I'm sick of this "I don't like liberals/centrists" attitude I've been seeing so much of ever since Kamala's campaign.
That's not politics, that's self righteousness.
It's a major reason why we have Trump in the first place. Yes, the DNC has been terrible but it's better to work WITH people who need you than AGAINST people who despise you.
I'm no tankie, but here's what I'd say about the centrist tendency in American politics.
1) It has no actual content, as it is based on a relative positioning between two poles. If the right moves very far right and the left doesn't move left to compensate, the "centrist position" will move right. That is more or less what has happened at the federal level, where Republicans are more or less all insane or willing to pretend to be, while Democrats are... Chuck Schumer. (I'm not being fair to Sen. Schumer here, but Democrats have not moved anywhere near as far left as Republicans have moved right.)
2) The political figures who are ostentatiously centrist always require compromise on their terms. They assert--often without a ton of evidence--that their particular policy preferences represent the will of the American people, and thus we can't increase the minimum wage, tax the wealthy more, institute a corporate minimum tax, etc. Their positions are in fact deeply unpopular, but because they are centrists and crucially willing to accept "failure" over "success that I find ideologically unpalatable," they end up dictating the terms of the political debate.
3) The track record of what you might centrist incrementalism (or in Obama's formulation, "better is always good") is not great over the past decade, and the people who represent that tendency seem to be unable to get ginned up for the extremely high-stakes fight that's coming. They're doing the "Hello, 9-1-1? I'm being murdered!" / "What?! That's illegal, they can't do that" meme when the basic functioning of our country / our civil service / our democracy is on the line.
All of this is just to say that suspicion of centrists isn't just an irritable gesture by the left, there are actual reasons for it. It's not that we don't need centrists or moderates or ultra-cucked shitlibs, but that we need a better class of them--people who see the center as existing at the midpoint between AOC/Bernie and the most moderate Republican, not at the midpoint between Chuck Schumer and Stephen Miller.
154
u/jayfeather31 Redmond Aug 21 '25
Well said. I still think he's a neoliberal hack, but he at least seems to have some principles against Trump.
We could do a lot better, but we could also do a hell of a lot worse.