Alright, you got me, I’ll bite. Note that this is broadly descriptive rather than “This is why Centrism is good.” I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Section Summary:

A) Historical Context B) What is Centrism? C) Modern Centrism

A) Historical Context

First, on the abstract topic of centrism, it’s a general concept, in one sense or the other, that’s been around for at least a couple of thousand years. Aristotle’s “The golden mean,” as I’m sure some of you have heard of, basically says that the right action in any situation is in the middle of two extremes. An example of this might be if you saw someone being assaulted by a group of people with weapons - running in would be reckless, running away and doing nothing would be cowardly, but yelling from a distance and calling the police would be the brave choice. (Don’t get too hung up on this particular example, it’s just to illustrate broadly what his philosophy entails).

Aristotle contends that by avoiding extremes and making balanced choices in life, we become moral people who begin to do the right things without even thinking. (It is also, interestingly, an alternate ethical phiolophy that contrasts with results and rules-based ethical systems, which are generally more popular).

Aside from Aristotle there have been a number of political movements over the years that might be defined as centrism, or something close to it (a more popular term was once “moderates”) and in many ways you could probably consider some modern political parties to be at least symbolically centrist. (Ex: The Liberal Party of Canada has more than once marketed itself that way, with the NDP being on the left and Conservatives on the right - whether this is a reasonable claim is of course a good enough debate topic for its own post).

As I’m not a political historian I’m sure I’m hardly doing justice to the broader historical scope of things, my general aim is just to illustrate that this isn’t solely a modern reactionary concept.

B) What is Centrism?

As for the bounds of what centrism is, I think that’s pretty wide open. The term ‘centrist’ itself implies “something in the middle” but that’s incredibly vague. Here are some broad categories of centrist thinking you’ll see:

1) Moderates This group believes in general that all action should be moderate, thoroughly and carefully considered. These guys like 6 hour meetings. So, if we’re talking about something like the example in our first post, the simple answer would be “Killing in general is an extreme act.” So it’s obviously not just the average between any two positions, but a general rejection of extreme thinking as a whole.

Some positions you might see here would be in favour of trans human rights, but against allowing transition before the age of majority, and either against trans M->F in sports, or with strict requirements. (Ex: The Olympics has highly specific requirements for trans M->F).

2) Political apathy/indifference Basically you’ve got a “Stay out of it,” mentality about pretty much everything. As far as you’re concerned, most of politics is rubbish and people discussing it passionately are more or less wasting their time. I think this isn’t what you see much of on the internet in terms of groups or people saying they’re centrist since the implication here is that the people in this category genuinely don’t care. (I would also assume there are a lot of people who secretly are in this category are “performatively” left or right-wing but really don’t honestly give a damn other than for the need to adhere to social norms in their peer groups).

3) Commitment to neutrality This is something you’d probably find more commonly among people making the apparatus of a non-political institution work, where neutrality is vital: Ex: Elections Canada (we don’t want them to be biased in favour of one party or the other lest it destroy the democratic system which would be worse for all parties). A lot of non-political government institutions are at least, on the surface, intended to work this way.

You’ll also find your odd religious organization that is intentionally political neutral (JWs for example) because it’s some core part of their belief system. This is a bit different than apathy because there is more of a belief in the value of or need for neutrality in and of itself to make certain things in society run (or even everything), and these people may genuinely care about public policy, etc. but are just more non-partisan about it.

4) Unhinged Centrists (This is a made-up term to describe an odd group, don’t take it too seriously). These are the guys where they have all kinds of extreme beliefs: left, right, libertarian, authoritarian and all over the map and seemingly randomly so. Either they’re just memeing or they broadly disagree with the right/left distinction as a whole and don’t feel limited by the way things are typically grouped. (Ex: A trans person who believes that there are only two genders). These guys are the ones who go the most against the typical image of “balanced, reasonable, neutral” centrism because in a lot of ways they’re more extreme than a lot of extremists in their thinking. This is a surprising number of people in centrist groups.

5) Basically left/right wing This is a pretty simple one - basically someone who used to be either right or left wing, but either because their views shifted, or their party’s did (more recently the latter being more common) they’ve found themselves not feeling comfortable identifying as left or right-wing, but broadly hold a lot of views as though they still are. In a lot of cases these people are for all intents and purposes still left/right in most meaningful ways, but feel uncomfortable openly identifying as such / feel too constricted in terms of what they can discuss when they participate in those circles.

Summary As you can see, a lot of these camps have fundamentally different motivations and assumptions about the right way to go about things and, despite all being “centrist” in some general way they can have radically differing views. Compared to people on the left or right, which often have a similar core set of beliefs, the only real core belief of “centrism” is a broad, general rejection of what the left and right are offering, and even committing to that much is probably going too far.

C) Modern Centrism

As someone who’s been following “modern internet centrism” more or less since it started (they’ve been around for a while but I would say they really started to take off around the 2016 election cycle with Trump/Sanders making unexpected runs through their respective primaries). I’d say there are a few pieces of information people from the outside looking in might not be aware of. This context may give you a better idea of what’s been going on behind the scenes.

In the beginning, you had Centrist Groups like “The Centrist Chads” with like, 2k members making funny memes making fun of both sides of an issue (and sometimes also the centrist position). From this you got stuff like the grilling meme and so on. (If you’re not familiar it’s basically the political apathy type of centrism). At this point it was extremely niche; most ‘centrists’ were a bunch of history / political science nerd types who probably found average public discourse to be a little banal, were sick of party politics, etc. It never struck me as any kind of coherent movement or set of philosophies - more a jester poking fun at everyone from a distance.

From my point of view the biggest change happened around the time Facebook nuked all of the alt-right pages, though to be honest I forget the precise time that happened. A number of centrist groups (particularly ones with the word “alt” in them) were basically seen as a wink wink nudge nudge if we can’t be right and we’re obviously not left I guess we’re in the centre.

Around this time there was a MASSIVE influx of very right-wing views into centrist groups (some more than others, I’d point my finger at Alt-Centrist Utopia as a pretty good still somewhat ongoing example of this). That said there were a number of people who felt this was unacceptable and, shall we say, made an effort to make that element feel unwelcome.

I would also identify this as being the point where centrist groups stopped being mostly populated by well-educated history/political science nerds and turned into a lot more of a general “random people from the public kinda interested in politics” following. (That said, the smaller Centrist Chads group does still exist and has more of that history/political science nerd vibe).

Though, unlike with the alt-right groups, there was no singular event that caused a landslide of formerly left-wing people to join, there has been more of a steady trickle of former (or even simultaneously left-wing) people, they generally sort into two groups:

1. Labour-left where they’re the more traditional “Let’s try to be more like the Scandinavian countries with a nice social safety net,” types. They may feel increasingly uncomfortable with what they feel to be “unrealistic” or “extremist” sentiments on the left. (Ex: People advocating for the end of Capitalism or Full Communism - they don’t think this is practical). This group is likely to feel the current left is too fixated on social issues while neglecting important efforts that need to be made on economic ones. (Ex: The housing crisis).

2. Libertarian-left which basically doesn’t exist anymore but if you think back to the hippie image of “Dude man just like, chill out and live and let live,” this basically is the image that libertarian left should evoke. This group feels uncomfortable with the insistance of there being a particular morally right way to do things, and generally feel put off by forceful methods, which is essentially how they see the modern left as having evolved to be.

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