WittyUsername wrote: ↑Wed Sep 08, 2021 12:47 pmI realize this is an incredibly minor part of the conversation, but when people talk about “centrist liberals,” what exactly are they referring to?
While its a minor part of this particular convo obviously, its actually I would argue an INCREDIBLY key, crucial point that is absolutely necessary to understand if you're going to have any hope at all of grasping what the actual realities are of the political landscape (particularly in America, but also abroad in some other places as well).
In America in particular, there's a popular - and completely and hopelessly wrong - binary view of politics that the playing field is split evenly between what can be broadly categorized as "the Left" and "the Right". Liberalism vs Conservatism.
The reality is of course far, far more crucially nuanced than that, but for the purposes of simplification, we can boil the lay of the land down to not two, but THREE key factions in the political landscape:
The Left (Progressivism)
The Right (Conservatism)
and The Center (Liberalism)
One of the biggest issues, certainly at least in American popular discourse, is the lumping in of the Left and the Center as being 100% one and the same exact faction, with largely overlapping and consistent political views and agendas between them. Those of the more Right-leaning persuasion (both intentionally to obfuscate as well as unintentionally out of sheer, cement-headed ignorance, depending on who the right-leaning person in question happens to be) are particularly guilty of doing this
constantly, but its unfortunately also come to be seen that way amongst a very large mass of apolitical "normies" (thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Right's tenacious and night-constant bombardment of messaging).
The reality of course is that once you go even a
millimeter deeper beyond the most shallow of surface levels, the differences between the Left and the Center are fairly night and day drastic and in most cases overlap minimally to almost not at all when the rubber meets the road.
Since internet nerd culture of the last 7 years or so has, unfortunately and horrifyingly, come to make up the main backdrop and conduit for a vast, vast chunk (if not majority) of online young people's way, WAY too goddamned belated political, history, and civics education (including the overwhelming majority of people posting on this forum: seriously, most of you are only learning this stuff anywhere in your mid to late teens to late 20s/early fucking 30s when you should've already had a lot of these fundamentals firmly nailed down by like, grade 3 or 4
at most), I'll try my very best and basically attempt to see if I can simplify and boil down what the essence of those core differences are in as succinct and economically bite-sized a compressed format as possible without turning this entire post/thread into a whole Noam Chomsky-length textbook.
Right Wing Conservatism can be broadly understood by a fixation on the past: both real and also overwhelmingly imaginary. Most of the world's problems to the Right Wing Conservative mind can be solved if we just rewind the clock and go back to to some previous point in history. Where that previous point in history happens to be is a constantly shifting goalpost, but its often usually further and further back into the past the more extreme one's Conservative viewpoints are.
The common Conservative stereotype sees them as being obsessed with returning back to the 1950s - think an entire civilization made up of solely lily-white WASP families, with a pipe smoking, suit-jacketed, bread-winning dad, an apron clad, homemaking house servant mom, and a handful of obliviously innocent little rugrats and their dog or cat running around a house with a white picket fence in a sleepy, quiet little suburban hamlet, and not a black or brown person to be seen for thousands of miles in any direction: something straight out of an episode of Leave it to Beaver or Ozzie & Harriet - but there are plenty of hyper-reactionary Conservatives out there in the deeper waste pits of their movement who'd love nothing better than to go back much, MUCH further than that even (think literal Dark Ages shit).
The Conservative Right viewpoint is that things are shit now... but they were WAY better
back then. When exactly "back then" happens to be may vary, but the running throughline is "We used to be fine before, but we've lost our way now: so lets all agree to just rewind and go back to the way things were back when we were all happy and just stay there instead". The phrase "back in simpler times" spoken of in wistful, longing tones is like the central mantra to Conservative thinking.
Left Wing Progressivism meanwhile and by stark contrast, is more focused on the future and moving society forwards rather than backwards. I mean its in the name itself: Progressive, and in "to Progress". They see society as something that should always be evolving or improving (hmmm, constantly working towards self-improving... that theme sure sounds familiar
) and not devolving or regressing backwards.
