Why I’m Not A Centrist
Even though I think I am
I like to think of myself as a centrist. It isn’t necessarily an enviable thing to be these days. There are all these mocking epithets on social media: centrist dads, radical centrists, etc. People are constantly trying to ‘move the Overton window’ to redefine you as something more extreme. Or they suggest they haven’t moved, you have, and that your claims to the centre ground are hollow, if you would only look in the mirror and see the monster you have become.
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They may have a point. I notice more and more that I’m not the man I used to be, even while I think I still am. Hobbies, interests and habits that I still think of as mine, I haven’t actually bothered with in decades. I still think of myself as my younger self, without any cognition of how I behave now. So it’s possible that I carry a rucksack of opinions with me that I no longer hold.
So that’s one thing, but there is a more fundamental problem; I may always have been a cuckoo in the centrist nest. For there are two competing strains of centrism. There is the centrism of the moderate, who is in favour of certain policies but in a constrained, sensible way, not committing to them in the full-blooded way of the true believer. And then there is the centrist who simply doesn’t know, who can kind of see what both sides are getting at and therefore can’t decide between them. These two are not the same. And the latter may not really be a centrist at all, standing instead outside the debate. They lack the ability to form a settled opinion, but if that ability were to be in some way granted them, there is no telling where in the political spectrum it might place them.
But wait, there is another issue with centrism; is it really principled? In the case of our indecisive centrist, their centrism is clearly a character trait and they’d be exactly the same at any period in history, irrespective of the issues involved. It is less clearcut for the policy-driven centrist. For example, imagine you are such a centrist now, and therefore in favour of universal suffrage, you may even be open to the voting age being lowered but aren’t yet convinced. Now ask yourself what your view would have been 150 years ago. Would you have been advocating a vote for everyone, men and women, over 18, as now, or would your view have been centrist in the context of the time — some expansion of voting rights but not to the extent we have now? If the former then your current centrism is an accident of timing; 150 years ago you would have been a radical, and at some point in the future you may be a conservative, depending how the times reflect your consistent principles. But if the latter, then it starts to look like as much of a personality type as indecision does. Two hundred years ago this stripe of centrist would have been wringing their hands about how totally abolishing slavery might be a step too far.
So we now have three kinds of centrist: the indecisive centrist, the historically contingent accidental centrist, and the congenital centrist. And each of them vulnerable to the possibility that they have failed to update their self-perception in line with their actual behaviour. We deduce our centrism from our behaviour when young and define ourselves as such, but over time that definition can become axiomatic while we continue to evolve as people. This would explain why people from various political positions are adamant they are centrists. It’s commonly observed that no matter our age we still think we are sixteen, but maybe we also still think we are who we were at sixteen. We don’t notice how far we have travelled in our views, or more importantly our behaviour. We may reflexively espouse the opinion while contradicting it with our actions. This can lead us to dark places while insisting on our innate reasonableness.
