A couple old friends of mine often riff about their being “centrofascists”, going back and forth with slogans like “You **must **agree that all sides of any issue are equally valid, under pain of death !”
Um, yes he very much is ? At the very least, he’s at the right fringe of the left.
But then again it’s a cliché at this point that American politics aren’t a left vs right thing so much as right vs slightly_less_right one.
We may have a semantics difference in how we decide what really is the center then. If Obama is a centrist, then I’m not sure what your definition is. Obama is much more accepted by the left than the right, so how can he be center? The right hates his guts. You can argue about his ideology being somewhere close to the middle, but I doubt anyone on the right would agree with that. Since we’re never going to agree on an ideological center, I think the only way to define the center is to look at the positions of those who are still considered party members, but lean most toward the other party. People like Manchin and Murkowski, or Doug Jones. Does Obama fit with them? Nah, he’s a ways left of that.
Well, he agreed to lower spending. He waged wars, deported lots of immigrants. He didn’t raise tariffs. He presided over a reduced deficit. He didn’t pass, or really even try to pass any real gun control legislation. He tried to appoint Merrick Garland, a moderate justice as agreed by the Republicans, to the Supreme Court. These are all conservative or moderate situations.
He also increased some taxes on the wealthy and got Obamacare passed, which was an attempt at a market-based solution to our health system issues, but, sure, left of center here in the USA.
If this is off-topic, I apologize for the hijack.
In a rational world, that would reflect a centrist position. But the right has gone so extreme and conspiracy-theory-laden, they consider those positions to be a betrayal of American values. So are we talking about where the center should be? Or where it actually is? I think that’s the discrepancy here.
When one party deals in reality, and the other is in fantasyland, in order to be in the center, you have to believe about half of the crazypants stuff.
Center does not move to the right just because white power got installed in the white house.
I’m not at all disagreeing with the policies, but what I’m saying is that a lot of people out there view it as a bug, not a feature.
I have no proof, but my suspicion is that your average relatively uninformed voter who isn’t firmly in either camp probably can’t really articulate whether or not the Green New Deal is an official Democratic thing, or AOC’s thing. Nor do they probably know what the Democratic party’s health care position is either- is it Medicare-For-All, is it Obamacare, is it expanded Obamacare, is it single-payer UHC, or something else entirely? Hell, I’m not entirely uninformed, and I can’t say that I have a good idea what it is, other than something more collective than the status quo.
I also have a feeling that this sort of uncertainty isn’t a good thing when it comes time for people to pick which candidate they want.
The presidential primary process is the main part of how this is determined. Chances are, Warren’s or Biden’s or Sanders’ or someone else’s preferred policies for health care, immigration, the environment, the Green New Deal (or not), etc., will become the “official Democratic party policy” on those issues – through election day, at the very least, and through the next 4-8 years if the Democrats win.
I mean he’s very close to the center in the wider, international context of left/right ideology and philosophy. Within the specific confines of US political discourse he *seems *left, but that’s a question of representations and Overton windows and all that, not an “objective” standpoint (to the extent that such a thing exists) ; hence the right vs slightly-less-right cliché. Even “hard left radicals !!!” like Bernie Sanders or AOC are hardly revolutionaries or anywhere near the general vicinity of, well, radicalism or radical socialism or whatever else nonsense they’re labeled as by Republicans or less progressive Democrats.
Sure, but then the current (or at least, the vocal) American right is profoundly blinkered about its own representations, to say nothing of that of their political opponents, so that’s not saying much :D. I mean, e.g. their idolizing Reagan as a paragonistic defender of star-spangled freedom domestic and foreign, when his administration was providing direct support to fascist dictators and paramilitary death squads makes precious little sense, when it comes right down to it.
I don’t know exactly how you’re parsing “really even try”, but he did try to pass gun control legislation.
CNN - Obama announces 23 executive actions, asks Congress to pass gun laws
Less than 30 days after Sandy Hook.
When virtually all of the people who call themselves “the right” agree with the extremist position in the WH, then I would argue that the center has shifted.
This is why I think the center is almost non-existent in today’s politics. You’re either on board the Trump train or you’re not. When one party has devoted themselves wholeheartedly to conspiracy theories, it’s very hard to find a middle that makes logical sense. I think there actually is a middle out there, but it’s defined mostly by ignorance. It’s the people who are barely paying attention.
I had in mind the kind of full-court press that they did with the Affordable Care Act. Asking congress to pass some gun laws is different than bringing it up all the time, pressing congress in general and individual congressmen and women, putting direct political pressure, etc. So, he really tried to pass health care reform (he succeeded) and he made a token effort to pass gun laws in the wake of a horrific school shooting, and then basically let it drop again.
This is probably different from how a Bloomberg administration, for example, may handle gun laws, because he’s really a fan of gun control, funds gun control organizations, etc.
That’s fair. Obama made modest efforts to pass gun control legislation and sought ways he could curtail gun rights through executive actions. I think it was more than a “token” effort (for an example of a real “token” effort, you could look back to the GWB administration’s brief lip service to renewing the expired federal AWB), but it wasn’t comparable to the effort / time / money expended to pass ObamaCare. You’re almost certainly correct that his efforts would probably be exceeded by a hypothetical President Bloomberg or President O’Rourke (although this last one seems to not be in the cards).
I think, there are probably more centrists that actually have more left or more right views, but understand that there probably needs to be compromise and are willing to accept a compromise that gives them some of the things they are concerned about, even if it doesn’t give them everything they wanted.
I’m not making the case that some racism is OK as long as there is also some equality, but I am saying that maybe you can have environmental protections AND a farm bill, or something like that, instead of insisting on “it’s my way or the highway”.
The “center” is a human construct, and human beings populate the ENTIRE planet. When the USA physically separates from the rest of the planet, THAT is when they (we) will have earned the right to have a “center” that applies solely to the USA.
Hell yeah. The GOP hasn’t been the party of defense and national security since the first Gulf War, nearly 30 years ago.
You don’t see the value of identifying / understanding the “center” of the American political spectrum in discussions about American politics?
We realize that our left and right are different from the left and right you might find in Latin America or Europe or China or Russia, but we can talk about our “center” and let Latin America talk about theirs, can’t we?
I don’t see it. What do you think it is?
You clearly do not understand, so let’s try this again. Please follow along. It’ll save both of us time.
What it means to be moderate: Social and political views tend to fall roughly in the middle between liberal views and Republican views.
What it does NOT mean to be moderate: holding some leftist beliefs and some radically right beliefs and averaging them together.
Here’s an example:
far left beliefs: hates elite one-percenters; against monogamy; promotes hard drugs
far right beliefs: white supremacy
Those were Charles Manson’s views. Want to average them together and call him a moderate?