Centrism is often relative.
Someone who is a ‘centrist’ between the far-right GOP and the centre-right Dems is probably just a shy Republican.
Someone who is a ‘centrist’ by the perceptions of Lemmy could be anyone who isn’t a devotee of Mao, depending on which part of Lemmy you’re talking to.
Totally, when you’re in a left wing echo chamber it’s easy to get labelled as a centrist or worse solely because you can sometimes see where the right wing is coming from, even if you don’t agree with them.
I don’t know why there’s currently a coordinated attack on anyone who isn’t so far left that reality has left them and they’re abstaining from voting. It’s bizarre.
Basically everyone on this website is to the left of the dems, and is just settling because America’s democracy is kinda fucked
i think this is vastly misrepresented. A conservative “centrist” would be your traditional conservative, what we would refer to as moderate right, or center moderate right. Where as on the lefty side, it’s a little bit more like “i just don’t like the conservatives” and that’s kind of the extent of it.
moderate lefties would be like, socially progressive people, for example. Anything past that and you start getting into harder left wing camps. The left just isn’t as fractured and extremist as the right is in certain aspects, there are definitely extremists, but the vast majority of people fall into the more “centrist” definition of political alignment.
Ah, the good old claiming that “everybody not with us is a commie” so beloved by Fascists coming from the guy who posts memes where the toon who doesn’t agree to vote for Zionist-Genocide-loving Biden is wearing a red shirt with a white sickle and hammer.
It’s really interesting to see neolibs using the same kind of argument Nazis (I KID YOU NOT!) used which was basically calling everybody not with them “Communists”.
Well, it does make some sense given that the pro-Oligarchy politics of Neoliberlism aren’t that much away from Fascist politics, the main difference being that Fascism thinks the State should be above the ultra-wealthy and then after that comes the powerless riff-raff whilst Neoliberalism thinks the ultra-wealthy should be above the State and after that comes the powerless riff-raff.
Lemmy was literally started by ML. Who misidentify as Communists. Giving communists a bad name. There are literally people here who regularly defend lenin, stalin, Mao, Soviet russia, china, North korea, Etc. He’s not wrong. And if you feel attacked I think that says more perhaps about you than anyone else.
I Trend left libertarian/ anarcho communist. Yet I regularly get called a neoliberal by many of the Marxist leninists around here for not playing Simon Says group think. Far more often than I get called a tanky by right Wingers who visit. Which is saying something because being anti authoritarian I critique both pretty regularly.
Quick Edit I don’t stand behind everything PJ posts. Some I think is in bad taste as is much of Ozma’s. But they’re definitely not wrong in this case.
It is pretty funny that the “part of lemmy” in question immediately pops up and calls them a fascist though, proving the point
I think the exact term use was neoliberal. But they do treat them as synonymous. You’re not wrong about that.
It’s like calling all ML tankies. They’d be up in arms banding together if you did that to them. Yet they think it’s fine to do it to others. They know what they’re doing. And they’re not endearing themselves to anyone else that is for sure.
I mean I guess you’re technically right, they didn’t directly call them a fascist, they called them a neoliberal and then only compared them to Nazis
Semi-serious question, what made you want to engage with this guy in like, some kind of debate? It’s pretty obvious he’s just like, a basic bitch bad faith neolib poster that’s going around and inciting pre-election division, probably get suppress voting or some shit, idk. But like, why engage with him? What’s the point, really?
I detest hypocrisy and bad faith mindless tribalist propaganda slogans.
(In fact in the country I live in, there are actual Communists who were even Stalinists until not that long ago, and that’s exactly what I dislike about them: hyprocrisy and bad faith mindless tribalist propaganda slogans. Curiously I detest the neo-Fascists for the very same reason: it’s a judgement and opinion I hold quite which applies independently of the supposed political side of those doing it)
So I pointed out the hypocrisy and the tribalist, parroty, propagandist and even unimaginative nature of the slogans that poster uses, not for them (in my experience people who operate like that either do so in bad faith or don’t actually seriously analyse the tribalists slogans they hear before they parrot them, so logic won’t affect them in the least) but for anybody else who ponders about politics (rather than be a mindless follower of a tribe) who happens to go by and who might not have noticed this yet.
