Centrism: Why/How/When is it wrong?

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Pseudo Stupidity
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Centrism: Why/How/When is it wrong?

Post by Pseudo Stupidity »

Hey Liberal Communist Think-Tank members, I have a question!

How and why is centrism wrong? I've always thought centrism is wrong because one side can be completely cuckoo-bananas and propose crazy shit, and then the side that's arguing reasonable solutions CAN'T be right because "lol the correct position must be in the middle." Is my view on centrism just crazy because US politics are lunacy, or is my view on centrism generally correct because in situations where there's an answer to a problem at least one side will be correct?

Note: There can be more than two sides.

Basically, is centrism actually bad (and why) or is it reasonable (and why)?
Last edited by Pseudo Stupidity on Mon May 16, 2016 5:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Eikre »

Ironclad centrism is predicated on a logical fallacy that states when two radicals argue about something, they are equally wrong and the correct path lays always compromise.

Compromise can have its own merits. If you have a numerous radical faction that says Let's Kill All the Jews and a numerous radical faction that says Let's Not Kill Any Of the Jews but you can strike an accord where none of the Jews get killed and merely aren't allowed to vote in elections, then your society can continue operating in a clearly unjust but somewhat livable fashion, which is nice for all those times that you're not yet prepared to underwrite an actual civil war. Then you hunker down for incrementalism where gradually you identify the Nazis and decry their loathsomeness to the extent that their children start to hate them and the pro-Jew sentiment swells to such a majority that you can pass emancipation on an easy majority.

Some people miss a couple of steps and spin this notion into its own heuristic where centrism is its own legitimate faction, eternally underwriting whatever horseshit temporary accord is on the table. This marks the death of progress through incrementalism and serves a de-facto support for whoever is the wrongest fucker in the room. Then the system is broken in its own stability and it starts looking like the only way things are going to get better is if the Antifa goes to meet the Nazis in a fucking street fight and murders every one of the fascist pricks.

Moderates who enjoy living in a society not in the midst of a revolutionary turmoil will appreciate the centrist compromise for a time, but their end of the social contract is to seek out the correct ideology and muster affirmatively in its support. Otherwise, they make a moral necessity out of a more violent trend towards progress which is so anathema to their beloved business-as-usual.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Franktrollman wrote:Look: Centrism isn't the "sensible middle". It's not even the middle of any spectrum you could draw that would be vaguely sensible! Centrism is a doctrine that supports what incredibly out-of-touch plutocrats think will keep them in power. That's it. That's the whole thing. There is nothing sensible about it. They support bringing the parties together and splitting the difference on all major political choices because that reduces the chances that major changes will happen and force their masters out of power. That's it. When you come down to it, that is the entire logic. They favor "splitting the difference" on divisive issues because they are moral cowards. Other than that they want to cut funding for social programs because rich people don't need them, and they think that market-based-reform can solve absolutely all issues. They want the debt to be low, but they have no idea what the economic implications of that would actually be, which is why they keep claiming that the fiscal cliff is a debt crisis.
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Post by Pseudo Stupidity »

I respect Frank's quote tremendously (I agree with its logic ALL THE WAY), and that's why I bring up the question. Centrism, to me, is just the death of logic and giving all power to the people who had the strength to kill it. That someone who's a communist (socialist, whatever we Murkians call a commie) doctor in the former Soviet Union helps confirm that belief, but it's still hard to argue with warm-blooded Murkians.

My main question (still failing to have been proven wrong by an ISP-level anarchist) is how do I convince shitheads who think centrism is reasonable that their position is not reasonable? It's really tough to do that without shitting on their beliefs in an insulting way. I want an amicable way to disprove their crazy-ass beliefs.
Last edited by Pseudo Stupidity on Tue Jul 12, 2016 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

As a general rule you can't convince people of anything. People hate changing their minds and once someone's taken a position they do not generally back down from it unless given years for their position to erode. So you can sit down with a centrist and try to explain to them that either side of the argument can change a centrist's position for them just by taking more and more radical positions until what they actually want is the middle, and that this encourages extremism, and that is an easier argument for people who are currently centrists to swallow than "you are dupes of the plutocracy," but no matter how easy it is to swallow it's still probably not going to change anyone's mind.
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Post by Username17 »

The positive argument for Centrism is one of two logical fallacies: the Golden Mean Fallacy and/or the Appeal to Tradition. The first is the idea that the truth is between extremes. The second is the idea that radical departure from orthodoxy is wrong. Both of those are fallacious because they assign the entire range of potential truth to be based on what the chattering classes are talking about today rather than what is actually true in any real sense about the real world.

