Someone whose personal beliefs are that abortion is morally repugnant but who is against making it illegal is very different than someone who wants to make it illegal.
Claiming that someone with personal beliefs that guns are bad and who still accepts that others have the right to believe otherwise and to own them responsibly is going to confiscate guns was what was objected to.
Sure you are free to not like someone’s beliefs that tour choice is a bad one. I’m pretty sure you disapprove of some of my choices. We can still allow each other the freedom to make what the other thinks is a poor decision.
I used to think I was a “centrist”, but it was really a way for me to always claim that none of the problems of the day were my fault. I finally decided that it was a poor way to go through life. Pick a side, and work with that side.
Also, long, long ago I used to think I was a libertarian. :smack::smack::smack:
You’re reading the wrong articles or perhaps not bothering to go past the first paragraph. When I see this it’s always in the context of a larger discussion of how income inequality is affecting society.
Or it could possibly mean that as a liberal I would honor the law of the land, instead of conservatives who approach anything they don’t like by wanting to make it illegal, no matter how much popular support it has. (Homosexuality, marijuana, background checks, abortion, separation of church and state, …)
Somewhat related, but support for banning semi-automatuc rifles is in the minority at 40 percent, but once you ask about a ban on the AR-15, it shoots up to 60 percent support. People oppose broad restrictions but are much more agreeable to specific gun grabs, even if there are hundreds of guns that operate exactly the same.
Never gonna happen. Due to party discipline, the Republicans have historically displayed the tendency to place themselves in the clutches of whomever can grab and hold the majority of the power, but Democrats love to schism.
The day after the Republican Party ceases to exist, the Democratic Party will split like an atom of Fr223.
Gallup. 28% of Republicans support the idea. Fewer than Ds to be sure but not an insignificant number.
This is interesting. Among White UBI polls negative 26% among college educated whites but positive 2 among “white working class”.
But another poll finds that “less than 17 percent of Trump voters in the survey supported the idea of an income-tax-funded UBI. Indeed, among those who voted for the Republican candidate, 64 percent strongly opposed the policy.”
So some conservatives yes, but not the ones who voted for Trump I guess. Even though they are more commonly white working class. It seems contradictory to me but there it is.
Wiki doesn’t assert that centrism is an ideology like you did. It does say that some ideologies can be centrist.
What’s the difference…an ideology would suggest that people are deliberately finding the midpoint in a controversy and staking a claim on it, for the sake of being the middle ground in a controversy. Which some might be doing, and which may be the focus of the WaPo article cited by madmonk28 that I can’t access. I’m not sure. We do know that can be an institutional-type view that explains some of the complaints you hear about the media and political coverage. It follows a certain formula: the administration or a government official makes some false or batshit claim, and an opposition gathers in response with rebuttals, and the media dutifully presents both sides to the public in equal measure, on equal footing. Over and over again. That’s a kind of ideological centrism.
Centrist people can be a different thing, they’re just there, in the middle. Party or no party, they’re likely to take offense at others who don’t want illegal immigrants to get health care and question their humanity, ffs, not recruit them. That’s just a general heads up.
Thinking would be easy, and strict ideologies all the rage if simple principles could be relied on, and details or quantitative effects were irrelevant. Here are some examples:
Mr. A thinks the right to bear arms is inviolable. AR-15s? Ha! Everyone has the right to bazookas, anti-aircraft missiles, nukes and weaponized anthrax. It’s all there in the Constitution.
Ms. B wants the right to kill her fetus. The month before birth? Why not the month after birth? Age 10, age 20, whatever. If the kid is still living in my house then he/she is mine to dispose of.
Mr. C wants to ban carcinogenics. We banned asbestos which was causing tens of thousands of cancer deaths per year, and similarly for secondhand smoke. But we need to ban paprika also; even its mildest forms can kill. Isn’t all human life sacred? Isn’t a single cancer death due to paprika too much?
I hope you get my point. If “centrism” means the ability to find a middle ground between hilariously extreme positions, then count me in!
I notice you didn’t deign to write real numbers, using “Y” and “X” (just like the guy opposed to all carcinogenics who isn’t happy to reveal how many lives the banning of paprika would actually save).
Let me help. According to this source the CEO-worker wage ratio at big companies was 312:1 in 2017 and 20:1 in 1965. It appears that median worker, not lowest-paid worker, was used for the comparison. (Those figures are for the U.S.A. The ratios are much less in Europe.)
312 is significantly larger than 20. For those who see no problem I’ll ask: 3000:1? 30,000:1? Is there any point beyond which you would see a problem? Or is this a matter of integrity to “principles.” If the 2A gives the right to bear arms then combat helicopters and nuclear weapons are on the table. If it’s good that a free-enterprise system doesn’t impose identical wages for everyone, then the more disparity the better?