Progressive Leftism sees the world through a 100% unromanticized historical lens, and recognizes that the world has ALWAYS from day one till now been a complicated, convoluted, clusterfucked shitshow of mess of human fallibility, stupidity, and competing, conflicting, and contradicting interests. Always and throughout time.
That there never was any such thing as a "back when things used to be better and simpler", that most of human history can be defined by people (most often a marginalized minority) having ALWAYS been engaged in a constant, vicious struggle to inch society forward toward improvement against extreme resistance from a greater, lackadaisical whole from the moment we all started modern civilization to now, and that the bullshit of today echoes back into the past and throughout history. That the past is something to be LEARNED FROM and MOVED BEYOND, and not something to wallow in and fetishize.
The Progressive Left, put in its most simple terms, wishes for society to travel forth, not back.
Then there's the Liberal Center. The "Third Way" if you will (note "Third Way" is the name of a literal, actual, real world political organization that's existed for decades now and that works to push forward a Liberal Centrist agenda and put power into the hands of Liberal Centrist political leaders: I didn't just make that term up).
As the "third option" that is sandwiched in between one political ideology that is obsessed with rewinding society back to an imaginary, romanticized past (that largely never was, or was actually pretty shit for most other people when you actually take the time to critically examine it) and another political ideology that sees the past for what it is and is instead focused on moving society ahead towards a brighter future and towards continued betterment and improvement... Liberal Centrism is obsessed and fixated on staying forever frozen in time in a perpetual, never changing, here and now present status quo.
A Liberal Centrist fully recognizes that so many aspects of the past were bad and would rather not go back to that... but is also, when push ultimately comes to shove, hopelessly frozen in terror of what the future might hold as well. So most the obvious answer for most Liberal Centrists is to... just stay put and not do ANYTHING meaningful either way. Don't move society backwards, and don't
dare move it forwards either: or if you DO move it forwards, ONLY do it in the tiniest of baby steps, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, regardless of how desperate, dire, or unsustainable the present circumstances are.
In contrast to both the Right and the Left (but oftentimes when push comes to shove, most Centrists are WAY more afraid of a Left future than they are of a Right regression, and gun to their heads will sooner and much more viciously fight back a Left march towards the future than a Right march towards the past), Liberal Centrism is focused on forever preserving the present status quo in ember.
Status Quo is God to a Liberal Centrist mind: don't touch or move ANYTHING in EITHER direction. Fiddle around the edges a small, tiny, subtle bit, but NEVER do anything in either direction that is TOO extreme... no matter how obviously, desperately needed and necessary it might be for the basic survival of the broader whole or the most vulnerable.
As a metaphor to illustrate my point further: lets say for a moment that civilized society is a boat stuck out in the middle of a vast freezing ocean and humanity is made up of people who are either safely aboard the boat or are stuck paddling around out in the ocean outside the boat and will inevitably either freeze to death or drown if they can't get aboard the boat.
The Right leaning Conservative shifts the boat to the right in order to kick more and more people off of the boat to make more room, luxury, and comfort for an increasingly narrower and narrower few sliver of people aboard the boat. And everyone else who's stuck outside the boat? Fuck 'em, sucks to be them. Hell, lets all even laugh at them and openly mock them as they're drowning right in front of us, just because we can and because it satisfies some twisted psychological inferiority complex.
The Left leaning Progressive meanwhile wants to shift the boat to the left in order to let MORE people ONTO the boat (
everyone in fact) and save them from needless, easily preventable death and suffering. The Left Progressive understands and recognizes that there's indeed actually PLENTY of room on board the boat for EVERYONE, that NO ONE needs to be left out in the water to freeze or drown, that keeping them away or kicking them off of the boat is pointlessly, needlessly cruel, sociopathic, and completely unjustifiable.
To a Liberal Centrist mind however, you don't
dare rock the boat in
either direction: because the people in the boat who are the perceived "mainstream" (that is generally largely white or otherwise just financially well-off people: so the definition of "mainstream" in a Liberal mind tends to be pretty skewed in itself) are comfortable with the way things are now, and that the comfort of those privileged people on board the boat who are fine with the status quo of the boat as it is right now is to NEVER be disturbed in
either a left or right direction (but again if push comes to shove and they were forced to choose, they're ultimately much more comfortable with fewer people aboard the boat than more)... no matter how gaping and obvious the immense, incalculable pain and suffering of anyone who isn't lucky enough to be in the boat themselves and are stuck drowning and freezing to death in the water surrounding the boat.
