totally equal

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.
- 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).
- "International" meaning certain select European countries, ignoring the other shitty European governments of course
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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
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

Reminder that objective political centrism is either social democracy or democratic socialism.

Not Reagan.

I'm not sure calling democratic socialism a centrist political system is reasonable. The intended changes to society are still radical and their gradual implementation doesn't change that. The intended outcome is still some flavor of communist utopia, and that's still reasonably leftist I'd say.
- I'm not sure calling democratic socialism a centrist political system is reasonable.
- Okay buddy far right winger.
- the intended changes are radical but good for everyone, and involve no sacrifice or tolerance for mess in getting there, slowly and conservatively enough that nobody's too uncomfortable at any point except the people who were already DEEPLY uncomfortable and fucked by the current shape of things, not rocking the boat too much, etc.
  that's, like, the definition of moderate. it's the psychology and strategy right wingers claim to have when they're pretending to not just be evil monsters who get off on oppression, applied to 'make the world better'. that's almost the definition of centrist.
- That sounds like a claim that centre means conservative (dictionary conservative rather than political party)
  They want change to be done slowly.

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.
- This shit right here is why I hate to argue about labels or whether someone is/isn't liberal/leftist/centrist/conservative/whatever. At best, they're an extremely vague, ill-defined, hyper-individualized label that means different things to different people. One person says "I'm a leftist," and they mean it as "I'm a progressive Democrat who supports heavily regulated capitalism, labor unions, LGBT rights, and am pro-choice." Another person says "I'm a leftist," and they mean it as "I'm an anarcho-communist who believes billionaires should forcibly redistribute their wealth, and I don't give a rat's ass about LGBT or minority rights because they're a bourgeoisie distraction from class consciousness."
  I don't care about your label, I care about your policies. Those actually tell me something about you.

"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.
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.
Left, right, and center.

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”

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.
- "Yes, you're correct, as clearly demonstrated by the Gazan 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.

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

And I'm the left, and I think the center left are capitalist cryptofascists, hypocrites who virtue signal about social justice to hide their opposition to economic justice, while ultimately achieving neither.
And I think the "far left" are generally good people who seek both social and economic justice. Some of their ideas for attaining justice are both moral and practical, while other ideas are impractical or would do more harm than good.
And I suspect, if I was a right-wing conservative, I would feel the same way about the center right and the far right.
All depends on where you stand, huh?
The "far left" to the person in the post is most probably just anyone left of American corporate democrats. If you think we should have public healthcare, you're ""far left""

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.

Xx

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.

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.
- 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.
- Centrists piss me off because inevitably they will treat civil rights as negotiable
  No.
Yes. As a European centrist, I would be far left-wing in USA.

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'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.

Who are the centrists even. I am a pro capitalist and I am extremely pro universal healthcare and education in addition to free market economy. It seems what was meant by „centrist” is conservatives in the context of American politics.

Which primo is USA centric and secondo idk if even is a good definition of the word in that narrow context.

Centriside

Centricide. I'll be taking that.

true (talking about beathecult reply)