It’s not surprising you get lumped with the super far left; the quiz heavily breaks down if you’re extremely far left (or far right), because it only presents two options which are extremely tied to a very narrow mainstream subset of political discourse.
I had to skip over most of this thread in the interest of a timely chore but my advice is that we can’t get anything done at all as long as an incompetent madman is the president. Removing him needs to be the top priority for all centrists. (I’m not one)
I’m a centrist, too. There is something about being terrified of AOC, but not the dumpster fire in our executive branch, nor the red tide of enablers in the legislative branch, that makes me think this is a new twist on centrism not previously explored. That Atlantic article cited is from 2014. The Obama vs. Romney era was indeed prime time for moderates, but we are years past that and all of those moderates have gone through Trump Vs. Clinton when we started having national paroxysms.
I feel like this is someone caught in the war of messaging, or lost in what Matt Gaetz would call the Marketplace of Ideas, or a former Republican who can’t afford health insurance or something. The middle is a big tent now and it’s surprising who you run into these days, calling for unity.
Even then moderates/centrists were much more commonly identifying and voting D.
So here’s what’s facing centrists.
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The parties and those more politically engaged are both more polarized than before. “Moderates” are thus less likely to feel comfortable with *either *party than before. “Independent” as a label grows in popularity, especially among those who are not so highly engaged.
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Team R is currently not at all centrist and has actively driven many of its leaners who were centrist out of the fold. And they are putting into place governance that is representative of the views of a minority of the citizen, in ways that will be very slow to reverse. (SCOTUS anyone?) Very few on Team R can afford to vote for other than an extreme Right perspective; the party is owned by Trump.
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Team D is less centrist than it had been but at least still has room for moderates within it. And even if the most progressive of its potential presidential nominees gets the nod (you pick who you think that is) the ability to execute the more progressive items will be very limited … even if there is a D majority in both House and Senate. (See how hard it was for Obama to move even very moderate legislation forward in his first two years with that circumstance.)
A moderate who wants moderate governance must recognize that governance has lurched far from the center to the far Right and that even an extreme progressive with great skills at getting things done in the executive with majorities in Congress would be hard pressed to do much more than shift the ship slightly away from that hard Right direction towards the center.
Any voter who wants moderate governance needs to work hard to get the current GOP out of power. The exact positions of the other candidate are actually immaterial to achieving that outcome.
Bumper sticker version: Vote for Parties, not for People
This would be an interesting discussion on its own. We have a tradition of celebrating the act of voting for the individual who we feel will best represent us but there’s no doubt to me that a system that paves the way for “individual instead of party” comes with its own drawbacks.
I’m also an independent, and have been for many years, in this little purple state. I don’t like either party. That insulates me from their messaging to some degree, and I must take that for granted.
It would make sense given the times that the middle, as a cohort, has moved several miles to the right to reflect the fact that right-wing goes all the way to the edges and over to Infowars. I can understand why individuals under this middle umbrella, now, are likely to possess more of a rightward tilt than in previous years and this is agreeable to a point. But OP lists nine (“conservative”) items on page one that look like they came straight from wingnut radio, one being “I don’t support healthcare for illegal immigrants.” (?) And he finds AOC terrifying. This is not the middle, I don’t what the hell it is. It has no business representing centrism. That is all.
It’s the second time I’ve run into this on the board in a month.
Another article of some salience. Can A ‘Moderate’ Win The 2020 Democratic Primary? | FiveThirtyEight
Idea is there are in facts many moderates within the D tent but they are moderate in different enough ways that they likely won’t coalesce around any one candidate.
Interesting. And salient, thank you. Check the quote by one Michael Wear:
Who is Michael Wear:
What is Bethany Christian Services? (per Snopes)
They’re the people that placed loads of separated kids in foster homes and maybe didn’t keep track of them. Maybe. :shrug: We can’t really know. But there he is, an evangelical white man, by definition pro-life and anti-LGBT and a believer in culture wars, with a slight problem of missing brown children, making an appearance in the 538 blog as a moderate Democrat and issuing demands. He’s a moderate like I’m a fairy princess.
Why, I ask you, and the room, would both this man and this blog believe that he represents moderation?
That is, in fact, exactly what he said. He said that if someone is labeled a terrorist they should have no right to defense council, no right to not testify against themselves, no right to confront witnesses, no right to a jury trial, no right to have a ‘not guilty’ verdict mean anything but ‘start the next show trial’. Most critically, he stated that they should be presumed guilty - that simply slapping the label ‘terrorist’ on someone means the government should not have the burden of proving that they did anything wrong.