Even if the reality is that there are increasingly fewer and fewer people who are safely inside the metaphorical boat (largely because the Right keeps kicking people off of it back into the water, and the Centrists aren't really doing a whole helluva lot much to stop them), the Centrist Liberal mind would sooner see the growing masses of people stuck outside the boat all collectively freeze to death and drown in front of them than even risk a sub 1% unlikely chance that people might tip the boat over if they let them onto it: even when people on the Left constantly demonstrate for them time and time again how incredibly possible and very much do-able it is to get EVERYONE safely on the boat quickly and orderly without tipping it over.
Much of Liberal Centrism can be defined as frozen inaction even in the face of immense pain, suffering, and cataclysmic disaster that is borne from a combination of selfishness and cowardice.
Mind you, I'm deconstructing and dissecting what are ultimately the root core of all three of these political ideologies/positions when you set aside all the bullshit and distractions that help obfuscate them to whatever degree. What often confuses so very many people as to the real underlying nature of these ideological positions is the surface-level affect that they put forth. All of the aforementioned bullshit and distractions that people get so caught up in focusing on and obsessing about without in any way looking more critically at the underlying substance beneath it all.
While Right Wing Conservatism, especially in the present day, is marked by wearing their cruelty and sadism outwardly and proudly on their sleeve (at this point, Right Conservatism has basically all but totally devolved into a bunch of real life, moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-esque comic books supervillains with a Swastika, often times literally, stamped on their foreheads; making anyone who willingly throws in with them - and who aren't doing so out of the most IMMENSE amount of searing pain and desperation - about as unjustified and indefensible as you can possibly be), Liberal Centrism is still HEAVILY preoccupied with optics, appearances, and good PR.
Thus, one of the most critically important political actions that Liberal Centrists will spend most of their time engaging in is purely Performative Empathy and Care that is without the slightest, vague vestige of actual substantive, material actions to back it up and lend it real weight or meaning.
To go back to our boat metaphor: a Right Conservative will gleefully kick people off the boat into the freezing ocean water and have a grand old time laughing their collective asses off at them, while a Liberal Centrist won't necessarily go out of their way to either help people get back aboard (maybe they'll help SOME occasionally, and that's certainly better than none for sure, but they're hardly making it their chief priority or doing NEARLY what they're capable of to help VASTLY more people get safely aboard) or to actively kick people off.
The Liberal Centrists' passive inaction, when push comes to shove, only serves and helps the Right continue to kick more and more people off the boat and out into the frozen water... just at a much slower, and more gradual pace than if they Right had sole free reign of the entire boat to themselves. Liberal Centrists are the epitome of saying "The only way for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". Liberal Centrists are
EXACTLY the sorts of people whom this saying is referring to directly.
But all that being said: unlike the Right, who will outwardly and openly mock and ridicule the suffering of the very people they're gleefully helping to murder and keep ground down into pointless, easily preventable suffering (and don't much care how bad it makes them look, and are indeed increasingly PROUD of how bad it makes them look), the Centrist will make a MASSIVE fucking deal and show of how badly they feel for all the people who are stuck out in the ocean drowning.
Centrist Liberals will bemoan and scream for all who'll hear that they WISH SO MUCH with all their heart of hearts that there was more they could do to help or save more of them (even while full well knowing there is VASTLY, near INFINITELY more that they can be doing, but are choosing not to) but gosh golly, their hands are just completely tied (even when they obviously aren't, and they have all the tools and materials they need to save pretty much EVERYONE sitting
right fucking there next to them in plain and easy reach), so what can you do? Certainly don't blame THEM for the Right being pricks.
Liberal Centrist affect is wholly defined by impotent hand-wringing and self-flagellation at how unfortunate and tragic it is that so many people have to suffer and die at Right Wing injustice... all while possessing all the power and ability to do far, FAR more to help those very same people that they claim to care so deeply for and who's suffering pains them so much to see, and just deciding ultimately "Nah, too much effort."
