Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
Lately my emotions have tended toward anger at the apathetic middle, not the cartoon villains of the Penguin Administration.
I know it’s a minority view but I blame all this on the nice normal people that thought they had better things to do than pay attention to politics.
If you do not see the need for aggressive responses to lawlessness, you let this happen and I find you boring.
This has been my position since I was a teenager: centrists are the weak underbelly because they can’t pick a side and just want a middle ground.
Great sentiment, but you never have a side, a cause, and your “meaning” is always shifting to placate everyone else in the name of middleness.
To be fair to some of those people, they’re not all being unintentionally malicious. I used to call myself a centrist but that was in the transition phase between “conservative because everyone I know is” and “I have formed my own beliefs”. For most people that’s what the process of developing their opinions looks like. You don’t swing right from one extreme to the other. You take baby steps along the way. You start to see the cracks in what people around you are saying but you still mostly hear exaggerated caricatures of what the alternatives are so you’re sort of stuck in the middle because you don’t know where else it’s even possible to go.
Compromise is an important part of government.
I too believe in centrism, so long as the parties are on equal footing and we apply ethics.
If the one side isn’t operating in good faith, and keeps shifting their view more and more extreme, the other side also needs to shift more and more extreme so that the compromise still ends up in the theoretical middle.
Current events are proof that your preconditions needed for compromise to work do not exist in the real world.
That’s because the democrats refuse to move left and don’t have a backbone.
“my centrism isn’t a problem, it’s DEMOCRATS for not being left enough, because then my centrism would really be centered”
Sure bud, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
You aren’t wrong about democrats being spineless, but Personally I could never try and compromise with someone who thinks my very existence and the existence of minorities gives them a reason to hate and persecute up to literal lynching and murder but that’s just me.
You missed the part about ethics. The compromise between murdering and not murdering minorities is to not murder minorities.
The Democrats can’t have a backbone. They are owned by oligarch interests. Asking the Democrats to save you is asking a shark to stop another shark from eating you. They are rotten to the core.
If the democrats won’t do it, then a leftist party is required
To be fair, they kind of did exist for like… at least ~60 years. Many of us are old enough to remember what life in the 90s was like.
I would say the last time they existed was the 1970s when Nixon agreed to create an EPA he really didn’t want to that had fewer powers than its supporters really wanted. The 90s only seemed smooth because scumbag Clinton gave Republicans everything they wanted on welfare reform, criminal justice, telecom deregulation, intellectual property laws, and international trade.
And we still got Gingrich and the contract with America and Ken Starr and Sore Loserman for being so conciliatory
And erased the deficit. Plus the first real attempt at national healthcare.
I mean, there’s good and bad. We could have that or we could have all bad.
Until some of you start running and finding out what it means to win an election we default to whoever they’ve got queued up.
Replace “the real world” with “America” and you’re right. There is plenty of real world out here where there is no need to be tied to one party. In my parliamentary elections I’ve had 3 parties that I’ll choose from depending on what they’ve been doing recently. It all comes back to that stopid FPTP system forcing two parties on you.
A parliamentary system may be more resilient against fascist takeovers but this discussion is about the inherent foolishness of the centrist fallacy.
It’s a fallacy under any circumstances: do not compromise with people who are operating in bad faith.
I mean, what is the compromise here exactly? Don’t deport all the children with cancer? Only shut down half of the department of education?
Did you not read the ethics part? The ethical compromise between fuck over DoE and not fuck over DoE is not fuck over DoE. Democrats should be moving left
Centrists are scum, but the truly disengaged “oh I don’t care about politics” people are much worse imo.
Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
This is what Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is about. A book about the rise of fascism in the US written in 1935.
If “did not vote” was a candidate, it would have won every presidential election in modern history.
If it’s minority, then I’m right next to you and will gladly stay mad at the 40% that gave fuck all about this election. I fucking hate each one of them. I’ve never hated abstract people before, but in my 54 years, I’ve never been utterly ashamed and sad to be an American.
On an article talking about how Dems failed voters…
There’s always going to be someone blaming voters and saying asking for representation is undemocratic…