How was it? The right says “we want to do genocide”, the left says “no, we don’t want any genocide”. So the right responded “ok, so let’s just do a little genocide”, and the left responded “no, we don’t want any genocide”. And the centrist said to the left “see, You are the extremists, you don’t want to meet in the middle”.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step toward him. He takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.—A.R. Moxon
On a related note, I really hate how our political system in the US tries to force parties to meet in the middle by allowing election results where neither party has the majority required for the government to actually function (pass laws and other critical functions)
This is perfect. The right has gone so far to the right that meeting in the middle is still very much on the right.
The lesser evil, still being evil trope.
Fake might be the wrong word. To me it feels very real and very entrenched both due to our voting system and those two powerful parties being the ones with the power to change it. Plus both are beholden to interests other than those of the general population, so their stated platforms aren’t necessarily real. (This is not a both sides comment, one side is still far worse than the other)
It’s an emergent thing from other flaws in the system, and it is bad, but it feels all too real.
We should not allow conservatives to get away with calling themselves centrist. “Centrists” are just conservatives who realize conservatives are definitely the bad guys.
In international terms, even the Democrats are right of center.
There’s an old Soviet joke about Americans being so decedent that they required two fascist parties.
“International” meaning certain select European countries, ignoring the other shitty European governments of course
Certain Governments may be right of the Democrats but, in comparison to European (and international) parties, the Democrats are right of centre.
Pure Right, with some being Hard Right.
(I was going to say that the Hard Right were ultra-Neoliberals rather then Fascists, but then I remembered Biden’s actual military support for ethno-Fascists - who are the most violent and racist kind of Fascist there is - so maybe it’s more complex than just being hard core Neolibs).
Both the left and right can be fascist.
I find it helpful to consider authoritarian/libertarian on a different axis to small government/big government.
Whilst I agree with your point about two axis, Fascism is Right-wing + Authoritarian and has nothing whatsoever of Left-wing in it.
Left-wing + Authoritarian would be the kind of Communism practiced in places like the Soviet Union - highly centralized and were people are supposed to obey the dictates of the Party.
Neoliberalism is Rightwing with a different form of Authoritarianism: whilst its practitioners claim it’s Libertarian, their policies do things such as using Wealth in gate-keeping access to opportunities (via things such as Private Education) and similarly using Property Rights (mainly Land Ownership and related) to limit most people’s access to what they require to satisfy their basic needs, de facto forcing them to produce wealth for the Asset Owners in order survive - it’s Authoritarianism through removing people’s freedom at a systemic level with access to all basic needs gatekept via Wealth and Asset Ownership so that everybody not born into the Asset Owner class has only the “freedom” to starve and be homeless if they don’t want to work to create more wealth for the Asset Owner class, a more subtle use of force (as Force does get used, to enforce Property Rights) that the rather more direct “boot in the face” kind of Authoritarianism of Fascism.
Struggle sessions: left auth.
Fascism is Right-wing + Authoritarian and has nothing whatsoever of Left-wing in it.
Authoritarian certainly. But Mussolini was fascist, but held left wing beliefs like welfare and relief for the poor and government intervention and ownership.
The rest I agree with.
US Libertarians should theoretically be closer to anarchy than authoritarianism but the need to group together distorts the thinking. Liberalism is probably a better counterweight for authoritarianism.
government intervention and ownership
I think you’re confusing the Authoritarianism elements with it being Left-wing, possibly because what you were taught was Authoritarianism was the Soviet Union and the Nazis, with the focus on the latter being all about their Militarism and violent Ethnic-purity policies (namely, the Holocaust) rather than their Economic policies.
I was born in a country - Portugal - which had Fascism and the Government did way more intervention and owned far more things than it does now, 50 years into Democracy.
Centralization of control is as common in Authoritarian Right-wing systems as it is in Authoritarian Left-wing ones.
Yes, my definition of left vs right is purely bigger government vs smaller government.
But I’ve just read another definition which is equality of decision making (left) vs hierarchical decision making (right).
How are you defining left vs right?
Mussolini was fascist, but held left wing beliefs like welfare and relief for the poor and government intervention and ownership.
Welfare for the in-group is not (exclusively) left-wing. The Nazis had welfare for blonde blue-haired ‘aryans’ that produced lots of children. Also, neoliberal and conservative western governments love giving welfare to corporations and rich people. Even if your in-group is “all Romans” (in case of the ancient grain dole that Mussolini was inspired by) or “all Italians”, if the motivation for welfare is to empower the in-group to exploit the out-group, it’s right wing.
Government intervention and ownership are not (exclusively) left-wing. The original right wing - the monarchists in the French parliament - were pro-government intervention and ownership, with the government being embodied by the king. Government spending is consistently higher among Republicans than Democrats. Large ostentatious state projects with kickbacks for the in-group are bread and butter of pretty much every right wing government, from the massive Nazi government-owned holiday park Prora to the Space Launch System. Right-wing governments often forcefully nationalize projects run by the out-group, like Jewish shops in Nazi germany or Black Panther community support networks in the US.
