[marginalium]

What Is Centrism?

6 Jun 2025

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What Is Centrism? This is a mildy interesting critique of centrism as a political destination, and of the flaws in the Democratic approach that keeps getting Trump elected. But what’s more interesting was this:

Unlike most political philosophies, centrism defines itself in relation to other political philosophies. The right stands for something, and the left stands for something, but the centrists stand for “in between those things.” This fact alone accounts for the centrists’ messaging problems, and their solution. The problem is: How do you get people to support a philosophy that doesn’t inherently stand for anything? Their solution is: Attack the other political philosophies as too extreme, leaving centrism by process of elimination.

Which makes me wonder if a desire to be centrist is a core contributor to political polarisation, and not so much the actual polarisation of people.

Anthologies: Connection, Collective Architecture, On Culture, On Leadership, On Politics and Power, Everything Is Ideology

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