**The Role of Moderates and Centrists in American Politics: A Critical Analysis**
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### The Origins of Left and Right Politics
The terms "left" and "right" in politics have their roots in the French Revolution, where those who favored absolute monarchical power sat on the right side of the Assembly, while radicals advocating for parliamentary monarchy sat on the left. Over time, these labels evolved to represent broader ideologies. The left became associated with wanting to change society into something new, often advocating for egalitarianism and challenging established hierarchies. In contrast, the right sought to preserve existing societal structures and traditions.
Today, these distinctions are often tied to economic policies and cultural debates. However, the most fundamental difference remains: the left seeks to transform society, while the right aims to maintain or revert to past societal norms.
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### Understanding Moderates and Centrists
Moderates and centrists in America are individuals who reject the political programs of either major party but do not align with extreme ideologies on either end of the spectrum. They often claim to be "neither left nor right," focusing instead on compromise and incremental progress. However, this self-perception is flawed.
Centrism, as it exists today, is inherently conservative. This is because many goals once considered radical (such as expanding parliamentary monarchy or implementing socialist policies) have become the status quo. Centrists prioritize preserving the current order through small, cautious reforms rather than pursuing significant societal change. Their mantra of "mixing socialism and capitalism" ignores the inherent conflict between these ideologies—specifically, their differing views on ownership of the means of production.
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### The Case of Biden's Centrism
President Joe Biden exemplifies the centrist approach in his handling of policies like Title 42, a Trump-era policy used to expel migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Biden modified the application of Title 42 to exempt unaccompanied minors, he continued to enforce it aggressively, expelling over 700,000 migrants—more than the previous administration. He also pursued other right-wing policies, such as building a border wall and implementing the "Do Not Come" campaign.
Biden's approach reflects the centrist belief in compromise and incremental change. However, this strategy often results in stagnation or regression rather than progress. Instead of reversing harmful policies, centrists like Biden tweak them slightly, maintaining the status quo while claiming moderation.
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### The Problem with Centrism
Centrism fails to account for long-term political trends, allowing reactionary ideas to dominate. For example, the idea of compromise between "we need healthcare" (left) and "we need an ethno-state" (right) is absurd and dangerous. Centrists often ignore the broader context, focusing only on immediate gains rather than addressing systemic issues.
The Overton window in American politics is skewed heavily to the right, limiting the options available to centrists. Even when they claim to judge policies based on merit, their choices are constrained by the narrow range of acceptable political debate. This results in a conservative approach that prioritizes maintaining power structures over meaningful change.
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### The Role of Moderates inPolitics
Moderates dominate American politics because they are marketed as sensible and pragmatic. Politicians like Joe Lieberman and Joe Manchin position themselves as the "center," claiming to represent the average voter. However, this center is not truly representative of the people's will.
Most Americans support policies further to the left than what is offered by political leaders. For instance, public opinion often aligns with progressive reforms on issues like immigration and healthcare. Yet, centrists like Biden continue to defend regressive policies, delaying meaningful change and denying justice for millions.
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### The Need for Real Democracy
The current system perpetuates injustice by slowing down progress under the guise of moderation. As MLK once said, "justice delayed is justice denied." Moderates serve to delay necessary reforms, allowing inequality and suffering to persist.
To move forward, we need a far greater democracy—one that prioritizes the majority over political elites. Celebrating moderates only perpetuates this cycle of stagnation and undermines democratic ideals.
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### Conclusion
Centrism in American politics is not a neutral ground but a conservative force that resists meaningful change. By focusing on compromise and incremental reform, centrists often preserve harmful policies rather than challenge them. To build a more just society, we must reject the false notion of moderation and embrace bold, transformative change.
