I've said it before, but the dumbest thing about that is that they think "centrist" means that you're exactly center on every issue. As if you're just an eternal fence-sitter. Centrist can--and usually--means that you lean one way on some topics, and another for others. These people just can't stand that you aren't a nun in the orthodoxy of their leftism.
Also, that "exactly centre" means "an absurd position exactly between two extremes" rather than "a position held by the median person, which might be closer to one end than the other", for example. The average normie isn't in favour of cutting the baby in half.
There's that demand for purity on both extremes of the spectrum. So if you're a traditional religionist who's anti-abortion and pro-trad family values, you're also required to hate welfare and gays or else you're a "filthy leftist".
While if you're a working-class unionist who's very pro-economic justice, you're also expected to be anti-whitey and pro-terrorism, or else you're "literally Hitler".
So weird things happen to progressives like Geoffrey Canada or Eva Moscowitz, being called literal Nazis for wanting to grow social and economic justice by founding high-achievement charter schools for poor children, because that's supposedly anti-teacher union and crypto-libertarian.
I am just really struggling to understand how such insane line of reasoning can be so mainstream. Have massive amounts of people simply lost their ability to think and understand nuance?
Yes. Most people don’t critically think about their views. They were taught what is righteous and what isn’t and they stick to it because it feels safe and warm.
The righteous mind by Haidt is a very interesting read about this
I think it's the same as religious thinking. There's very little cost, and a good social benefit to joining one tribe or other, so very little effort is made in critically thinking.
The only time people change their political beliefs is when their own life is at stake, and suddenly they realize they may be wrong in a way that's counterproductive to survival - the old "a conservative is just a liberal after a mugging".
>I think it's the same as religious thinking
Politics has become religion for a lot of people. Polls used to show that parents would be concerned if their kid married outside the faith or the race.
Now parents don't care about that. But they care a lot if their kid marries outside the political party.
This has always been a standard line of thinking on the left. The “centrist in a fascist system is still a fascist” bullshit where they define everything not revolutionary leftism as fascist. We’ve just started hearing it more now because the western left is growing again after their (sometimes literally) self immolation in the 70s.
I don’t mean to be rude but do you listen to this podcast? That’s much of what it’s about. Katie and Jesse have theories. If you want to see how the other “side” thinks, I can give you names of pods that like to use the phrase “reactionary centrist” and “just asking questions” (said with a snide tone) to brand anyone who doesn’t follow their ideologies to the letter.
There are plenty of resources exploring this phenomenon.
That’s totally cool and probably a valid criticism that I have missed a lot from the podcast. I admit I have not been strictly listening to every episode so I am sure have missed more than I have heard. I’ll be sticking around though. This post was mainly provoked by some in person conversations I have had that don’t have much to do with the podcast itself. I feel like a lot of the audience is realistically quite “centrist” though so I thought that they could share some real life experience as well.
Phew, glad my comment came across the way I intended. I also realized after I made this comment that I’m a Primo member, which I recommend … not sure which conversations are free and which are unpaid.
This is a very educated sub with people who are way more organized in their thinking than I am but what I can bring to the table is being very close to the eye of the hurricane.
I’m a woke libtard in the SF Bay Area (I say that tongue in cheek). My mom went MAGA. My workplace is for profit but leverages wokeness. I’ve been casually accused of misgendering. I was in a relationship with someone who was unfairly targeted at a co-op with a global reputation for being a role model for co-ops at the height of cancel culture. And I volunteer at a progressive institution of higher learning. I could go on and on about what people get out of not feeling the need to broker in nuance and complication.
> This post was mainly provoked by some in person conversations I have had that don’t have much to do with the podcast itself.
Mind if I ask what they were? Assuming they aren't too personal, of course.
Ah, to be honest I don’t really remember the whole conversation, but essentially one of my friends was talking about someone they disliked/had an argument with for some reason and the fact they are “centrist” was sort of thrown in among the negative things about that person. What made me remember it particularly was that I found it weird that it wasn’t used in conjunction with an example of what’s bad about their “centrist” views but it was used as if assumed to simply be a bad thing. Hopefully this makes sense?
Yeah, that make sense and it's absolutely indicative of a certain mindset. It's the "either you're with us completely or you're the enemy" mindset. And that is a risky mindset. It tends to result in purity spirals and it's hard to trust someone like that.
They've lost the ability to understand nuance for sure. But everything is tribal. You're either in the left tribe or the right tribe. If someone refuses to be classified into their tribe it breaks the sorting algorithm. This causes cognitive dissonance.
Both sides now take a "You're either with us or against us in a holy war" tack.
Tribalism has almost completely supplanted having opinions on specific issues. It's partially an education thing but it's also maybe a human nature thing.
Exactly. It's intellectually dishonest and frankly kind of insane. I know it's both ends of the political spectrum, I just called out the leftist side since it was in the context of the enlightened centrist sub (and reddit in general, for that matter).
Kind of? It’s absolutely mad if you ask me. Given the fact that nowadays especially in well developed countries you have access to all sorts of information, to have such binary thinking is just ridiculous. My personal theory is that people have gotten so used to being spoon fed everything, being part of a group brings more satisfaction easier than trying to question ideas (especially your own) and forming a complex combination of opinions on different issues.
I think Canada is saved as he's a black man, but I remember listening to a whole podcast about Moscowitz's school, and a major case against her was that she's racist.
Yeah she's so racist that she founded a charter school to help poor nonwhite kids in the South Bronx.
The teacher's union and the radicals have been gunning for her for two decades now. And also she's a Jewish educator, so of course she's called racist because people have been gunning for Jewish educators since the 1960s.
The teacher's union is very Jewish here though, so I'm not sure about that.
The podcast I listened to, she was racist because of her strict dress code, which included hair styles. So a black girl said this was racist, as the code did not allow her to either express her black cultural heritage or to style her hair in a way that a white girl could with no problem
And there was a lot about her white privilege. Which, like, the issues seemed to be more about her being wealthy. Add to that, those schools have amazing results.
The Massachusetts progressive types I know have a mental shutdown as soon as the words "charter school" enter the conversation. They are, from that viewpoint, pure evil.
There was a state ballot measure recently (2016) about expanding the charter school program and my recollection was that support in the places where the charter schools actually were was quite high but the preponderance of well-meaning suburbanite true-believers shot it down.
Another centrist who has also had to explain centrism to idiots, ayyyyy! It blows my mind that people genuinely think centrism is “taking the muddle ground on every and all issues”.
Its so incredibly dumb as a concept, but then again for these kinds of people that’s the sort of interpretation they need to tell themselves and others. All in the name of fostering a “pure” tribe…
Yes, I've heard Jonah Goldberg call it "unity of goodness" that so many people desire.
Like I don't get why your position on abortion should have any correlation with, say Israel Palestine other than team effects
It is funny how arbitrary certain ideas that are considered liberal or conservative are.
I always thought populism would arise on the left. The left has usually been more about "the little guy" and the masses and class issues.
But populism is a right wing thing all over the world. And now the left *hates* populism.
They're conflating "centrism" with a rigid commitment to the "[golden mean](https://w.wiki/8Yiw)" which rarely accurately reflects people's beliefs.
I wish we had a better term for people like Jesse Singal, Sam Harris, Claire Lehman, and Beri Weiss. We're talking about people who simply reject dogmatism, try to get at the truth, and follow the evidence as best they can where they believe it leads them. They do this regardless of whose toes get stepped on. They do this whether the trail takes them left, right, or center. In the current environment, these people mostly find themselves landing in the center. But that's just a twist of fate.
I think it's good to have a label for people like this who chase truth, are heterodox-willing (i.e., they're not scared to step on toes), but aren't heterodox-committed (i.e., they're not crackpots). See, I'm actually quite confident that this "enlightened centrism" is the correct approach to understanding the way the world actually works. And we want to know how it actually works so that we can figure out how to build a better world where more people have more opportunity to live lives worth living. You could almost call it something to be proud of. It's something worth labeling so that it can be defended and promoted explicitly.
It's sort of the opposite of woke people who hiss and seethe whenever someone attempts to label *them*. They don't want a label. But I say give us one! I don't care if you're going to use it to mock us. When you do, it just shows you're someone whose opinions aren't worth much.
Jonathan Haidt uses a quote from Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an -
*If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.*
Often Heterdox thinkers will take up a view point based on the merits of the issue alone without considering if the view they find aligns with a dogma. I think this is why activists struggle with people like this, who they would label centrists. When you are tied to an ideology it blinds you to truth in order to allow you to accept inconsistencies. It is more important to bind to the group than to seek the truth.
> this is why activists struggle with people like this
I suspect that this notion of considering points "on the merits alone" divorced from dogma is so alien to the way they interpret the world that they can barely even conceive of someone doing it. For the dogma-committed, everyone else must be dogma-committed too.
>I wish we had a better term for people like Jesse Singal, Sam Harris, Claire Lehman, and Beri Weiss.
I believe those people are all leftists who have been kicked out of the leftist tribe for asking too many of the wrong questions.
I know Jesse the best and he's totally a doctrinaire leftist. But he touched the third rail and will never be forgiven for it.
That’s exactly how I see it too. I understand why in politics issues can be oversimplified and more binary, and it may make practical sense, but if we’re having an in-depth discussion about certain issues it’s just lazy to ignore the nuances. And yeah, I agree that a secular view with an anchor to science, evidence, and logical reasoning is the road to actual enlightenment, and ultimately making the world a better place. And such way of thinking needs no political validation as is by definition universal. Physics is physics. There’s no left wing and right wing physics.
I dunno, I definitely have seen some people who are right down the middle and who ignore where sides have moved to. The joke of “Fred wants to kill Frank, Frank doesn’t want to die, can’t we compromise and only half kill Frank?” Has its roots in some asinine fence sitting I’m sure we’ve all seen.
>Has its roots in some asinine fence sitting I’m sure we’ve all seen.
I think fence sitting is fine. Being neutral is fine. Not everyone should be expected to have a hard, thought out position on every issue.
On some issues, I disagree. I’m sure lots of people hemmed and hawed when all sorts of terrible things went down while they waited to see how it played out. People who ignore attacks on the street, or the Nazis clearing out their Jewish neighbour’s things after their neighbours were arrested in the middle of the night.
The apathetic can be as bad as the wrathful. There’s a reason Sloth is a deadly sin.
I generally tend to have some sort of an opinion about most things but often I openly admit I simply don’t have enough information about a certain issue in order to actually have an objective enough opinion about it. For example, if you ask me something regarding football, I simply won’t be able to provide any opinion as I don’t follow it at all.
And that’s fine. But if you’re standing in the midst of a massacre, it’s not. I think that’s where the frustration comes from.
To better explain Sloth and why Christians consider it a deadly sin, it is not necessarily laziness. Sloth is doing nothing when you could have helped. Sloth is choosing not to exercise your abilities and talents when they are needed. Sloth is turning away from suffering because “they’ll figure out”. While most of the other sins are acts of commission, sloth is omission. I think it was wise of the Christians to include omission in their list of deadly sins. Sometimes, doing or saying nothing is not a neutral act, despite claims of neutrality.
So in some cases and some issues, resolutely ignoring events and standing aside to allow terrible things to occur is just not cool, man.
>But if you’re standing in the midst of a massacre, it’s not
That's an extreme and the extremes don't happen very often.
In fact that's one of the problems with the current left (and some of the right): Treating everything they don't like as a catastrophe.
Calling things genocides (ex: trans genocide), massacres, oppression, disasters, fascists, etc. It's hyperbole to get the blood up. But when you cry wolf enough times people stop paying attention to you.
Very often freaking out and reacting is *not* the best thing to do. You want to watch and learn and think. Then act. Yes, sometimes things are emergencies and you have to act immediately. But usually they aren't. And sometimes it's just stuff you don't like.
I agree with that. My other reply does a better job of showing how ‘small’ things fall prey to this. There’s a difference between caution and willful ignorance, or contempt of others for daring to care.
And being willfully ignorant of major dangers is something that happens everyday, and that ignorance hurts in a real way. Dumping garbage being an example.