The right wing may cloak themselves in the guise of the free market or of individual liberty or decentralization of power, or in the guise of community and centralization and rights that must be defended at the cost of freedoms. They will present themselves as underdogs and punks and outsiders or as rightful inheritors, powerful leaders, loyalists and patriots. Often they will switch narratives from topic to topic, going from underdogs fighting against the liberal elite who says you can’t say slurs anymore to patriots bemoaning the lack of solidarity of people kneeling in protest at a flag.
The one thing that unites them, the one thing that is consistent, is to exploit and oppress the out-group to benefit the in-group.
Contrast communist authoritarianism and mass murder, which were generally justified as being for the good of all mankind.
We are agreeing that fascism is much more strongly associated with the authoritarian/liberal axis than the left/right axis.
Fascism specifically centers around a hierarchy based on race, ethnicity, place of origin, sex, gender, sexuality, or some other (for the most part immutable) characteristic of a person. It also may specify heavy corporatism (as what governments like Mussolini’s Italy structured their economy around).
Leftism centers around abolishing all unjust hierarchies, including those that fascism relies upon. It is also anti-capitalist and, obviously, anti-corporate.
“Fascism” doesn’t just mean “authoritarianism”. Fascism doesn’t even strictly need a state – it’s mostly social and economic in its nature, and doesn’t say anything about the structure (or existence) of government. Anarcho-capitalism, for instance, starts to decay into fascism, where there may be no “government”, but rather private entities (like corporations and individuals) restricting or blocking the social and economic participation of certain groups based on a social gradient, or in general depriving people in those groups of rights (like enslaving, harming, or killing them, denying them food or healthcare, etc.). There are always enforcers of fascism, as it’s an inherently unequal and oppressive ideology, but whether the oppressors’ power ultimately comes from governmental organizations or non-governmental organizations doesn’t matter. You could argue this does constitute authoritarianism, and I wouldn’t disagree, but my point is that “big government” and fascism are entirely different concepts.
For the most part, fascism can be considered an ideology of emphasizing a supposed “former glory” of a nation or peoples, which co-opts socialist critiques of capitalism and twists them to emphasize immutable characteristics like ethnicity or masculinity as being the cause of economic woes, rather than class; Fascism, while taking significant influence from leftist ideology in its rhetoric, turns it on its head and repurposes it for the “Volk” (some population/identity based on generally immutable characteristics) rather than the worker. It ends in the dismantling of trade unions and other leftist structures, and an economy comprised of corporatoid organizations which is kept afloat by the constant drive for “purification” (the enforcement of a bigoted hierarchy) which never concludes, resulting in the gradual narrowing of who is included in the “in-group” (cannibalizing itself) after a certain point.
Leftism puts class warfare above all else, and while some leftists could incorporate fascist elements into their beliefs – that being, social conservativism, as elements like misogyny and homophobia aren’t impossible to find in the belief systems of self-identified communists (mostly apologia for the errors of authoritarian communist governments) – the socioeconomic structure of socialism compared to fascism is so radically different that it’s impossible to fit full-on fascism into a socialist structure. Fascism praxis perhaps may be observed as “welfare for a very specific class of peoples, reliant on the oppression of lower classes of peoples”, where the “out-groups” are forced into to the lowest classes, and the “in-groups” who are of lower classes may see a limited amount of welfare. Fascism combines class-based hierarchies with “they’re different than me”-based hierarchies; this very stark class division and exploitation of lower classes completely conflicts with core leftist ideology.
An excellent essay. And we agree that the simple left/right categorisation is woefully inadequate.
No they can’t. Fascist is not a synonym for authoritarian.
Ok. I’ll be more precise. Fascism is authoritarian, but not all authoritarians are fascist.
Mussolini was fascist, but held left wing beliefs like welfare and relief for the poor and government intervention and ownership.
At that level of discussion, a simplistic left-right characterization makes no sense.
What makes a fascist fascist is that they only defend welfare for the people they deem worthy and submit, who represent and strengthen the “nation”. That is not “left”.
What is usually called the left usually sees welfare as an end in itself and not exclusively as a means to strengthen the nation.
I think we are agreeing.
Left wing ideas are not fascist, but people with left wing beliefs can also hold fascist ideas (e.g. Mussolini).
It is a mistake to assume that only the right can be fascist.
Our Overton window is rammed so far right in America Bernie Sanders here is considered a radically dangerous communist, but in any other country he’s a slightly left democratic socialist.
It’s dangerous to our discourse and continually shifts sentiment further and further right beyond all sanity.
US politics have moved so far to the right that I’m pretty sure contemporary moderate Democrats are nearly interchangeable with Reagan-era Republicans.
That’s the first time I’ve seen that comparison but FUCK are you 100% right…
I hate to admit it but if the repugnicunts had put up a sane pre-reagan quality era candidate, I wouldn’t have voted for Biden.
Imo liberals are the real centrists because they understand that capitalism is failing society and the planet, but liberals still try to serve both the donor class and the public despite the fact that the interests of capitalists are diametrically opposed to democracy, society, workers, and the environment.
