This Ain’t Reactionary Centrism
The Populist Right’s Existence is Not an Excuse to Reject Moderation
Is ‘reactionary centrism’ a real threat to democracy these days? Many on the left, even left-leaning liberals, would definitely say yes. On the other hand, some with a politics more similar to mine would likely reject that claim. Today, I want to look at which version of events is closer to the truth here. To properly answer this question, I think we need to look at what ‘reactionary centrism’ is firstly. According to Wikipedia, ‘reactionary centrism’ was first coined in 2018, and it refers generally to centrists who some people feel criticize the left too much, while not proportionally criticizing the right enough, in a time of increasing far-right influence. Toby Buckle, a left-liberal writer who I read regularly and respect despite not always agreeing with, has recently defined it as those who justify people “moving right because they have ‘reasonable concerns’ about immigration, asylum, and the excesses of social liberalism’, and that “the fascist [his term for populist right] resurgence can hence be understood as a ‘backlash to woke’”. Given this definition, I’m pretty sure most reasonable people would conclude that I’m not a ‘reactionary centrist’, given my frequent and strident criticisms of the ‘populist right’ and its authoritarian tendencies, as well as explicitly stating that the presence of the woke left is not a valid excuse for the right’s recent authoritarianism. This shows that ‘reactionary centrism’ is quite different from ‘centrism’, which I do identify with.
Is reactionary centrism a real thing then, according to the aforementioned definitions? I’ve definitely seen people who would fit the description, although I strongly disagree with Buckle that former British Prime Minister Kier Starmer is among them (more on this later). The kind of people who fit the aforementioned description tend to most often be online influencers, and their ‘centrist’ identity tends to last only a limited amount of time, in that they tend to reveal that they have gone full MAGA sooner rather than later. It is an objective fact that most of the original ‘reactionary centrists’ from around 2018, the vast majority of the online influencers who fit the description back then, have publicly gone full MAGA at some timepoint since then. This was especially likely to have happened either in 2020, to help boost Trump’s re-election effort that year, or else during the Biden administration, when the Democrats clearly became less woke, thus removing that excuse to support Trump, and forcing those previously leaning on this excuse to more positively make a committed case for supporting Trump, independent of the existence of wokeness. Looking back, my take is that most of those who were seen as ‘reactionary centrists’ back in 2018 were actually going to move to the MAGA column anyway, and the Democrats’ unwise embrace of wokeness provided them the perfect excuse for their shift. This was why, when the Democrats became less woke under Biden, many of these people easily dropped the ‘centrist’ pretense, and became actively pro-MAGA. With the original ‘reactionary centrists’ having gone full MAGA a long time ago, all the influential centrists I see these days are pretty anti-Trump, and by extension, against populist right politics in general. Hence ‘reactionary centrism’ should now be a historicized phenomenon, and should be considered part of the historical development of the MAGA right, rather than have anything to do with genuine centrists.
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Why then, are people like Toby Buckle still complaining about reactionary centrism in 2026? And who exactly does this term refer to nowadays? Well, in Buckle’s article, he basically used the term to describe the Starmer administration, particularly on the two issues of immigration and trans rights. On immigration, Starmer did move to drastically reduce new immigrant numbers, but he certainly did not implement Trump-style policies like ICE on the streets or mass deportations. On trans rights, it’s not like the Starmer administration actually passed new anti-trans legislation like Texas, Florida and other red states have done. The backsliding was actually caused by a ruling of the Supreme Court, in regards to definitions in the Equality Act. I’m pretty certain that, had the court found the opposite (as the courts in Australia actually did), Starmer would have happily accepted that ruling, just like his Australian counterparts did. However, in the UK, the only way Starmer could have stopped the backsliding would be by amending the Equality Act itself, to undo the impact of the ruling. However, that would have required a whole process including public consultation and parliamentary debate, thus putting the whole issue of trans people and bathrooms into the spotlight for at least several months, with no guarantee of success. While one might have judged that, by refusing to go through that process, Starmer abandoned trans people for the sake of political expediency (and even this would be a subjective judgement, because not every trans person in Britain wanted to go through the public consultation drama again), there was certainly no evidence at all that Starmer personally held ‘reactionary centrist’ attitudes towards trans rights. Overall, it would be a huge stretch to suggest that Starmer is a ‘reactionary centrist’, especially given the original ‘reactionary centrists’ from the 2010s often eventually went full MAGA, and Starmer was certainly not MAGA-like at all. He also never used the excesses of the woke left to justify a right-wing agenda, which was the original definition of ‘reactionary centrism’.
By describing the Starmer administration as his example of reactionary centrism, I think Buckle essentially implied the kind of people he saw as reactionary centrists: moderates who appear to compromise with the populist right. And despite that I tend to be a more centrist kind of liberal, I think I understand this concern, and even share some of this concern myself, to be honest. For example, earlier this year, I responded to an article saying that the populist right is now a normal part of our political landscape, by firmly pointing out that I don’t think we should normalize the populist right, and that giving in to the populist right at this moment would be akin to suing for peace with the Nazis in 1943. In other words, I think it would not be morally upright to just accept the normalization of the populist right way of doing politics. However, in the same article, I also stated that some legitimate concerns that populist right supporters hold, for example regarding immigration numbers, should be addressed by liberals and democrats, rather than just ignored, brushed off, or made taboo. This is because, while the populist right as a whole shouldn’t be accepted, it doesn’t automatically follow that none of the concerns of their supporters are legitimate. This is why, adopting some policies that might seem to look like moving in the populist right’s direction, like Starmer did with immigration, isn’t the same as giving into the populist right’s position overall, and certainly isn’t the same as being a ‘reactionary centrist’. It’s the same reason why compromising on the issue of trans sports is not the same as adopting Trump-style anti-trans policy wholesale, for example. This, I think, is a point we must get into our heads, if we are to adopt reasonable policy positions again, regardless of the presence of the populist right. The alternative would be to force ourselves to adopt far-left positions just to be different to the populist right, which would be neither justified nor rational. Indeed, if the existence of the populist right means that we can’t compromise or moderate on anything anymore, that would be a ridiculous and self-defeating ‘policy’. It would also prevent any attempt by the center-left to reconnect with the working class, something that the left should want desperately, according to their own theory.
Still, I understand the fear of not holding the line adequately, and letting the populist right make inroads into eroding our long-standing freedoms and rights. This, again, is why I said we must not just normalize the populist right. I also acknowledge the fear that those who want to ‘look moderate’ primarily as a political aesthetic could be motivated to adopt half of the populist right’s positions at any time, just to stay within the middle of the Overton Window, even as the populist right keeps trying to shift its boundaries to a more authoritarian position on issue after issue. This kind of aesthetic-driven moderatism would indeed be a disaster for liberty, in the face of the populist right’s cunning political strategy. Instead, I propose that we embrace a values-driven moderatism, where we hold the line against authoritarians of all kinds simply by staying true to our values. We should consistently apply the values that make us moderates, like we would do even if the populist right wasn’t there in the first place. Values like willingness to listen to all sides of an argument, to put down our prior ideological beliefs, to strive to understand the objective truth better all the time, and to be compassionate towards stakeholders on all sides of the argument. I think by consistently doing this, we wouldn’t end up letting the populist right erode our long-standing freedoms, because it is on these values that they stand.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com on September 30, 2026.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the book TaraElla’s Political Theory of Everything and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.