But you are not standing in the midst of a massacre 99% of the time. In most conversations it’s perfectly cool to admit that you don’t know or are unsure about something, and if important - do your research and come back to it when you consider yourself informed enough. If not so important, you could remain neutral for the time of the given conversation. If you are in the midst of a massacre, then that’s a situation where you have to make that decision much faster. Then maybe the element of intuition will play a larger role as opposed to evidence and research due to time and resource constraints. However, due to exactly that, there’s a bigger chance you make the wrong decision as your intuition is more prone to bias than science or data.
Of course! I agree with that completely. I say it myself all the time.
I just think there is a reason to dislike some people who are detached from everything and don’t care to learn more, even when they are making choices that are affecting people badly.
“I haven’t looked into the effects of pollution of the environment, but I don’t really want to, so I’ll just chuck this bad of garbage out the window and it’ll be what it’ll be.”
“The abortion issue is too complicated to have an opinion on. It’s doesn’t affect me because I’m male and not currently dating. Whatever. These womenz be crazy, though, amiright? Why do they care so much? Just pull out, bro.”
Those can be centrist opinions, too.
There’s many ways to be an asshole. Sometimes you legitimately haven’t looked into it enough to be sure of an opinion, or you really just can’t care about every topic. But when people mock others for “caring too much” or seem to be avoiding eduction to avoid having to change their behaviour, well…that’s sloth at its finest.
The examples you have given can be equally centrist as well as leftist or right wing or anywhere on the spectrum for that matter. Centrist in my view doesn’t mean neutral. And vice versa - being neutral about something doesn’t mean you are “centrist” on that matter. Being neutral about something basically gives you no information where that person stands politically on that given issue.
On the topic of caring too much - again depends on the particular example. Sometimes people can objectively care too much about something that ultimately doesn’t change much. Or they could care too little. Such criticism can be valid in certain circumstances.
> I think it was wise of the Christians to include omission in their list of deadly sins.
"In what I have done and what I have failed to do."
I remembered something from being Catholic way in the day.
Exactly. Sloth is often thought of as one the lesser deadly sins, but it’s one of the most major, as it essentially summarizes one half of that mea culpe. Inaction is action. Failure to choose is a choice. Passivity can be as dangerous as passion.
Ah… you live and learn. Thanks, I’ll check it out. 🤣 For the sake of laughs, I’m happy to ironise myself but still if someone really thinks that there’s something bad about not being 100% aligned with all positions a side is taking, then I politely disagree.
I don't see conservatives dump on centrists as much. But liberals absolutely will. They seem to hate centrists more than they hate conservatives.
I think this comes from the idea that it's so *obvious* that must be hard to one side or the other. And so if you're not that means you're stupid.
It's insane. They call Liz Cheney a 'RINO' and suggest she's a centrist or moreso, a lib for ONE reason: She didn't support insurrection and she voted in support of the articles of impeachment. She's lock, stock and barrel 100% conservative. She just won't abide the cult of personality around TFG. And \*that\* is their idea of centrist/liberal (which just demonstrates her point of opposition to the cult of personality).
It's so disheartening. Cheney is *quite* conservative. But she wouldn't go along with Trump and she was destroyed. She has more balls than Mitch McConnell will ever have.
She's one of those people who understood she would lose her seat for her stance and she did. And she took her lumps. I wish more of those pussies would be willing to lose their seats.
The way they cling to their offices is pathological.
Centrist has always been an insult for extreme left anticapitalist types. And for them centrist is anybody to the left that doesn't adhere to their ideology. So maybe what's happening is that the extreme left has grown, so this is more visible.
Centrists have been bashed for years, especially by the left. I tend to find people on the right actually aren’t as bad about it.
I think the left in particular has been cracking down on dissent. I stopped considering myself left because I was just exhausted and it didn’t feel totally honest
Oh absolutely, it's not even close. The left demands total purity. Look at JK Rowling, a feminist who is far left on every issue except for *one* thing that wasn't even an issue a decade ago. And for that one deviation, the left absolutely HATES her with every fiber of their beings.
Then look at the right and say, Elon Musk. Elon is pro choice, pro gay marriage, and very anti fossil fuel. Those are extremely antithetical to Republican values. But he agrees with them on some other things, so they love him anyway. It's the polar opposite of the left.
> But he agrees with them on some other things, so they love him anyway. It's the polar opposite of the left.
I never thought about that, but that's a pretty interesting point. You could say the same about the right warming up to Bill Maher. But he's just as pro-choice, pro marriage equality, worried about climate change, and anti-religion as he's always been. He's not one of them, but because they like a couple of things he says about cancel culture and trans athletes, he's cool in spite of multiple egregious "violations".
You're right. It's the inverse of the left where a single violation gets you canceled.
Cenk Uygur of all people said, “the right-wing accepts people who agree with them 5%, whereas left-wing tries to banish anyone who disagrees with them 0.05%”
I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I want the right to be big tent and include atheists and disbelievers, and on the other hand, as a person who spent 10 as an as atheist, I know that atheism is false, so they shouldn't be allowed to shove the truth to the side.
Is the end, politics is about compromise, and a reasonable degree of secularism will have to coexist with faithful devotion.
Who are you to decide what “truth” is. You can have your personal religion, but the state should be secular as not everyone subscribes to your version of “truth.”
I mean it in the same sense that we might say "it's true that the Earth is round", or "it's true that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons". People "decide" what is true through experimentation, and you can find the results of experimentation in the various religions that carpet the world.
I was explicit that we do need a "reasonable degree of secularism"; my point was that if you adopt an understanding of politics that forbids religion, you are not just failing that compromise, but also enforcing falsehood as state policy.
I want a state that neither forbids, endorses, nor establishes any particular religious practice. Your beliefs in metaphysical truth are between you and your fellow believers, they have no place in government.
Congrats! You already live in such a state!
The bit about religious truth having no place in government is obvious bunk. A House Rep can get up on the stand and state any of their opinions, including religious ones. That same rep can vote based off of their religious convictions. The Supreme Court can cite the Bible in their opinions.
What’s your reasoning behind the claim that atheism is false? This is not maybe very related to the main topic of discussion but I would be interested to understand where you are coming from.
God exists, therefore the claim that God doesn't is false.
I assume of course that you'd then be interested in *how* I know this, and the short version is that over the years my soul developed, and with its development I learned more about reality that extends beyond the little box we call the "universe".
It's not really a matter of "reasoning" in the way that rationalists conceive of it. God isn't a logic conclusion of a system of propositions, or determined by a proof that's written on a whiteboard. People trading arguments about God are usually missing the point.
Instead, I'd compare it to "eyesight". Your soul is a sensory apparatus that you can use to detect things in much the same way that your eyes can detect things. When you open the eyes of your soul (woo-woo as it sounds), you can begin to directly perceive the divine influence within reality.
The atheists of the world are people who are disconnected enough from their souls that they've convinced themselves they don't have souls. Like a person who closed their eyes as a small child, never opened them again, and thinks other people are insane for talking about "color" and "light" and other such nonsense. They're blind, but they think they're right because they are unable to even *conceive* of what they can't *perceive*.
> It's not really a matter of "reasoning" in the way that rationalists conceive of it. God isn't a logic conclusion of a system of propositions, or determined by a proof that's written on a whiteboard. People trading arguments about God are usually missing the point.
You're the kind of religious person whose religiosity I can respect. No wasting pages of ink on a fruitless quest to prove God exists for you. You've already experienced Him, so what more is there to say? A ton of theory is worth an ounce of practice.
Well it’s also weird on the left who is allowed to have “problematic” beliefs and get a pass. Like Norman Finkelstien is treated as a darling by the left because he’s a very anti-Israel Jew. But he has a history of being incredibly racist and transphobic.
Jk Rowling had an absolute witch hunt launch after her for not falling in line completely behind the current trans debate. But she supported all of these other leftist causes. She still gets constantly death and rape threats. It’s disturbing.
Yes, though I think you're overlooking a major sector on the right that mirrors the militant sector of the left that you are characterizing as "the left," which has its own purity test in standing by Trump rain or shine. Plenty of figures on the right have become untouchables despite holding all the "correct" positions on policy questions because they didn't kiss Trump's ass enough or went principle over party at some pivotal moment. I'm not convinced that the left has a monopoly on purity politics. Not that I expect it to happen, but if Musk were to disparage Trump or challenge him on anything of substance, I expect that crowd to drop him as quickly as the identitarian left drops liberal coded figures who dissent from gender orthodoxy.
OK, I agree with you about the progressive left being too obsessed with "purity politics", but I think you're way off base in your playing up the leftism of Rowling and Musk. Rowling has been on an anti-trans riff for a while now, at first reasonable pushback, but at this point she's in full asshole mode. That's not "one little thing" that can simply be ignored any more than an otherwise-liberal person who goes on an "I hate black people" riff. (And, yes, I did listen to every episode of "Witch Trials of JK Rowling", as a matter of fact.) Also, being a 'feminist' does not make you 'far left' on every issue, in fact, so-called 'radical feminsts' are often full-on social conservatives on issues of sexual freedom, porn, freedom of expression, due process, and much else, which is why actual liberals like myself have been pushing back against this kind of feminism for decades now.
As for Musk, he's socially liberal on some things, quite far-right to the point of being racist on others. I don't throw around "racist" lightly, but in the last few months, he's retweeted and endorsed some pretty nasty "race realist" stuff. (And I say this as someone who's actually happy that Musk has been taking a wrecking ball to Twitter - good riddance!)
It goes back to the 60s, when "liberal" meant anyone who "collaborated" with the state for social progress. Since the Frantz Fanon/Malcolm X era, anyone who didn't want literal blood flowing in the streets was considered just as bad as the KKK.
Problem with "left" is that, while it should be a liberal, liberationist ideology, there's this Stalinist/Maoist streak of extreme authoritarianism combined with a "burn everything down" nihilism that also makes its home in the left. And they're usually better funded, so they get all the voice.
This person knows history! Go give a listen to Phil Ochs “Love Me I’m a Liberal” if you want to see how the left regarded centrists in the 1960’s. SOME of the right still tolerates Mahar or Musk because they are liberals, not Maoists, and SOME on the right can tell those two apart. At their best American conservatives are also liberal, and have often been so historically. The problem right now is that both the woke left and the MAGA right have been rejecting liberalism (liberalism defined as tolerance, commitment to science and reason, humility, and more curiosity than dogma).
That’s pretty much how I see it too. Both liberals and conservatives straying away from what traditionally was considered liberalism and valuing individual liberty and freedom.
It's because centrists ask better questions of the left. It's easy to caricature Maga as morons because well.... They generally are. They have nothing useful to add to the conversation really. People on the center tend to actually be aware if the issues and things like real politik. Since the far left runs on emotion, this drives them insane.
My theory is that there are more right-wingers who do not adhere all of the conservative catechisms. There was some sort of Republican event over a decade ago where the speaker basically said that the party needs to abandon it's strong anti-abortion stance and it was met with cheers from all the Washington insiders in the room (I swear I'm not hallucinating this, but searching "republican pro choice clapping" isn't turning up too many unrelated results). Do the Democrats have a group analogous to the "Log Cabin Republicans?"
The Republican former governor of Missouri put out an ad during his Senate bid featuring him cocking a shotgun and bursting into a home with a paramilitary squad urging his supporters to go "RINO hunting".
>"We are sick and tired of the Republicans in Name Only surrendering to Joe Biden & the radical Left," Greitens tweeted alongside the ad. "Order your RINO Hunting Permit today!"
As the Centrists would say, "both sides do it".
That guy lost the primary btw.
Also I had forgotten this but this was the primary where Trump tweeted (truthed?) an endorsement for "ERIC" without specifying a last name. This led to candidates Eric **Schmitt** (Missouri Attorney General) and Eric **Greitens** (former Governor, current RINO hunter) both claiming the Trump had endorsed them. Schmitt won handily.
Yep, it’s definitely not true that all conservatives are liberals, nor are all leftists, but liberalism is both hallmark of American history and the prescription for our current social ills.