Not wanting people to die is a leftist thing now?
It’s more the idea that everyone counts as people. The further right you go the smaller the group you assign full person status becomes. Liberals are OK with a bit of genocide and/or slavery as long as the victims are sufficiently poor, distant, and profitable.
Not wanting people to die is a normal and sane idea.
People are still who they are but the world we live in has for the last half century significantly shifted to state authotorian and fascist idealogy has flourished in our ego centric rewarding capitalist economy
Political Left in the US aligns with center in Europe. Only adding to the evidence that political labels are arbitrary and subjective.
Fascist attack normalcy and misinformation adds to confusion. You have to believe its us and them, you have to pick a side.
Decent people stay true to what they are, causing the people who are fooled to listen to fascists to now label you a vilified left. You then have the option to confirm to your centrists peers or to stay true to your original ideals.
Currently i am aligned with far left anarchism But i can perceive plenty of context and societal structures where my identical ideas could be perceived as conservative.
America’s political compass is weird. On one side you have a party that mostly just wants to keep the status quo, only really doing changes where it is already desperately behind the times. And on the other side you have the conservatives.
I had a weird experience with this “have to pick a side” issue just a couple days ago on a different lemmy. According to the moderators there, not being willing to use violence against protestors was the same as defending them
Pacifism being perceived as hostile by both sides of modern politics is a great summary for the state of things.
Also a huge red flag for what may still come, we may not all realize it but very important parts of our collective history are being decided on today.
Let’s hope for a good outcome
Yup. Not wanting to get into an argument about what defines a “real women” gets you banned from posting.
Lemmy does not imply free speech.
Ehh, just get to the next instance over :/
Political Left in the US aligns with center in Europe. Only adding to the evidence that political labels are arbitrary and subjective.
Dutch right wing conservative parties are further left than the US left. Not all of them, obviously/unfortunately, but they’re there.
Basically.
For example, tens of thousands of people die every year in the US because of inadequate access to health care. Universal payer would be cheaper and result in fewer preventable deaths. Centrists do not support the policy and thus are willing to let people die in order to support the parasitic insurance industry.
The genocide in Gaza, homelessness, prison industrial complex, climate change, etc. all get people killed in preventable ways. But we have to protect the owner class so we’re not going to do any of the clear solutions. Letting people die needlessly is an acceptable result.
This sounds like the plot of a post modern movie about society collapsing
Has been for a couple of years now.
That is quite sad to read, but thank you
Well it’s certainly not a right-wing thing
Yeah. They own that now apparently. I think it happened around the same time they collectively agreed that both sides are the same.
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question. Both sides of what?
I hope this is a genuine question because they are referring to the Political Spectrum.
A “spectrum” can exist on a line, a 2D graph, or even a 3D graph. I’m unsure of the 4th & 5th dimensions, though.
It was! I didn’t quite get that considering they’re fighting over each others differences
I’m pretty sure centrists think we’re bad because we want to abolish private ownership of the means of production, unless “leftism” means something else where OP is from.
The political center wants to maintain the status quo with regard to private property.
Edited for clarity.
A big problem of this entire argument, particularly when Americans are making it, is that nobody seems to agree on who the “centrists” and “leftists” are supposed to be.
Turns out social democrats are pretty sure they’re leftists, but everybody else self-identifying as a leftist is convinced they are indistinguishable from free market liberals, while free market liberals think they’re center left while social democrats are pretty sure they are indistinguishable from neocons.
Unless you’re in the US, where apparently social democrats are both far left and communists, the word socialism has about as much meaning as a Rorschard test card and hard left people seem to be a figment of an AI’s imagination in that they appear to exist exclusively online.
So yeah, I really don’t know what the OP is talking about, honestly.
Edit: who exactly is the liberal in the original post?
ITT people conflating liberalism with centerism.
Liberals in Australia are our right wing hypocrites so it’s tracking for me
Is the US the only country where liberals aren’t clearly right-wing? I know liberals in the US that sincerely seem to lean left (they agree that capitalism is destroying our planet, that we need more worker co-ops, co-op housing, etc)
Well you guys did have that big party swap so idk
Idk, I find it hard to seperate liberalism from centerism (at least in the US). I know lefties usually argue that liberalism is a right-wing ideology, but there are liberals who sincerely lean left so the party is in a weird place where it isn’t truly left but it isn’t truly right either.
“I don’t want to think, but I want to pat myself on the back for being Above It All™”
Cool cool cool. Be proud of your ignorance I guess?
Some are proud of their ignorance, some seem to think that hating everything means they are intelligent with discerning tastes.
I know you are only speaking the truth but FUCKDAMN did you just depress the hell out of me.
Because I see it in so many self-righteously ignorant people. The state I grew up in was filled with people absolutely prideful about never once having read a book after graduating. AND they were so thoroughly convinced of their refined redneck discernment which in nearly all cases was just echoing the opinion of whatever authoritarian they were welded to at the time.
The more I go through life, the more I am convinced that the confident people don’t have a clue what’s going on, and the people that DO are generally never listened to because they present their ideas realistically, flaws and all, and therefore lack the bullheaded confidence that for some FUCKDAMN reason that humanity falls in line behind.
