I often see on here that someone that says they are Center just means they are right wing.
Eg. this post https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2492350/centre-party
Center Party = Far right.
And I get that that is often true, but that got me thinking, when is someone actually “Center?”
A true centrist is someone who considers both left and right positions carefully, then sides with the right.
Centrism is rarely a coherent ideology and to most people it’s seen as the “default” or “starting” position of politics. In reality, issue by issue, there is rarely a coherent ‘in between’ position. Centrists tend to be politically naive, and navigate the world by intuition (they call it common sense). The Right dominates people who think this way.
You just described the entirety of .ml and that pseudo-progressive movement on lemmy pretty succinctly.
The only thing I’d add is how it’s all a made up front to look like they are active and committed to a belief, but when it comes time to do anything meaningful at all, they cannot be bothered.
Their entire ideology can be summarized as: just a bunch of words on the internet.
Sorry, no. Politics is about tradeoffs. The defining tradeoff of politics is how you balance individual freedom from interference, with public services like public transport, sanitation healthcare. Most people would prefer to be left alone by the government and to be able to get on with their lives, but most people would also like there to be a social safety net and convenient things like buses and trains which can only really be tackled with government involvement.
But in order to have sanitation, say, you need people to drive bin lorries, and so you need to convince people to drive bin lorries (maybe by paying them, or maybe by punishing people who are allocated to driving bin lorries by the government and don’t do it) which involves a curtailment of freedom - either because the government is taking money off its citizens, or punishing people who don’t do what it says, or whatever. There will always be jobs that people want to be done but don’t really want to do if given a completely free choice.
And so, there is a tradeoff: how much does the government interfere to make those jobs get done? Whether it’s charging taxes or job allocations, the better you want public services, the more the government interferes.
And because it’s a tradeoff, there is a continuum of reasonable positions. It’s not that you can only consistently think we should have Marxist-Leninist communism, the state tells you what job to do and if you refuse you are sent to the gulag, or an anarcho-capitalist hell-state where nobody ever collects the garbage because nobody wants to pay for it.
And that’s only the most important tradeoff - there are infinitely many other tradeoffs where fulfilling one shared goal impinges on another and how you resolve it can be expressed on a continuum. People tend to have a broad direction on all of these - left wingers prioritise public goods over individual freedoms (but still think both are good), while right wingers prioritise individual freedoms (but still think both are good). Even the MAGA “healthcare is communism” morons still think that there should be healthcare and transport and so on (they just disagree about how it should be provided and paid for and what form it takes). Even the communists think freedom is good as long as it doesn’t interfere with some greater goal.
I mean, there’s way more dimensions to this than just freedom vs. safety net. The dominant form or right wing politics, right now, is very much not libertarian.
But yes, “everything is actually the right” is not how directions work.
It doesn’t have to be an ideology.
People don’t fit neatly into boxes or necessarily have to subscribe to an ideology fully.
Centrilsts might be politically naive yes, but that doesn’t just make them Right wing automatically?
you’re trying to be rational and thoughtful here.
that makes you an evil centrist, clearly.
the people on lemmy here don’t want to discuss things, they just want to label you as awful for not being as politically hardcore or pure or whatever as they believe themselves to be.
Centrism is the ideology of not having an ideology. If you’re not working from root axioms, if you’re just winging every moral decision… that’s being a loser, not politically intelligent.
oh, praytell us wise sir, what are these ‘root axioms’ from which you are so intelligent?
lol condescending asshole… They’re supposed to be YOUR axioms, not mine. They could be anything you supposedly care about.
The point in identifying and using axioms is to not accidentally be a hypocrite, like every Republican that voted for Trump that thinks small government is the way to go.
Centrism describes the views you have, not the methods you have used to obtain those views, so this is incorrect on a base level. Someone who thinks through their views from first principles and lands on having views between the current left and right (somehow, seems hard to do but it’s possible) is a centrist. Someone who wings their views and pays no attention to politics at all but happens to align more with a right or left ideology is not a centrist.
Centrism. Not finding yourself in the center.
Yes I know what you said. I’m doing this thing called disagreeing where I think something different than what you do.
It’s comments and people like you that divide us
Why I hate being left sometimes
No it isn’t… I’m not feeling very divided by that guy.
Speak for yourself, the left alienates allies.
Ok
- Person currently causing division
lol no.
It’s people like you who insist labels are more important than beliefs that divide us. Genuinely, your ignorance is beyond vile in this context.
I don’t think OP is the one here I’d say is obsessed with labels. The entire question is basically just asking what’s behind them.
It’s pretty much naive realism applied to politics.