Auden Finch
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

There’s nothin noble about not having an opinion. There’s nothing noble about claiming “Oh, I just don’t like politics.” There’s nothing noble about being a centrists.

For years, probably starting with the Clinton program of triangulation, a major talking point for politicians is that we all need to improve our “discourse” and become more “bipartisan.” In their ideas, both Republicans and Democrats are just people with opinions, and we can never make “real progress” until we have friendships across the aisle and work together all friendly-like. Obama continued this rhetoric with his remarks at the 2004 Democratic Convention that there are no red states or blue states, only the United States of America.

Utopian vagueness aside, there’s nothing special about having an America without red or blue states. Red states are red because of years of racist pandering and a high population of rural whites. Blue states are blue because of their high urban populations and relative diversity. This only matters because of the electoral college, a system that is both ineffective and a threat to democracy, but that’s a different matter entirely.

In general, listening to politicians today gives on the idea that personal opinions are a hinderance, that our best hope for “change” is to put our beliefs aside and work together. We’re told that we need more “centrists,” but what does that really mean? If a centrist stands in the middle of political discourse, then centrism isn’t a political ideology. It’s entirely dependent on the position of the Overton Window, and really doesn’t represent convictions of any kind. It just means that you’re playing politics. The political spectrum in the United States has hovered in the upper middle of the authoritarian right since around the time of Jimmy Carter. The consequences of this ridiculously small area of debate is obvious when the 2016 Democratic Primary led Bernie Sanders, a typical New-Deal-Democrat, to be smeared as “far left,” and called a “communist by many on the right for advocating policies that have been mainstream in Europe and Scandinavia since the early 1990s. Centrists are typically thought of somewhere along the lines of “socially liberal, fiscally conservative,” which describes much of the elected Democratic Party, or more accurately a Libertarian like Gary Johnson. However, if this is your core belief system, we’re likely to see some drastic consequences. “Fiscal conservatism” led Reagan to close down (instead of seriously improve or create alternatives to) the nation’s mental institutions, leading the homeless population to skyrocket. Is this considered an acceptable “centrist position” that opens up our national dialogue?

We are constantly being told that our country is more divided than ever (which is incredibly insulting to anyone who lived through segregation and Jim Crow), and that we are polarized beyond belief. This has led the media to do some drastic things in the name of balancing things out, such as the New York Time’s hiring of climate change denier Bret Stephens or MSNBC’s aquiring of many far right commentators to change their “liberal image.”

This “centrism” is spoken to everyone on the outside, but looking from the inside out, it’s directed almost entirely to Democratics, encouraging them to go farther and farther right. This is incredibly laughable, considering the state of “left” politics in the United States. As party platforms stand, Democrats want millions of people uninsured, Republicans want more millions of people uninsured. A nationwide stop and frisk program is seen as just as legitimate as a nationwide cap and trade. This equation of all beliefs is annoying at best and dangerous at worst.

If climate change wipes out all human life on Earth, at least we’ll know that for a brief moment we heard both sides out equally.