Make Up Your Mind Already: The Failure of Centrism in Modern Society

Sometimes things just aren't that complicated (Kasia Babis, The Nib)

“I can’t follow politics these days, the political scene is so crazy. There are just so many nasty comments on both sides.” This sentiment is one I have heard from many people both online and in person over the past decade, and it drives me up a wall. It seems that we live in a time where staying in the politically inoffensive middle ground on the basis of intellectualism and rationality is prioritized over anything else. Aristotle argued for the concept of the Golden Mean, saying that virtue could be found in the mean of two ends of the extreme, and this concept is one that many people still seem to support today. A lot of people who aren’t very involved in politics claim that there are some Democratic positions they support and some Republican positions they support, and they do so to cement their status as centrists. Centrists are often very proud of this middle ground stance, believing it demonstrates their ability to rise above ideological lines and find the “realistic” path forward in a political scene dominated by rigid thought camps. The problem is that they are wrong, and the only thing centrists ever really compromise on is their morals.

There is no virtue to being in the middle of two opinions. It does not make you correct to “be able to see both sides” of the argument. The Earth is not flat. Slavery was and is wrong. Genocide is bad. The idea that it is morally right to constantly moderate your opinion is a fallacy. Just because two sides strongly disagree on an issue doesn’t automatically make the compromise between them correct. Additionally, the sides of the argument are often not as even as centrists want them to be. There is an old journalism saying that goes, “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.” This is never more true than when talking about politics. When the BLM protests of 2016 and then 2020 happened, you constantly saw white moderates contorting themselves to condemn random individual protestors at the same time as cops who kill innocent black people. Why? You don’t have to “both sides” a position where one side is not only unbelievably more powerful and influential than the other, but is also clearly committing much worse acts of violence and depravity. Doing so only helps normalize harmful rhetoric and actions that lead to people’s lives getting materially worse, all because centrism makes people scared to stand up for the right thing for fear of disturbing the status quo.

One factor that cannot be discounted in this conversation is the idea of “debate” that we follow in this country. The debates we have most often in modern society are set up to draw attention rather than to actually come to any agreement on an issue. There are countless examples of bad-faith pundits “debating” college kids by talking over them and claiming ideological victory when these random people can’t eloquently defend their positions (those links all came from searching the phrase “destroys woke college student”) . To keep on track, the main modern debate format I want to look at comes from the Youtube channel Jubilee, which runs the “Surrounded” series of debate style videos, where one person argues with twenty other people on a topic. These videos are clearly set up to get clicks rather than for the ideological weight behind them, with titles like “Can One Pro-Lifer Survive 25 Pro-Abortion Activists?” demonstrating the hostile framing these sessions come with.

I bet I’ll learn a lot watching this video (Jubilee)

These “debates” are clearly not set up in a way for anyone to change their minds, but more importantly for our conversation on centrism, they naturally position two ideological positions as having equal merit and deserving to be debated. Yes the number of people supporting the two sides is different, but the mere act of having people on the show to argue for a position legitimizes it in many people’s minds, even if it does not have much evidence supporting it. One video is between an actual credentialed doctor and twenty people who are anti-vaccines. Anti-vaccine beliefs are objectively incorrect, are backed up by conspiracy instead of science, and get people killed, including hundreds of children. Under no circumstances should we be treating beliefs like this with any esteem, but they are put on the same ideological level as the beliefs of someone who went to medical school and is objectively correct on this issue. The framing makes it seem like anti-vaccine beliefs could be correct if their presenters win the “debate,” even though regardless of the outcome their validity would not change.

The other problem that this debate format brings with it into the real world is this obligation for civility. It is considered bad form for obvious reasons to be rude to the person you are debating in a more formal context, but these modern debate structures use that against their participants. When Charlie Kirk went on this show, he said to his opponent’s face that if his daughter was raped as a child, he would force this child to give birth, not allowing her to abort the rapist’s baby. That is a horrific thing to say, and in a more neutral interaction the argument would have ended there. However, the structured format of these for-show debates forces the conversation to keep going, and creates a hostile environment where people are not able to fully push back against actively dangerous beliefs (including self described fascists being allowed on the show) due to this obligation of civility.

Unfortunately for us, ideological debate does not happen in a vacuum (@Tori_TLCR)

You are obligated to fully hear out your opponent’s perspective in a debate, but too many people carry over these learned practices from debate into real life. We do not have to treat radical and dangerous positions with respect, and we don’t need to pretend that it is hard to pick which side of the argument is more correct. The most radical Republicans in office right now want to commit genocide, while the most radical Democratic politicians seem to get (in terms of left-wing beliefs anyway) is wanting school lunches for children to be free, and there are still people who pride themselves on “not picking sides.” After two Trump presidencies and more than eighty years of neoliberal rule, the Overton window (or the scope of generally accepted political beliefs) is so far to the right that even the debates we do manage to have are comparing the most far right conservative positions to the most middle of the road liberal positions. The Democratic party’s most recent nominee painted herself as harsher on immigration than Donald Trump, a man fine with being called a fascist. If centrists keep compromising on their positions in order to meet in “the middle”, then this will only benefit this right-wing expansion. We need to believe in things in order to stand up for them.

The point of this article is not that everyone needs to become a socialist immediately, but rather that people need to recognize that the era of reasonable takes existing on both sides of the political spectrum, if it ever existed, is long gone. Hiding behind centrism to avoid taking a moral stance on issues is embarrassing. Video essayist Elliot Sang put it best in a Youtube post where he said, “Centrists and liberals do this thing where they assume they are the most even-handed, thoughtful, and realistic thinkers simply because their viewpoints do not challenge any prevailing assumptions. They are totally disinterested in studying the world in any way that might change that, or that might make them have to challenge themselves.” It is imperative in our modern world that we are able to stand up against the ever-gaining growth of fascism. We can’t do that if we are too scared of taking stances that actually say something and thus carry any moral weight.