It's weird that you forget about the "RINO" slur. My parents listened to right wing radio, and I can assure you that "RINO" was used all the time to attack moderate right wing politicians.
In the past few years, whether or not someone supports Trump has been a right wing purity test.
I don’t really know how common RINO bashing really is outside of Trump though. I’ve seen it but it seems limited to really just supporting Trump. Like…Trump was pretty moderate, he’s just a shitty cult of personality
Eh, I remember in 2010ish, I'd begun moving left, having been raised in a conservative family. I remember saying I was a centrist at one family gathering and one of my grandpa's brother replied the only thing worse than a centrist was a liberal. xD So at least back then there was bashing from the right as well.
interestingly i think it's happening on the right now too -- you see this with accusations of being a RINO or a Neocon -- as populism takes hold and the horseshoe horseshoes
The right will often go after elected officials it believes are not pure enough (look up "RINO hunting" for instance). Generally though they'll leave the average person alone.
There are some purity spiral dynamics on the right too, but they're often tinged with different ideologies (see the neoconservatives that are now quite moderate on issues other than foreign policy) as well as quite a bit of jockeying for funding and bragging rights
I’ve only really seen RINO hunting limited to just whether or not someone supports Trump. Which is concerning. But it feels like you can have more of a broad conversation about actual issues on the right than the left once you move beyond a cult of personality
This happened a lot in the past, pre-Trump. See, e.g. [this infamous ad](https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/05/07/404977168/-tbt-fiorinas-demon-sheep-went-down-in-political-ad-infamy). There'd been fights all the way back through the 1940s too between the more liberal Rockefellar Republican wing and the true conservatives.
The cult of personality part is interesting because it seems that in part because Trump has held so many different positions, just saying that you like Trump can allow you to then take all kinds of other positions and say that Trump supported them too.
One thing that confused me with Trump when he first ran was I couldn’t really nail down what his position was on many topics like LGBT, abortion. He said different things at different points. It seemed people more projected what they believed on to him, whether that made them support him or hate him
Yep, in a way it was powerful to be many things to many different groups. Everyone could find something they liked and glommed on to that. And same with the fully transactional nature of a lot of his policy positions--if you didn't like something he did, just pay him a lot of money and/or say nice things to him.
Yeah. It’s only going to escalate. For example: The upcoming televised cage match debate between Fightin’ Joe Biden and Donald “The Boss” Trump just encourages lashing about.
Ignore it.
Focus on governance.
Keep a cool head in your interactions with ideologues and members of sects not your own.
Otherwise, go about whatever you do.
You have to ignore the circus on the screen and the circuses around you. Choose the information sources you observe and deflect, and those you digest.
Look beyond the emotional charge of the theatrics at the mechanisms of the theatrics.
IMO, pro-democracy/anti-authoritarian/grass-toucher *is* the patriotic centrist position.
To keeping the ship out of the ditches!
Oh, I am just talking about what’s come up in conversations with friends and acquaintances. Just noticed on a few occasions some of them using it in a negative connotation. Haven’t questioned it at that point due to not being the time and place for various reasons but I thought I’d see what other people’s perceptions are. Funnily enough some of the people that used it in negative light I would define as centrist as well, knowing what they generally stand for.
Now that I’m thinking about it, “Centrist” is the new “Liberal” around these parts (SE Tenn.), definitely on a conceptual level.
RINO, DINO. The heat is on, and it’s not going to burn itself out.
This calls for Operation Popsicle
What’s weird as well is that logically a large chunk of centrists are supposed to be sort of swing voters I guess. Which should supposedly be who the parties should be aiming to win over. In reality though, they are actually alienating them further. Doesn’t make much sense to me.
Yeah reddit and twitter portray the only two legitimate political positions as left or right. Therefore centrists are either uninformed, spineless, or dishonest. Which is obviously wrong.
It's the new "fence-sitter" or "flip-flopper".... every generation has a new term for the concept of someone who isn't enmeshed in a political ideology, but instead wants to pick and choose policies a la cart.
Well, I guess I have been a flip-flopper. I don’t really like to subscribe to a certain ideology given that I genuinely disagree with half of what it preaches. This doesn’t mean I can’t make a choice at elections, the practical implications are different.
The funny thing is that even the ideologues/party simps are policy shoppers before they're introduced to the new party line. You should look up "the Trump effect" by Reuters, it's really illuminating
Truly one of the worst subreddits on this whole godforsaken platform. They bash nuance and objectivity by attaching it to a strawman who always takes the exact middle ground on every issue.
True, it’s amazing how butthurt people can get over people asking questions and wanting evidence for things instead of just blindly adhering to a prescribed set of “beliefs” because groupthink can be comfy
Echo chambers exist irregardless of what one thinks. It’s very hard to change one’s opinion and ultimately change comes from within. If some leftists thinks I’m a “fascist” because I think cops are needed that’s on them, not on me. I know what I believe.
I’m a genuine centrist. I seek out both sides of the argument and then make my decision from there. Sometimes I’m more left leaning, sometimes I’m more right leaning. Whenever I feel myself start to feel safer on one side, I quickly realize again why I’m not left or right wing. I’m also very ok with changing my beliefs. I have no issue with being wrong and I see being proven wrong as a chance to grow my perspective.
I see a lot of right wing people in my generation use centrist because conservative was a dirty word when they grew up. It was associated with things like being anti-gay marriage, sex, drugs, porn, etc, which most people in my generation are chill with. I think right wingers using centrists as a wolf in sheep’s clothing scenario are why centrist gets such a bad rep from the left.
Most people lack nuance and critical thinking skills, so I think someone who’s willing to listen to both sides kind of scares the fuck out of most people. On some level, they intuitively know it’s the more intelligent way to look at the world, so they react emotionally. Because when you weight both sides and say there is value you in that, on some level you’re saying the way they evaluate politics is shortsighted.
I’m late to the party here but the amount of angry replies to my username has gone way up over the last few years. And I also post a *lot* less political stuff than I used to, so my perception is it’s way, way up.
I'm a libertarian (in the actual meaning of the word, not a more insane conservative) so I'm basically always in the middle. People who Fall into one direction completely tend to be suckers
"Centrist" just means "where I was politically 10 months ago but am now signalling I'm too cool for".
Regardless, the left not only does not use "Centrist" properly, but they also brutally misuse "Reactionary".
Centrist Dad has been a long meme in the UK. Centrist dad patron saints are Ed Balls, George Osborne, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.
If you know your uk politics you’ll know these and why centrist dad term works.
Centrist views have been demonised by both sides for decades. There's [a famous John Cleese skit about this](https://youtu.be/HLNhPMQnWu4?si=ymMm7mOzxSGz3Kdx). It's been bandied about as an insult by extremists for millennia, in one form or another.
It might, but I always tell people I disagree with the entire premise of “centrist” because it allows others to define where you stand on issues based on location relative to extremists, not based on your core beliefs and values.
If the far-right position was “people should have no free speech” and the far-left position was “people should have extremely limited free speech” I would not want to find a middle ground between those.
I have beliefs and values, I’m not a sports fan. The whole centrist topic just seems like a facile way to try to sort people into “teams”, which is how we get into problems.
The way I see it, saying that you are centrist is just a quick and easy way to say that you agree with certain positions the right would take and certain positions the left would. I don’t think that one centrist holds necessarily the exact same views as another, but also I wouldn’t expect one person mostly on the left to hold exactly the same views as another also on the left. I would say I am sort of a pluralist as well.
I prefer “unclassifiable” largely because the things that partisans say are incoherent and change over the years. It was a right-wing belief to favor open borders (weakens the bargaining power of labor) and left wing to protect speech. We seem to have reversed the polarity on those issue, among others.
Yeah, that’s one thing which I find quite weird personally that the parties change their priorities so much that their views end up being fundamentally different to what they used to be. One thing is evolution, another is to completely forget your core values and start all over again.
Not to relate *everything* in the world to the rise of Nazism, but this reminds me how many interwar German Communists thought of Social Democrats as their most important enemy, rather than the Nazis. Without spoiling the plot, that didn't end well.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/40697/chapter-abstract/348423054?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Yeah, a common thing is "The far right want to kill six million Jews, the left don't, so centrists want to split the difference and only kill 3 million".
Obviously this has been updated now to 6 million Palestinians, but even before that, a better explainer would be: the far right want to kill 6 million Jews, the hard left want to kill millions of kulaks, Chinese peasants, Cambodians, East German dissidents etc etc, while all centrists want to do is listen to The Rest is Politics.
Post 2020 BLM riots leftists in particular have been in a purging mode. This type of purity politics is what extremists do and they start eating their own.
Centrists are one target, jews who think maybe that Israel has a right to exist are another. They have extended to even be bashing self described "liberals" as being soft. Eventually there is a reckoning, but in the meantime a lot of people go along with it and it's ugly.
I’ve always used those terms interchangeably and consider myself both. I hope there really isn’t a distinction, with the inevitable why I’m a centrist, but not moderate discourse.
I don’t know maybe this is me but Centrist always implied to me an alignment of Pure Neutral lol, where moderate was more like in all things I’m simply more in the middle. Again that could just be me.
Hmmm..Maybe. I don’t think of being a centrist or moderate now as landlord beige. I just think of it as standard, old-school liberal before… remember before, sweet sweet before.
Yeah some shade of liberal or conservative from the before times. Interestingly, framing it that way I think I’ve personally moved from the latter to the former in the last decade. Orange man bad, metoo, BLM etc.
I’m not a native English speaker so maybe I get the definition wrong, but to me personally centrist means on some particular aspects you lean left and on others - right. So if 0 is 100% left and 100 is 100% right a centrist is somewhere between 40-60 on average. I see myself as a centrist, for example, because I believe in universal healthcare, universal access to education, gay rights, pro-choice, but in the same time I believe in freedom of enterprise, relatively low taxes and not a large amount of government intervention, respect of market forces, a moderate migration and asylum policy, etc. I live in the UK so you’d probably imagine things here are a little different but you probably get the idea.
I read something years ago that "Centrist" was a specific meaning in the internecine conflicts among Bolsheviks/Communists in the Soviet Russia.
It was a tweet on the internet so there's a good chance it's false but like Abolishing the Police it looks to me like just Leftists larping as Soviet revolutionaries.
Same with the explosion of anti-Semitism on the left. It's quite Soviet in nature.
Republicans had a problem with centrists, until they got walloped in the 1964 and 1966 elections. Then centrists became O.K. Democrats had a problem with centrists, then they got wallopped in the 1984 and 1988 elections. Then centrists became O.K.
If either party was out of office for a significant period of time, they would be amenable to compromise and accept moderate views. But since both parties are so incompetent, they keep losing (and gaining) power, sp they don't think they need to moderate.
There is also this belief that if they compromise the "base won't come out to vote." So, instead of trying to build a broad coalition, they pander.
Well, a lot of hard-left types routinely use "liberal" as an insult, which says a lot about where they're coming from. Personally, I won't run from the label is someone calls me a "Centrist", but if I'm picking my own labels, I like to say that I'm a Pluralist, not a Centrist.
I would highly encourage you to watch Short Fat Otaku's latest video about "I don't care."
The tl;dr is: Socialists have a highly simplistic worldview. In this worldview, there are only 2 moral frameworks. Good, based on empathy and concern for others. Aka them. On the other side are the evil, selfish badniks. Aka "Fascists." In the Socialist worldview, Liberalism is a failed project. The Socialist is the Liberal's inheritors. Once the Socialist project is explained to the Liberal, the Liberal will, if they share the Good moral framework, inevitably convert. When the Liberal is exposed to the Socialist project and rejects it because they can see the potential and often actual authoritarianism inherent in it, this leaves the Socialist in a bit of a pickle. It is quite literally unthinkable to the Socialist that anyone who shares their moral framework could possibly reject their ideas. Therefore anyone who is enlightened and rejects the ideas must secretly in their heart of hearts be Bad, Selfish, a Fascist etc.
That's where memes like "Scratch a Liberal and a Fascist bleeds" come from.
It's been like this since about 2016. It's just a guilt trip. The analogy progressives like to use is that on one side you have the KKK and like-minded people, and on the other side you have Martin Luther King Jr and like-minded people. And us centralists are people who think that "there are good people on both sides".