If they have no presumption of innocence
The idea that they should have ‘human rights’ is utterly meaningless if they have no right to due process. Without trials and
[quote]
- I do not claim to be an expert on international law, but I would posit that there are one to perhaps many international human rights laws or wartime codes of conduct, et al. that could be adopted for terrorist suspects/crimes.
Because I can slap the label ‘terrorist’ on anyone, there’s nothing magical that makes it not apply to US citizens, and in fact a lot of groups in the US are correctly referred to as terrorist groups. And since there’s no presumption of innocence and no right to have a lawyer under your system for someone being declared a terrorist, how would you even meaningfully argue that you’re a citizen?
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/03/us/us-citizen-detained-ice/index.html
Omar Khadr - Wikipedia (Canadian not American but shows what happens)
Your statement that if someone is labeled a ‘terrorist’ they should be presumed guilty and have no right to a meaningful defense in court means exactly that the government should be able to do whatever it wants to someone labeled a ‘terrorist’, including torturing and killing them at will, like has been done at Guantanamo Bay.
Not sure how you want to define moderation.
Is it being in what you consider the middle on all axes?
Is it having some balance of positions that are some left of that point that you believe is center and some to the right?
I am sympathetic to the article’s position favoring the latter, which is why so defined moderates will not necessarily coalesce together. One can be rightward on religious issues (as are some Hispanic and Black voters who vote D as well as this man) but leftward on others. Another could be right on gun rights but left on everything else.
They are not able to be described as right or left. If not centrist and moderate what word should we use? “Mixed bags of positions” just is not going to get traction.
Our OP is a mild case of this but with only a few positions that go rightward and more that are pretty liberal. Identifying the former does not invalidate the latter.
I don’t know in what ways you are like a fairy princess. Are we talking Tinkerbell world or Tolkien? The newer Tinkerbell or the original?
You might be surprised to learn that there is a not inconsiderable number of conservatives who also support a Universal Basic Income and not just some fringe people. Conservative economic luminaries such as Milton Friedman support a UBI.
And, as it happens, some liberals oppose it. In short, I would not chalk this one up to one side or the other just yet.
I didn’t bother to check a box for President in 2012 as I had no preference. For the second time in my life, I left it up to the gods and my neighbors. That is centrism. Things are different today, I’m much less willing to compromise on certain issues, and far less tolerant of certain partisans, so I won’t mind shedding the label when the label does not apply (these are not normal times.) The label is, or was, only shorthand for a place on the political spectrum, not interchangeable with “moderate”.
“Moderate” to me suggests average, garden variety, no frills. I don’t think an average Democrat makes snide remarks about other Democrats and their culture warring. But this one did and that’s what is interesting. I’d call him “conservative”.
That is not “centrism”, that is indecisiveness. Not remotely the same thing.
Not remotely the same thing, because…?
Centrism is an ideology.
Leaving it, “…up to the gods and my neighbors…” is gambling.
Can you describe it?
Average on all dimensions or average … on average? I suspect very few are average in all axes, in all dimensions, but many more are average on average.
Sort of like students all with average GPAs but one who does better in math and poorer in science and another who does better in English and worse in Spanish … so on. They are all average students but they are not all alike. An average student does not necessarily have an average grade in all classes and a centrist voter is not necessarily in the center of every issue.
What defines them is what they place the highest values on.
When push comes to shove do they vote for the person who wants to act on climate change, immigration and criminal justice reform, even if they do not share their views on abortion and “religious freedom” … or do the latter take priority over the former? Or do they passively let others decide for them?
The last one is clearly not centrism.
Nobody has proposed a law saying that there should be a maximum of 5:1 between CEO pay and lowest worker pay, but we always see stats posted about how in 1950 it was only Y:1 but today it is X:1 with no further elaboration on why that is an important thing to mention.
Likewise a poster upthread believes that owning handguns in antithetical to our values, but then states that he would not criminalize them.
To make these statements imply a hostility towards the object such as if I own a handgun, or believe that CEO pay disparity is not indicative of anything negative, then perhaps I don’t want to vote for that person, even though that person did not make the 5:1 proposal?
It would be like if I said that illegal immigration has risen from X in 1950 to Y in 2019. Would you think I was giving out an important little trivia factoid for amusement? Or would you think that I thought illegal immigration was becoming a problem? If you called me out on it, I don’t think it would be proper for me to say that I wasn’t making any particular point.
Sure.
You know you could Google it too right?