PS: Funnilly enough, the post below this one on my profile is also on a chain were I engaged with another parroty, slogan throwing hypocrite, of the other tribe of American politics (not that those tribes are politically that far apart, IMHO) for a very similar reason: that one was throwing around the “Free Speech” slogan demanding that Netanyahu gets to address Congress, but apparently wasn’t so keen on my suggestion that if Congress is indeed a place where speech should be free then anybody should be allowed to speak there whenever they want and hence Netanyahu can join queue rather than get ahead by invitations (which interfere in the Free Speech of everybody else). Tribalist slogan throwers are invariably hypocrites.
I tend to avoid anyone that feels compelled to define themselves by a political ideology. It just becomes an identity and the identity becomes more important than anything the ideology was supposed to represent.
You really aren’t required to wear your team colors or even have a team. If you have a point- make the point. If any part of your point depends on declaring your political identity- it’s not a solid point.
Counterpoint: If my existence as a marginalized individual has already been politicized by conservatives, then I lack the privileged position to simply “Make the point and shut up”, which is what you are effectively suggesting. When my identity as a human being (by blood, not beliefs) has been made a political argument, then no I’m sorry, my identity is also political… and that has been forced on me. Nothing about that invalidates the points I have to make to argue for my continued existence.
All I’m saying is, you act like identity is an abstract thing from politics, but for some people it can never be. Just being quiet means they are still people arguing for your death.
I tend to avoid anyone that feels compelled to define themselves by a political ideology. It just becomes an identity and the identity becomes more important than anything the ideology was supposed to represent.
Please reevaluate my comment with focus on the phrase ‘political identity’. If you’re talking about sexuality or gender- that’s not a ‘political identity’, That’s who you are as a human being as much as being black or white or tall or short. I recognize and sympathize that those facets of humanity have been brutally politicized but I’m speaking of ‘political identities’ that people necessarily choose or willingly accept, not the ‘identity’ that comes from just being born as you.
My dude, their comment is arguing that their sexuality/gender is already politicised, so they don’t have the privilege of choosing a political identity as it’s thrust upon them by the republicans.
They read your comments fine, I don’t necessarily agree with them, but they read it
Big whooosh here.
I recognize and sympathize that those facets of humanity have been brutally politicized
No… I don’t think you do.
Unfortunately, to all those that feel compelled to proudly display their teams colors, that makes you the ‘other’.
I’m not really comfortable as ‘one of’ anything so I’ve become pretty accustomed to being ‘the other’.
A person belonging to one or more Order is just as likely to carry a flag of the counter-establishment as the flag of the establishment-- just as long as it is a flag. - Principia Discordia
Never heard that before but I tend to agree. People that need symbols\teams for meaning\belonging will always take whatever they can get.
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my long standing, and proven litmus test of politics is “if you have an opinion, it’s wrong”
Because without fail, people will just say shit, that’s just wrong. The second that politics comes into play.
Please for the love of god, stop engaging with politics, it’s worse than reality TV, because we live here.
Please for the love of god, stop engaging with politics,
If you live in anything resembling a democracy that’s basically surrendering to whatever opponents of your rights want to do to you. If you’re that submissive I guess that’s your only option but I’m saying if you have any strength of will at all ‘engage with politics as an individual, just don’t imagine yourself as representing or represented by a team.’
‘engage with politics as an individual, just don’t imagine yourself as representing or represented by a team.’
this pretty much. Everytime i say this shit people seem to take the most idiotic interpretation of it for some reason. I’m talking about the kind of politics where nothing happens other than people yelling at each other for being stupid, and then ironically, people yell at me for being a stupid idiot.
Comedy literally couldn’t write itself.
“Why are people interpreting my broad stupid statement as a broad stupid statement instead of the nonsense specific statement I imagined in my head? Are they stupid?”
that’s part of the funny though.
That’s kind of the whole joke here.
