How was it? The right says "we want to do genocide", the left says "no, we don't want any genocide". So the right responded "ok, so let's just do a little genocide", and the left responded "no, we don't want any genocide". And the centrist said to the left "see, You are the extremists, you don't want to meet in the middle".
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step toward him. He takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.—A.R. Moxon
This is perfect. The right has gone so far to the right that meeting in the middle is still very much on the right.
The lesser evil, still being evil trope.
Fake might be the wrong word. To me it feels very real and very entrenched both due to our voting system and those two powerful parties being the ones with the power to change it. Plus both are beholden to interests other than those of the general population, so their stated platforms aren’t necessarily real. (This is not a both sides comment, one side is still far worse than the other)
It’s an emergent thing from other flaws in the system, and it is bad, but it feels all too real.
We should not allow conservatives to get away with calling themselves centrist. "Centrists" are just conservatives who realize conservatives are definitely the bad guys.
In international terms, even the Democrats are right of center.
There's an old Soviet joke about Americans being so decedent that they required two fascist parties.
Pure Right, with some being Hard Right.
(I was going to say that the Hard Right were ultra-Neoliberals rather then Fascists, but then I remembered Biden's actual military support for ethno-Fascists - who are the most violent and racist kind of Fascist there is - so maybe it's more complex than just being hard core Neolibs).
Both the left and right can be fascist.
I find it helpful to consider authoritarian/libertarian on a different axis to small government/big government.
Whilst I agree with your point about two axis, Fascism is Right-wing + Authoritarian and has nothing whatsoever of Left-wing in it.
Left-wing + Authoritarian would be the kind of Communism practiced in places like the Soviet Union - highly centralized and were people are supposed to obey the dictates of the Party.
Neoliberalism is Rightwing with a different form of Authoritarianism: whilst its practitioners claim it's Libertarian, their policies do things such as using Wealth in gate-keeping access to opportunities (via things such as Private Education) and similarly using Property Rights (mainly Land Ownership and related) to limit most people's access to what they require to satisfy their basic needs, de facto forcing them to produce wealth for the Asset Owners in order survive - it's Authoritarianism through removing people's freedom at a systemic level with access to all basic needs gatekept via Wealth and Asset Ownership so that everybody not born into the Asset Owner class has only the "freedom" to starve and be homeless if they don't want to work to create more wealth for the Asset Owner class, a more subtle use of force (as Force does get used, to enforce Property Rights) that the rather more direct "boot in the face" kind of Authoritarianism of Fascism.
Our Overton window is rammed so far right in America Bernie Sanders here is considered a radically dangerous communist, but in any other country he's a slightly left democratic socialist.
It's dangerous to our discourse and continually shifts sentiment further and further right beyond all sanity.
US politics have moved so far to the right that I'm pretty sure contemporary moderate Democrats are nearly interchangeable with Reagan-era Republicans.
Not wanting people to die is a leftist thing now?
It's more the idea that everyone counts as people. The further right you go the smaller the group you assign full person status becomes. Liberals are OK with a bit of genocide and/or slavery as long as the victims are sufficiently poor, distant, and profitable.
Not wanting people to die is a normal and sane idea.
People are still who they are but the world we live in has for the last half century significantly shifted to state authotorian and fascist idealogy has flourished in our ego centric rewarding capitalist economy
Political Left in the US aligns with center in Europe. Only adding to the evidence that political labels are arbitrary and subjective.
Fascist attack normalcy and misinformation adds to confusion. You have to believe its us and them, you have to pick a side.
Decent people stay true to what they are, causing the people who are fooled to listen to fascists to now label you a vilified left. You then have the option to confirm to your centrists peers or to stay true to your original ideals.
Currently i am aligned with far left anarchism But i can perceive plenty of context and societal structures where my identical ideas could be perceived as conservative.
America's political compass is weird. On one side you have a party that mostly just wants to keep the status quo, only really doing changes where it is already desperately behind the times. And on the other side you have the conservatives.
Political Left in the US aligns with center in Europe. Only adding to the evidence that political labels are arbitrary and subjective.
Dutch right wing conservative parties are further left than the US left. Not all of them, obviously/unfortunately, but they're there.
I had a weird experience with this "have to pick a side" issue just a couple days ago on a different lemmy. According to the moderators there, not being willing to use violence against protestors was the same as defending them
Pacifism being perceived as hostile by both sides of modern politics is a great summary for the state of things.
Also a huge red flag for what may still come, we may not all realize it but very important parts of our collective history are being decided on today.
Basically.
For example, tens of thousands of people die every year in the US because of inadequate access to health care. Universal payer would be cheaper and result in fewer preventable deaths. Centrists do not support the policy and thus are willing to let people die in order to support the parasitic insurance industry.