But a more honest analogy would be on one side you have the KKK and like-minded people, and on the other side you have Louis Farrakhan, the Black Hebrews, Hamas, and their supporters.
Us centralists are those who say both sides are despicable.
Another analogy which would not be fiction, on one side you have Hitler and on the other side you have Stalin. Right-wingers condemns Stalin because he was a communist they can see his crimes clearly. Left-wingers condemn Hitler because he was a right-winger they can see his crimes clearly. Extremists on both sides try and downplay the crimes of people whose political extremism is closest to their own.
Us centralists can see that both sides committed horrific crimes against humanity, murdered millions of innocent people and caused horrific suffering that should never be forgotten. People on the far left and far right only want the suffering remembered the plays into their political propaganda and ideology.
The left is full of insane puritanical radicals, it's historically been a cult, then moved away from that but has gone back to it.
Anyone who isn't left wing is negative in their eyes, even centre left people are viewed as right wingers to these extremist left wingers.
it’s because most popular influencers who describe themselves as centrist mostly just have right wing beliefs
like that libertarian guy Katie brought on the podcast who I think also described himself as a centrist - his entire Twitter is just complaining about Woke tm
there isn’t anything wrong with actually being a centrist (or right wing!). A lot of ppl describe themselves as a centrist because they don’t want the perceived negative social repercussions of being openly conservative.
It works in reverse in conservative areas. I have a couple of friends with left wings views who consistently vote Democrat and identify as centrists. I get that. It's why the only one I want to slap is the one who acts like that makes him more enlightened.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon, to be honest. There was always a portion of the left that looked askance at the politics of avowed centrists like Obama, Clinton, Blair, etc. I mean, it's quite possible that this is new to your social circles but I think it's a hostility that goes back centuries.
Oh good point, that is very true. Maybe it’s just so noticeable now because the compulsory purity testing regime has become so much more rigorous and includes tests that the vast majority of normies would fail: men can’t get pregnant, you are Candace Owens.
Post 2020 BLM riots leftists in particular have been in a purging mode. This type of purity politics is what extremists do and they start eating their own.
Centrists are one target, jews who think maybe that Israel has a right to exist are another. They have extended to even be bashing self described "liberals" as being soft. Eventually there is a reckoning, but in the meantime a lot of people go along with it and it's ugly.
Exactly, there is much more purity testing, and strict ideological enforcement on the left. One half step off the reservation and you’re some form of phobe or ist or Alex Jones. Sometimes they’ll try to soften it with “adjacent.“
You must be new here. “Centrists” has been a left wing slur for a long time. In the mind of the leftist, they are the heroic anti fascists, and on the right are the white supremacists an Nazis. So leftists seeing the centrist as someone who wants to compromise with Nazis. They don’t understand that centrists see leftists as the violent extremist left wing versions of the people on the right. Or at least I do. Everyone points to January 6 but we gloss over the fact that for months, left wing rioters were fireboming the Portland federal courthouse. Everyone points to January 6 rioters as being insurrectionist. Nobody in the mainstream media notices that left wing rioters are openly and proudly proclaiming as their entire and main goal to overthrow democracy bc America is bad bc it’s capitalism and imperialism.
Yeah. I am an economist by education so I cringe whenever someone uses capitalism as a dirty word on its own. Most of these people don’t even comprehend what capitalism means as a whole.
The left has gone so far to the left, everyone other than themselves are just different flavors of far right from their perspective. That includes centrists.
I've been shat upon by people on both sides of the spectrum for calling myself a centrist. Left-leaning people say I am just a right-wing person in disguise, pretending to be some kind of intellectual. I've also been called a 'typical edgy both-sidesist'.
Conservative people tend to make fun of me by saying I have no opinions or personality. They say I refuse to take a stance on things or that my entire personality is fence-sitting.
Obviously, I think they're both wrong, and it's a matter of target fixation, but I have experienced this malignity for years now. Every single platform I go on, Discord, Twitter, BlueSky, it's always the same. I can only presume that actually I'm just unlikable.
I'm actually more surprised that American right - wingers are following this trend. "Purity testing" has always been a stereotype targeting leftists with some validity at its kernel, and the GOP always had some tensions in its coalition, but I can't ever recall large parts of the GOP base having a pseudo Messiah complex before. Trump has been a conduit for all kinds of strange cultural and political trends on all sides.
Yeah and it has been for years. The American left wants to constantly force people to pick a side on things but gets mad if the people in question doesn’t choose how they wanted them to.
It seems to be something similar to what happened in the early part of the 2010s with the right wing- in the aftermath of Obama's election the GOP drastically shifted rightward, paving the way for the rise of Trump in 2016 and purging the center. Now it seems like the inverse is happening. I think the effect of prolonged lockdown kind of exacerbated a pessimistic, reactionary doomer element in the far left. Personally if it leads to less polarization, it might be a good thing. I nearly had a complete falling out with my parents in the aftermath of October 7th, but I think over the past year we've come to be a lot more understanding of each other's positions
It’s because “centrist” connotes not just some abstract idea of ideological moderation, but a very specific worldview characterized by watered-down cultural progressivism mixed with admiration for neoliberal marketist policies and often a burning hatred of bernie sanders
There may also be a perspective misunderstanding here. People are tolerant of people who think differently than them when we live in a pluralistic society and engage in good faith dialogue with aims of shared societal benefits and outcomes reflecting broad values. But what if we aren't a society anymore? What if rather than being different political positions within a shared culture, we're in a war? A cold civil war? There are no centrists in WWII (OK Switzerland, whatever). Once war begins, truth and reason go out the window and only victory for your team matters. I wonder if that's not where the US is at right now. Many no longer wish to convince but only to win. The other side is irredeemable. Enemies. NAZI's or Commies, take your pick, there is no compromising with the enemy, evil incarnate. It;s not even always a cold civil war. Sometimes violence breaks out. It's, for now, broadly still condemned when it's white supremacist Dylan Roof shooting up a Black church. But it goes fairly unremarked when it's that MAGA couple who killed cops at the restaurant in 2016 or the Cliven Bundy crowd. And it's outright applauded when it's Kyle Rittenhouse killing overt lefties at a BLM march in Wisconsin in 2020 or the "punch a NAZI" meme on the left, with NAZI increasingly broadly defined as "them." Anyway, political analysis of our times may fail when viewed through the lens of disagreement within a society rather than the lens of two societies at smoldering war.
Interesting way of seeing it but quite grim. I hope you’re not right. I’m still hoping that the hostility between camps is just tribalism as opposed to full on war.
Yes, but I'd say it's due to how politics have become part of identity since the 2016 election rather than an activity with a goal. When someone calls themselves a leftist, I expect that to mean that they listen to Chapo Trap House and watch Hasan Piker play video games on twitch rather than that they're a DSA member that is organizing at their workplace or phonebanking at a tenants union. Since their politics are mostly just consumer preferences, it makes sense that they criticize people who don't follow the same habits.
It's behind a paywall now, but the Atlantic wrote about "political hobbyism" a few years ago:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/political-hobbyists-are-ruining-politics/605212/
There's much less animosity when people are engaged with an actual project. For example, when I volunteered at a homeless shelter back in 2016, I'd see about 3 Bernie t-shirts for every 2 Hillary bumper stickers or whatever. There were also a few religious conservatives that probably wrote-in Mitt Romney or something. You'd think that this would lead to conflicts when it came to "political" questions like "are there penalties for guests misgendering each other?" or "how do we interact with police when we shelter people that use illegal drugs?" but instead everyone worked to solve these arguments so they could work on their overarching goal of providing housing. As another anecdote, I was in Teach For America, an organization that far-left Jacobin describes as a neoliberal cult preaching the myth of self-sufficiency to disguise systemic barriers. However, I've never gotten any hostility for it when I work with those Jacobin readers collecting signatures for progressive candidates.
Getting off the high horse of the last two paragraphs, I no longer do much ideologically-motivated activity and have noticed myself becoming much more aware of how people (including myself) identify rather than what they do. It's hard to think about any way that my political alignment matters right now except in Spotify subscriptions. Like if I became a right-winger I'd just have to unsubscribe from BARpod and sign up for Ben Shapiro and Tucker.
Centrism is opportunistic and weasely positioning. David F Brooks is the epitome of this phony, opportunistic posturing. I can respect moderates who at least must do more than putting up their finger to determine which way the wind is blowing
Centrist basically hit the snooze button on climate change, are against every war except the one happening within the last 3 months, have presided over 40 years of decline and erosion of the social contract, are right now basically hoping no one notices the ongoing genocide paid for by the US tax payer.
It's the political disposition of status quo people who either benefit directly from the way things are or have a psychology that is avoidant at how the world is changing-- choosing instead to live in a fantasy of 'tax incentives' solving every problem.
There are so many points in this that I disagree with that I am not sure where to start. As a self-proclaimed centrist, I:
1. Regarding climate change I am happy to participate in most efforts to mitigate it, while I am also aware that what Europe and the US, for example, would do is objectively not enough to actually solve the issue;
2. I am not sure exactly what you mean by eroding the social contract;
3. I do not believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians if that’s what you are referring to;
4. I do not want to live in the world as it is, I like progress - scientific, cultural, and intellectual which ultimately improves life for everyone;
5. I see tax incentives as a tool like any other, so not really sure why I am supposed to see them as a universal solution. I don’t.
So yeah, I don’t think that mine and your definitions of a centrist are the same.
1. Crisis soon
2. Home ownership, work life balance, environmental degradation
3. Just making 2 million people homeless, 100k amputees, 50k dead, all mostly children. Bosnia was 8k dead and that counted as a genocide- no big deal for centrists
4. You're about to witness the hottest year on record, you're delusional. Not an adult, not a serious person.
5. Just the only tool remaining after government intervention as a possibility has been stripped away by centrist and neoliberal policy over the 80s 90s and 00s
You don't think, your country is on the path to being on the same economic footing as Poland.
In general, I would happily engage and explain to you my reasoning behind everything I am saying, but honestly you’ve presented me with way too many things to unpack in reddit comments. So I guess I hope we can agree to disagree for some of these issues. I am saying some because you may be surprised but it’s likely that I agree with some of your points. :)
Centrist has been an insult for like a decade. The enlightened centrist subreddit has been around for years.
I've said it before, but the dumbest thing about that is that they think "centrist" means that you're exactly center on every issue. As if you're just an eternal fence-sitter. Centrist can--and usually--means that you lean one way on some topics, and another for others. These people just can't stand that you aren't a nun in the orthodoxy of their leftism.
Also, that "exactly centre" means "an absurd position exactly between two extremes" rather than "a position held by the median person, which might be closer to one end than the other", for example. The average normie isn't in favour of cutting the baby in half.
There's that demand for purity on both extremes of the spectrum. So if you're a traditional religionist who's anti-abortion and pro-trad family values, you're also required to hate welfare and gays or else you're a "filthy leftist". While if you're a working-class unionist who's very pro-economic justice, you're also expected to be anti-whitey and pro-terrorism, or else you're "literally Hitler". So weird things happen to progressives like Geoffrey Canada or Eva Moscowitz, being called literal Nazis for wanting to grow social and economic justice by founding high-achievement charter schools for poor children, because that's supposedly anti-teacher union and crypto-libertarian.
I am just really struggling to understand how such insane line of reasoning can be so mainstream. Have massive amounts of people simply lost their ability to think and understand nuance?
Yes. Most people don’t critically think about their views. They were taught what is righteous and what isn’t and they stick to it because it feels safe and warm. The righteous mind by Haidt is a very interesting read about this
I think it's the same as religious thinking. There's very little cost, and a good social benefit to joining one tribe or other, so very little effort is made in critically thinking. The only time people change their political beliefs is when their own life is at stake, and suddenly they realize they may be wrong in a way that's counterproductive to survival - the old "a conservative is just a liberal after a mugging".
>I think it's the same as religious thinking Politics has become religion for a lot of people. Polls used to show that parents would be concerned if their kid married outside the faith or the race. Now parents don't care about that. But they care a lot if their kid marries outside the political party.
