so by lending their academic and intellectual prestige, and that of their institutions (Stanford and “the Ivy League”) to the diversion of public resources away from legitimate public purposes. And people like Bhattacharya and Oster play a role here because they’re embedded in credible academic environments. They’re not straight-up hacks like Niall Ferguson or John Yoo or Mary Rosh, nor are they political activists like Paul Krugman or Grover Norquist. Rather, they’re coming from the outside to offer their own expertise and perspective.

Reactionary centrism

And this brings us to the term, “reactionary centrism,” which bothered me so much. I looked up Emily Oster on the Federal Election Commission, and, based on her recorded campaign contributions, she appears to be a loyal Democrat:

That’s fine. You’re allowed to donate to campaigns. Here’s my point. Given Oster’s history of support for the Democratic party, I’d say that it’s fair to characterize as “centrism” her endorsement of the government’s ridiculous recent dietary guidelines, along with her above-noted eagerness to chime in on Bhattacharya’s uninformed criticism of the report he suppressed.

I don’t know Oster—here’s some background on an earlier error of her—so this is just speculation: My guess is that, as a Democrat, she’s conscientiously doing her best to be nonpartisan, to see the good points raised by the other side. It’s an admirable centrism, an avoidance of hackery.

But, yes, it’s also reactionary, in that Oster is making what are essentially false statements in the service of a corrupt dismantling of our public health system.

So, yeah, reactionary centrism is what it is, and I hate to see it.

It’s frustrating because I’d think there are so many ways to be centrist without doing the reactionary vibe. I wonder if part of the problem is that someone like Oster thinks of politics as being unidimensional: she’s on the left, so to be more centrist she supports something on the right. It doesn’t matter what it is; from her perspective, all she’s doing is moderating her position on the left-right scale. From the outside, though, we can see that it’s actual corruption that she’s enabling—not directly, but indirectly in the sense of lending her institutions’s cultural prestige to the project.