The genocide in Gaza, homelessness, prison industrial complex, climate change, etc. all get people killed in preventable ways. But we have to protect the owner class so we're not going to do any of the clear solutions. Letting people die needlessly is an acceptable result.
Well it's certainly not a right-wing thing
Reminder that objective political centrism is either social democracy or democratic socialism.
Not Reagan.
I'm not sure calling democratic socialism a centrist political system is reasonable. The intended changes to society are still radical and their gradual implementation doesn't change that. The intended outcome is still some flavor of communist utopia, and that's still reasonably leftist I'd say.
I'm not sure calling democratic socialism a centrist political system is reasonable.
I have no idea what you think "objective" means here, which I think makes your claim not particularly useful. It's not wrong, it's just based on a different set of definitions than most people appear to be using on this post.
I'm pretty sure centrists think we're bad because we want to abolish private ownership of the means of production, unless "leftism" means something else where OP is from.
The political center wants to maintain the status quo with regard to private property.
Edited for clarity.
A big problem of this entire argument, particularly when Americans are making it, is that nobody seems to agree on who the "centrists" and "leftists" are supposed to be.
Turns out social democrats are pretty sure they're leftists, but everybody else self-identifying as a leftist is convinced they are indistinguishable from free market liberals, while free market liberals think they're center left while social democrats are pretty sure they are indistinguishable from neocons.
Unless you're in the US, where apparently social democrats are both far left and communists, the word socialism has about as much meaning as a Rorschard test card and hard left people seem to be a figment of an AI's imagination in that they appear to exist exclusively online.
So yeah, I really don't know what the OP is talking about, honestly.
"I don't want to think, but I want to pat myself on the back for being Above It All™"
Cool cool cool. Be proud of your ignorance I guess?
Some are proud of their ignorance, some seem to think that hating everything means they are intelligent with discerning tastes.
I’m a centrist. I live in Canada. We have public health care here. Even right wingers here like it. People who are against public health care aren’t ideological, they’re in the pockets of private insurance.
If it's not ideological, why is it always the conservatives in Canada and the UK trying to dismantle public healthcare? Come the fuck on.
Same pattern holds here in Sweden. It’s definitely ideological. The right wing ideology of “fuck you, I’m lining my pockets”
I don’t think centrists are against socialised health care.
There are people in this thread who think being centrist means you're ok with a little genocide. What do you even say to that?
By answering whether someone like Joe Biden is a centralist and whether his actions contribute to genocide.
The reason your confused is because leftist have seen examples of people calling themselves centralist and also being okay with what is going on in Gaza.
By being okay I mean not trying to stop it actively.
It’s important to define what we mean when we use these terms/phrases.
My brother called me the other day, and after explaining how nature isn't "take or be taken from" when there's enough to go around. We got more into the myths about humans we're taught, and eventually he asked how I identify politically, and about the difference between a leftist and a liberal
I told him liberals want the system to work, to be fair. Leftists look around and say "there's so much food we leave a third of it to rot, why the fuck are people starving? What the fuck are we doing? No one is happy with the world we've created, why are we doing it? Why don't we start with the assumption that everyone gets to live, and figure out the details from there?"
Leftists/progressives say "the reason for all of that is the oligarchy hoarding all the resources, so we need to start with stopping them from doing that"
Liberals kinda want the same things as progressives, but they don't want to "hurt " the rich to get it. But of course if 5 people are hoarding literally everything the only way to get more for everyone is to take it from those 5 people. Liberals just can't get themselves to take that next step.
(This is US liberal btw, might be different in Europe)
And not a soul in these comments noticed that the original post was about the "far left", not "the left". I'm "the left" and think the far left end of the bell curve is a bunch of fruits and nuts.
And I'm the left, and I think the center left are capitalist cryptofascists, hypocrites who virtue signal about social justice to hide their opposition to economic justice, while ultimately achieving neither.
And I think the "far left" are generally good people who seek both social and economic justice. Some of their ideas for attaining justice are both moral and practical, while other ideas are impractical or would do more harm than good.
And I suspect, if I was a right-wing conservative, I would feel the same way about the center right and the far right.
All depends on where you stand, huh?
The "far left" to the person in the post is most probably just anyone left of American corporate democrats. If you think we should have public healthcare, you're ""far left""
There is also a point for the left not wanting to alienate all their voters so they are wanting to start slow. Personally I see this as a progress point for how left a country is. If their left is saying a little genocide okay it's probably a right leaning country.
Xx
Does anyone consider that there might be a large number of the people that consider themselves to be centrists are near the actual center, and that everyone dunking on them is imagining center of our current Overton window? I think about that a lot. (Not the guy in the meme, just in general)
I mean, even if not, why do both sides shit on them instead of trying to bring them closer to their side?
Do we not want to make change? Because you need people for that. Are we just concerned about being correct? Because that does nothing to solve our problems.
i like how this image is three different posts tied together precariously.
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