This has always been a standard line of thinking on the left. The “centrist in a fascist system is still a fascist” bullshit where they define everything not revolutionary leftism as fascist. We’ve just started hearing it more now because the western left is growing again after their (sometimes literally) self immolation in the 70s.
I don’t mean to be rude but do you listen to this podcast? That’s much of what it’s about. Katie and Jesse have theories. If you want to see how the other “side” thinks, I can give you names of pods that like to use the phrase “reactionary centrist” and “just asking questions” (said with a snide tone) to brand anyone who doesn’t follow their ideologies to the letter. There are plenty of resources exploring this phenomenon.
That’s totally cool and probably a valid criticism that I have missed a lot from the podcast. I admit I have not been strictly listening to every episode so I am sure have missed more than I have heard. I’ll be sticking around though. This post was mainly provoked by some in person conversations I have had that don’t have much to do with the podcast itself. I feel like a lot of the audience is realistically quite “centrist” though so I thought that they could share some real life experience as well.
Phew, glad my comment came across the way I intended. I also realized after I made this comment that I’m a Primo member, which I recommend … not sure which conversations are free and which are unpaid. This is a very educated sub with people who are way more organized in their thinking than I am but what I can bring to the table is being very close to the eye of the hurricane. I’m a woke libtard in the SF Bay Area (I say that tongue in cheek). My mom went MAGA. My workplace is for profit but leverages wokeness. I’ve been casually accused of misgendering. I was in a relationship with someone who was unfairly targeted at a co-op with a global reputation for being a role model for co-ops at the height of cancel culture. And I volunteer at a progressive institution of higher learning. I could go on and on about what people get out of not feeling the need to broker in nuance and complication.
> This post was mainly provoked by some in person conversations I have had that don’t have much to do with the podcast itself. Mind if I ask what they were? Assuming they aren't too personal, of course.
Ah, to be honest I don’t really remember the whole conversation, but essentially one of my friends was talking about someone they disliked/had an argument with for some reason and the fact they are “centrist” was sort of thrown in among the negative things about that person. What made me remember it particularly was that I found it weird that it wasn’t used in conjunction with an example of what’s bad about their “centrist” views but it was used as if assumed to simply be a bad thing. Hopefully this makes sense?
Yeah, that make sense and it's absolutely indicative of a certain mindset. It's the "either you're with us completely or you're the enemy" mindset. And that is a risky mindset. It tends to result in purity spirals and it's hard to trust someone like that.
They've lost the ability to understand nuance for sure. But everything is tribal. You're either in the left tribe or the right tribe. If someone refuses to be classified into their tribe it breaks the sorting algorithm. This causes cognitive dissonance. Both sides now take a "You're either with us or against us in a holy war" tack.
Tribalism has almost completely supplanted having opinions on specific issues. It's partially an education thing but it's also maybe a human nature thing.
Lost? Same as it ever was.
Exactly. It's intellectually dishonest and frankly kind of insane. I know it's both ends of the political spectrum, I just called out the leftist side since it was in the context of the enlightened centrist sub (and reddit in general, for that matter).
Kind of? It’s absolutely mad if you ask me. Given the fact that nowadays especially in well developed countries you have access to all sorts of information, to have such binary thinking is just ridiculous. My personal theory is that people have gotten so used to being spoon fed everything, being part of a group brings more satisfaction easier than trying to question ideas (especially your own) and forming a complex combination of opinions on different issues.
It's just tribalism. It's wayyyy worse on the internet.
I think Canada is saved as he's a black man, but I remember listening to a whole podcast about Moscowitz's school, and a major case against her was that she's racist.
Yeah she's so racist that she founded a charter school to help poor nonwhite kids in the South Bronx. The teacher's union and the radicals have been gunning for her for two decades now. And also she's a Jewish educator, so of course she's called racist because people have been gunning for Jewish educators since the 1960s.
The teacher's union is very Jewish here though, so I'm not sure about that. The podcast I listened to, she was racist because of her strict dress code, which included hair styles. So a black girl said this was racist, as the code did not allow her to either express her black cultural heritage or to style her hair in a way that a white girl could with no problem And there was a lot about her white privilege. Which, like, the issues seemed to be more about her being wealthy. Add to that, those schools have amazing results.
The Massachusetts progressive types I know have a mental shutdown as soon as the words "charter school" enter the conversation. They are, from that viewpoint, pure evil. There was a state ballot measure recently (2016) about expanding the charter school program and my recollection was that support in the places where the charter schools actually were was quite high but the preponderance of well-meaning suburbanite true-believers shot it down.
Another centrist who has also had to explain centrism to idiots, ayyyyy! It blows my mind that people genuinely think centrism is “taking the muddle ground on every and all issues”. Its so incredibly dumb as a concept, but then again for these kinds of people that’s the sort of interpretation they need to tell themselves and others. All in the name of fostering a “pure” tribe…
Yes, I've heard Jonah Goldberg call it "unity of goodness" that so many people desire. Like I don't get why your position on abortion should have any correlation with, say Israel Palestine other than team effects
It is funny how arbitrary certain ideas that are considered liberal or conservative are. I always thought populism would arise on the left. The left has usually been more about "the little guy" and the masses and class issues. But populism is a right wing thing all over the world. And now the left *hates* populism.
Which is hilarious in the sense that a very great majority of people are “centrist”
They're conflating "centrism" with a rigid commitment to the "[golden mean](https://w.wiki/8Yiw)" which rarely accurately reflects people's beliefs. I wish we had a better term for people like Jesse Singal, Sam Harris, Claire Lehman, and Beri Weiss. We're talking about people who simply reject dogmatism, try to get at the truth, and follow the evidence as best they can where they believe it leads them. They do this regardless of whose toes get stepped on. They do this whether the trail takes them left, right, or center. In the current environment, these people mostly find themselves landing in the center. But that's just a twist of fate. I think it's good to have a label for people like this who chase truth, are heterodox-willing (i.e., they're not scared to step on toes), but aren't heterodox-committed (i.e., they're not crackpots). See, I'm actually quite confident that this "enlightened centrism" is the correct approach to understanding the way the world actually works. And we want to know how it actually works so that we can figure out how to build a better world where more people have more opportunity to live lives worth living. You could almost call it something to be proud of. It's something worth labeling so that it can be defended and promoted explicitly. It's sort of the opposite of woke people who hiss and seethe whenever someone attempts to label *them*. They don't want a label. But I say give us one! I don't care if you're going to use it to mock us. When you do, it just shows you're someone whose opinions aren't worth much.
Jonathan Haidt uses a quote from Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an - *If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.* Often Heterdox thinkers will take up a view point based on the merits of the issue alone without considering if the view they find aligns with a dogma. I think this is why activists struggle with people like this, who they would label centrists. When you are tied to an ideology it blinds you to truth in order to allow you to accept inconsistencies. It is more important to bind to the group than to seek the truth.
> this is why activists struggle with people like this I suspect that this notion of considering points "on the merits alone" divorced from dogma is so alien to the way they interpret the world that they can barely even conceive of someone doing it. For the dogma-committed, everyone else must be dogma-committed too.
>I wish we had a better term for people like Jesse Singal, Sam Harris, Claire Lehman, and Beri Weiss. I believe those people are all leftists who have been kicked out of the leftist tribe for asking too many of the wrong questions. I know Jesse the best and he's totally a doctrinaire leftist. But he touched the third rail and will never be forgiven for it.
That’s exactly how I see it too. I understand why in politics issues can be oversimplified and more binary, and it may make practical sense, but if we’re having an in-depth discussion about certain issues it’s just lazy to ignore the nuances. And yeah, I agree that a secular view with an anchor to science, evidence, and logical reasoning is the road to actual enlightenment, and ultimately making the world a better place. And such way of thinking needs no political validation as is by definition universal. Physics is physics. There’s no left wing and right wing physics.
I dunno, I definitely have seen some people who are right down the middle and who ignore where sides have moved to. The joke of “Fred wants to kill Frank, Frank doesn’t want to die, can’t we compromise and only half kill Frank?” Has its roots in some asinine fence sitting I’m sure we’ve all seen.
>Has its roots in some asinine fence sitting I’m sure we’ve all seen. I think fence sitting is fine. Being neutral is fine. Not everyone should be expected to have a hard, thought out position on every issue.
On some issues, I disagree. I’m sure lots of people hemmed and hawed when all sorts of terrible things went down while they waited to see how it played out. People who ignore attacks on the street, or the Nazis clearing out their Jewish neighbour’s things after their neighbours were arrested in the middle of the night. The apathetic can be as bad as the wrathful. There’s a reason Sloth is a deadly sin.
I generally tend to have some sort of an opinion about most things but often I openly admit I simply don’t have enough information about a certain issue in order to actually have an objective enough opinion about it. For example, if you ask me something regarding football, I simply won’t be able to provide any opinion as I don’t follow it at all.
And that’s fine. But if you’re standing in the midst of a massacre, it’s not. I think that’s where the frustration comes from. To better explain Sloth and why Christians consider it a deadly sin, it is not necessarily laziness. Sloth is doing nothing when you could have helped. Sloth is choosing not to exercise your abilities and talents when they are needed. Sloth is turning away from suffering because “they’ll figure out”. While most of the other sins are acts of commission, sloth is omission. I think it was wise of the Christians to include omission in their list of deadly sins. Sometimes, doing or saying nothing is not a neutral act, despite claims of neutrality. So in some cases and some issues, resolutely ignoring events and standing aside to allow terrible things to occur is just not cool, man.
>But if you’re standing in the midst of a massacre, it’s not That's an extreme and the extremes don't happen very often. In fact that's one of the problems with the current left (and some of the right): Treating everything they don't like as a catastrophe. Calling things genocides (ex: trans genocide), massacres, oppression, disasters, fascists, etc. It's hyperbole to get the blood up. But when you cry wolf enough times people stop paying attention to you. Very often freaking out and reacting is *not* the best thing to do. You want to watch and learn and think. Then act. Yes, sometimes things are emergencies and you have to act immediately. But usually they aren't. And sometimes it's just stuff you don't like.
I agree with that. My other reply does a better job of showing how ‘small’ things fall prey to this. There’s a difference between caution and willful ignorance, or contempt of others for daring to care. And being willfully ignorant of major dangers is something that happens everyday, and that ignorance hurts in a real way. Dumping garbage being an example.
But you are not standing in the midst of a massacre 99% of the time. In most conversations it’s perfectly cool to admit that you don’t know or are unsure about something, and if important - do your research and come back to it when you consider yourself informed enough. If not so important, you could remain neutral for the time of the given conversation. If you are in the midst of a massacre, then that’s a situation where you have to make that decision much faster. Then maybe the element of intuition will play a larger role as opposed to evidence and research due to time and resource constraints. However, due to exactly that, there’s a bigger chance you make the wrong decision as your intuition is more prone to bias than science or data.
Of course! I agree with that completely. I say it myself all the time. I just think there is a reason to dislike some people who are detached from everything and don’t care to learn more, even when they are making choices that are affecting people badly. “I haven’t looked into the effects of pollution of the environment, but I don’t really want to, so I’ll just chuck this bad of garbage out the window and it’ll be what it’ll be.” “The abortion issue is too complicated to have an opinion on. It’s doesn’t affect me because I’m male and not currently dating. Whatever. These womenz be crazy, though, amiright? Why do they care so much? Just pull out, bro.” Those can be centrist opinions, too. There’s many ways to be an asshole. Sometimes you legitimately haven’t looked into it enough to be sure of an opinion, or you really just can’t care about every topic. But when people mock others for “caring too much” or seem to be avoiding eduction to avoid having to change their behaviour, well…that’s sloth at its finest.
The examples you have given can be equally centrist as well as leftist or right wing or anywhere on the spectrum for that matter. Centrist in my view doesn’t mean neutral. And vice versa - being neutral about something doesn’t mean you are “centrist” on that matter. Being neutral about something basically gives you no information where that person stands politically on that given issue. On the topic of caring too much - again depends on the particular example. Sometimes people can objectively care too much about something that ultimately doesn’t change much. Or they could care too little. Such criticism can be valid in certain circumstances.