Liberal Centrism distilled to its essence.
This is largely why Liberal Centrism is ultimately such a popular and pervasive ideology among people who are - to whatever extent - perfectly comfortable with their lives exactly as they are now and who don't have any real stake or skin in the game personally, and on the one hand have at least
just enough self-awareness to understand that their current comfort is totally unfair and unequitable and that there are countless people outside their sphere who are in wholly unjustified suffering and misery due to a completely indefensible and unnecessary lack of direct access to their levels of comfort and privilege...
...and yet at the end of the day, deep down, just don't care THAT much enough to even
slightly risk or jeopardize losing even just a tiny fractional percentage blip of their material benefits from their current status quo, no matter how many people they claim to care about it'll help.
Needless to say, much of the Right Wing has continued to gain so much of their power and influence from (among a host of other things mind you) a combination of Centrist Liberal inaction along with Liberal Centrists being such blatantly easy targets for the far Right to Hypocrisy Shame.
Liberal Centrists also Hypocrisy Shame the Right Wing all the live long day as well of course, and the Right are certainly just as easy of a target, if not more so... but part of the reason it doesn't stick to the Right nearly as much as it does to Centrists is because the Right aren't PRETENDING to be anything other exactly what they are and always have been: complete and utter scumbags and human garbage of the lowest sort.
Centrists carry around VASTLY more pretenses at moral and ethical piety, which makes their hypocrisies being laid out stick out in people's minds much harder than does the hypocrisy of people on the Right, who can barely be bothered to conceal the fact that they're transparently and obviously full of shit guttertrash.
This is in no small part of why for at least some significant subset of people who are genuinely desperate and suffering the worst kinds of pain imaginable, it is on some primordial, lizard-brained level, vastly easier for them to trust and throw in with a Right Wing slimeball than it is a wishy-washy and ultimately detached and passive Centrist Liberal: the former may be clearly evil swine,
but they aren't pretending to be otherwise, unlike Centrists. Better to be stabbed in the front than in the back in other words. That doesn't make it right or justified mind you: that's just the reality of how it is for a lot of people who are brought so low that they feel like they have nothing left to lose.
In other words, its the Scorpion and the Frog ("Its in my nature to sting" said the Scorpion) fable on a mass, grand political scale.
So... how does all of that metaphor and analogy for how the Right, Left, and Center differ actually translate out in the practical and observable day to day real world?
Simple enough: in actual practical reality, Social and Economic issues are intrinsically and inescapably linked and tethered to one another. Much like how Piccolo and Kami are, to rope a random Dragon Ball analogy into things: what impacts the one also impacts the other and vice versa.
If you want to meaningfully address the roots of the suffering that black people in America have been putting up with for more than a century or two straight now, for just one example of many, you're only going to do that by making MASSIVE economic and legislative reforms toward systemic issues (that are omnipresent in everything from basic policing to real estate to banking, and so on) that have been critically key toward keeping black Americans (for the most part and in aggregate: your celebrity superstar examples are indeed the exception and not the rule, no different than it is for any other given ethnicity) largely in sustained, inter-generational poverty. Because the deck has been (legally/legislatively) stacked SO insanely heavily against black people for so long, we're still dealing with the fallout of GENERATIONS worth of sustained institutional injustice and racism towards them, that have only in VERY recent decades been seeing a slow, gradual roll towards meaningful reform (that's being constantly impeded and slowed and pushed back at every step of the way by largely rich, white racists who've been haunting the halls of U.S. power for sustained generations).
To try and address issues of systemic racism and bigotry without in any way meaningfully tackling economic issues that are at the clear heart of the matter on a nationwide, systemic level is to basically live in a fairy tale neverland where you basically believe that real change happens because enough people who are good in their hearts wish hard enough for Tinkerbell to fly or for the Carebears to shoot their Care Beams out of their chests or whatever the fuck happens in dogshit children's cartoons that defeats the villain at the end.
If you aren't serious about tacking economic reform, then you aren't serious about meaningfully addressing racism or bigotry, anymore than you would be if you were someone with a car that has a busted engine block and who wants to get it fixed, but refuses to take the car in to a mechanic to have the engine replaced while knowing jack from shit about cars to fix it yourself. You can't have it both ways and you can't single out just one:
either you address both problems, or you're addressing neither. Period, end of.
