this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Great strides can be made by simply trying to avoid reductionism. Ofc, FPTP isn't helping this cause.
Is that not what a centrist is, by definition? I don't mean that a centrist is literally doing what you are describing, but a centrist is someone who sits in the middle of the left/right dichotomy. By this fact, they would have to be right in the average of the Overton Window.
This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.
Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.
One important thing to clarify is that when the term "liberal" is used as a pejorative, it is, generally, and weirdly, not used in reference to liberalism (at least that's how it seems to me), but, instead, as some vague reference to the also nebulous term "leftist".
I mean, academia can define “liberalism” however it wants, that isn’t how I define it and most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.
I don’t understand the confusion here. My point is that centrism in the US is largely a political position constructed in reverse. If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.
Call it whatever you want, people that try to disappear in a crowd by just mimicking the behavior and beliefs of people around them are not doing the same thing as people in the crowd who are behaving according to their morals, ethics and understanding of the world and either are blending into the crowd or not because of it.
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards, they are unwilling to imagine right and wrong outside of the comfortable and established narratives that determine right and wrong in their head (and are described within the Overton Window). Centrists will for example happily join progressives in attacking Trump for doing awful things like draconian and cruel immigration control measures, and as soon as Biden takes office and keeps doing the same shit they will flip to yelling at progressives for attacking Biden for doing the same thing.
Centrists are the kind of political position that has substance, it is purely an average of the Overton Window, no matter distorted and fucked up the Overton Window has been made by conservatives and the rich.
Hm — it feels like more of an uneducated misappropriation than an evolution of the term. Funnily enough, when the "right wing" types use it with a negative connotation, it really doesn't paint them in a good light — they are speaking negatively of things that they posture themselves as being in support of.
Sure, I agree. Keep in mind that the latter can still place one in the Overton Window, though.
Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.
Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.
A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting "some genocide!" and it is incredibly pathetic.
This is essentially a false generalization, or, more generally, just conjecture, unless you have proof that it is the case that that is what centrists do (arguably, it's virtually impossible for that to be the case).
I don't really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?
Yes
Based on what are you making that claim?