Binarism is a sop for people who desperately want to cling to a self-affirming label, but can’t come up with any justification better than “the opposition is worse.”
Imo, the issue is that political opinions are more complicated than reducing them to a location on a 1-dimensional line.
Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.
I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.
Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.
At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.
Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.
Great strides can be made by simply trying to avoid reductionism. Ofc, FPTP isn’t helping this cause.
Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe.
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.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs
This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.
At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism
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.
calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.
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”.
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.
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.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs
This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.
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.
most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.
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.
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.
Sure, I agree. Keep in mind that the latter can still place one in the Overton Window, though.
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards
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.
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards 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.
[Centrists] 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.
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).
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.
I don’t really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?
I don’t really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?
Yes
“everyone has to be a raving lunatic completely committed to following one herd or the other, regardless of what they actually think. Any individual thought must comply with hard party lines”
Is that what this means?
It’s Ozma were talking about. It 100% is. They will always sabotage the achievable in favor of unobtainable perfection.
The hallmark of Fundamentalism.
lol, this is the internet, nuance doesn’t exist here.
My favorite is “socially liberal but economically conservative”, like those things are exclusive of each other
“I hate poor people but I also like weed”
I thought it is more like - “I hate taxes, but I don’t mind the gays”.
"Discriminatory treatment against poor Afro-Americans because of their race is wrong.
Discriminatpry treatment against poor Afro-Americans because of being born into poverty is the right thing to do."
Weed should be legal so I can sell it to the people being crushed by capitalism.
They are the way they mean it. Indivual freedoms such as legal abortions, gay marriage, drug legalization, etc, just not big on a welfare state.
Yeah, it’s basically “I’m in favor of a social safety net, but I’m also in favor of starving all social programs of funding” 🤦
“I’m in favour of Freedom as long as it doesn’t negativelly impact the priviledges I was born into when I popped-out of the right vagina”.
It’s the “Fight For Equality” that very purposefully keeps away from the one kind of discrimination of treatment is which bigger than all the others combines by quite the margin: Wealth Discrimination
“My parents are entitled to social security, but I really hate paying taxes”
well no it’s different than that, it’s more “i don’t believe in upholding the previous methods of societal progress, and control. But i prefer our economy stay minimally involved with most things.”
i don’t think that statement implies that they’re mutually exclusive of each other. This has been a long defined standing that people will hold.
It always cracks me up when they call Joe Biden the radical left. Republicans haven’t got a clue.
Exactly. When they say “radical left Biden” I’m like “I WISH!”
Biden. The guy who wrote the precursor to the patriot act.
I’ve lost track, who’s turn is it tomorrow to post that’s same ‘meme’ tomorrow. Gosh it’s just so original and fresh the 75th fine seeing another, “if your centrist your basically a Trumper!”.
It’s okay, buddy, I believe you’re not a Trumper.
You’re just not a centrist either, because that’s not a real thing.
You can support the oligarchal control of the means of production without believing in a specific oligarch’s policies. That doesn’t make you more left, it’s perfectly right wing to believe in human rights. It just means you think exploiting labor is one of those rights, as equally important as the right to self defense and freedom of speech and protest.
And you believe in those, right?
Exploiting labor? You mean two people entering into a contract voluntarily?
Person 1: I will pay you $X to paint my house
Person 2: I accept the terms of this agreement
DragonTypeWyven: isn’t there someone else you forgot to ask?
centrism is real, and like schrodingers cat, it’s both alive and dead until you look inside the box.
Someone who claims themselves to be a centrist, is often miserable. Someone who claims themselves to be socially progressive, or economically conservative (for example) is often best defined as a “centrist” since they often toe the line, and will in many cases, cross over the line depending on policy, and how they feel that year. These people are more analogous to swing voters more than anything.
Okay. How many socialism points do you need to trade to do a genocide? Is a universal healthcare enough?
i reckon about the equivalent to saving an equivalent amount of lives. If we’re doing a barter deal.
Lol, trash.
i mean it makes sense, if we’re trying to find out how to karmic balance a genocide with healthcare, it would follow that saving an equivalent number of people would be the natural equivalent.