And black people (along with a host of other vulnerable, oppressed minorities, from Latinos to women to the LGBTQ community) don't have forever to sit and wait around for clueless-ass, coddled as fuck middle/upper class white dudes (and no small number of white women frankly) to slowly, gradually piece this shit together for themselves: they're kind of dropping like flies and dying, especially since the nature of systemic oppression means that what impacts ALL of the lower class (including lower class white men) also disproportionately impacts minorities
doubly and triply so. They have all of poor white America's same exact problems, PLUS all this other shit piled on top of it as well.
This is something that SO much actual socio-economic research has been done on over the past half-century (honestly, just crack open pretty much ANY halfway decent academic political/economic textbook that isn't written by an obvious fringe crank or whacko to see for yourself; there's SO MUCH documented, hard research data to support this that I could be here for days and days at a time listing them all), that its just an inescapable and inarguable fact of reality: and yet between the Right, Left, and Center, it is largely only the Left who take that crucial reality in any way seriously towards anything that at all resembles a constructive, practical, or ethically justified end.
To hear the Conservative Right tell it, Social and Economic issues ARE indeed linked according to them... but in the manner of a bunch of true psychopaths, they put all the onus of the burden of blame onto the absolute weakest, most powerless and disenfranchised people in all of society as the reason for why economic harmony (which in their eyes basically amounts to "All the money in the world for me and mine, and none for anyone else") isn't being attained. In other words, to go back to the boat metaphor, the Right Wing thinks that "Things aboard the boat would be SO MUCH more peaceful and nicer if all those masses of drowning, freezing people outside would just shut the fuck up and die quicker."
Good paying jobs are drying up nationwide? It can't be because increasingly skewed trade laws (which are put into place by both Right AND Centrist political leaders and legislators) continually incentivize massive corporations to outsource more and more of their labor to 3rd world hellholes that still have legalized slavery and sweatshops: no, the OBVIOUS root of the issue (according to the Right) are all those penniless Mexican day laborers who only take the worst, most lowest paying and difficult jobs that every statistic and poll in existence clearly shows that most white Americans
don't even want to take under even penalty of utter poverty and destitution.
Those poor, starving brown people who don't have a pot to piss in and almost no political leverage... THEY are somehow or other to blame for your economic woes (via the most asinine, backward-assed, tortured logic imaginable), NOT the big, friendly corporation with all the money and power and the big fat smiley sticker on it.
Thus social and economic issues are linked in the right's mind - and the correct way to address it according to them is to step on the hands of the people who are barely hanging on for dear life and laugh as you watch them fall to their deaths rather than just help them up and make more room for them (which is primarily being impeded by corporate obstruction in the overwhelming majority of most cases). Meanwhile the Right Wing political leadership are often times themselves HEAVILY in bed financially with massive, multinational corporations, so this is all a 100% totally self-serving misdirect on their part.
Get the masses of people with torches and pitchforks to turn the brunt of their rage at the weakest, most blameless people possible (i.e. poor and impoverished minorities) for their troubles, so that they don't go turning their guns instead onto the corporate overlords who are both at the
real root of the problem and are the Right Conservative movement's chief sugar daddies. Its one of the oldest political tricks in the book that dates all the way back to medieval times, if not earlier.
The Center on the other hand are a whole other story. They DENY that there is almost ANY meaningful link between Social issues and Economics. To hear it from Centrist Liberals, our current economic model and framework is all but perfect exactly as it is, and at most only needs the most mild of tweaking and subtle little adjustments to make it even better. That's all it'll take to solve any economic issues: little bits of tweaking.
According to Centrist Liberal thought, the core nuts and bolts of our economic model - which is clearly, demonstrably, and quite literally
killing people in ever-increasing droves, and will eventually and inevitably via climate change (which is caused and continued by massive fossil fuel industry profits being directly prioritized over human lives and mass public safety) lead to total and complete human extinction and genocide - are largely working just fine and only has a few bugs and small kinks that need to be ironed out.