Centrism can only be right on accident because the arguments it makes for its positions are no more persuasive than having thrown darts or reached into a hat.

And the actual positions espoused by Centrists are simply whatever alligns with the interests of those who have the most wealth and power. So in the very likely event that you are not a Billionaire or his surprizingly racist butler, their ideas are no more likely to benefit you than the recommendations of the aluminum mining industry or whatever.

Centrism is a fringe viewpoint that has no compelling arguments to be taken seriously. But it is anyway because it is advocated on behalf of people who own media outlets.

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Post by Kaelik »

Centrism as a concept obviously has to be wrong some times. For example, leftism is wrong, you can't say, "Position to the left of X is always more right than position X" because there has to be some position at which that stops being true (okay yeah, the entire right left spectrum is kind of arbitrary and nonsense when applied to enough issues, shhhhh, leave me alone.) But you can at least argue that "Leftism" is right with respect to some currently existing policies, because you can move to the left, and say that all the reachable points to the left are better than the current policies.

Now Centrism objectively has to be wrong for the same reason as leftism, because of course there have to be issues in which being to the "Center" is not correct. But over and above that, you can't figure out what Centrism even is in relation to existing policies, because all positions are either left or right of existing policies. So Centrism is obviously wrong most of the time, because the "Center" is either defined relatively to the positions advocated in society (in which case Donald Trump actually made Arizona racism laws more correct that they were previously, by winning the nomination, which is fucking nonsense and so abhorrent that any Centrist will immediately throw a fit when you point that out) or defined arbitrarily (my position is the center on every issue).

So centrists are either golden mean idiots, or self obsessed idiots who can't see how defining themselves as the center and always correct is bullshit. (As opposed to defining themselves as always correct, but admitting their positions are not based on "being the Center" but are based on some actual reasons).
Last edited by Kaelik on Mon May 16, 2016 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

Centrism is an attractive position for media outlets because it seems innately bipartisan to blame both sides and to say both sides need to compromise - it's like claiming that the weather forecast has a 50% chance of rain. But assigning blame equally only applies if both sides really are equally at fault - and of course, in American politics the right has gone off the deep end.
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Post by Maj »

There are some things that shouldn't be positions of compromise: segregation, for example. So promoting a compromise position of segregation-is-bad-but-not-always is centrist, but clearly still hypocritical and unfair.
Last edited by Maj on Tue May 17, 2016 1:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Wiseman »

Funny. I guess I have my terminology wrong then. I though centrist meant not commenting oneself fully to one side, only picking one or the other or a compromise based on what you thought was right or agreed with?
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I used to think centrism was a good idea because everyone pisses me off, then I realized two things: I'm probably more of a misanthrope than a centrist, also as annoying as I find the SJW crew to be they aren't that far from what I would want while the American Right has been losing their shit in increasingly elaborate and nonsensical ways for decades.
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Post by ckafrica »

I think that there was a time when you could call yourself a centrist in that you saw that proposals on both sides of the political divide had merit and you were willing to adopt from either to get shit done. Canada's Liberal party certainly have tried to paint themselves with this brush since the left-wing CCF/NDP came into being.

In the current American political climate I'm not sure its possible to do this because the the two wings have drifted so far apart (or more accurately the right have paddled as hard as they can into lalaland).
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Post by Korgan0 »

Really, the "right" and "left" wings that exist in contemporary liberal democracy are so similiar in so many respects that the idea of there being a coherent ideological space between them is utterly laughable. The salient faults in the West arise not from the issues that are at stake between the various parties, but rather from the things they have in common: acting as the patsies of neoliberalism, enforcing commodity control via massive violence, and exploiting the vast majority of the world's labour.

At the end of the day, the vast majority of modern forms of centrism (given the omnipresence of capitalism and liberal democracy) rests on the assumption that the current way of doing things deserves something other than total and utter destruction; that complete revolution is a mistake, since the forces of reaction apparently have a valid point beyond enforcing exploitative power structures.

If you believe that radical change is necessary, then centrism actively becomes poison.
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