The future of democracy depends on our ability to expand political debate beyond the narrow confines of the Overton window and demand leaders who prioritize people over profit. Only then can we hope to realize the progressive ideals that justice and equality require.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enYou’ve read the title.You’ve seen the thumbnail.You’ve inspected the element and combedthrough the metadata.This episode is about moderates, centrists,independents, pragmatists, middle-grounders,fence-straddlers, and the ungodly, unceremonious“electable politician.”Today, we’re looking at everyone’s politicalneighbors in the middle of the street.Let’s.Get.This.Started!Cuethe MLK!Look, I already know what you’re going tosay.“JT, please describe to me in politicalscience terms what a moderate is.”Fine, but only because I want to.And as a punishment for being so presumptuous,I’m starting with the difference betweenthe left and the right.You already know the story of the two terms.During the French revolution, those who wantedto “laissez les bons temps rouler” withabsolute monarchical power sat on the rightof the Assembly, their version of The House,and the no good radicals who wanted to tryout terrifying and capricious parliamentarymonarchy, ooOoOoH, sat on the left.This is a pretty specific issue to disagreeabout, so when people, i.e. academics withtoo much free time, try to come up with meaningfuldifferences between the left and the rightthat hold true across most of global politicalhistory, you get very vague distinctions betweenthe two political families.While today we associate the left and theright mostly with their stances on specificeconomic issues or cultural debates, the mostfundamental distinction that you can probablymake between the two is that the left seeksto change society into something new, andthe right seeks to preserve present societyor to go back to something old.In practice, that usually means the left seeksto undermine established hierarchies and distributepower and wealth more equally and the rightseeks to preserve hierarchy and order sincemost existing societies are or were builtaround power being concentrated in very fewhands.But obviously such a simple distinction willcertainly make you mad, so be sure to commentwhy and how I’ve actually gotten it completelywrong in the comment section.I’d hate for this video to get more engagement.Anyway, we’ve lost the plot a little here.We’re not talking about either of thesegroups, we’re talking about the illuminatedminds who can look past the squabbling ofthese dirty extremes: moderates.The people who reject petty ideological battles,and at the end of the day, just know betterthan you and I.Just listen to how terrible the extremes arein this No Labels video on the Biden infrastructurebill:Cool!Fine, let’s be a little bit more charitableand actually understand what’s going onhere.Centrists and moderates in America (the twoterms are pretty much interchangeable) arepeople and politicians who are not entirelysatisfied with the political programs of eithermajor political party.Unlike people who reject both parties fromthe opposite ends of the spectrum, however,moderates are most comfortable in the bi-partisanmiddle.They usually like saying things like “We’reneither left nor right.”We’ll get to that sentence in a minute,but first, we might like to understand centristsa little better.If we are to assume the definition of leftand right as historically transcendent termsabout the stance one has towards present societyand values like egalitarianism, being a centristdoesn’t really make sense.Over time, movements that start out on theleft like liberalism, republicanism, or evenparliamentary monarchy, become solidly rightwing movements without ever changing theirideology because they replace the old rightand become contested by the new, more radicalleft.In such a position, centrism becomes nothingmore than a conservative ideology.Its prime directive is resistance to changeand as a result, it’s not “neither leftnor right,” it’s just right-wing.It might have been on the left in yesterday’ssociety, but now that the goals of the oldleft are the established order and have becomethe new conservative right, preserving presentsociety with only incremental and moderatereform (which is what centrists believe in)becomes a profoundly conservative worldview.And it makes sense that this is where moderacysettles, because it has to compromise betweentwo completely opposing ideas: changing societyin a new way, or keeping it the same.Think about classic centrist statements like“we need a mix of socialism and capitalism,”an idea that makes absolutely zero sense whenyou know the two ideologies and that theirbase disagreement about the ownership of themeans of production makes them fundamentallyincompatible.Okay, this all might seem a little confusing.Let’s get away from the theory of it fora second and look at something concrete likethe Biden brandof centrism.This speech is Biden’s “Freebird.”Biden, like pretty much every centrist, isa big fan of compromise.Reaching across the aisle to get past politicalgridlock is the doctrine of American centrism,and when you hear him talk about it you cankind of get sucked into the idea that thisform of compromise is what makes politics,and therefore society, progress.It appeals to our vision of the democraticideal: a society in which everyone gathersaround the table to discuss an issue and thencomes to a mutual decision that compromiseson the various interests represented by theassembly.And, if after all, nobody compromises we mightvery well not get anywhere.In American politics, this is anything butdemocratic, though, and far from leading tothe progress we’re promised, we get a governmentthat stagnates or actively pursues regressive,reactionary politics.Take immigration.For over a year, we heard just about everydemocrat call out the very real, far-rightpolicies enacted by the Trump admin at theMexican border.One of these was the invocation of Title 42,a policy choice that might as well be called“oh, it really is just that easy.”At the start of the pandemic, the Trump administrationused the pretext of national health and COVID-19to close the southern border pretty much completely.Nobody comes in, and a whole lot of peoplego out.It was a brilliant success for conservativesand reactionaries, and a massive step backin immigration law.And to this day, Title 42 still stands.No, sorry, that makes it seem like peoplearen’t paying attention to it.The