In other words, Liberal Centrism is THE primary reason for why you might recognize this image here and is why its become one of the most culturally and generationally defining internet memes of the last decade.
Instead, Centrist Liberals will insist to their utmost being that all everyone has to do is JUST BE NICER TO EACH OTHER FOR
GOSH SAKES. Nothing is wrong with society that can't be fixed with a little good old fashioned positive thinking (and literally
nothing else besides). All meaningful political action is symbolic, performative, and completely 1000% interpersonal rather than systemic and material.
Don't give homeless people money, a roof over their head, and three square meals a day, even when its well within your ability to do so: just tell them how bad you feel for them, tell them to buck up, and maybe give them a "Help the homeless" t-shirt. That will go a long way to brightening their day, surely!
Once again folks: Liberal Centrism distilled to its essence.
From a Liberal Centrist perspective, nothing is materially or inherently wrong with the system itself at its core (despite being established and started under a white supremacist and patriarchal framework from the getgo), people are just too mean to each other and that's all there is to it.
Upset and frustrated with how fucked the world is right now? Then just go outside and pet a dog, take up dance lessons, give a kid a lollypop, hug a black friend during black history month, pretend you love every single Marvel movie and that each one is a new breakthrough in breaking another societal glass ceiling. Whatever, anything...
just so long as you don't ask us to actually change or fix anything that might make our own economic comfort just SLIGHTLY less so than it already is.
Even when that's the ONLY thing that'll actually solve anything and ease people's collective pain and suffering and actually create something that's akin to an ACTUALLY and for-real equal and just society instead of just having the transparently fake veneer of one like we do now. Just don't make us (Liberal Centrists) have to do anything politically that might even SLIGHTLY disturb our comfort (read: make us part with one shiny red penny of our treasure hoard) to actually get you where you need to be to actually live a healthy, sustainable life.
The reality for why Liberal Centrists (at least those in the uppermost halls of elected office and economic wealth) think in this way is actually not that much different from people in Right Wing positions of political leadership: they're ultimately in bed financially with many of the same corporate interests who keep them wealthy and sign their checks.
Push comes to shove, that sweet, sweet money and all the comforts and luxury it entails is ultimately just what wins out in their mind and actions in the end when it comes down to a put up or shut up choice of "Help suffering poor and minorities and save their lives from senseless death and maybe lose some small, ultimately insignificant bit of that excess wealth in the process" versus "Keep ALL of my money, and watch everyone who is too poor or too black/queer to be in my position die senselessly in front of me", they'll ultimately choose the latter... all while wringing their hands and wailing and moaning loudly about how sad and tragic and what a grave injustice it all is, and if ONLY
someone could've done
something to prevent it.
In practical terms, you can basically sum up Liberal Centrism as "Anything to help black, brown, women, and gay people against bigotry and oppression... just as long as it doesn't cost me any money. What's that? Oh, it WILL cost me just a
little bit of money after all? Um... er... black people? Gay and trans people? Women? Those people have problems? Oh well shit... golly if only something could be done about that... oh well, life's full of little downers like that I guess."
You see this attitude not just in the halls of political power, but also even in day to day life, particularly if you live in the suburbs. Suburban white middle class "Leftism" is in most cases the farthest thing ever from actual Leftism (though most will happily delude themselves into thinking that it is) and is in fact simply Liberal Centrism.
All the focus and emphasis in their political activity is on purely SYMBOLIC change and PERFORMATIVE concern and shallow AFECT over tangible, material, substantive steps towards real change that actually impacts people's lives in a meaningful fashion. Back in the day, we used to call these types "Limousine Liberals" but now "woke SJW" is the go-to term for a lot of people (even though that's a very messy label that overlaps and conflates actual Leftist activists with very much unserious and ridiculous Neoliberal Centrists: which of course is exactly the point and the goal for the Right in using that term in such a broad way, and it isn't an accident).
For average, ordinary, clueless suburban dipshits, their motives aren't generally as purposeful and malicious as it tends to be from Centrist Liberals' completely feigned impotence and passivity within the higher halls of political and corporate power (to say nothing of the Conservative Right): its more a kind of blissful, willful malaise and lack of care to look at the problem TOO closely: because end of the day, they simply don't feel the weight of the impact nor do they largely have to deal with the repercussions that the poorest, most vulnerable groups tend to. Their lives will go on as comfortably as it would've either way, regardless of whether or not oppressed minorities actually have their most serious issues resolved in any meaningful way.