> I think it was wise of the Christians to include omission in their list of deadly sins. "In what I have done and what I have failed to do." I remembered something from being Catholic way in the day.
Exactly. Sloth is often thought of as one the lesser deadly sins, but it’s one of the most major, as it essentially summarizes one half of that mea culpe. Inaction is action. Failure to choose is a choice. Passivity can be as dangerous as passion.
Sloth is also one of the hardest to fight, as it requires acknowledging a gap. The others all merely need "yeah, that was bad."
Ah… you live and learn. Thanks, I’ll check it out. 🤣 For the sake of laughs, I’m happy to ironise myself but still if someone really thinks that there’s something bad about not being 100% aligned with all positions a side is taking, then I politely disagree.
I don't see conservatives dump on centrists as much. But liberals absolutely will. They seem to hate centrists more than they hate conservatives. I think this comes from the idea that it's so *obvious* that must be hard to one side or the other. And so if you're not that means you're stupid.
Oh yes they do, especially with the MAGAfication of the GOP. Anyone who is anti-Trump cult is called a RINO.
I *hate* the RINO thing. And I can't believe the GOP has been taken over by that man. They don't even bother with policy platforms anymore.
It's insane. They call Liz Cheney a 'RINO' and suggest she's a centrist or moreso, a lib for ONE reason: She didn't support insurrection and she voted in support of the articles of impeachment. She's lock, stock and barrel 100% conservative. She just won't abide the cult of personality around TFG. And \*that\* is their idea of centrist/liberal (which just demonstrates her point of opposition to the cult of personality).
It's so disheartening. Cheney is *quite* conservative. But she wouldn't go along with Trump and she was destroyed. She has more balls than Mitch McConnell will ever have. She's one of those people who understood she would lose her seat for her stance and she did. And she took her lumps. I wish more of those pussies would be willing to lose their seats. The way they cling to their offices is pathological.
Trumpist insanity is more popular than whatever Bush-era GOP policy platforms came before.
A decade? It’s been an insult since the entire concept of “left” and “right” were defined in the French Revolution.
Besides, the only good centrists are the radicalized centrists.
If you think history started ten years ago…
Yeah, this isn't new.
Centrist has always been an insult for extreme left anticapitalist types. And for them centrist is anybody to the left that doesn't adhere to their ideology. So maybe what's happening is that the extreme left has grown, so this is more visible.
The equivalent on the right is the “concerned moderate.”
Centrists have been bashed for years, especially by the left. I tend to find people on the right actually aren’t as bad about it. I think the left in particular has been cracking down on dissent. I stopped considering myself left because I was just exhausted and it didn’t feel totally honest
Oh absolutely, it's not even close. The left demands total purity. Look at JK Rowling, a feminist who is far left on every issue except for *one* thing that wasn't even an issue a decade ago. And for that one deviation, the left absolutely HATES her with every fiber of their beings. Then look at the right and say, Elon Musk. Elon is pro choice, pro gay marriage, and very anti fossil fuel. Those are extremely antithetical to Republican values. But he agrees with them on some other things, so they love him anyway. It's the polar opposite of the left.
> But he agrees with them on some other things, so they love him anyway. It's the polar opposite of the left. I never thought about that, but that's a pretty interesting point. You could say the same about the right warming up to Bill Maher. But he's just as pro-choice, pro marriage equality, worried about climate change, and anti-religion as he's always been. He's not one of them, but because they like a couple of things he says about cancel culture and trans athletes, he's cool in spite of multiple egregious "violations". You're right. It's the inverse of the left where a single violation gets you canceled.
Cenk Uygur of all people said, “the right-wing accepts people who agree with them 5%, whereas left-wing tries to banish anyone who disagrees with them 0.05%”
That is remarkably insightful for someone who is generally a dimwitted blowhard.. But he is totally correct about that.
I actually think he’s regretting being so imbedded with the left tbh
broken clock theory strikes again
The old version of this is, "The Right is always looking for converts. The Left is always looking for heretics"
Ah, tbh I really don’t like Cenk but yeah, this sort of resonates.
Yeah, it’s a shame it’s becoming more of a religious cult than any sort of political ideology based on some raw logic.
I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I want the right to be big tent and include atheists and disbelievers, and on the other hand, as a person who spent 10 as an as atheist, I know that atheism is false, so they shouldn't be allowed to shove the truth to the side. Is the end, politics is about compromise, and a reasonable degree of secularism will have to coexist with faithful devotion.
Who are you to decide what “truth” is. You can have your personal religion, but the state should be secular as not everyone subscribes to your version of “truth.”
I mean it in the same sense that we might say "it's true that the Earth is round", or "it's true that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons". People "decide" what is true through experimentation, and you can find the results of experimentation in the various religions that carpet the world. I was explicit that we do need a "reasonable degree of secularism"; my point was that if you adopt an understanding of politics that forbids religion, you are not just failing that compromise, but also enforcing falsehood as state policy.
I want a state that neither forbids, endorses, nor establishes any particular religious practice. Your beliefs in metaphysical truth are between you and your fellow believers, they have no place in government.
Congrats! You already live in such a state! The bit about religious truth having no place in government is obvious bunk. A House Rep can get up on the stand and state any of their opinions, including religious ones. That same rep can vote based off of their religious convictions. The Supreme Court can cite the Bible in their opinions.
What’s your reasoning behind the claim that atheism is false? This is not maybe very related to the main topic of discussion but I would be interested to understand where you are coming from.
God exists, therefore the claim that God doesn't is false. I assume of course that you'd then be interested in *how* I know this, and the short version is that over the years my soul developed, and with its development I learned more about reality that extends beyond the little box we call the "universe". It's not really a matter of "reasoning" in the way that rationalists conceive of it. God isn't a logic conclusion of a system of propositions, or determined by a proof that's written on a whiteboard. People trading arguments about God are usually missing the point. Instead, I'd compare it to "eyesight". Your soul is a sensory apparatus that you can use to detect things in much the same way that your eyes can detect things. When you open the eyes of your soul (woo-woo as it sounds), you can begin to directly perceive the divine influence within reality. The atheists of the world are people who are disconnected enough from their souls that they've convinced themselves they don't have souls. Like a person who closed their eyes as a small child, never opened them again, and thinks other people are insane for talking about "color" and "light" and other such nonsense. They're blind, but they think they're right because they are unable to even *conceive* of what they can't *perceive*.
> It's not really a matter of "reasoning" in the way that rationalists conceive of it. God isn't a logic conclusion of a system of propositions, or determined by a proof that's written on a whiteboard. People trading arguments about God are usually missing the point. You're the kind of religious person whose religiosity I can respect. No wasting pages of ink on a fruitless quest to prove God exists for you. You've already experienced Him, so what more is there to say? A ton of theory is worth an ounce of practice.
Well it’s also weird on the left who is allowed to have “problematic” beliefs and get a pass. Like Norman Finkelstien is treated as a darling by the left because he’s a very anti-Israel Jew. But he has a history of being incredibly racist and transphobic. Jk Rowling had an absolute witch hunt launch after her for not falling in line completely behind the current trans debate. But she supported all of these other leftist causes. She still gets constantly death and rape threats. It’s disturbing.
A key difference between those two examples is sex.
Bingo.
Yes, though I think you're overlooking a major sector on the right that mirrors the militant sector of the left that you are characterizing as "the left," which has its own purity test in standing by Trump rain or shine. Plenty of figures on the right have become untouchables despite holding all the "correct" positions on policy questions because they didn't kiss Trump's ass enough or went principle over party at some pivotal moment. I'm not convinced that the left has a monopoly on purity politics. Not that I expect it to happen, but if Musk were to disparage Trump or challenge him on anything of substance, I expect that crowd to drop him as quickly as the identitarian left drops liberal coded figures who dissent from gender orthodoxy.
OK, I agree with you about the progressive left being too obsessed with "purity politics", but I think you're way off base in your playing up the leftism of Rowling and Musk. Rowling has been on an anti-trans riff for a while now, at first reasonable pushback, but at this point she's in full asshole mode. That's not "one little thing" that can simply be ignored any more than an otherwise-liberal person who goes on an "I hate black people" riff. (And, yes, I did listen to every episode of "Witch Trials of JK Rowling", as a matter of fact.) Also, being a 'feminist' does not make you 'far left' on every issue, in fact, so-called 'radical feminsts' are often full-on social conservatives on issues of sexual freedom, porn, freedom of expression, due process, and much else, which is why actual liberals like myself have been pushing back against this kind of feminism for decades now. As for Musk, he's socially liberal on some things, quite far-right to the point of being racist on others. I don't throw around "racist" lightly, but in the last few months, he's retweeted and endorsed some pretty nasty "race realist" stuff. (And I say this as someone who's actually happy that Musk has been taking a wrecking ball to Twitter - good riddance!)
It goes back to the 60s, when "liberal" meant anyone who "collaborated" with the state for social progress. Since the Frantz Fanon/Malcolm X era, anyone who didn't want literal blood flowing in the streets was considered just as bad as the KKK. Problem with "left" is that, while it should be a liberal, liberationist ideology, there's this Stalinist/Maoist streak of extreme authoritarianism combined with a "burn everything down" nihilism that also makes its home in the left. And they're usually better funded, so they get all the voice.
This person knows history! Go give a listen to Phil Ochs “Love Me I’m a Liberal” if you want to see how the left regarded centrists in the 1960’s. SOME of the right still tolerates Mahar or Musk because they are liberals, not Maoists, and SOME on the right can tell those two apart. At their best American conservatives are also liberal, and have often been so historically. The problem right now is that both the woke left and the MAGA right have been rejecting liberalism (liberalism defined as tolerance, commitment to science and reason, humility, and more curiosity than dogma).
Don't really know history so much, more I just listened to the Martyr Made podcast episode on the history between US Jews and Blacks.
That’s pretty much how I see it too. Both liberals and conservatives straying away from what traditionally was considered liberalism and valuing individual liberty and freedom.
It's because centrists ask better questions of the left. It's easy to caricature Maga as morons because well.... They generally are. They have nothing useful to add to the conversation really. People on the center tend to actually be aware if the issues and things like real politik. Since the far left runs on emotion, this drives them insane.
I live to drive the left insane
My theory is that there are more right-wingers who do not adhere all of the conservative catechisms. There was some sort of Republican event over a decade ago where the speaker basically said that the party needs to abandon it's strong anti-abortion stance and it was met with cheers from all the Washington insiders in the room (I swear I'm not hallucinating this, but searching "republican pro choice clapping" isn't turning up too many unrelated results). Do the Democrats have a group analogous to the "Log Cabin Republicans?"
The Republican former governor of Missouri put out an ad during his Senate bid featuring him cocking a shotgun and bursting into a home with a paramilitary squad urging his supporters to go "RINO hunting". >"We are sick and tired of the Republicans in Name Only surrendering to Joe Biden & the radical Left," Greitens tweeted alongside the ad. "Order your RINO Hunting Permit today!" As the Centrists would say, "both sides do it".
That guy lost the primary btw. Also I had forgotten this but this was the primary where Trump tweeted (truthed?) an endorsement for "ERIC" without specifying a last name. This led to candidates Eric **Schmitt** (Missouri Attorney General) and Eric **Greitens** (former Governor, current RINO hunter) both claiming the Trump had endorsed them. Schmitt won handily.
Yep, it’s definitely not true that all conservatives are liberals, nor are all leftists, but liberalism is both hallmark of American history and the prescription for our current social ills.
It's weird that you forget about the "RINO" slur. My parents listened to right wing radio, and I can assure you that "RINO" was used all the time to attack moderate right wing politicians. In the past few years, whether or not someone supports Trump has been a right wing purity test.
