If someone says that they are “centrist” they are not telling you that they base all of their opinions on being in the middle of any two positions. That would be astoundingly stupid and is very much a straw-man take on the situation.
They are telling you that they agree with neither major party on everything, and find that both parties have views that they don’t agree with. It’s pretty easy to come to that conclusion because the US two-party system packs in an almost incoherent mishmash of beliefs into exactly two sides.
There is absolutely no contradiction in being for police reform, and against riots lasting for days. There is no contradiction in being for gun rights, while also wanting limits on them. There is no contradiction in wanting functional government services and universal healthcare, and thinking that free markets are effective. There is no contradiction in wanting a more balanced budget, and government services to be funded.
The idea that there are only two sides in politics is a strange delusion created by your two party system.
If you are left wing, and argue for left-wing policies in every case, that means you will also be argued with by somebody who believes political nuance and not just waving a party flag.
The right wing also shits on centrists because they think they are secretly left-wing since they argue with some of their stupider points as well.
These people are not “secretly right-wing” and just don’t have the balls to say it. That is a horrendous take no matter where you fall on the political spectrum the only serves to limit conversation.
You just described a Leftist, in some ways. Disagreeing with both majority parties doesn’t mean you have to stand between “evidence-based” and “far-right”.
There is absolutely no contradiction in being for police reform, and against riots lasting for days
That’s being in the middle of the two positions. It’s not that there’s a contradiction, but that you just ate up the rhetoric that BLM protesting was all “riots lasting for days”. And “Police Reform” is a middle-of-the-road alternative to “follow the evidence, defund 90% of the police and have non-lethally-armed services do those things”. This fits our description of centrist to a tee
There is no contradiction in being for gun rights, while also wanting limits on them
Sure. I’m a leftist who feels this way. The “real center” here, though, would be the Democratic party, who still want less gun control than most civilized nations. Your view perhaps resembles the “the Right is so bat-shit insane that conservatives are confused for moderates”?
There is no contradiction in wanting functional government services and universal healthcare, and thinking that free markets are effective
I mean… yeah there is. If free markets were effective, we should be gutting all government services and regulatory bodies. Nobody actually believes free markets are effective. There are those who embrace the buzz-word without realizing it, and then there are those who want the free markets because they are ineffective and that the profit margins available to them are massive.
There is no contradiction in wanting a more balanced budget, and government services to be funded
Again, this is the formal Democratic position. The formal Republican position is called “Starve the Beast”, and it is for there to NEITHER be a balanced budget NOR be government services funded. I’m not making that up. On this view, you sound like a Democrat, but if you vote for Republicans on their economic stances despite matching Democrats, that makes you the middle of the two views again.
The idea that there are only two sides in politics is a strange delusion created by your two party system.
Obviously, but there are two sides to every issue. If we get back to the OP issue, it’s that one side has been screaming “climate change is real and permanent damage is imminent” and the other side has been screaming “climate change is fake and God loves us”. Centrists have been between the two saying “I know the meteor is headed for us, but my retirement is more important to me than the world still being around when my kids grow up”. We’ve been dealing with 40+ years of that. But yeah, that IS between the two sides.
If you are left wing, and argue for left-wing policies in every case, that means you will also be argued with by somebody who believes political nuance and not just waving a party flag.
The funny thing is that for 9 policies out of 10, most lefties just argue for the educated position against the “gut instinct” or “I know science says this but it worked for me” position. Hell, just look at the topic of parents hitting kids and it covers all the nuances of the leftist problem. Is the Left always correct? No. But the Right and/or Center is a broken clock in this. I think the Left is wrong on Gun Control and the Democrats are right. That’s about the only issue I can think of right now that the majority of the Left is wrong on. Not because I’m a leftist but because I’m educated in the issues.
The right wing also shits on centrists because they think they are secretly left-wing since they argue with some of their stupider points as well.
Not quite. They pretend centrists are the far left and shit on them, so that “moderate” really means “neocon but not seeking Handmaid’s Tale”.
These people are not “secretly right-wing” and just don’t have the balls to say it. That is a horrendous take no matter where you fall on the political spectrum the only serves to limit conversation.
Anyone who voted Trump in 2020 was either ignorant or Right-Wing, regardless of what they claimed to be. He is against fiscal conservativism, against modern medicine, and was caught red-handed working with Russia to steal the 2016 election. His presidency damaged the economy, but also focused that damage on states that net-provide resources for the country as a whole because they are Democrat. A person in New York paying an extra $10,000/yr in taxes with reduced overall QOL and COVID-dead family members “voting Trump anyway” is not a centrist.