The shallow "Left/Progressive" affect is more about making THEMSELVES feel good and feel better about their own comfortable and privileged little blissful existence, and not actually HELPING the people that they make a big show of caring about. They don't know what the real root of the issues are or what it'll take to actually fix them because they simply
don't want to know and
don't care to know.
Because it isn't actually helping people in need that's actually motivating them deep down inside: its making themselves
feel good and
feel like they're someone who cares about helping people without the necessary discipline and self-sacrifice it entails to actually fucking do it in reality. Its cosplaying as a Leftist without realizing or thinking about what it entails and what it means to
actually go to the matt in a serious, substantive way for Leftist causes and goals.
And its especially telling (not to mention galling) whenever Centrist Liberals are ever ACTUALLY and actively confronted in person, face to face, with the very oppressed people that they make such a big show of caring so much about helping, and those people actually tell them directly, to their face, exactly what it is that they need to be done to help them and exactly what it is that Centrists have been doing wrong all this time and why it is they're failing at delivering actual results for the people they purport to want so badly to help for so long...
...it just bounces right off of them. They'll focus on literally just about ANYTHING else, even going as low as to focus on manners and etiquette over the actual substance of what is being said to them.
I cannot count the number of times I've watched - even face to face in person before my very eyes - some suburban wine mom Karen-type with a "Black Lives Matter" t-shirt and pink "pussy hat" on be directly confronted by an actual black or brown person who actually comes from a for-real poverty-stricken background and who has clearly been through absolute and utter hell and yet is soldiering on and trying again for the umpteenth time to seek political and material aid via some form of activist work within white suburban communities...
...and suddenly the most important thing in the world in that moment for so many white upper/middle class suburbanites (who it cannnot be stressed enough lead some of the most blessed, pampered lives imaginable, and yet hold such a disproportionate amount of political and economic power in society) is that they be treated and talked to with perfect, prim, and proper respect at all times, or else they'll dismiss the person in front of them who is all but begging them for a shred of help as "too rude" to bother with.
This is part of the sheltered nature of so many Centrist Liberals (one could even call it "white privilege" if one were so inclined) who don't actually have real, lived-in experience with what actual
desperation actually looks and sounds like in person, and to whom its only an abstract concept to be discussed among their similarly privileged friends with token, performative solemnness as part of some circle-jerk display to one another about what good Left Progressive Allies they are.
People who are actually hurting and who's lives are in absolute ruins aren't in a position to consistently frontload calm, reasoned manners at any and every given possible moment when making a political case for their seeking material aid: when you've been through absolute hell throughout much of your life and are at the absolute end of your rope, patience and perfect politeness is sometimes going to go out the window. Impassioned yelling and crying might even happen from time to time. Obviously. Common fucking sense (for anyone who's even so much as vaguely brushed up against actual, genuine life-ruining and life-upending misfortune) should tell you this.
If someone's whole body is on fire, they aren't going to cry for help like "Excuse me sir or madam, but if it wouldn't be too troublesome for me to ask you, do you think you might be willing to turn that nearby fire extinguisher one me? Pretty please with sugar on top?"
Its going to sound a whole lot more like "OH MY GOD IT BURNS!!! HELP ME!!! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE I'M FUCKING DYING HERE!!! WHY ARE YOU JUST STANDING THERE!!!??? DO SOMETHING!!!! PLEEEEEEASE!!!!"
Liberal Centrists are often the kinds of people who'll be confronted with the real life political equivalent of this level of misery and suffering from actual poor people and minorities (of the very sort they'll tell to anyone who'll listen how much they care so deeply about helping them in any way possible), and say to the person coming to them for help directly to their face "No, sorry, not interested. If you asked me a little nicer, then maybe I would've, but not if you're going to be so RUDE about it!" then close the door in their face. And then continue to still pat themselves on the back immediately thereafter about what an empathetic, progressive "ally" they are to minorities who are suffering and in need, without missing a beat and without seemingly the slightest hint of self-awareness.