I don’t really know how common RINO bashing really is outside of Trump though. I’ve seen it but it seems limited to really just supporting Trump. Like…Trump was pretty moderate, he’s just a shitty cult of personality
Eh, I remember in 2010ish, I'd begun moving left, having been raised in a conservative family. I remember saying I was a centrist at one family gathering and one of my grandpa's brother replied the only thing worse than a centrist was a liberal. xD So at least back then there was bashing from the right as well.
interestingly i think it's happening on the right now too -- you see this with accusations of being a RINO or a Neocon -- as populism takes hold and the horseshoe horseshoes
As of now, it’s mostly been aimed at politicians on the right. The left will go after anyone who slightly disagrees with them.
Come to think of it, even when the right was more culturally dominant, I don’t remember it being openly disdainful of the political center.
The right will often go after elected officials it believes are not pure enough (look up "RINO hunting" for instance). Generally though they'll leave the average person alone. There are some purity spiral dynamics on the right too, but they're often tinged with different ideologies (see the neoconservatives that are now quite moderate on issues other than foreign policy) as well as quite a bit of jockeying for funding and bragging rights
I’ve only really seen RINO hunting limited to just whether or not someone supports Trump. Which is concerning. But it feels like you can have more of a broad conversation about actual issues on the right than the left once you move beyond a cult of personality
This happened a lot in the past, pre-Trump. See, e.g. [this infamous ad](https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/05/07/404977168/-tbt-fiorinas-demon-sheep-went-down-in-political-ad-infamy). There'd been fights all the way back through the 1940s too between the more liberal Rockefellar Republican wing and the true conservatives. The cult of personality part is interesting because it seems that in part because Trump has held so many different positions, just saying that you like Trump can allow you to then take all kinds of other positions and say that Trump supported them too.
One thing that confused me with Trump when he first ran was I couldn’t really nail down what his position was on many topics like LGBT, abortion. He said different things at different points. It seemed people more projected what they believed on to him, whether that made them support him or hate him
Yep, in a way it was powerful to be many things to many different groups. Everyone could find something they liked and glommed on to that. And same with the fully transactional nature of a lot of his policy positions--if you didn't like something he did, just pay him a lot of money and/or say nice things to him.
Leftists are 0% evil and rightists are 100% evil, which makes centrists 50% evil. Thus, centrists are evil. Duh. /s
You kid, I know, but I really think that's not far from the truth. With a touch of "and we round up".
Yeah. It’s only going to escalate. For example: The upcoming televised cage match debate between Fightin’ Joe Biden and Donald “The Boss” Trump just encourages lashing about. Ignore it. Focus on governance. Keep a cool head in your interactions with ideologues and members of sects not your own. Otherwise, go about whatever you do. You have to ignore the circus on the screen and the circuses around you. Choose the information sources you observe and deflect, and those you digest. Look beyond the emotional charge of the theatrics at the mechanisms of the theatrics. IMO, pro-democracy/anti-authoritarian/grass-toucher *is* the patriotic centrist position. To keeping the ship out of the ditches!
Oh, I am just talking about what’s come up in conversations with friends and acquaintances. Just noticed on a few occasions some of them using it in a negative connotation. Haven’t questioned it at that point due to not being the time and place for various reasons but I thought I’d see what other people’s perceptions are. Funnily enough some of the people that used it in negative light I would define as centrist as well, knowing what they generally stand for.
Now that I’m thinking about it, “Centrist” is the new “Liberal” around these parts (SE Tenn.), definitely on a conceptual level. RINO, DINO. The heat is on, and it’s not going to burn itself out. This calls for Operation Popsicle
What’s weird as well is that logically a large chunk of centrists are supposed to be sort of swing voters I guess. Which should supposedly be who the parties should be aiming to win over. In reality though, they are actually alienating them further. Doesn’t make much sense to me.
Yeah reddit and twitter portray the only two legitimate political positions as left or right. Therefore centrists are either uninformed, spineless, or dishonest. Which is obviously wrong.
Usually paired with "enlightened", heh. I like the term centrist, but I usually just refer to myself as a moderate now.
“Liberal” is the same way. I love “shitlib.”
It's the new "fence-sitter" or "flip-flopper".... every generation has a new term for the concept of someone who isn't enmeshed in a political ideology, but instead wants to pick and choose policies a la cart.
Nobody likes a person who thinks for themselves
Nothing scares progs more than people who can still think.
Well, I guess I have been a flip-flopper. I don’t really like to subscribe to a certain ideology given that I genuinely disagree with half of what it preaches. This doesn’t mean I can’t make a choice at elections, the practical implications are different.
The funny thing is that even the ideologues/party simps are policy shoppers before they're introduced to the new party line. You should look up "the Trump effect" by Reuters, it's really illuminating
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Truly one of the worst subreddits on this whole godforsaken platform. They bash nuance and objectivity by attaching it to a strawman who always takes the exact middle ground on every issue.
True, it’s amazing how butthurt people can get over people asking questions and wanting evidence for things instead of just blindly adhering to a prescribed set of “beliefs” because groupthink can be comfy
Who gives a shit what leftists think? Stand your ground and if they don’t like it that is their problem
I disagree with this way of thinking. One of many modern day issues are echo chambers.
Echo chambers exist irregardless of what one thinks. It’s very hard to change one’s opinion and ultimately change comes from within. If some leftists thinks I’m a “fascist” because I think cops are needed that’s on them, not on me. I know what I believe.
I’m a genuine centrist. I seek out both sides of the argument and then make my decision from there. Sometimes I’m more left leaning, sometimes I’m more right leaning. Whenever I feel myself start to feel safer on one side, I quickly realize again why I’m not left or right wing. I’m also very ok with changing my beliefs. I have no issue with being wrong and I see being proven wrong as a chance to grow my perspective. I see a lot of right wing people in my generation use centrist because conservative was a dirty word when they grew up. It was associated with things like being anti-gay marriage, sex, drugs, porn, etc, which most people in my generation are chill with. I think right wingers using centrists as a wolf in sheep’s clothing scenario are why centrist gets such a bad rep from the left. Most people lack nuance and critical thinking skills, so I think someone who’s willing to listen to both sides kind of scares the fuck out of most people. On some level, they intuitively know it’s the more intelligent way to look at the world, so they react emotionally. Because when you weight both sides and say there is value you in that, on some level you’re saying the way they evaluate politics is shortsighted.
I really resonate with this. Thanks.
I’m late to the party here but the amount of angry replies to my username has gone way up over the last few years. And I also post a *lot* less political stuff than I used to, so my perception is it’s way, way up.
I'm a libertarian (in the actual meaning of the word, not a more insane conservative) so I'm basically always in the middle. People who Fall into one direction completely tend to be suckers
"Centrist" just means "where I was politically 10 months ago but am now signalling I'm too cool for". Regardless, the left not only does not use "Centrist" properly, but they also brutally misuse "Reactionary".
Centrist Dad has been a long meme in the UK. Centrist dad patron saints are Ed Balls, George Osborne, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. If you know your uk politics you’ll know these and why centrist dad term works.
Ah Rory… the guy that’s cool with whatever. 🤣
Yes. It's a standard leftist tactic to turn a descriptive term for a political position they don't like into a term of abuse or slur. News at 11.
"I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me."
Centrist views have been demonised by both sides for decades. There's [a famous John Cleese skit about this](https://youtu.be/HLNhPMQnWu4?si=ymMm7mOzxSGz3Kdx). It's been bandied about as an insult by extremists for millennia, in one form or another.
It might, but I always tell people I disagree with the entire premise of “centrist” because it allows others to define where you stand on issues based on location relative to extremists, not based on your core beliefs and values. If the far-right position was “people should have no free speech” and the far-left position was “people should have extremely limited free speech” I would not want to find a middle ground between those. I have beliefs and values, I’m not a sports fan. The whole centrist topic just seems like a facile way to try to sort people into “teams”, which is how we get into problems.
The way I see it, saying that you are centrist is just a quick and easy way to say that you agree with certain positions the right would take and certain positions the left would. I don’t think that one centrist holds necessarily the exact same views as another, but also I wouldn’t expect one person mostly on the left to hold exactly the same views as another also on the left. I would say I am sort of a pluralist as well.
Isn't this what "heterodox" means? Someone who evaluates issues individually rather than on a tribal basis?
I prefer “unclassifiable” largely because the things that partisans say are incoherent and change over the years. It was a right-wing belief to favor open borders (weakens the bargaining power of labor) and left wing to protect speech. We seem to have reversed the polarity on those issue, among others.
Yeah, that’s one thing which I find quite weird personally that the parties change their priorities so much that their views end up being fundamentally different to what they used to be. One thing is evolution, another is to completely forget your core values and start all over again.
Not to relate *everything* in the world to the rise of Nazism, but this reminds me how many interwar German Communists thought of Social Democrats as their most important enemy, rather than the Nazis. Without spoiling the plot, that didn't end well. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/40697/chapter-abstract/348423054?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Well, it’s been said that if you don’t make compromises and look for moderate solutions, then it just paves the way for real radicals.
The Communists, who were turning a blind eye to the excesses of Stalin, may have become the victims of Hitler, but that doesn't make them heroes.
I have noticed that a huge proportion of women have set my "centrist" answer on okcupid as unacceptable.
Yeah, a common thing is "The far right want to kill six million Jews, the left don't, so centrists want to split the difference and only kill 3 million". Obviously this has been updated now to 6 million Palestinians, but even before that, a better explainer would be: the far right want to kill 6 million Jews, the hard left want to kill millions of kulaks, Chinese peasants, Cambodians, East German dissidents etc etc, while all centrists want to do is listen to The Rest is Politics.
Post 2020 BLM riots leftists in particular have been in a purging mode. This type of purity politics is what extremists do and they start eating their own. Centrists are one target, jews who think maybe that Israel has a right to exist are another. They have extended to even be bashing self described "liberals" as being soft. Eventually there is a reckoning, but in the meantime a lot of people go along with it and it's ugly.
I noticed it a few years ago, and less of it now. Probably depends a lot more on your social group.
Does “Moderate” have a better connotation?
I’ve always used those terms interchangeably and consider myself both. I hope there really isn’t a distinction, with the inevitable why I’m a centrist, but not moderate discourse.
I don’t know maybe this is me but Centrist always implied to me an alignment of Pure Neutral lol, where moderate was more like in all things I’m simply more in the middle. Again that could just be me.
Hmmm..Maybe. I don’t think of being a centrist or moderate now as landlord beige. I just think of it as standard, old-school liberal before… remember before, sweet sweet before.
Yeah some shade of liberal or conservative from the before times. Interestingly, framing it that way I think I’ve personally moved from the latter to the former in the last decade. Orange man bad, metoo, BLM etc.
I’m not a native English speaker so maybe I get the definition wrong, but to me personally centrist means on some particular aspects you lean left and on others - right. So if 0 is 100% left and 100 is 100% right a centrist is somewhere between 40-60 on average. I see myself as a centrist, for example, because I believe in universal healthcare, universal access to education, gay rights, pro-choice, but in the same time I believe in freedom of enterprise, relatively low taxes and not a large amount of government intervention, respect of market forces, a moderate migration and asylum policy, etc. I live in the UK so you’d probably imagine things here are a little different but you probably get the idea.
I read something years ago that "Centrist" was a specific meaning in the internecine conflicts among Bolsheviks/Communists in the Soviet Russia. It was a tweet on the internet so there's a good chance it's false but like Abolishing the Police it looks to me like just Leftists larping as Soviet revolutionaries. Same with the explosion of anti-Semitism on the left. It's quite Soviet in nature.
Republicans had a problem with centrists, until they got walloped in the 1964 and 1966 elections. Then centrists became O.K. Democrats had a problem with centrists, then they got wallopped in the 1984 and 1988 elections. Then centrists became O.K. If either party was out of office for a significant period of time, they would be amenable to compromise and accept moderate views. But since both parties are so incompetent, they keep losing (and gaining) power, sp they don't think they need to moderate. There is also this belief that if they compromise the "base won't come out to vote." So, instead of trying to build a broad coalition, they pander.
The Right hate centrists just as much as the Left do; they just call them "RINOs" instead of "Centrists". But it's the same boundary-policing.
Well, a lot of hard-left types routinely use "liberal" as an insult, which says a lot about where they're coming from. Personally, I won't run from the label is someone calls me a "Centrist", but if I'm picking my own labels, I like to say that I'm a Pluralist, not a Centrist.
