For the record, I can recall a time when I too enjoyed flaunting my lack of allegiance to either Right or Left, my freedom from “ideologies,” and my commitment to individualism. Don’t hate me, I read “Self-Reliance” at a young age and it made probably more of an impact than it should have. I saw both left wing and right wing ideas as threatening to things that seemed obviously good, and naturally, because I was pretty young, I could not help but to flatter myself that the ability to see this made me a superior kind of person. Obviously, “extremism” needed to be avoided; why couldn’t all the “rational” people between these extremes get together and save themselves from the “polarization.”

This is probably a good place to start because it is the primary reason that people hate centrists: their perennial habit of flattering themselves. 

All of you morons are too stupid to think for yourself. Instead you have to receive all of your beliefs from “approved narratives” and ideologues. 

First of all, I am not writing a defense of group-think. While I have parted ways with Emerson on a number of issues, I still share with him the idea that a person should examine things himself and test ideals and ideas to see if their “good” actually be good. Socrates thought the same and I doubt that there is anything that would ever be able to cause me to abandon principle, so deeply has it been ingrained in me. However, the realist in me also knows that this is a big responsibility and an extremely tall order. Most people have neither the facility nor the interest in thinking deeply about society, politics, or philosophy.

People are shocked when they discover that the United States was a country built by intellectuals and idealists. At one time, America had the highest literacy rate of any country in the world. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by the level of intellectual and sociopolitical awareness that even the average laborer in America possessed and he wrote as much in Democracy in America. The fact that people today find this so hard to believe is a testament to how far the country has fallen. But fallen it has, and there’s no use crying over spilt milk at this point. For better or worse, most people will depend on political parties to do most of their political thinking for them. I think that’s a problem, but it’s a problem that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. 

Still, the self-aggrandizing mistake that centrists always make is assuming that any person who subscribes to some political ideology must simply be a conformist. This is simply a failure in basic logic: sufficient vs necessary conditions. 

Having people who think like you doesn’t mean that you haven’t thought for yourself. This ought to be obvious, but it is a point which often goes flying over the head of the centrist. This is embarrassing for them since they too are part of an ideology and a group of people who also think like them. If a person can, through independent consideration, arrive at centrism, then they can just as well arrive at a position other than centrism, and if there are other people who have also independently reasoned their way to that set of beliefs, well I guess that’s just as legitimate, isn’t it? This is the great irony of the individualist, the “free-thinker.” They always want to condemn others for standards which they themselves fall short of, and usually, they fall short of them by an even greater distance than those they criticize. But let’s leave behind this character flaw. No matter how common it is among centrists, having it is not a necessary condition to be a centrist. Let’s take centrism a little more seriously. 

Centrism as it is typically understood is seen as the middle-way between left and right wing ideologies. But what does that actually mean? Left and right aren’t geological locations that it is possible to walk between. They are political ideals and value systems. We don’t walk between values; if anything, we try to balance them. But here too we run into a problem with the metaphor. 

Balancing in the real world is pretty easy. There’s an obvious fail state and strong feedback and you know pretty much immediately if you’ve cocked it. There’s no need for consideration of secondary effects. But it doesn’t work the same way in the world of politics, where the unintended consequences of a policy decision can take years or even decades to manifest. There’s also much less agreement about what constitutes “failure” when you’re making choices about the trade-offs of pursuing different value systems. 

Centrists will often congratulate themselves for having graduated to “non-utopian” thinking, for their anti-idealism, for their realism and for their pragmatism; they will pat themselves on the back for living by “their own values” rather than following any ideology. And all of this stuff does sound pretty good, as the writing on the box always sounds pretty good. But it’s what is inside the box that really matters. 

One of the things in that box is ingratitude and historical illiteracy. Centrists are often unwilling to admit the debts that they owe to their rivals. For instance, this country exists because of people who very clearly were not centrists. They were people of such devout faith that they were willing to take a dangerous and difficult journey to another country and start their lives over there just so that they could worship God in the way that they wanted. And it was only after those people had done the work of establishing the colonies that others were lured by availability of wealth and new fortunes to be made in the new land. 

