A centrist is a privileged person who can act like politics is pure sports and play “devils advocate” for fucking pedos.

Losers, the lot of them. Take an actual stand on something.

Depends on your definition. If it’s someone who agrees with different sides on different stuff, that’s fine. If it’s someone who just doesn’t take sides, then yeah that’s bad.

In western capitalist dictatorships, “centrism” means an acceptance and non-opposition to the status quo of capitalist rule, liberalism, and landlordism.

Any opposition to poverty, homelessness, hunger, or rule by capitalists, is deemed “radical”, and outside of respectable discourse, even though these should be just a baseline of human decency.

Some resources:

• Liberalism - The tyranny of wealth
• Losurdo - Liberalism - A counter history (audiobook)
• Can’t we use voting to solve our problems? Is violence really necessary? What about Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi? audiobook

“Meet me in the middle” says the unfair man. You take a step forward, he takes a step back

“Meet me in the middle” says the unfair man.

Strawman centrists are drawn as people who think the right choice between genocide and peace is only-killing half. This is obviously nonsense, yet you’ll see it a lot even in this thread.

A proper centralist is someone that disposes with political tribalism and instead chooses their position on issues individually. Sometimes they’ll agree with one party, sometimes another. It depends who has the better policy. They believe that no party has all the answers.

I would say that if everybody did this it would be fantastic.

However, they are rarer that rocking horse shit.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

centrist

Which axis? How are the maxima defined on both ends?

Centrism, as in what? The center of the Statesian political parties? Then yes, considering both parties are right-wing. The center of two arbitrary points? Depends on the points. “Centrism” is inherently an irrational way to describe political views, being in the center of two points adds no value. If someone says we should kill everyone with glasses, and someone else says we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t kill half of the people with glasses. What centrism does in practice is give people cover to obfuscate their actual views, it isn’t a position by itself.

If we are talking US politics than yeah i fucking hate em. Moderate dems are just blue facists.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

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.

MLK’s perspective on centrists is perennial. They’re Judas goats.

There is a tendency for some people to think anyone who’s not exactly like them is bad. If they’re saying that about centrists, it probably extends to anyone actually on their side of center but not in the right way, as well.

Anyone who believes the ficticious idea that if everyone is mad at you, then you’re making the right decisions is certifiable.

Centrism is okay during good times, when managing the country is all it takes and the political climate isn’t poisoned. During times of crisis, however, it’s horribly ineffective, because centrists are usually quite averse to any large-scale reforms and their ineffectiveness will only benefit (usually right-wing) radical parties.

I don’t believe the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are useful to describe people. We can, and should, aim to be more specific.

As Cowbee pointed out already, ‘centrism’ is a vague concept, especially since this site isn’t just people from the USA. Does it mean people who are apathetic about left-right politics? People who intentionally position themselves in the middle? People resistant to changing this terrible tragedy?

Even in my country, and my country is progressive compared to the USA, both the center-right and center-left parties (I’m using Wikipedia’s evaluation here because I object to the left-right political scale) are funneling wealth up to the rich, destroying our environment, compounding housing issues, supporting an ongoing genocide and scapegoating immigrants. Seeing either of these parties as acceptable is a serious issue, and is complicity in the crises these issues create.

That doesn’t mean I absolutely judge these people as ‘bad’, perhaps ignorant or misled but not bad, there are many sincere and caring ways through life that lead people to these harmful positions, but it’s a seriously harmful political position which we, as a society, are obligated to shift. And yes, apathy is a political position too, there is no ‘apolitical’: the status quo is just the ideology of the ruling class.

It’s hard to justify centrism in the context of the US, where one party is radically attacking peoples’ rights and re-writing the constitution to support it.