Imagine this scene from Temple of Doom (complete with Indy's "WE!! ARE GOING!!!
TO DIE!!!"), but Willie is too put off by how rude Indy's request was or how gross the bugs are, doesn't bother to pull the lever at all, and lets Indy and Short-Round get impaled by the spikes... only to them proceed to then just shrug it off and go on bragging to people about what a Good Samaritan they are and how they can't stand to see people in need to pain suffer. Liberal Centrism folks.
For whatever vague surface-level similarity you might see, there is a HUGE chasm that separates Centrist Liberal thinking and Progressive Left thinking when you actually examine both critically and carefully: but due to all the mountains of surface level social baggage surrounding the current mainstream political discourse, a horrifying lack of even
incredibly basic civic or historical education and awareness, the active machinations and marketing/messaging chicanery of the Right Conservative movement (who play dirty and are unashamed and proud of it), massive corners of the internet being the type of hopeless wasteland of stupidity that it is, the gobs and gobs of corporate money that's constantly being thrown at actively sowing disinformation to make sure nothing gets done or ever goes anywhere, the passive learned helplessness and inaction of Centrist Liberals, and the Left being totally shut out of power at the higher levels for generations now...
...all of these factors together, and a host of others besides, when combined as they are now, result in a mainstream political discourse that is hopelessly robbed of any shred of actual nuance or substance towards the actual heart of the issues themselves.
As Julie said earlier, Liberal Centrism is, in the end and to all practical purposes, basically just Right Conservatism in terms of long-term outcomes, but with a TON more steps in between and with tons more tedious internal debating, hand-wringing, and masturbatory naval-gazing in place of them actually just getting the fuck up off their ass and just DOING
SOMETHING,
ANYTHING. Its Right Conservatism that ultimately just works much, much slower. Which is still unmistakably
better for sure than Right Conservatism (buys you more time to fight back at least), but in the end isn't THAT much better and in the long run only ultimately leads to the same disaster and ruin for everyone else.
I think that a nuanced, critical understanding of the dynamics between all three political factions in modern politics (Left vs Right vs Center) is HUGELY necessary and beneficial to successfully navigating the political landscape (both the present one and also historically in earlier eras) and not getting conned or suckered in by hucksters, frauds, and grifters: particularly those on the Conservative Right, who have by this point made an art form of taking the obvious failings and hypocrisies of Liberal Centrists across the decades and Jiu Jitsuing them to funnel the energies of the genuinely hurt and vulnerable or the pampered and sheltered (but in both cases, just as cluelessly ignorant and poorly educated) away from Left solutions that would materially and constructively improve their lives and actually solve their problems and instead towards homicidally deranged and suicidally self-destructive and twisted White Nationalism and Reactionary Conservatism/Neo Nazism.
tl;dr
Left Progressivism - Work to solve the material reality at the heart of the most serious problems facing us in roughly descending order of urgency for the broadest, most universal number of people across humanity so that we can ALL have as bright and positive a future as possible. And be fucking quick about it though, because time's a wasting and real people are actually dying while nothing is being done, and there's an ever-shrinking amount of time left to actually stop the very worst from happening and going beyond the point of no return.
Right Conservatism - Rewind civilization and human progress backwards by decades/centuries/generations, even though that will only worsen and exacerbate the problems that are now facing us, and just full speed us ahead over the cliff; all in the name of retreating back into an imagined, completely illusory past that satisfies the nostalgic, myopic, emotional cravings of a narrow, privileged slice of society at the direct expense of virtually everyone else. All while not even pretending to even vaguely give a shit about anyone else around you who are being devoured and obliterated by your actions.
Centrist Liberalism - Stay put in place, and do absolutely nothing whatsoever, even in the face of civilization-threatening cataclysm and even as certain doom is quickly bearing down on us all... because god forbid we upset or make anyone who is already doing well right now the slightest bit uncomfortable for even a nanosecond or even slightly fundamentally change or alter that which is causing them to do well even when its also causing untold hurt and misery for everyone else around them. Just be sure to put on the most performative show possible about how much it REALLY BOTHERS YOU that nothing is being done about the problem.