Well I apologize for the effects of the discussion, but you’re also right.
I come from a conservative white Catholic family, and a big part of getting my head right as an adult has been realizing that the negativity-first approach to life isn’t the only way to live, isn’t healthy, and that it’s OK for me to reject it. And I’m close with my family and see them all the time, so it’s unfortunate that even though they are nice to me and we have good times, they can just be a fucking downer to be around.
And you’re spot on about the confidence stuff, both in how the wrong people have it, and in how it works so well on so many people. And I’m 100% convinced it influences how strongly echo chambers and confirmation bias are with them. Their combination of misplaced confidence despite the prideful ignorance, and their default negative stance on anything that’s different or “other” just leads to them rejecting different ideas before even considering them. After all, anybody who doesn’t agree with all the truths they know is clearly an idiot and should be ignored, right?
Shared commiserations fellow recovering Catholic.
Unfortunately my negative-first approach is largely medical and so far no treatment has worked for more than a few weeks, but I remain hopeful.
How do we break up these echo chambers then? They’re no good for anybody and I haven’t met a single person that had all the answers.
I gotta admit I have some conservative values that I keep, like sincerely thinking that there should be very little regulation on guns and actively support restructuring of the atf.
That said, since only the most extreme viewpoints get amplified, until the barriers and enclaves of communication come down, until the rational is amplified over the extreme, we are going to have to deal with the fact that WHAT WE ARE DEALING WITH NOW is probably the most cooperative we are going to be as a nation for a very VERY long time, and in 20 years we are going to look back at the shit cauldron of online discourse 2015-preset the same wistful nostalgia Millennials think of the 90s for economic growth.
Left, right, and center.
If that doesn’t work you can always Fedjacket, complain that all governments are evil, and insist that wanting progressive reforms makes someone a tankie.
And here we see why reductivism isn’t generally helpful outside of academic frameworks.
Hold up… Are centrist people now lumped together with right wingers?
the problem is that people are called centrists because their major opinion is simply “the status quo is fine”, which is effectively just being a conservative but without the active outspoken racism.
The centre party here in sweden meanwhile actively promotes LGBT rights and obvious things like that, they actually have opinions on both sides of the spectrum and a vision for the future, and that vision is one that you might not consider optimal but it’s not obviously fucking evil.
But then they’re not centrist. If these people are conservative minus active racism, then they’re just “RIGHT WING lite.”
Why destroy the whole concept of centrism that way?
This issue doesn’t stem from the left, it stems from many self-proclaimed centrists actually espousing right wing ideology to the point it has become almost a dogwhistle.
dunno, but they always do it. ask any woman who dates men and has been single in the past five years.
Don’t you love how American commenters can’t see things like LGBT rights as obvious
Gay rights are human rights. No sane person cares what adults do in private. No sane person cares about who other people hold hands with and kiss
Centrists are seen as fence sitters because they are ok with the horrible things the system has baked into it, as they are comfortable enough to refuse to take a hard stance against it. Right wingers are people who actively destroy things.
I’ve been accused of being centrist, usually by American left wingers, on multiple occasions. I don’t go about defining my political views with a specific side, much less American sides, but if I am indeed an example of someone centrist, then I can safely say your statement is bullshit.
I could explain why, but I’m not sure if I’ll be spending half an hour writing something that nobody is going to read.
I’ll read it
sometimes writing is a great way to organize your thoughts!
In general maybe not, in these lemmy spaces absolutely.
They often are, because they often are effectively supporting similar policies. I think MLK wrote about this quite well in Letter from a Birmingham Jail. If you haven’t read that, it’s well worth the 20 minutes.
On a more specific note, many centrist Democrats are actually corporate Democrats, and they’re supporting many laws that Republican politicians are also supporting, laws that benefit big businesses at the expense of everyone else in the world.
Here are the two paragraphs you’re referencing from the letter he wrote from the Birmingham jail in 1963
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured
Oh, so, moderates, not centrists. Yeah.
From my point of view, virtually all of the people who call themselves “centrists” in U.S. politics are the people who say that both sides are bad, and when you dig into it, they think both sides are bad because they uncritically accept right-wing talking points (read: lies) and framing of the issues.
The problem with US politics is that there are only two sides, two parties. This lumps together all the worst elements of a particular point of view with the more moderate or logical ones.
The extreme elements of the American left are doing the incredibly ironic thing of reintroducing racist concepts, such as segregation, under the idea of it being somehow progressive. State that the slaves brought to the US were bought on African markets that existed centuries before Europeans ever took interest and you’ll get a veritable social media lynching mob come after you because it doesn’t fit in the idea that anyone with European origins need to feel shame for history long gone. I had an argument in Discord voice chats three times with some American leftists who were adamant that racism was entirely created by white people and that no other ethnic group in the world is capable of being racist (an ironically racist statement). These same kinds of people thought they could educate Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the RPG Cyberpunk, on racism because they wanted him to exclude black characters fram fictional gang called “The Animals” and didn’t like the existence of a Haitian gang called “The Voodoo Boys”.
