Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
This has been my position since I was a teenager: centrists are the weak underbelly because they can’t pick a side and just want a middle ground.
Great sentiment, but you never have a side, a cause, and your “meaning” is always shifting to placate everyone else in the name of middleness.
To be fair to some of those people, they’re not all being unintentionally malicious. I used to call myself a centrist but that was in the transition phase between “conservative because everyone I know is” and “I have formed my own beliefs”. For most people that’s what the process of developing their opinions looks like. You don’t swing right from one extreme to the other. You take baby steps along the way. You start to see the cracks in what people around you are saying but you still mostly hear exaggerated caricatures of what the alternatives are so you’re sort of stuck in the middle because you don’t know where else it’s even possible to go.
Centrists are scum, but the truly disengaged “oh I don’t care about politics” people are much worse imo.
Compromise is an important part of government.
I too believe in centrism, so long as the parties are on equal footing and we apply ethics.
If the one side isn’t operating in good faith, and keeps shifting their view more and more extreme, the other side also needs to shift more and more extreme so that the compromise still ends up in the theoretical middle.
Current events are proof that your preconditions needed for compromise to work do not exist in the real world.
That’s because the democrats refuse to move left and don’t have a backbone.
“my centrism isn’t a problem, it’s DEMOCRATS for not being left enough, because then my centrism would really be centered”
Sure bud, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
You aren’t wrong about democrats being spineless, but Personally I could never try and compromise with someone who thinks my very existence and the existence of minorities gives them a reason to hate and persecute up to literal lynching and murder but that’s just me.
You missed the part about ethics. The compromise between murdering and not murdering minorities is to not murder minorities.
Replace “the real world” with “America” and you’re right. There is plenty of real world out here where there is no need to be tied to one party. In my parliamentary elections I’ve had 3 parties that I’ll choose from depending on what they’ve been doing recently. It all comes back to that stopid FPTP system forcing two parties on you.