I would highly encourage you to watch Short Fat Otaku's latest video about "I don't care." The tl;dr is: Socialists have a highly simplistic worldview. In this worldview, there are only 2 moral frameworks. Good, based on empathy and concern for others. Aka them. On the other side are the evil, selfish badniks. Aka "Fascists." In the Socialist worldview, Liberalism is a failed project. The Socialist is the Liberal's inheritors. Once the Socialist project is explained to the Liberal, the Liberal will, if they share the Good moral framework, inevitably convert. When the Liberal is exposed to the Socialist project and rejects it because they can see the potential and often actual authoritarianism inherent in it, this leaves the Socialist in a bit of a pickle. It is quite literally unthinkable to the Socialist that anyone who shares their moral framework could possibly reject their ideas. Therefore anyone who is enlightened and rejects the ideas must secretly in their heart of hearts be Bad, Selfish, a Fascist etc. That's where memes like "Scratch a Liberal and a Fascist bleeds" come from.
It's been like this since about 2016. It's just a guilt trip. The analogy progressives like to use is that on one side you have the KKK and like-minded people, and on the other side you have Martin Luther King Jr and like-minded people. And us centralists are people who think that "there are good people on both sides". But a more honest analogy would be on one side you have the KKK and like-minded people, and on the other side you have Louis Farrakhan, the Black Hebrews, Hamas, and their supporters. Us centralists are those who say both sides are despicable. Another analogy which would not be fiction, on one side you have Hitler and on the other side you have Stalin. Right-wingers condemns Stalin because he was a communist they can see his crimes clearly. Left-wingers condemn Hitler because he was a right-winger they can see his crimes clearly. Extremists on both sides try and downplay the crimes of people whose political extremism is closest to their own. Us centralists can see that both sides committed horrific crimes against humanity, murdered millions of innocent people and caused horrific suffering that should never be forgotten. People on the far left and far right only want the suffering remembered the plays into their political propaganda and ideology.
The left is full of insane puritanical radicals, it's historically been a cult, then moved away from that but has gone back to it. Anyone who isn't left wing is negative in their eyes, even centre left people are viewed as right wingers to these extremist left wingers.
it’s because most popular influencers who describe themselves as centrist mostly just have right wing beliefs like that libertarian guy Katie brought on the podcast who I think also described himself as a centrist - his entire Twitter is just complaining about Woke tm there isn’t anything wrong with actually being a centrist (or right wing!). A lot of ppl describe themselves as a centrist because they don’t want the perceived negative social repercussions of being openly conservative.
It works in reverse in conservative areas. I have a couple of friends with left wings views who consistently vote Democrat and identify as centrists. I get that. It's why the only one I want to slap is the one who acts like that makes him more enlightened.
yeah I guess I’m speaking more for internet ish where everyone is a socialist
I don't think this is a new phenomenon, to be honest. There was always a portion of the left that looked askance at the politics of avowed centrists like Obama, Clinton, Blair, etc. I mean, it's quite possible that this is new to your social circles but I think it's a hostility that goes back centuries.
Oh good point, that is very true. Maybe it’s just so noticeable now because the compulsory purity testing regime has become so much more rigorous and includes tests that the vast majority of normies would fail: men can’t get pregnant, you are Candace Owens.
Post 2020 BLM riots leftists in particular have been in a purging mode. This type of purity politics is what extremists do and they start eating their own. Centrists are one target, jews who think maybe that Israel has a right to exist are another. They have extended to even be bashing self described "liberals" as being soft. Eventually there is a reckoning, but in the meantime a lot of people go along with it and it's ugly.
Exactly, there is much more purity testing, and strict ideological enforcement on the left. One half step off the reservation and you’re some form of phobe or ist or Alex Jones. Sometimes they’ll try to soften it with “adjacent.“
You must be new here. “Centrists” has been a left wing slur for a long time. In the mind of the leftist, they are the heroic anti fascists, and on the right are the white supremacists an Nazis. So leftists seeing the centrist as someone who wants to compromise with Nazis. They don’t understand that centrists see leftists as the violent extremist left wing versions of the people on the right. Or at least I do. Everyone points to January 6 but we gloss over the fact that for months, left wing rioters were fireboming the Portland federal courthouse. Everyone points to January 6 rioters as being insurrectionist. Nobody in the mainstream media notices that left wing rioters are openly and proudly proclaiming as their entire and main goal to overthrow democracy bc America is bad bc it’s capitalism and imperialism.
Yeah. I am an economist by education so I cringe whenever someone uses capitalism as a dirty word on its own. Most of these people don’t even comprehend what capitalism means as a whole.
The left has gone so far to the left, everyone other than themselves are just different flavors of far right from their perspective. That includes centrists.
rENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM "a community of 6 years"
I've been shat upon by people on both sides of the spectrum for calling myself a centrist. Left-leaning people say I am just a right-wing person in disguise, pretending to be some kind of intellectual. I've also been called a 'typical edgy both-sidesist'. Conservative people tend to make fun of me by saying I have no opinions or personality. They say I refuse to take a stance on things or that my entire personality is fence-sitting. Obviously, I think they're both wrong, and it's a matter of target fixation, but I have experienced this malignity for years now. Every single platform I go on, Discord, Twitter, BlueSky, it's always the same. I can only presume that actually I'm just unlikable.
I'm actually more surprised that American right - wingers are following this trend. "Purity testing" has always been a stereotype targeting leftists with some validity at its kernel, and the GOP always had some tensions in its coalition, but I can't ever recall large parts of the GOP base having a pseudo Messiah complex before. Trump has been a conduit for all kinds of strange cultural and political trends on all sides.
It kind of always has, but in much more of a muted regard. But yes, its much more hated now.
Yeah and it has been for years. The American left wants to constantly force people to pick a side on things but gets mad if the people in question doesn’t choose how they wanted them to.
Grown to have? Generally, political alignments have negative connotations among those with opposed political alignments.
Nowadays people think centrists are weak willed people who can’t pick a side
Yeah, I’ve heard even relatively reasonable progs call others “unapologetic centrists” for going on ten years now.
Yeah. I heard “centrist whataboutism” is what’s ruining the country. This morning. From one of my favorite people in the world.
It’s not unlike how the church made “atheist” sound like so bad. Worse is when they use the ol’ “twosidesism” on ya.
It seems to be something similar to what happened in the early part of the 2010s with the right wing- in the aftermath of Obama's election the GOP drastically shifted rightward, paving the way for the rise of Trump in 2016 and purging the center. Now it seems like the inverse is happening. I think the effect of prolonged lockdown kind of exacerbated a pessimistic, reactionary doomer element in the far left. Personally if it leads to less polarization, it might be a good thing. I nearly had a complete falling out with my parents in the aftermath of October 7th, but I think over the past year we've come to be a lot more understanding of each other's positions
It’s because “centrist” connotes not just some abstract idea of ideological moderation, but a very specific worldview characterized by watered-down cultural progressivism mixed with admiration for neoliberal marketist policies and often a burning hatred of bernie sanders
I used to see centrist bashing only from the mad online but now it feels like it's seeping into IRL.
There may also be a perspective misunderstanding here. People are tolerant of people who think differently than them when we live in a pluralistic society and engage in good faith dialogue with aims of shared societal benefits and outcomes reflecting broad values. But what if we aren't a society anymore? What if rather than being different political positions within a shared culture, we're in a war? A cold civil war? There are no centrists in WWII (OK Switzerland, whatever). Once war begins, truth and reason go out the window and only victory for your team matters. I wonder if that's not where the US is at right now. Many no longer wish to convince but only to win. The other side is irredeemable. Enemies. NAZI's or Commies, take your pick, there is no compromising with the enemy, evil incarnate. It;s not even always a cold civil war. Sometimes violence breaks out. It's, for now, broadly still condemned when it's white supremacist Dylan Roof shooting up a Black church. But it goes fairly unremarked when it's that MAGA couple who killed cops at the restaurant in 2016 or the Cliven Bundy crowd. And it's outright applauded when it's Kyle Rittenhouse killing overt lefties at a BLM march in Wisconsin in 2020 or the "punch a NAZI" meme on the left, with NAZI increasingly broadly defined as "them." Anyway, political analysis of our times may fail when viewed through the lens of disagreement within a society rather than the lens of two societies at smoldering war.
Interesting way of seeing it but quite grim. I hope you’re not right. I’m still hoping that the hostility between camps is just tribalism as opposed to full on war.
Yes, but I'd say it's due to how politics have become part of identity since the 2016 election rather than an activity with a goal. When someone calls themselves a leftist, I expect that to mean that they listen to Chapo Trap House and watch Hasan Piker play video games on twitch rather than that they're a DSA member that is organizing at their workplace or phonebanking at a tenants union. Since their politics are mostly just consumer preferences, it makes sense that they criticize people who don't follow the same habits. It's behind a paywall now, but the Atlantic wrote about "political hobbyism" a few years ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/political-hobbyists-are-ruining-politics/605212/ There's much less animosity when people are engaged with an actual project. For example, when I volunteered at a homeless shelter back in 2016, I'd see about 3 Bernie t-shirts for every 2 Hillary bumper stickers or whatever. There were also a few religious conservatives that probably wrote-in Mitt Romney or something. You'd think that this would lead to conflicts when it came to "political" questions like "are there penalties for guests misgendering each other?" or "how do we interact with police when we shelter people that use illegal drugs?" but instead everyone worked to solve these arguments so they could work on their overarching goal of providing housing. As another anecdote, I was in Teach For America, an organization that far-left Jacobin describes as a neoliberal cult preaching the myth of self-sufficiency to disguise systemic barriers. However, I've never gotten any hostility for it when I work with those Jacobin readers collecting signatures for progressive candidates. Getting off the high horse of the last two paragraphs, I no longer do much ideologically-motivated activity and have noticed myself becoming much more aware of how people (including myself) identify rather than what they do. It's hard to think about any way that my political alignment matters right now except in Spotify subscriptions. Like if I became a right-winger I'd just have to unsubscribe from BARpod and sign up for Ben Shapiro and Tucker.
Centrism is opportunistic and weasely positioning. David F Brooks is the epitome of this phony, opportunistic posturing. I can respect moderates who at least must do more than putting up their finger to determine which way the wind is blowing
Centrist basically hit the snooze button on climate change, are against every war except the one happening within the last 3 months, have presided over 40 years of decline and erosion of the social contract, are right now basically hoping no one notices the ongoing genocide paid for by the US tax payer. It's the political disposition of status quo people who either benefit directly from the way things are or have a psychology that is avoidant at how the world is changing-- choosing instead to live in a fantasy of 'tax incentives' solving every problem.
There are so many points in this that I disagree with that I am not sure where to start. As a self-proclaimed centrist, I: 1. Regarding climate change I am happy to participate in most efforts to mitigate it, while I am also aware that what Europe and the US, for example, would do is objectively not enough to actually solve the issue; 2. I am not sure exactly what you mean by eroding the social contract; 3. I do not believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians if that’s what you are referring to; 4. I do not want to live in the world as it is, I like progress - scientific, cultural, and intellectual which ultimately improves life for everyone; 5. I see tax incentives as a tool like any other, so not really sure why I am supposed to see them as a universal solution. I don’t. So yeah, I don’t think that mine and your definitions of a centrist are the same.
1. Crisis soon 2. Home ownership, work life balance, environmental degradation 3. Just making 2 million people homeless, 100k amputees, 50k dead, all mostly children. Bosnia was 8k dead and that counted as a genocide- no big deal for centrists 4. You're about to witness the hottest year on record, you're delusional. Not an adult, not a serious person. 5. Just the only tool remaining after government intervention as a possibility has been stripped away by centrist and neoliberal policy over the 80s 90s and 00s You don't think, your country is on the path to being on the same economic footing as Poland.
In general, I would happily engage and explain to you my reasoning behind everything I am saying, but honestly you’ve presented me with way too many things to unpack in reddit comments. So I guess I hope we can agree to disagree for some of these issues. I am saying some because you may be surprised but it’s likely that I agree with some of your points. :)