In short; uneducated dumbasses who think they can speak for people who they never even met or consulted with, and get incredibly vengeful to the point of ruining people’s lives if you call them out on their bullshit. That is why someone can look up at how fucked up American politics is and say. without much difficulty, “Both sides are equally shit. Just choose a flavour”.
Apparently, yes, at least by some liberals and leftists.
It’s clearly an extremist view. Nobody in their right mind would do so much to alienate people who they also want to vote for their party.
YES.
My brother called me the other day, and after explaining how nature isn’t “take or be taken from” when there’s enough to go around. We got more into the myths about humans we’re taught, and eventually he asked how I identify politically, and about the difference between a leftist and a liberal
I told him liberals want the system to work, to be fair. Leftists look around and say “there’s so much food we leave a third of it to rot, why the fuck are people starving? What the fuck are we doing? No one is happy with the world we’ve created, why are we doing it? Why don’t we start with the assumption that everyone gets to live, and figure out the details from there?”
Leftists/progressives say “the reason for all of that is the oligarchy hoarding all the resources, so we need to start with stopping them from doing that”
Liberals kinda want the same things as progressives, but they don’t want to "hurt " the rich to get it. But of course if 5 people are hoarding literally everything the only way to get more for everyone is to take it from those 5 people. Liberals just can’t get themselves to take that next step.
(This is US liberal btw, might be different in Europe)
liberals say they want the same things as leftists. they do not.
In Europe, the Liberal party is pretty far right, tbh.
The rest of the world uses the name “liberal” for different things. I think left and (American) liberal are pretty much the same thing, but obviously since America has two words, America divides the left into two.
We used to think the conservative side of politics was fairly united, while the left was a mess, ranging from leninists through environmentalists through workers’ rights through people into the public good (and a thousand other divisions)
Now that conservative politics has been replaced by a radical mix of authoritarianism, individualism, anti-government, so I’m not all that sure they’re as united as they used to look
I don’t think that’s true. At the heart of it …
Liberals want to fix the system. They want to tweak things to make it fair, to make it work better
Leftists want to change the system. They want to rewrite the rules in a way that works better, the way things are currently be damned
Maybe I’d say liberals think the system CAN be tweaked enough to make it work for the people, progressives don’t think it can and want to create a system that does… But I do think the major difference between liberals and progressives is liberals serve the oligarchy while progressives want to eradicate it
I think it’s more like the system is built for the oligarchy, and liberals want to preserve the system. They’ll often support things like taxes on the rich or worker protections - but they don’t like the idea of something more direct
Neo-liberals do directly serve oligarchs, because they’re liberals who operate under myths about how capitalism works - the efficiency of corporations, billionaires as innovators and job creators, voting with your wallet. They think if you fix the economy, everything else will work out, and for every social service they make sure to send a pile of money into someone’s pocket. Thank God this seems to finally be declining
I think what makes this topic so complicated is we’re taught a lie - that the political spectrum is a line. It’s not two dimensional or a horseshoe - tankies are leftist authoritarians, but they’re not further left than anarcho-communists. On some aspects they’re pretty close to christo-fascists, but it’s not because they went so far around that they’re curving towards the far right. They just also want their end goal enforced from above, and also are willing to overlook a little genocide of the “enemy”
Meanwhile, anarcho-communists are on the other side of a different spectrum. They don’t believe in a large system of enforcement from the top down, they believe in building community from the ground up. They don’t believe in a system of rules, they believe in social bonds
The end goal is the same, but the methods couldn’t be more different
My point with all this is that the left want change, the right wants the status quo. Conservatives want a hierarchy under de facto aristocrats, liberals want a system of rules, and anarchists want community rule
This doesn’t all fit on a 2d spectrum, but it all makes sense when you break it down in more dimensions - you can nail down any coherent political stance to a point in this multifaceted graph space.
American liberals are different from liberals elsewhere, but what they have in common is they hold the legal framework as sacred. We already live in a world managed by English common law, they all want to perfect the laws, but resist anything that threatens the status quo
I don’t think centrists are against socialised health care.
There are people in this thread who think being centrist means you’re ok with a little genocide. What do you even say to that?
By answering whether someone like Joe Biden is a centralist and whether his actions contribute to genocide.
The reason your confused is because leftist have seen examples of people calling themselves centralist and also being okay with what is going on in Gaza.
By being okay I mean not trying to stop it actively.
It’s important to define what we mean when we use these terms/phrases.
It’s probably a bad idea to reply in the first place because I don’t really want to argue… at all, let alone about politics and what label I or someone else has, but fuck it.
I’m more confused about what you’re trying to say than what I think about Gaza. I don’t really care about Biden, I’m not an American. There’s nothing I can do about what he says or does. I can’t tell you whether he’s a centrist or not, frankly I don’t care.
Naturally, I don’t agree with any support whatsoever, financial, military, or otherwise of what Israel is doing in Gaza. The same applies for the vast majority of armed conflict… ever. It might apply to all of it, I don’t care to do a quick run through all of human history and make a judgement call on each and every one but… get this. War bad. Subscribe for more hot takes.