Biden administration is defending it toothand nail in the courts.True to the spirit of compromise, Biden changedthe application of the rule so that it wouldno longer apply to unaccompanied minors, buton the back end has used it to expel around700,000 migrants, more than the Trump administrationever achieved with its “paltry” 450,000.Simultaneously, Biden has also continued theconstruction of the border wall, has led theinfamous “Do Not Come” campaign, and leftuntouched migrant detention facilities (you’llremember them as “concentration camps”during the Trump presidency).It’s not that Biden has done nothing forprogressive immigration politics, he’s reinstatedDACA and done work to reunite separated families,but the majority of his platform has beentweaking Trump-era policies in the spiritof compromise rather than reversing them entirelyand treating them like the indefensible, rightwing policies that they are.Centrism isn’t incremental progress in thesecircumstances.Malcolm X saidit best:When reactionary and far-right politics areso dominant in a society as America and soregularly find their way to institutions ofpower (or are baked right in from the start),the centrist stance of compromise and incrementalretroactive change allows for politics tojump to the right without ever really comingback.How many politicians today pretend like there’sa reasonable compromise between the “weneed healthcare” left and the “we needan ethno-state” right?Title 42 still stands because the myopic compromiseof moderate ideology fails to take into accountlonger political trends.There are of course some exceptions to therightward shift of American politics, butthe attachment to moderation at all costsmakes any left-wing legislation a blip inwhat is otherwise a sea of reactionary bravado.But most centrists don’t like this and that’snot how they think about themselves.They don’t like the idea that they are justa mushy average of the left and the rightor a simple tool of conservative politics.Instead, moderates describe their stance somethinglike this: “I don’t care whether somethingcomes from the left or the right, I just lookat the idea and judge it on its own merit.”Here the tricky centrist thinks he’s gottenus.We can’t possibly disagree with the ideaof sensibly considering multiple options andforming an opinion based on rational costand benefit analyses!And he’s right, but at the end of the day,centrism falls right back into the same placewhether it sees its role as averaging outthe left and the right or picking and choosingfrom each side.And that’s because the Overton window isso small and so skewed in America.The choices centrists make are limited bythe acceptable politics they are contextualizedin, and the American political spectrum beingso stunted towards the right with only figureslike Bernie Sanders and his social-democraticpolitics even approaching the left, meansthat centrism will by default fall into theconservative, stagnatory, or even regressiverole.There just aren’t that many options to choosefrom, and they’re mostly on the same sideanyway.Even if the centrist voter is a careful andconsiderate pragmatist, who doesn’t blindlyfollow the party line and thinks entirelyfor themselves on every topic and politicaldebate, the inevitable fact that they willbe picking and choosing policies from thefascistic Trumpism in the Republican partyand the neoliberal capitalism of the Democrats,to the extent they can even be differentiatedat times, means they’ll never actually considerthe full range of political debate becausethe left isn’t prominently represented.The result is the center conserves far morethan it progresses, and when it chooses toconserve something built by the right, itactively participates in regressive, reactionarypolitics.There’s also the issue that politicianswho call themselves the center aren’t reallydoing so in good faith.While they may represent the center betweenelected officials, the actual center of theAmerican people is far more to the left onmany key issues than the center of the Americanpolitical class.Just look at this clip featuring celebritycentrist Joe LiebermanAnd here we get back to that MLK quote.It’s absurd to think that any moderate democrator any republican would ever agree to anyof these policies that have overwhelming supportamong Americans if the only difference wasthat they were just sat down and talked toas opposed to having things “pushed through.”There is no way that moderate democrats likeManchin, Sinema, or Biden are going to beconvinced by good argumentation presentedpolitely when that is contending with themassive sums of money changing hands to makesure they remain spoilers.MLK made it very clear.The moderate’s role in politics is to slowthings down to a trickle.Justice gets delayed further and further,never actually realized despite decades ofpromises, allowing for millions of peopleto continue suffering injustice and hundredsof thousands more to be brought into the fold.It’s trite, but justice delayed is justicedenied.The issue we’re going to have to figureout is how we do anything about this.In every election, moderates are going todominate the field because they will continuouslybe presented as more sensible, measured, andpragmatic than their opponents.They have done the careful electoral calculationand know that between the people who willinevitably vote for them and the people whowill never vote for them regardless of whatthey do, the only way to win is to presentthemselves to the colossal group of Americanmoderates who won’t bother to go any furtherthan see who gets closest to being the exactaverage of the Dems and the Republicans.We know Americans want more from their politicians.We know that, for the greatest number of them,those things are further to the left thananything the government has provided in decades.That is a much bigger issue for our democracythan “polarization.”Democracy is slow by nature and there aretimes where that can be a good thing.But when democracy is slowed down artificiallylike this, just for the sake of slowing itdown and not letting things change for thebetter, when politicians ignore what peoplenot only demand but desperately need, it nolonger resembles democracy nor its ideals.If you’re hearing an appeal to authoritarianismin these statements, you’re not understandingwhat I’m saying.We need far greater democracy than what wehave today, real democracy, democracy forthe majority, and continuing to venerate moderatesin this country won’t bring us any closerto getting it.\n"
