Centrism Isn't Real

The middle doesn't exist

We are facing an unprecedented assault on free speech and independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

---

Since Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump in 2024, a deluge of articles have been written about the factional battle inside the Democratic Party between the centrists / moderates and the progressives. Some of the people most responsible for the direction of the party writ large but more specifically the direction of Harris’ failed campaign have done everything they can to distance themselves from her, to claim that “real centrism hasn’t been tried” and to convince everyone that actually it wasn’t her platform of war with Iran, “the world’s most lethal military”, campaigning with Liz Cheney and inviting Leon Panetta to speak at the Democratic National Convention, doubling down on support for a broadly unpopular genocide, that harmed her. It was the answers she gave to an ACLU survey in 2019 about transgender care for incarcerated individuals that sealed her fate. Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait are among the worst offenders. Tweet after tweet, article after article, they’ve tripled down on their notions that “wokeness” was to blame for the broad loss of some seven million voters between 2020 and 2024. They insist that what the party has to do is to moderate even harder. To give up on more marginalized groups. To abandon even the few popular policies the party is known for and, hopefully, pick up enough racists and bible thumpers to make up the difference.

To anyone who has been following the trajectory of this party over the last four or five decades, “move to the center” is hardly new. From the dawn of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the eighties, the prescription for what ails you has always been “move right, move right, move right”. This year, after the hard launch of the airport book that wants to be a political ideology “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the liberal intelligentsia has flooded the media with thinkpiece after thinkpiece about how there’s really no need to pivot to economic populism, the party just needs to give up on a few key marginalized groups, deregulate housing development, and ??? profit! Klein in particular posited that it might be a good idea to run anti-abortion Democrats in red states (states that have overwhelmingly supported ballot measures to keep abortion legal, mind you) in order to somehow pick up mythical evangelical voters who like everything about Democrats except their views on abortion.

There have been countless iterations of “how to remake the Democratic Party” published this year from the same old mouthpieces with the same old politics that has landed us here, in a desperate bid to shift the blame from themselves and onto “the groups” or trans people or immigrants or the elusive concept of “woke”, but whether it’s Welcome PAC’s missive in Deciding to Win that insists Democrats just need to move away from “unpopular ideas” like Medicare For All (entirely based on shoddy push polling), or Klein and Thompson’s insistence that the silver bullet to fix the housing crisis - and society at large - is deregulation, every single one of these arguments boils down to trying to technocratically determine who is worth saving and who is worth throwing away, in service of the nebulous goal of “winning” (what we win and for whom is an open question).

This is because the very concept of centrism is a lie.

The foundation of centrism is built on the delusion that there can be a middle ground between exterminationism and an ideological commitment to the sanctity of human life. The fundamental premise of centrism requires you to classify violence as the things independent, rogue, non-state actors do to one another, and to ignore the monopolized violence of the state; whether at the hands of police, the military, or the guy at Aetna with a spreadsheet of claims rejections. Centrism believes that politicians who are bribed by capital to deprive workers of fair wages, of healthcare, of housing, of food, can continue to do so and still represent the workers that they are (in spirit if not in practice) tasked to represent. Centrism thinks that trillionaires and wealth inequality are unrelated phenomena. Centrism believes that you can reconcile blatant election meddling and corruption with abundance for everyone (although I doubt they really care about that last part). Centrism believes as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

While great minds on the left spin their wheels debunking specious argument after specious argument from the centrist hive mind, the centrism intelligentsia laughs all the way to the bank to cash another handsome check from another billionaire funded think tank. I could spend this entire article going through why Medicare for All is actually popular, how people turned to Trump because of economic pain that Democrats refuse to address, how corruption is so total in American politics that any kind of course correction that doesn’t include taking money out of the equation is useless. I could do that but the Centrist Hive would just vomit out another ten or twenty articles or PACs or think tanks next week. In truth, debunking arguments that are made not because someone believes them, but because someone is being paid really well to make them, is futile. So what I will argue instead is that centrism is a fiction.

To put it bluntly you either think all people deserve the right to life or you don’t. It may sound outlandish to claim that the centrists, the “moderates”, think there are people who simply don’t deserve to live, but when you put aside the five dollar words in the thinkpieces from the thought leaders, when you reduce the arguments to their truest form, what else are they saying when they tell you that housing should not be a human right? Are they not saying that if you don’t have dollars in your pocket - if you are not useful to the GDP - you should endure freezing to death? When centrism tells you that Medicare for All is a pipe dream are they not telling you that you shouldn’t be able to get cancer treatment if you get laid off or if your claim is denied? Are they not telling you that the 68,000 people who die every year for lack of healthcare (saying nothing of those whose claims are routinely denied) are an acceptable price to pay for the given system?