As to what I’m doing about it, I’m not protesting or arguing with faceless text online. I don’t have the time, inclination, or energy for it. I have a lot of things to worry about that are a lot closer to me. Elections happened, and are coming up, and I’m gonna vote according to my interests which happen to include not supporting Israel.
Having said all that, I’m not even sure how disagreeing with killing innocent people and supplying weapons for killing innocent people is a political alignment factor. Shit’s crazy, what the fuck.
As far as I’m concerned, both the far left and the far right have completely insane dealbreaker things I never want to see happen (again). The reason I think I’m centrist is that there are ideas on both sides that are a lot tamer that I think could help us all live fulfilling, comfortable lives. When I think about compromising with either side, it’s about trading between these tamer ideas. I think it’s strategically worthwhile to not get everything you want from those tamer ideas immediately so you can at least get some of them.
Surely I won’t regret typing this out.
As far as I’m concerned, both the far left and the far right have completely insane dealbreaker things I never want to see happen (again).
I’m so curious what dealbreaker things the far left has.
But overall, you misunderstood my point. It was that centralist could mean being okay with genocide as in they literally want to meet halfway between fascism and reasonability.
Like if one side said let’s not do slavery, and one side says let’s do slavery, a centralist compromised means being okay with some slavery.
My comment was more about:
Halfway between justice and injustice is still injustice.
You see it as fascism (the far right) and reasonability (the far left). I don’t really have anything to say to that other than, that is not reasonable. I come from a formerly communist country. I won’t entertain that bullshit.
Edit:
Like if one side said let’s not do slavery, and one side says let’s do slavery, a centralist compromised means being okay with some slavery.
This is completely batshit crazy, what the fuck. I’m a few more drinks in right now and don’t have the same filter, but “not slavery” is not what the far left is.
Edit 2: Yeah I probably could’ve phrased it better or just not answered. Sorry about that, shouldn’t have called you batshit crazy. If I were to phrase it better, I don’t believe that is a reasonable depiction of what the spectrum looks like. The far left isn’t a rainbow land of inclusion, acceptance, and happiness. I don’t really care to debate with communists the failings of communism, I’m not going to change my opinion on my experience and they won’t change their world view because of some random comment on lemmy.
formerly communist country
Far left doesn’t automatically = communism.
There are many flavours of socialism, including social democracies which I would call far left even though it has aspects of capitalism (it’s the end result that matters imo. If it’s more equality, that’s far left).
Which goes back to my original point, it’s really important for people to spell out what they actually mean when they use words or phrases that have been twisted by the other side.
Sorry if you’re fuming. Didn’t really mean to offend.
Thanks for waiving that little snafu, I appreciate it, sincerely.
As far as I’m concerned, social democracy is center left. Maybe there’s a difference between European and NA perspectives. I live in a social democratic country and I have to say life is pretty good.
This is what I mean by that depiction of the spectrum not being reasonable. I don’t see how someone can say that on equal distance from the center you have social democracy and genocide.
Yeah what?
I thought secure socialized programs were left and “fuck you i got mine” system was about as far right as you could get.
The centrist position would be universal healthcare, but less available to higher incomes who can afford portions of health insurance. Thus reducing limitations of too much tax going toward a top-tier health system, neglecting other areas of the nation like education, infrastructure, aged care, etc.
“If you can afford it, you can afford it. Don’t neglect it and don’t abuse it.”
I’m a centrist. I live in Canada. We have public health care here. Even right wingers here like it. People who are against public health care aren’t ideological, they’re in the pockets of private insurance.
If it’s not ideological, why is it always the conservatives in Canada and the UK trying to dismantle public healthcare? Come the fuck on.
Same pattern holds here in Sweden. It’s definitely ideological. The right wing ideology of “fuck you, I’m lining my pockets”
Yeah, US lefties are odd.
Where I’m from, if far left is 10, centrist 5, and far right is 0. You apply the US version to our spectrum and their left is like 5, centrist 0, right -5. Hell, not even, because the moderate-far right support universal health.
I’m centrist-left and I see the average US self-labelled lefties as generally more centrist or even right-leaning than me. Their whole spectrum and perspective is decades behind and heavy right-leaning.
But credit where credit is due, progress has gotta start somewhere and they no doubt see themselves as very progressive and left in their environment.
It’s not that the entire spectrum is further right, it’s more that the vast majority of society is dealing with actual praxis and thus living in some anarchocapitalist hellscape where fairly centre-liberal reforms are a big lurch left, while a small pocket of cosplayers are online pretending they’re about to start the February Revolution.
It’s not a one axis thing, either. Americans are also blissfully unaware of how hostile European leftism is against some of their cultural causes. We don’t talk enough about how it’s well accepted among Euro leftist circles that surrogate pregnancies are a form of human trafficking, or that all sex work should be banned. Culture is culture, left/right positions aren’t universal.
Ah, I see you’re a fellow “three-dimensional spectrum” person. Not the traditional two-dimensional one, or worse yet, the binary “If not this, than that. This and that are only options.”