Once you had floods of people from different backgrounds and cultures, there was a need to move from this idealistic mold to a more pluralistic model capable of accommodating all these differences. This parasitic relationship is typical between centrists and their more idealistic counterparts. They are more than happy to benefit from social capital produced by people whose values they do not share and even undermine. 

They also have a tendency towards myopia and shortsightedness. Given any influence that seeks to direct society towards some goal, the centrist can be depended on to think of nothing but the immediate effects. More often than not, the centrist is simply reacting to change that is too fast. Incrementalism towards any objective will work pretty well for the centrist or the moderate. They are not terribly picky; they simply don’t like rapid change. Provided that the change gives them time to acclimate, they will generally be satisfied. Though it is not always true, they are prone to regarding whatever is at the center of the Overtone Window at any given time as “reasonable” without regard to how this “reasonable center” is always a moving target. In this way, the average centrist is the frog who has made a virtue of commanding the chef that he must be boiled slowly. 

Another common claim from the centrist is that they take the “best ideas” from both sides. Again, that sounds nice, but it presumes the existence of an ethical framework that centrists can never seem to provide any justification for. How are they determining what ideas are best or worst? Centrists claim to be above this kind of value talk, but this is simply naive. Anyone who believes this doesn’t know how it works. Values are implicit at all times and to be unaware of this is to tacitly admit that you have allowed someone else to do your thinking for you. 

To the extent that centrists actually have some kind of coherent political ideology of their own, they are generally just liberals in the classic sense. They value consent-based morality and pluralism, and they value these things because they are conducive to economic growth and higher standards of living (at least for those whose boats rise with the wave). But financial capital and social capital do not necessarily rise together. In fact, they seem to have a negative correlation, such that as monetary wealth grows, the wealth of social capital decreases. 

Norms and the recognition of duties of reciprocity and restraint that historically have made life easier to those in the lower echelons of the social pyramid are slowly usurped as money becomes the only standard of value. The idea of “unpaid labor” even for one’s family is considered perverse, and a generalized kind of mean-spiritedness and antagonism comes to dominate the lives of those who can’t afford to pay for pleasantness. This is the process which David Brooks attempted (and fabulously fucking failed) to explain in his 2023 article “How America Got Mean.” He failed due to his intellectual cowardice, but before his courage gave out, he did get right that a large part of the problem is the same radical individualism that centrists usually idolize.  And the endpoint of this individualism is a harsh atomism which may even ultimately end with a de facto dissolution of the social contract. 

(Yeah, sure you can say that people will always recognize that their personal interests are in maintaining the contract, but I can imagine that there are actually degrees of dysfunction that could put this to the test. And besides, rather than some broad renunciation of the thing across an area as massive as the United States, it is far more likely that you would arrive at a situation in which there were pockets in which the social contract had ceased to be operative, and factions and cartels would rise to fill the vacuum.)

In the end, the centrist relies on the well-traveled myth of the view from nowhere. Where everyone else is mired in the delusions of ideologies and questions of value, they alone have access to unmediated reality. But much like the consequentialists, when asked to ‘show their work’ for the utilitarian calculus justifying this choice or that one, what is ultimately revealed is an incoherent mess of scribbling. What they claim are obvious matters of “rationality” or good sense are simply their own unsupported prejudices and fallacious ad populum arguments, and where they are not, they are elaborations of self-interest or hedonism. And this would be forgivable, if only they didn’t insist on giving themselves such breathless accolades for doing so little. 

In the end, I left centrism because I wanted to get closer to the ground, philosophically speaking. It is a hollow, derivative political position, ironically motivated by a desire to avoid conflict and therefore more conformist than of the positions that it seeks to unite. These at least have their own visions of the Good, whereas the centrist is relegated to attempting to play the cultural babysitter. And maybe there is a time for this role and place where it has a noble purpose, but the kids are grown up now and the sitter has grown old and dusty, and I think that it is about time that we told her to put herself to bed.