I can’t find evidence of this but I swear the first time I heard of Dennis Prager he was selling himself as a ‘centrist’.
I would call him the moderate wing of the neonazi movement but we both know he’d go full reich if he could get away with it
That’s how republicans try to redefine the Overton window - claim that conservative extremists are moderates and the majority.
Maybe if you insult them a few more times they will see the error of their ways and vote for your guy.
Maybe if we prod them to be loud about what their claimed values are their candidate will be less shit.
A long time ago being a centrist or a libertarian just meant you support gun ownership and also weed rather than only one or the other. Seems times have changed.
Sigh that’s part of the problem. I thought I was a centrists. Not anymore! They changed that for me.
Lots of card-carrying members of the “enlightened-centrist-that-won’t-stand-for-anything-but-will-fall-for-everything” brigade coming out of the woodwork to justify their privilege on here.
Average centrist.
That’s the thing… a centrist will never burn the bridges that takes them back to the right.
Aren’t we all here for the whole “non binary” idea?
What happend to that.
Undecided voters are Republicans who refuse to admit they’re voting for Trump.
“Ayh aint tellin’ yew who imma votin’ fer!”
Hey, it’s everyone’s right not to reveal political affiliation, when you aren’t actively campaigning for the other guy.
Yea, we liberals think the same thing about you buddy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Populists, who’s reactionary attention spans are harnessed by TV Media (right) or Social media (left) to drive up some corporations stock price
Okay so did you even read that? Your own link says it is a feature of “popular discourse” - ie not supported by actual evidence - and then says:
Several political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists have criticized the horseshoe theory. Proponents point to a number of perceived similarities between extremes and allege that both tend to support authoritarianism or totalitarianism; political scientists do not appear to support this notion, and instances of peer-reviewed research on the subject are scarce. Existing studies and comprehensive reviews often find only limited support and only under certain conditions; they generally contradict the theory’s central premises.
That’s about as close as an impartially worded style of article can come to saying “yeah this is obviously bullshit”.
Explain why tankies and Nazis both support Russia in its war in Ukraine. It’s exactly horseshoe theory, when based centrists support Ukraine
“Tankie” is not synonymous with “socialist”. It was coined to describe a type of person who will side with the war crimes of anybody who waves a red flag regardless of whether they’ve fallen into statist counterrevolution.
“Nazi” is short for “national socialist”, because they fraudulently wore the name of socialism whilst doing horrific counterrevolutionary repression. Tankies are the left’s name for another type of person who does almost the same thing, although with more token adherence to the aesthetics and ideology of supposedly leftist thinkers and movements.
Some people call them “red fash” although there is a specific subgroup of tankies who I think that label fits better, the nazbols.
My impression is that their only consistent ideology is to oppose the US, so they support absolutely anyone who opposes the US. Also, they’re lost in a reverie of 60 years ago and think the current Russian and Chinese governments are communist or something.
Yes, that’s the horseshoe theory. More broadly they want the demise of the current political system so their system can arise from the ashes, like every extremist movement
Well then horseshoe theory isn’t about leftism and it’s basically just wrong, which was the point of me quoting that person’s own link back at them. If your point is that unhinged extremists with no coherent ideology tend towards a horrifying common denominator regardless of their starting point, then that’s true, but it says nothing about principled socialists.
There are plenty of revolutionary ideologies that do not fit within horseshoe theory, as political scientists have pointed out. If you want to say they’re wrong you’ll need something more than just what you reckon.
The horseshoe theory is not real theory, it’s an observation that people on the extremes will have contrarian views, so they agree with each other on accident
Right, so it’s basically just bullshit, and it doesn’t apply to anyone principled anyway. Although most people who talk about horseshoe theory try to use it to discredit people on the left in general, whatever your walked-back version of it may be.
I thought Horseshoe was basically an observation that extremists on both ends like authoritarianism, and thus roughly agree with each other. I suppose that could lead to admiring Putin and the CCCP.
demise of the current political system
Isn’t that accelerationism?
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