A thought experiment: During the government shutdown, imagine Trump gets on stage at one of his rallies and says this “Healthcare is too expensive and diabetics are 11% of the population. They account for $1 of every $4 spent on healthcare in the United States. My administration is signing an executive order that ends the production of insulin. If you are diabetic, I’m sorry but you are costing us too much folks, too much money, and we will no longer help you”. Can you predict the outrage from the centrist media class? The pearls that would be clutched? Yet how is that so different from saying that if you don’t have a full time job and $500-$1000 a month, you shouldn’t have the ability to get insulin? How is saying “kill the poors” fundamentally different than saying “it’s ok if a million people sleep outside and have no access to food and shelter in the winter. Them’s the breaks”?

What is called centrism is really just a decency filter on the abominable. Dressing up anti-human policy in a human suit. It requires you to completely overlook all of the ways the organization of society deprives the average person of the necessities of life and considers this - at best - a necessary evil. Whether it’s deciding that data centers need to be built at the cost of a livable planet or even drinkable water in low income communities or it’s deciding that children should not be entitled to food as a basic guarantee, it’s an ideology built on the demand that every human life justify its own existence. You are not entitled to anything just by the virtue of being born a human on this planet that should belong to us all, you have to consistently demonstrate your utility in society to qualify to drink the water or breathe the air or have a shelter or get that mole looked at.

As our society tumbles endlessly towards the darker and more horrifying vision of the future that some of the most nefarious in our ruling class have planned for us, the compromises the centrists are willing to make become more and more heinous. Because the “center” to them is the center of the prevailing forces, whatever those forces may be, it must constantly shift towards the cruel as our politics continues down a path that fails to meet basic needs and the masses find a consolation prize in savagery. Finding the middle ground between deploying a secret police force that is kidnapping documented, undocumented, and native born alike and simply not doing that, is where you make the masked thugs unmask, but you do not stop the thuggery.

As we careen off a cliff, the wretchedness of “centrism” demands that you overlook more and more overt violence against your fellow citizens and try to find a compromise where we collectively decide exactly how many lives are worth nothing to us and can be thrown away to achieve our goals. Worst of all, this sort of Faustian bargaining is nearly invisible to us because it’s something that has been a part of the fabric of capitalist society since before we were born. Indeed, we are trained from a very young age to overlook the innate violence that is ever-present under capitalism. We are not trained to see the man begging for change on the street corner as a victim of an inscrutable universalized system of violence. We are taught that if you need food stamps or welfare, you didn’t play by the rules, you are a victim of no one but the consequences of your own bad decisions. At its most indelicate you are told “someone has to scrub the toilets” which is a polite way of saying that we need an underclass that lives lives of quiet desperation in order to make it so that others can take lavish vacations, have big houses in the hills, and keep the whole thing running.

When you’re little you might even question this. You might wonder why we can’t just feed and house everyone. You might wonder why humans can’t just share. Why are there children starving in Africa, you might ask. If you do, you’re told that a collectivist society is “a great idea on paper but goes against human nature” but that we humans are just too selfish and self-interested to ever share the earthly spoils of our labor with each other so that everyone has enough. Maybe you’re told there actually isn’t enough for us all and not to believe your lying eyes. Be realistic, they say. But in the greatest sense of irony, the more the veil is lifted, the more you begin to see that the childlike impulse to - simply - care for us all, was the right one.

The more the veil is lifted the more you begin to see that our “normal” would be considered insanity if we weren’t so close to it. Our normal is one where we keep armed guards by dumpsters full of food while letting the man down the street starve. Our normal is one where we are so inextricably obsessed with a human invention, currency, that we are willing to kill ourselves, our home, and each other over it. Our normal is one where the people that are lauded as the “adults in the room” are willing to make detached proclamations about who should live and who can go ahead and die for all they care.

Of course, the rational conclusion is that none of this is normal at all. And in realizing this you start to see that you are living in a world gone mad, not guided by calculated logic or reason, but by a forgetting. A forgetting that we all belong to one another and that we owe something to each other. That we were all thrust into this world and that it could be anything, it never had to be this. That this society came about because of decisions made long ago but that it requires our consent to keep running. That there are only two possible outcomes in our future: socialism or barbarism. Moving towards a future of socialism is a process of remembering everything you forgot. And in that cold light, with new eyes, you can see that what is called “centrism” is a deception. It’s an attempt to cover over the obscene with academic words and self-serious declarations. It is nothing more than a thin coat of paint on a system that will eventually destroy us. There will never be a middle ground between extermination and liberation. Centrism does nothing but sell a comforting lie in the hopes that you get too confused to start remembering that we all inherited this earth and we all deserve to be here. The true danger to the centrist is not in losing an election, or having an untruth debunked. It is in exposing centrism itself as an illusion, a mirage. The promise of the a future worth living in will never be found in trying to seek a reconciliation of human life with its antagonist, it will be found in walking a path towards liberation, with each other, remembering that it was always ours to take.