I have never once voted for the right-wing party in my country (Canada). I also don’t agree that any left-leaning party in my country is particularly great. If I were in the US, I would be presently voting for the Democrats, but only because they are the least bad of the two. I would also be stumping for third-party candidate viability as a solution to this.
you just ate up the rhetoric that BLM protesting was all “riots lasting for days”
It was vague on purpose. I’m not discussing a specific set of current events, merely commonly attached attitudes to events that have occurred throughout history. Police forces vs. protesters is a pretty common recurrence, no “rhetoric eating” required.
Nobody actually believes free markets are effective.
Well, if you’d like to actually discuss, they are to a limited extent. I also believe that the government should step in to break mon- du- and tri-opolies.
If a bail out is required, the government should then own the business and all patents should be made public. Patent timeframes should also be restored to the original or shorter as all it’s doing is stifling innovation.
Some industries should be removed entirely from being for-profit.
Now you go!
Centrists have been between the two
Maybe some. Centrists and independents are not a cohesive group with set ideals. Each individual has their own stance. It also doesn’t mean that the views they hold are always between the two parties in power, but instead means that they fall between any two parties. As an example, I could be a Canadian Centrist between Green and NDP; I’m still a centrist. This makes ragging on the label kinda worthless because depending on the scale, most people are Centrists.
I would be screaming at the top of my lungs about the fucking meteor in your example instead of wasting time on social politics. Yelling “Whataboutism” with things that important is fucking absurd when one means we’re all going to die roasting in our own goddamn juices.
Trump
The dude sucks, no doubt. To me he represents the enshittification of modern politics, but… You can vote for Trump and still be centrist just like you can still have voted for Hillary and be a Centrist. It depends on what you value most and to what extent.
There was a really good episode of Radiolab a few years back that discussed this. Basically, a legal US immigrant (with undocumented family members) voted Trump despite feeling that the man was disgusting and disagreeing with him on literally every single issue but one. The one issue they believed in so hard though, that it was enough to vote Trump (in that instance, their line was abortion). If you have a line that you will not cross, then that’s all there is for some people. You can say they’re wrong (and in that instance, I would agree with you), but they’re neither stupid nor gullible.
This is another case of how more (and more varied) political candidates would help.
Basically, a legal US immigrant (with undocumented family members) voted Trump despite feeling that the man was disgusting and disagreeing with him on literally every single issue but one. The one issue they believed in so hard though, that it was enough to vote Trump (in that instance, their line was abortion). If you have a line that you will not cross, then that’s all there is for some people.
“I’m not a fascist but I am willing to vote a fascist into power if it means I can get my way on this single issue” isn’t going to win over many left-wing people.
Centrism was a perfectly acceptable position when the left- and right-wing had broadly similar goals - a better society, a healthy economy, a happy population, a somewhat fair society, etc. Different sides might disagree on the methods, but they could find compromises to reached their shared goals.
However, modern day right-wing ideals are totally incompatible with left-wing ones. Many right-wing ideals and policies actively cause suffering and inequality. They enrich corporations and billionaires at the expense of regular people. They harm minority groups. They cause misery. Even if someone isn’t actively chanting for the death of minorities in the streets, being willing to enable all that makes them at best ignorant, selfish, and possibly stupid (especially in the case of your Radiolab guy).
I’m not totally against centrism, but centrists - especially in two-party systems - are defining themselves based on both parties. If one of the parties is awful and the centrist is unwilling to distance themselves from them, the centrist deserves the criticism they get.
I don’t think the person was tying to win over left-wing people. They were voting the way they felt was right, which is how voting is supposed to work. They don’t need to vote to make you happy, and they seemed very conflicted over it.
I personally agree that many right-wing policies cause misery. You’re arguing like I’m right-wing and I am not.
That being said, I also think current left-wing policies are mostly toothless, focus on feelings over making the world better, are too easy on the wealthy, and are mostly preformative because the real solutions would alienate voters and donors alike - they seem to coast on “Let’s not make things actively worse most of the time!”
