Stuff like this is why all the move-toward-the-center tripe that the DC donor class likes to peddle is just bullshit. It’s never as simple as projecting the political spectrum to a 1D axis and assuming you need to take the “average” or “median” voter’s positions to achieve maximum popularity. Your “average” person is incoherent, and you need to have a backbone of values that can energize a base of support. Class analysis will always lead you to identify the widest potential base, but they’ll never do that!
Whenever I am forced to talk politics with people and they bring up ‘oh I’m in the middle’, I just ask them ‘in the middle of what’ and force them to try to explain either the political compass or line graph they are visualizing and picking apart the metaphor through Socratic dialogue. It irritates the absolute shit out of people but it usually gets them to either stop talking to me about it, or stop thinking about politics in those terms because it is easily demonstrated to be nonsense.
The other fun one is agree that you’re also a centrist/moderate but then only espouse left wing views without using any of the scary words they’re programmed to ignore
Stuff like this is why all the move-toward-the-center tripe that the DC donor class likes to peddle is just bullshit. It’s never as simple as projecting the political spectrum to a 1D axis and assuming you need to take the “average” or “median” voter’s positions to achieve maximum popularity. Your “average” person is incoherent, and you need to have a backbone of values that can energize a base of support. Class analysis will always lead you to identify the widest potential base, but they’ll never do that!
Whenever I am forced to talk politics with people and they bring up ‘oh I’m in the middle’, I just ask them ‘in the middle of what’ and force them to try to explain either the political compass or line graph they are visualizing and picking apart the metaphor through Socratic dialogue. It irritates the absolute shit out of people but it usually gets them to either stop talking to me about it, or stop thinking about politics in those terms because it is easily demonstrated to be nonsense.
The other fun one is agree that you’re also a centrist/moderate but then only espouse left wing views without using any of the scary words they’re programmed to ignore
I’m a centrist, I think we should execute only half of billionaires.