171
David Ellison says 70% of Americans are centrist. Surveys tell a different story
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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politics
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It doesn't matter anyways because most people will always claim to be "in the middle" because the people to either extreme are always loudest.
You poll them on policies, and suddenly everyone is a "far left extremist" for wanting safety nets and basic standards for human existence.
You ask right/center/left at face value, and the answers will always be about the same despite what's going on in reality.
Former coworker kept saying he was republican, but he disagreed with them on a fundamental level about nearly every social issue, including guns.
He was all for anything and everything about collective bargaining, the workers uniting against management, but god forbid you use the "U" word.
Agreed every day about this social safety net needs expanded, that program needs better funding, more programs like this or that should exist for people in need, but once the dreaded "S" word comes out, suddenly everyone is a commie. Cause you know how socialism is actually communism and all that.
Kinda it. Everyone thinks their position is just average common sense. You only really get to the point of saying "I'm pretty far ____" if you've been actively alienated by others but just dug in your heels instead of changing your mind.
I suspect most people who don't have political thought as a large part of their identity don't really have a well integrated worldview with good internal consistency. Few enough active political thinkers do, after all! It might not be that useful to describe everyone in aggregate along a spectrum.
Nope, we're built for us/them thinking.
Loads of people "don't care about politics" but really care about other shit.
They were born into a family/community that was heavily one or the other, and they'll stay that way no matter what.
Like, that's the crux of it.
It's not an accurate representation of someone's policy positions. Which is why when we poll that, we get vastly different results.
It's just the human brain doing what it evolved to do: commit to "us" and ignore "them".
It's not a bug, it's a feature, and why there's no other modern homind close to us.
We can't stop it from happening, because it's fighting human nature. So we have to socialize kids when very young so that they don't set "us" along maladaptive lines.
That's why the racists leading "the right" are always bitching about "woke culture" in kids shows, because that is hands down the most effective plan to stop bigotry. Without it, bigotry is the human default.
Just like a dog won't chase cats if it was around them as a puppy. We need to show kids that even if someone doesn't look/act/sound/whatever exactly like us, they're still "us".
Otherwise the kid will think of groups they weren't exposed to as "them" instinctively, and it's a lifelong conscious effort to remember "everyone is us".
Which is why white American boomers get racist when drunk/tired/old, they've had to put in effort this whole time, and can't always do it.
They weren't socialized as kids to be around other groups, they grew up during segregation
To put it more directly, anyone with a political ideology based on having a position relative to two or more other positions seems constantly so desperate to appear like an enlightened, balanced thinker while also having a political that’s nearly entirely worthless. They’re great at voting against stuff but their spines are jelly and it’s so fucking hard to get them to commit to fuckin’ anything.
And it carries over in their lives! Trying to get a hard opinion out of them on anything is so hard! They’re so scared of being “wrong” that they constantly half-ass everything they do and I’m so tired of it. Just commit to something, please!
(Maybe we need to start running actual super far left parties in the world to centralize regular leftist parties to get these people to finally behave lol)
Yes, entirely unironically. It's a negotiation technique called "anchoring".
If you're in the u.s., give them a small break. Only business owners and corporation havers are allowed to have political opinions that contradict another's. Unless you're a lucky peon who has a dick of a boss and they let you mouth off at work, then you can have a political opinion.
But that’s just it, the US had this strong pro-labour stance, so much momentum, and then they threw it all away and now it’s about what your boss “lets” you do.
But they won’t even have those discussions outside of work. I have a theory that it’s because if they’re progressive outside of an exploitative power dynamic then it’s much harder to handle if when it’s happening. It’s like their lives are in constant justification of why being taken advantage of is “actually normal” and why they say shit like “that’s life” or “in an ideal world…”. Easier to submit than fight*.
*Clarification: “fight” here could literally even just be voting progressive since that’s a completely secret thing. I’m not saying we gotta be raging at our bosses or trying to imply that everyone is in a place they can even speak honestly, safely.