I know they likely weren’t trying to win left-wing people over specifically, I was just trying to explain why centrists are generally disliked by left-wing folks. Them being able to entertain voting for fascists and for generally misery-inducing policies is what makes left-wing people see them as fundamentally not that different from right-wing people. If someone’s so strongly against abortion that they’re willing to vote for a fascist (or at least seriously consider it) then, for most left-wing people, they’re not just trying to achieve a similar positive goal through different methods, but rather they’re actively a bad person.
That’s not to say if you’re left-wing you have to blanket disagree with every single right-wing policy - and I do genuinely think everyone should consider each individual issue on their own merits rather than just adopting the party line - but the overall right-wing package is just so awful that “enlightened” centrists being willing to entertain it are awful by extension.
I do agree with you about left-wing policies being toothless, and I think a lot of left-wingers are lacking in pragmatism - particularly when it comes to achieving their long-term goals and the sacrifices they might need to make to reach that point. Far too many left-wingers are willing to make perfect the enemy of good and end up suffering for it.
Of course, it’s difficult when the right-wing are so good at rallying together and unifying different factions in order to get power. A lot of the right-wing’s ideology is simply “get into power”. Meanwhile, the left-wing is a mish-mash group filled with differing ideologies and factions that unite more out of necessity in order to be politically relevant and competitive with the right-wing than because they necessarily want to be a unified group. I’m not from the US, but I’ll use the US Democratic party as an example: the party’s overall stance is somewhat centre-right by most countries’ standards, but it’s also the party die-hard left-wingers have to vote for and support if they want any kind of representation at all. It makes it very difficult for genuine left-wing policies to get pushed through.
In the current political climate, left-wing parties tend to rely on swing voters to get into power, too. So not only do they have to try to appeal to all the varying ideologies of the people who make up and consistently support the party, they also have to try to appeal to the moderates. “Radical” left-wing policies would lose the support of moderates and swing voters, and therefore lose the party their political power. Sticking with the US example: the US’ Overton window is so far to the right that real-world left-wing solutions to problems would probably ensure the Democrats don’t regain power for years. There needs to be a more gradual shift to the left and a de-escalation before any real changes and solutions can happen.
And I agree with nearly all of that, and I would call most of the ideology you listed Centrist or independent (which are interchangeable to me when I talk about them, frankly), but I see what you’re meaning.
It doesn’t mean you’re the centre of current USA right and left wings, which most of the people in this thread mischaracterise them as. It means you’re between two points. Which points? Talk to them and find out. Maybe it’s a left-wing position but they disagree vehemently on the “How” of the situation. Maybe it’s a right-wing position, but they have a non-shitty take (like I tried to show with my immigration example elsewhere).
I desperately hate the “Centrists only want to kill some of the trans people” argument some make (even in this thread). It’s disingenuous, anti-intellectual, and flat-out wrong.
Again, the real and long-term solution is to make more parties viable.
(As an addendum, thanks for actually discussing and not being just a shithead like some others!)
If someone says that they are “centrist” they are not telling you that they base all of their opinions on being in the middle of any two positions. That would be astoundingly stupid and is very much a straw-man take on the situation.
They are telling you that they agree with neither major party on everything, and find that both parties have views that they don’t agree with. It’s pretty easy to come to that conclusion because the US two-party system packs in an almost incoherent mishmash of beliefs into exactly two sides.
There is absolutely no contradiction in being for police reform, and against riots lasting for days. There is no contradiction in being for gun rights, while also wanting limits on them. There is no contradiction in wanting functional government services and universal healthcare, and thinking that free markets are effective. There is no contradiction in wanting a more balanced budget, and government services to be funded.
The idea that there are only two sides in politics is a strange delusion created by your two party system.
If you are left wing, and argue for left-wing policies in every case, that means you will also be argued with by somebody who believes political nuance and not just waving a party flag.
The right wing also shits on centrists because they think they are secretly left-wing since they argue with some of their stupider points as well.
These people are not “secretly right-wing” and just don’t have the balls to say it. That is a horrendous take no matter where you fall on the political spectrum the only serves to limit conversation.
You just described a Leftist, in some ways. Disagreeing with both majority parties doesn’t mean you have to stand between “evidence-based” and “far-right”.
That’s being in the middle of the two positions. It’s not that there’s a contradiction, but that you just ate up the rhetoric that BLM protesting was all “riots lasting for days”. And “Police Reform” is a middle-of-the-road alternative to “follow the evidence, defund 90% of the police and have non-lethally-armed services do those things”. This fits our description of centrist to a tee
Sure. I’m a leftist who feels this way. The “real center” here, though, would be the Democratic party, who still want less gun control than most civilized nations. Your view perhaps resembles the “the Right is so bat-shit insane that conservatives are confused for moderates”?