AFAIK, no American politician or opinion-maker outside the Yahoo lunatic fringes is proposing absolute salary caps. Instead the inequality is addressed with gradual measures, or tax policies.
The present U.S. tax code calls for 35% marginal tax at $210,000 and only 37% at $25,000,000. Is this best practice? Is the $25,000,000 earner doing only slightly better than the $210,000 earner? Bill Clinton proposed that salaries beyond some threshold ($1 million?) should not be deductible to the corporation. Perhaps that should be extended somehow to bonuses and stock options.
Some of us think that a dollar spent on food for a hungry human child is better spent than on feeding caviar to the cats of an indulgent billionaire. Nobody wants to steal the cat’s caviar at gunpoint, but we might want to push the billionaire from a 37% bracket into 39% so we could fund subsidized childcare. Does that sentiment mean that we are Stalinist central planners?
I did not say you did. I said Dianne Feinstein, senior Senator from California, wants to ban firearms.
Except for those of her security detail, of course.
I think the tax rates are too low for higher incomes, too, but-
If you want to spend your dollar on for a hungry human child, go right ahead. That is different than wanting to spend someone else’s dollar the way you would like; your billionaire can spend their own money as they want. And their taxes, at 35% or 39%, feed far more hungry human children than you or I could with our earnings over our entire lifetimes.
Does she want to ban *some *guns? Yes. Does every public actor in the U.S., including the NRA, want to ban *some *guns? Yes. The only difference is which set of guns they want banned. Any argument that doesn’t include that qualification is disingenuous and not worthy of our time.
Ah, the whole “Warren Buffet should just write a check to the government” canard. Or is it the “charities should do the work, not the government” positions.
Both issues have been discussed and discussed and most people not part of the Cato Institute realize that both positions are untenable. There is a reason that the government should be expected to handle certain things and a reason we as a people should be required to fund those efforts adequately.
Relevant to the OP: I was glad to see that Left Hand of Dorkness brought up the Overton Window. The fact is that window seems to have moved as far to the right as the country could bear and is now suddenly creaking slightly leftward.
It can be argued that means we are finally moving it to an area that better represents where we stand as a nation. To be sure, it was puzzling that Republicans kept winning elections while their actual positions on topics that are important to Americans have consistently skewed more extreme to the right than Americans would poll.
The false equivalence of a few congresscritters such as AOC are somehow the exact same as, say, The Tea Party was seems silly to me. The Tea Party got things done. Terrible things to be sure. Things I didn’t agree with and things that the past decade have shown to not be beneficial to this country. They had enough power in the Republican caucus to give Boeher fits and usually acquiesce to their extremism. Whereas Pelosi may disagree with some positions and tactics of the freshman class but she probably won’t call them assholes and what some may call a mixed record of dealing with them I charitably see as her balancing their enthusiasm with her ability to work the system.
My point is that those who say centrism is dead are wrong: The Democratic Party, thanks to the Overton Window, is a centrist party with a minority fringe that is slowly moving it to the left. Even when they have legislative control, they attempt (often misguidedly, in my opinion) to work with the opposition party.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, has mainstream views on most issues that are extreme to the right and an unwillingness to compromise unless you mean how someone like Susan Collins who talks a big game but reliably falls into line when she is needed. Being an ineffectual contrarian is literally the farthest to the center than a Republican on the national stage is allowed to be.
So supporting Democratic candidates should be easy for the OP. Even if that was just because they weren’t Republicans would be enough as it stands now. Fortunately for the OP, that isn’t the only reason,
This reminds me of the George Carlin joke about drivers. Anyone who is driving faster than you is a maniac and anyone who is driving slower than you is a moron. I think this applies to someone’s politics as well. We all know someone further left or right than us that we think is either nuts or purely evil, respectively. That doesn’t make us centrists.
Enlightened centrists are just about the most annoying people I can think of. How can you pay attention to what is going on and still not pick a “side”?
Nitpick: “Centrist” doesn’t mean “unable to pick between the Ds and the Rs.” I think I speak for many centrists here in saying there is no longer any doubt whatsoever which side we must support.
Note the use of the word “these”. That word is used to indicate a subset of a greater whole. As in the phrase “These Republicans are morons” implying the existence of Republicans who are not morons. Your use of the phrase “walked it back” is pejorative, clarified might be more accurate.
Conversely, I am required to admire your ability to take something that someone actually said and tell us what they actually meant.
Trump has walked back hundreds if not thousands of things he has said over his lifetime. I assume that means you believe he only meant the original saying and not any of the corrections. That must give you a very… interesting view of his convictions.
Citizenship has nothing to do with it. The fifth amendment, to pick an example, applies to anyone under US jurisdiction. It says “persons”, not “citizens”. There are rights that apply only to citizens (I can’t vote in the US, nor can I donate to a political candidate), but there are also those that apply to non-citizens as well.