More of a “people agree and disagree on different things, often for cultural and historical reasons, and the bundling of those things into pre-established packages is way less consistent than political traditions would suggest”. How much that’s the same thing I leave up for interpretation.
i like how this image is three different posts tied together precariously.
Does anyone consider that there might be a large number of the people that consider themselves to be centrists are near the actual center, and that everyone dunking on them is imagining center of our current Overton window? I think about that a lot. (Not the guy in the meme, just in general)
I mean, even if not, why do both sides shit on them instead of trying to bring them closer to their side?
Do we not want to make change? Because you need people for that. Are we just concerned about being correct? Because that does nothing to solve our problems.
Yes. As a European centrist, I would be far left-wing in USA.
we’re talking centrists here, not liberals, not moderates, there’s a DISTINCT difference.
The vast majority of so-called centrists are people who just don’t like stress of having a hard stance. That’s why they piss off people on both sides. Impassioned people who understand that progress is a fight need fighters to join them don’t like someone saying that they need to compromise when there are lives and futures on the line. People who see the larger picture are going to be a lot more committed and able to weather criticism.
But most centrists think that they can somehow ride the line between the two and avoid being condemned by either side. This is a thing people do in many circumstances not just politics, and it always makes both sides mad. It’s just a very basic human social faux-paux to think that you can appeal to principled people with a butchered version of their ideals.
A more generous interpretation would be that an “appeal to principled people with a butchered version of their ideals” is basically the definition of compromise. From their perspective, they’re just trying to keep the band together. Maybe the band needed to break up a long time ago, and they’re just holding everyone back. But I don’t think intellectual cowardice / laziness explains all centrists.
See, I agree with you on everything here, and I even used to hold this same position:
But I don’t think intellectual cowardice / laziness explains all centrists.
I really, really wanted to be charitable, as a former conservative, as someone who grew up in the deep rural south surrounded by hardline conservatives, and then flipped a hard 180-degree later in life, I figured my own unique perspective allowed me to see both sides.
Then the fire nation attacked.
And by that I mean covid happened, and with it came off a lot of masks. Now I believe that not only is centrism intellectual laziness, so is ALL political dysfunction. It’s as close as I will get to a twinge of centerism myself, that I have seen into the hearts of people and have seen that they share a common factor that unites us all: laziness.
It’s too broad of a term, and would take an essay to define properly in this context, but at heart it’s what drives everyone, a desire to avoid challenge.
Learning and becoming politically astute to even a grade-school level takes some amount of effort and self-improvement and betterment and study and acceptance of new ideas, and we have left the age of self-challenge. Just look at the state of video games with quest markers to do anything, and 30-second popular video clips for the shortest of attention spans, or make a comment more than three paragraphs in a popular forum if you need evidence that people are not out to challenge themselves broadly. They set into a position that feels comfortable based on who they’re around and who validates them, and they generally stay there. We don’t celebrate people changing their minds, if anything people treat it with shame, and not without good reason. I have been shouted out of leftist spaces for saying I used to be right-wing in some of my views. (Purity testing appears to be another common trait.)
Well said! I’ve come to terms with being Fire Nation, myself. I try to be Iroh but too often end up Mai.
Covid did a number on me. I have a thing about germs anyway, but the vitriol around masks and the anti-vax stuff really reset my barometer for what I can expect from other people. I’m basically just now getting some faith back in humanity whilst trying to pull my head out of my ego. But still, there’s a reason I spend more time with A.I. these days. Without dredging up the loss of third spaces and the effects of social media, I just gotta say - it seems like we’ve forgotten how to help each other. Like as a species.
The vast majority of so-called centrists are people who just don’t like stress of having a hard stance.
No, that’s a bullshit definition imposed by nuance-allergic ‘either you’re with us or you’re against us’ ideologues. Someone who consistently avoids taking an explicit stance on issues is not a centrist. Fence-sitting is not centrism–they’re only “so-called centrists” because ignorant people like you label them that.
A centrist is someone whose collective of views/stances is such that it would not really be accurate to label them with “left” or “right”. Furthermore, people like you also, in my experience, don’t seem to realize that, for example, “left-leaning” and “right-leaning” are in fact subcategories of “centrist”–the “lean” describes the direction that the majority (but not all) of their positions go.
The irony is that a lot more people can be accurately described as “centrist” than actually self-identify (or are accurately identified by others) as such (partially thanks to people like you constantly using the term incorrectly), while the hardline ideologues of both wings arguably hate ‘people who agree with them more than they disagree, but won’t go as far as they do’, more than they do the ones at the opposite end of the political spectrum, and call them “centrists”, instead of the ones for whom the definition actually applies!
That is absolutely not what a centrist is. Although centrists have a non-voting, disinterested crowd, it likely it isn’t any larger, by percent, than, say, leftists, who have a difficult time getting people of their own party to vote. More likely it falls between the Democrats’ less aggressive voter turnout and the Republicans’ more aggressive voter turnout.