I mean… yeah there is. If free markets were effective, we should be gutting all government services and regulatory bodies. Nobody actually believes free markets are effective. There are those who embrace the buzz-word without realizing it, and then there are those who want the free markets because they are ineffective and that the profit margins available to them are massive.
Again, this is the formal Democratic position. The formal Republican position is called “Starve the Beast”, and it is for there to NEITHER be a balanced budget NOR be government services funded. I’m not making that up. On this view, you sound like a Democrat, but if you vote for Republicans on their economic stances despite matching Democrats, that makes you the middle of the two views again.
Obviously, but there are two sides to every issue. If we get back to the OP issue, it’s that one side has been screaming “climate change is real and permanent damage is imminent” and the other side has been screaming “climate change is fake and God loves us”. Centrists have been between the two saying “I know the meteor is headed for us, but my retirement is more important to me than the world still being around when my kids grow up”. We’ve been dealing with 40+ years of that. But yeah, that IS between the two sides.
The funny thing is that for 9 policies out of 10, most lefties just argue for the educated position against the “gut instinct” or “I know science says this but it worked for me” position. Hell, just look at the topic of parents hitting kids and it covers all the nuances of the leftist problem. Is the Left always correct? No. But the Right and/or Center is a broken clock in this. I think the Left is wrong on Gun Control and the Democrats are right. That’s about the only issue I can think of right now that the majority of the Left is wrong on. Not because I’m a leftist but because I’m educated in the issues.
Not quite. They pretend centrists are the far left and shit on them, so that “moderate” really means “neocon but not seeking Handmaid’s Tale”.
Anyone who voted Trump in 2020 was either ignorant or Right-Wing, regardless of what they claimed to be. He is against fiscal conservativism, against modern medicine, and was caught red-handed working with Russia to steal the 2016 election. His presidency damaged the economy, but also focused that damage on states that net-provide resources for the country as a whole because they are Democrat. A person in New York paying an extra $10,000/yr in taxes with reduced overall QOL and COVID-dead family members “voting Trump anyway” is not a centrist.
I have never once voted for the right-wing party in my country (Canada). I also don’t agree that any left-leaning party in my country is particularly great. If I were in the US, I would be presently voting for the Democrats, but only because they are the least bad of the two. I would also be stumping for third-party candidate viability as a solution to this.
It was vague on purpose. I’m not discussing a specific set of current events, merely commonly attached attitudes to events that have occurred throughout history. Police forces vs. protesters is a pretty common recurrence, no “rhetoric eating” required.
Well, if you’d like to actually discuss, they are to a limited extent. I also believe that the government should step in to break mon- du- and tri-opolies. If a bail out is required, the government should then own the business and all patents should be made public. Patent timeframes should also be restored to the original or shorter as all it’s doing is stifling innovation. Some industries should be removed entirely from being for-profit. Now you go!
Maybe some. Centrists and independents are not a cohesive group with set ideals. Each individual has their own stance. It also doesn’t mean that the views they hold are always between the two parties in power, but instead means that they fall between any two parties. As an example, I could be a Canadian Centrist between Green and NDP; I’m still a centrist. This makes ragging on the label kinda worthless because depending on the scale, most people are Centrists. I would be screaming at the top of my lungs about the fucking meteor in your example instead of wasting time on social politics. Yelling “Whataboutism” with things that important is fucking absurd when one means we’re all going to die roasting in our own goddamn juices.
The dude sucks, no doubt. To me he represents the enshittification of modern politics, but… You can vote for Trump and still be centrist just like you can still have voted for Hillary and be a Centrist. It depends on what you value most and to what extent. There was a really good episode of Radiolab a few years back that discussed this. Basically, a legal US immigrant (with undocumented family members) voted Trump despite feeling that the man was disgusting and disagreeing with him on literally every single issue but one. The one issue they believed in so hard though, that it was enough to vote Trump (in that instance, their line was abortion). If you have a line that you will not cross, then that’s all there is for some people. You can say they’re wrong (and in that instance, I would agree with you), but they’re neither stupid nor gullible.
This is another case of how more (and more varied) political candidates would help.