A centrist, in general, may agree with some aspects of either party, and, depending on the political climate and the overall weight and balance of needs, will vote one way or the other after actually thinking about the issues involved. This is because they are willing to take on the personal responsibility of making a fucking assessment.
…as opposed to extremists, who take the simplest, least nuanced, most insulting take they can of anyone with a different opinion, and assume that that is what those with a different opinion are doing.
This is, however, pretty understandable, because extremists are emotionally, mentally, and overall psychologically incapable of hosting two genuinely differing ideologies in their heads without going on tilt and asserting insulting shit about people whom they, in actuality, know nothing about except a label they have chosen to vent their hate on.
I stopped listening to this bullshit when we had one party openly wanting to roll us back to the dark ages, allowing raped children to die and rolling back the civil rights… and another who just wanted like, healthcare mid populism. If you think it’s extremist to think we need to push back on fascism at all costs then we have nothing to talk about, there is no compromise with hate. That’s literally what they want. You are playing right into their tricks.
as opposed to extremists, who take the simplest, least nuanced, most insulting take they can of anyone with a different opinion, and assume that that is what those with a different opinion are doing.
And then you went and did exactly what he said, you threw nuance out of the window, made broad assumptions of all parties motives, and then levied a “with us or against us” thinking to it.
We could all chill the fuck out and focus on real issues. Issues like how the ruling class inflames these wedge issues like abortion, and woke ideology for this exact purpose, so we are too busy fighting each other to care enough about being robbed so we don’t band together and end capitalism… Most people think the way they are told to by their peer groups, that is to say their values are a byproduct of environment, and as long as our government continues to let billionaires exist, they will continue exploiting large groups of people to fight each other over issues, those issues, that if we were all left alone to our own devices, i feel pretty certain we wouldn’t be fighting over.
Let me be clear by saying i agree these wedge issues actually matter, but that’s why they are effective tools. But fighting over them creates more division which makes the wedge issues more serious, but if we could just collectively agree we are sick of capitalist money in politics and collectively force the government to end it, within 5-10 years you would see that we can have common sense policies again. But we cant do that while divided.
For me I see 2 things happening. 1) I see capitalism destroying the world rapidly, for real, while we are fighting each other over social issues global warming is rapidly closing in on ending our species. 2) I see a population trained to hate each other that cannot stand together against the ruling class that is going to destroy us all just so that they can live like gods on private islands.
This is what gets me, even when you make well reasoned arguments like this people just collectively what-about-ism you into the floor, and we drifter closer to the end. It feels like screaming into a vacuum…
Absolutely solid take. Well said.
“Divide and conquer” has worked from time immemorial. I may not agree with everything in socialism or capitalism, or other world views - there are lots of things everyone can disagree about in our variegated ideologies.
But the far greater threat is falling prey to the divisions used to control the populace, and thus being unable to effectively defend yourself and those you love against things like the ruling class centralizing wealth excessively while blithely ignoring matters that are critical to species survival.
And from what I can tell there is no way to convey this point to people effectively. Shit half the time someone reluctantly agrees with me I still know that nothing changed for them. Kind of like “yeah what you’re saying is true, but what-about…”.
If we cant stop demonizing each other we are fucked, especially when in the end the people who everyone is fighting against, are actually just like 5-10% of the population on other side of the aisle. I truly believe the large majority of people don’t really care that much and just vote the way they always have because that’s how they were raised, but social media and the news has tricked everyone into thinking that 1 side of the aisle are a bunch of transexual communist’s who get pregnant just so they can abort it, and the other side of the aisle are polishing there SS uniforms and dreaming about when they can finally go on a liberal killing spree. The truth is the people worthy of that level of critique are not most people, we are just being propagandized at levels the world has not seen before.
tl:dr
“Explain it to me like I’m 10 or i cant understand it.”
Centrists piss me off because inevitably they will treat civil rights as negotiable
No.
Civil rights are literally the things we happen to by and large agree upon because we have negotiated. We must always refine and improve our idea of civil rights and what they mean - and much of that refinement comes through negotiation.
Xx
The problem with leftists (and I say this as a leftist) is they resort to name calling of anyone who disagrees with them. Instead of listening to their point of view and trying to convince them otherwise. There’s a real “othering” going on.
Tankie. Chinese. Russian. Republican. Child. Moron. Bot. Shill. Purity pony. Trumper. Jihadi cheerleading Jew hater.
This is what I’ve seen leftists and progressives called right here on lemmy. Yeah, leftists resort to name calling.
I’m not saying who’s morally worse. I’m saying it doesn’t help people change their minds. It only serves to push centrists further away.
I’m not saying who’s morally worse
Then I will. Not only does the center enable the worst excesses of capitalism, they’re also far more rude than you and they accuse the left of being.
I’ve said things like “you are literally alienating people who, being reasonable in general, would be voting for you this election,” and been downvoted or argued against.
When someone openly shouts heil Hitler, I think I’m justified in ignoring their POV and calling them what they are.
There is also a point for the left not wanting to alienate all their voters so they are wanting to start slow. Personally I see this as a progress point for how left a country is. If their left is saying a little genocide okay it’s probably a right leaning country.