“I’m not a fascist but I am willing to vote a fascist into power if it means I can get my way on this single issue” isn’t going to win over many left-wing people.
Centrism was a perfectly acceptable position when the left- and right-wing had broadly similar goals - a better society, a healthy economy, a happy population, a somewhat fair society, etc. Different sides might disagree on the methods, but they could find compromises to reached their shared goals.
However, modern day right-wing ideals are totally incompatible with left-wing ones. Many right-wing ideals and policies actively cause suffering and inequality. They enrich corporations and billionaires at the expense of regular people. They harm minority groups. They cause misery. Even if someone isn’t actively chanting for the death of minorities in the streets, being willing to enable all that makes them at best ignorant, selfish, and possibly stupid (especially in the case of your Radiolab guy).
I’m not totally against centrism, but centrists - especially in two-party systems - are defining themselves based on both parties. If one of the parties is awful and the centrist is unwilling to distance themselves from them, the centrist deserves the criticism they get.
I don’t think the person was tying to win over left-wing people. They were voting the way they felt was right, which is how voting is supposed to work. They don’t need to vote to make you happy, and they seemed very conflicted over it.
I personally agree that many right-wing policies cause misery. You’re arguing like I’m right-wing and I am not.
That being said, I also think current left-wing policies are mostly toothless, focus on feelings over making the world better, are too easy on the wealthy, and are mostly preformative because the real solutions would alienate voters and donors alike - they seem to coast on “Let’s not make things actively worse most of the time!”
I know they likely weren’t trying to win left-wing people over specifically, I was just trying to explain why centrists are generally disliked by left-wing folks. Them being able to entertain voting for fascists and for generally misery-inducing policies is what makes left-wing people see them as fundamentally not that different from right-wing people. If someone’s so strongly against abortion that they’re willing to vote for a fascist (or at least seriously consider it) then, for most left-wing people, they’re not just trying to achieve a similar positive goal through different methods, but rather they’re actively a bad person.
That’s not to say if you’re left-wing you have to blanket disagree with every single right-wing policy - and I do genuinely think everyone should consider each individual issue on their own merits rather than just adopting the party line - but the overall right-wing package is just so awful that “enlightened” centrists being willing to entertain it are awful by extension.
I do agree with you about left-wing policies being toothless, and I think a lot of left-wingers are lacking in pragmatism - particularly when it comes to achieving their long-term goals and the sacrifices they might need to make to reach that point. Far too many left-wingers are willing to make perfect the enemy of good and end up suffering for it.
Of course, it’s difficult when the right-wing are so good at rallying together and unifying different factions in order to get power. A lot of the right-wing’s ideology is simply “get into power”. Meanwhile, the left-wing is a mish-mash group filled with differing ideologies and factions that unite more out of necessity in order to be politically relevant and competitive with the right-wing than because they necessarily want to be a unified group. I’m not from the US, but I’ll use the US Democratic party as an example: the party’s overall stance is somewhat centre-right by most countries’ standards, but it’s also the party die-hard left-wingers have to vote for and support if they want any kind of representation at all. It makes it very difficult for genuine left-wing policies to get pushed through.
In the current political climate, left-wing parties tend to rely on swing voters to get into power, too. So not only do they have to try to appeal to all the varying ideologies of the people who make up and consistently support the party, they also have to try to appeal to the moderates. “Radical” left-wing policies would lose the support of moderates and swing voters, and therefore lose the party their political power. Sticking with the US example: the US’ Overton window is so far to the right that real-world left-wing solutions to problems would probably ensure the Democrats don’t regain power for years. There needs to be a more gradual shift to the left and a de-escalation before any real changes and solutions can happen.
And I agree with nearly all of that, and I would call most of the ideology you listed Centrist or independent (which are interchangeable to me when I talk about them, frankly), but I see what you’re meaning.
It doesn’t mean you’re the centre of current USA right and left wings, which most of the people in this thread mischaracterise them as. It means you’re between two points. Which points? Talk to them and find out. Maybe it’s a left-wing position but they disagree vehemently on the “How” of the situation. Maybe it’s a right-wing position, but they have a non-shitty take (like I tried to show with my immigration example elsewhere).
I desperately hate the “Centrists only want to kill some of the trans people” argument some make (even in this thread). It’s disingenuous, anti-intellectual, and flat-out wrong.
Again, the real and long-term solution is to make more parties viable.
(As an addendum, thanks for actually discussing and not being just a shithead like some others!)